fun with stereotypes

Not a good week for the ladies, sports-wise. First up, in order of horrifying: The Chicago White Sox haven't been doing so hot, so they initiated a little "slumpbuster" that involved taking two female blow-up dolls and arranging them in the team clubhouse with baseball bats jammed into various orifices. Surrounding the dolls with players' bats, the team also stuck a sign on one encouraging players and clubhouse visitors to "push."

Sigh. One day after the Washington Post published the op-ed by Charlotte Allen titled "We Scream, We Swoon. How Dumb Can We Get?", the paper has responded to the massive public outcry against the piece by stating — what else? — that the piece was meant to be

Much as I had mixed feelings about the film Juno, I just don't understand the massive public hate-on for its screenwriter, Diablo Cody. Okay, she gave herself a stupid pen name. Juno had a couple of overly precious, cringeworthy lines of dialogue. Does that really warrant parodies like these?

It’s enirely too late on a Friday afternoon to get all riled up about this article, but shit, it really went there. In a nutshell: Lori Gottlieb believes that women should settle for men they don’t really want to marry, because being married is better than not being married. The Atlantic Monthly, meanwhile, believes that this kind of crap is something that people actually want to read. Both of these things are, inherently, problematic.

In response to a news story about a family putting out an oven fire with the mother's "big pants"—that's Brit-speak for granny panties—comes this column from the Times Online's Caitlin Moran on the scourge of "pantorexia." To be honest, I'm not really sure what's going on in this overlong column — Moran basically starts off encouraging women to stop strangling their asses with "sexy pants" and creating the dreaded quad-buttock effect with ill-fitting unmentionables, but then she goes on to bemoan the state of big pants as well. (Apparently the deprtment stores in Old Blighty are overrun with underpants in the hue of an "uncooked pork chop.")