This week sees the launch of a new technology website & podcast, run by my old college classmate Sunshine Mugrabi: TechnoGirlTalk.

Yours truly was one of the panelists on the initial podcast and it’s a doozy — we dive into the James Chartrand controversy, as well as dissect a controversial Droid vs iPhone ad and discuss what it’s like to be a woman in technology.

Recording the episode was a ton of fun and I hope you’ll take advantage of the slow holiday season to download it and listen.

But frankly, not at all surprised.

http://www.copyblogger.com/james-chartrand-underpants/

In a perfect world, things wouldn’t be this way but (no surprise) we don’t live in a perfect world.

Updated (after reading the full comment thread over at Copyblogger): And to be clear I’m not at all angry at “James”. I admire her guts. I am angry that someone with talent and skills needed to become someone else in order to make a living in her chosen career. it’s a thoroughly sad commentary on how screwed up our society still is.

Dr. George Tiller was murdered this morning as he walked into his church to attend regular weekly services.

Killed at a church, of all places. How could his murderer miss the irony in that action? Did he think that it was somehow fitting? Or was it simply a place where he could more easily get close enough to Tiller to kill him?

Whatever you think of Dr Tiller’s work, he was a brave man who stood up for his principals in the face of decades of threats and violence. Reasonable people can disagree about abortion. But there’s simply no justification at all for killing someone that you disagree with.

He didn’t deserve this.

UPDATE: If you’re so inclined, I’d suggest making a donation to Medical Students for Choice in Dr Tiller’s memory.

Some things really do not change.

The most recent figures from the University of Wisconsin’s National Survey of Families and Households show that the average wife does 31 hours of housework a week while the average husband does 14 — a ratio of slightly more than two to one. If you break out couples in which wives stay home and husbands are the sole earners, the number of hours goes up for women, to 38 hours of housework a week, and down a bit for men, to 12, a ratio of more than three to one. That makes sense, because the couple have defined home as one partner’s work.

But then break out the couples in which both husband and wife have full-time paying jobs. There, the wife does 28 hours of housework and the husband, 16. Just shy of two to one, which makes no sense at all.

The lopsided ratio holds true however you construct and deconstruct a family. “Working class, middle class, upper class, it stays at two to one,” says Sampson Lee Blair, an associate professor of sociology at the University at Buffalo who studies the division of labor in families.

*sigh*

Not to make this a “pile on Hillary” kind of weekend, but a quote I saw a week or so ago has been nagging at me.

To feminist writer Linda Hirshman, Clinton’s likely defeat signals a harsh reality that future female candidates will need to consider.

“It shows how fragile the loyalty and commitment of women to a female candidate is. That’s a pretty scary thing,” says Hirshman. “She can count on the female electorate to divide badly and not be reliable.”

That’s a definition of feminism that I don’t understand. In act, it sounds a lot more like essentialism. As a woman who has spent a good portion of her life making her way in male-dominated fields – and as a Jew, to boot – I have an extreme distaste for any ideology that assumes that group characteristics are identical and unalterable.

And yet …. it would make me happy to see a woman elected President, I can’t lie. It would also make me happy to see a Jewish President, although frankly I think that’s even less likely to happen in my lifetime. Still, that doesn’t mean I’m going to put gender or religious characteristics ahead of everything else on the table. Especially when it comes to something as important as a Presidential election.

I’m one of the first generation of American women to be born and raised in a world where women actually had the option to escape the constraints they’d previously been limited to. Is that why I do not feel the pull of identity politics? I consider myself a feminist. Does being a “good” feminist mean that I must vote for a woman candidate solely because of her gender? I don’t think so, but clearly some other women do.

How did things get to this place? And more important, can we fix it?

They say you should never blog while angry, but I am going to make an exception this morning. The Washington Post has an article out today by one Charlotte Allen that’s about the most pathetic excuse for woman-bashing I’ve seen for a long time.

It doesn’t matter that the author is herself a woman. Comments like this:

I don’t understand why more women don’t relax, enjoy the innate abilities most of us possess (as well as the ones fewer of us possess) and revel in the things most important to life at which nearly all of us excel: tenderness toward children and men and the weak and the ability to make a house a home.

are so thoroughly ignorant and sexist that I’m amazed the Post actually published it. What the hell were they thinking?

I just read that Mexico City has now joined several other locations, including cities in Japan, India, and Brazil, in adding women-only buses and subway cars to combat the ongoing problem of male sexual harassment of female passengers.

According to the article, the women seem to love it, and frankly, I can’t blame them. There’s scarcely a woman on this planet who has not been groped, pinched, handled, or leered at against her will at some point in her life (myself included), and not having to worry about that as you go to work every day would be a welcome relief.

But there’s another part of me that is angry, too. Why do women have to be segregated from men in order to be safe? Why do so many men seem to lack even the most basic sense of courtesy or respect when there is a breast or a butt in their vicinity? In short, why is is so damn hard for men to just keep their hands to themselves?

And please, spare me the “ohhh, they just can’t help themselves” bulls***. Men are perfectly capable of self-control. They are choosing otherwise. And these kinds of actions, however, well-intentioned, just reinforce the perception that a woman outside the ‘safe zone’ is an acceptable target.

It’s Friday night and I should be kicking back with a glass of wine after a long hard week, but this caught my eye and I had to pass it on:

A striptease of sorts at a federal courthouse has an Idaho woman fuming.

While passing through security, the woman was asked to remove her bra because it had an underwire. The undergarment set off a metal detector.

The woman says she had no choice but to have her husband shield her from others so she could take off her bra. However, the embarrassment did not end there.

“I had to place my bra on the conveyor belt to go through the X-ray machine,” says Lori Platto. “When I got to the end, well, one of the security officers said to me, ‘That’s a girl. Now you can go put it on.’ I was humiliated. I feel demeaned, because I was just… what was I to do?”

The U.S. Marshal’s office says its guards followed appropriate security protocol.

Considering how common underwire bras are, I have to wonder why this particular woman got asked to remove her bra; this can’t possible be the first time they’ve had a woman go through the metal detectors wearing an underwire bra. Were the guards looking for a a cheap thrill at her expense? If so, they should all be fired.

Hat tip, Peter at PR Differently.

This is pretty pathetic: Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary to offer academic program in homemaking. Yes, really:

A description of the homemaking program on the seminary’s Web site says it “endeavors to prepare women to model the characteristics of the godly woman as outlined in Scripture.

“This is accomplished through instruction in homemaking skills, developing insights into home and family while continuing to equip women to understand and engage the culture of today.”

The whole thing sounds like an expensive way to find a ‘suitable’ husband more than anything else. If you honestly believe that the role of a woman is to stay home and raise kids, why would you be getting a bachelor’s degree in the first place?

To be fair, at least not all Baptists share that college’s view on things:

The Rev. Benjamin Cole, pastor of Parkview Baptist Church in Arlington, Texas, and a frequent Southern Baptist critic, wrote about the homemaking program on his blog.

“At first it was almost incredible to me,” Cole said. “I thought this is not happening. It’s quite superfluous to the mission of theological education in Southern Baptist life. It’s insulting I would say to many young women training in vital ministry roles.

“It’s yet another example of the ridiculous and silly degree to which some Southern Baptists, Southwestern in particular, are trying to return to what they perceive to be biblical gender roles.”

Good for Rev. Cole.

Joss Whedon, for those unfamiliar with him, is a successful and well-respected creator of several television series, including Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Firefly.

So Joss got a look at the Dua Khalil murder video that’s made the rounds of the Internet (and no, I am not linking to it, go find it yourself) and got a little upset, saying:

What is wrong with women?

I mean wrong. Physically. Spiritually. Something unnatural, something destructive, something that needs to be corrected.

How did more than half the people in the world come out incorrectly? I have spent a good part of my life trying to do that math, and I’m no closer to a viable equation. And I have yet to find a culture that doesn’t buy into it. Women’s inferiority – in fact, their malevolence — is as ingrained in American popular culture as it is anywhere they’re sporting burkhas. I find it in movies, I hear it in the jokes of colleagues, I see it plastered on billboards, and not just the ones for horror movies. Women are weak. Women are manipulative. Women are somehow morally unfinished. (Objectification: another tangential rant avoided.) And the logical extension of this line of thinking is that women are, at the very least, expendable.

[snip]

It’s safe to say that I’ve snapped. That something broke, like one of those robots you can conquer with a logical conundrum. All my life I’ve looked at this faulty equation, trying to understand, and I’ve shorted out. I don’t pretend to be a great guy; I know really really well about objectification, trust me. And I’m not for a second going down the “women are saints” route – that just leads to more stone-throwing (and occasional Joan-burning). I just think there is the staggering imbalance in the world that we all just take for granted.

Call me ungrateful, but I have to wonder, why did it take him so long to get to this point?

Whedon is one of the few writers who’s been able to write a successful TV series about a strong female protagonist who doesn’t end up either dead or pregnant for having sex, a woman for whom rape is impossible. You’d like to think that he’s sincere when he says that this is an issue he’s thought about for a long time, but it would have been nice if he’s applied his massive talents to giving voice to the problem a bit earlier.