Cherchez La Femme

Déclaration de Mission

This blog is named "Cherchez La Femme" in an attempt to claim the term and belie its misogynistic origins and undertones. If taken at face value, which is, in plain English, "seek the woman," the phrase suddenly takes on philosophical implications...

Girl on Girl Crime

Last week, Time Magazine’s Belinda Luscombe grasped at why Sarah Palin has been on the receiving end of apparently derisive and vitriolic criticism, namely from women. It’s not because her resume about qualifies her to be the vice president of some holy...

Ew, Belgium

Et Septembre, là-haut, Avec son ciel de nacre et d.or voyage, Et suspend sur les prés, les champs et les hameaux Les blocs étincelants de ses plus beaux nuages. -Emile Verhaeren This is an ad for Ché magazine, Belgium's equivalent to...

Golly-Gee Feminism

I'd like to know exactly what McCain means by "liberal feminist agenda," or if he knows exactly what feminism was and has transformed into. He probably means something close to what Kathleen Parker was getting at when she called feminists a...

Keep Your Paws Off My Pills

The Roman Catholic storeowner of the Diving Mercy Care Pharmacy in Chantilly, VA has amended the usual convenience store decorum code. Instead of "No shirt, no shoes, no service," manager Robert Semler has installed a "No candy, no soda, and no birth...

Bachmann's History as a Bigot

Jamie's last post touched on Michele Bachmann's McCarthy-ish wants for a press "exposé" of those members of Congess she thinks could be Anti-american (only Liberals need be scrutinized). Here's a video from the uptake.org of a debate in...

Heroes: Amy Sedaris

Every time I see, hear about, or read something by Amy Sedaris, I get weepy. If, when filling out my Sunday crossword puzzle, there are only three spaces instead of five to answer the clue "Humorist Sedaris," I imagine giving the sprightly little blond a...

Update: In Case you Missed It

I think they actually filmed this:I mean, with actual film.On Barack Obama's sex appeal: Please read this at your own risk (it isn't unsavory, it just tastes really bad). It's by Nicole Caldwell, former-editor-in-cheif of Playgirl. I understand how...

Maddow About You: Expanded

It seems appropraite to make this post now after reading Tom Vannah’s Between the Lines in this week’s Advocate, which addresses the credibility of (basically) admittedly biased “news” programs on television like those of Rachel Maddow and Sean...

Okay, So Now What?

I'm at a loss. I am ecstatic, sure, but I am feeling hesitant. I whooped it up Tuesday night, jumped on the bed, said "I'm proud to be an American," rained crappy champagne out my apartment window, and watched a grown man cry. Barack Obama is now...

Dumb Diva Dodges D.C. …

…and Faux News reaps the benefits. Apparently, hundreds of Sarah Palin stories that were to remain off the record until the end of the campaign are now ON THE RECORD. In the following clip, Fox News political correspondent Carl Cameron reveals some juicy inside...

Sex Workers' Jobs Just Got Harder

Craig's List, the popular nationwide internet classifieds site, has made a pact with 40 states to crack down on users who use the "erotic services" section of the site to advertise prostitution. This page has, until now, been free to use for both people...

Maddow About You

Rachel Maddow is funny. She has great hair and pretty, subtle makeup. The low-button stances of her suits hit just the right spot to flatter her figure and look casual without being sloppy. I'm glad she's on television. She has established herself as the only...

Cooking With Balls: It's a Good Thing

I recently came across a vividly illustrated cookbook that utilizes a main ingredient of testicles in each of its recipes (the testicles were not human, but once belonged to bulls, calves, lambs, rams, stallions, ostriches and turkeys). It is a refreshingly simple...

Entitled Entitled Hippo

I had a small and ancient fourth grade teacher with an affinity for elastic-waisted calico house dresses. We liked to call her Mrs. Itchy-Butt. She was evil. I recall her not allowing a girl to go to the bathroom, that girl then peeing in her chair, and Itchy-Butt...

Heroes: Sarah Haskins

Sarah Haskins is a funny lady. Here is her latest installment of Target: Women, her online show in which she adresses the way women are targeted (hey!) by the media. She's a keenly derisive broad, and isn't afraid to be a little raunchy. This episode is about...

Grrrls Rock

When thinking of great rock guitarists, I'm generally awash with images of thin men in tight pants through which they exude some sort of super-sexual musk that increases in intensity when they shred. I lament not maturing in an era past, perhaps the sixties,...

Tween-age Wasteland

This is so wrong. Another blog pointed this image out and I had to see if Amazon had done anything about it. I followed the link, and sure enough, the image of a mid-pubescent girl was used to illustrate an article of clothing being described as "sexy."...

The (Boob) Job

A gang of theives in Uganda has taken a somewhat shrewd approach to robbery. Police in that country are warning bar-going men to watch their noses, lest they have a heaving bosom smeared with chloroform shoved in their faces. Apparantly, women have been applying the...

Attention: Aspiring Ladies

In perhaps one of the most hilarious performances of one of the silliest songs of all time, this goofball manages to say some stuff that isn't really okay. Like why does he get to decide that a certain "kind" of woman that he'd "like to flaunt...

The Antis Have It

It seems like people who are anti-something for religious reasons stemming from Christianity are heard much more loudly that those who are opposed to things for moral reasons in general, even though both sets of people are equally insenced. The manipulative techniques...

R.I.P.

The venerable Bettie Page dies at 85. That she became a household name is testament to the fact that she was more than just a pin-up girl.

How Young is Too Young?

With all of the talk about restrictions against gay marriage lately, I think it's prudent to take a look at controversial straight relationships that some may consider immoral or perverse. In Australia, the law does not recognize same-sex marriages. However, in...

Not-So-Virgin Mary

Playboy Mexico's December issue features a sexy and nude Virgin Mary on the cover. They recently issued an apology, but i can't help but think someone had to have seen the potential for controversy coming, especially considering that Roman Catholics make up...

On Nature

The BBC/Discovery Channel series Planet Earth has been on my mind lately. If you haven't seen it, I recommend that you do so. Soon. Do yourself a favor and watch the version narrated by David Attenborough, not Sigourney Weaver.Not only is the series full of...

Grandma Palin and the Baby Train

Bristol Palin's controversial pregnancy has come to a head. Continuing the Palin trend of obnoxious, made-up baby names, Bristol dubbed her son Tripp Easton Mitchell Johnston. Baby Tripp–who sounds like he could grow up to be either a country singer (the...

Finding a Way

Thankfully, the appeal of social conservativism did not outweigh the benefits of financial liberalism in October’s presidential and senatorial races. For once, the Republican party was not successful in convincing poor white Americans to vote for them because...

Semi-Vintage Stewart

Now that the world’s coolest president elect is about to become the world’s coolest president, should we be worried that John Stewart will become obsolete? My instint tells me he (and I) will have enough to make fun of. Check out this clip from early 2008....

More Obama Drama

So everyone's up in arms about Barack Obama's choice for the person who will give the prayer at the inauguration later this month. He's picked the inspiring-looking, Evangelical, megachurch-leading Rick Warren to bless the ceremony. The logic behind such a...

Tales from the Tool Box

Vh1's "reality" programming is anything but. Instead, the shows seem to bubble to the surface from the depths of a bottomless cesspool of greed, confusion, humiliation, and fame, manufactured to provoke the worst in people. Seen this way, the shows seem...

Pelosi Footing

Who knew? Nancy Pelosi and congress have nothing better to do than post silly videos of cats and RickRolling (which is sooo last year). If Newt Gingrich was dead, he'd be rolling in his grave.

Staying Abreast

In the latest issue of the New Yorker, Jill Lepore explores the history of breastfeeding in the Western world, and how it is practiced today. What she determines is that more and more women are opting to use breast pumps to extract milk from their breasts in order to...

Abortion + Doughnuts = Wing-Nuttery

This is an actual press release from actual pro-life group the American Life League. In it, Judie Brown explains how the Krispy Kreme doughnut chain is bad because they used the word choice twice in a promotional statement promising free doughnuts on Inauguration...

Shaking Things Up

"The question we ask today is not whether our government is too big or too small, but whether it works…"-Barack Obama, 2009 inaugural address Jezebel.com compiled a montage of Fox News' coverage of the inauguration. It's pretty fascinating. (I...

iGroan

Let it be known that there is nothing in the world that I covet more than an iPhone. But when the miraculous day comes when I receive my communicative and mechanized manna, I do not want it to do this. Ew.I give this one a big, Nancy Kerrigan "Whyyyy?!?!" (I...

R.I.P.

Author and examiner of the "American small town, Protestant middle class," John Updike died yesterday at 76. His 1984 novel The Witches of Eastwick was criticized by many for its misogynistic undertones. Updike was too smart not to know this ahead of time,...

iGroan 2.0

Recently a friend accosted me about this post in which I expressed displeasure at an iPhone application called Wobble that enables people to manipulate images by pinpointing an area to be distorted in various directions in rapid succession when the phone is shaken,...

Dis-Oriented

[If you are not in the mood/ don't have time/ too lazy to read the full post, do yourself a favor and check out the video at the end] Examining human sexuality and the way gender operates in our daily interactions with each other is a theme that can be worked into...

Eight is Enough?

Nadya Suleman, the California woman who recently gave birth to octuplets (conceived by IVF), and mother of six other children including twins (also conceived by IVF), has been put through the ringer by the national press this week since information that she is single,...

Sheroes: Salma Hayek

I've never breastfed (on the giving end, I mean, not the receiving end), but there seems to be a lot of hubbub about the practice. In my last post, I quoted Tim Rutten of the LA Times and pointed to what he refers to as a sense of "entitlement" when it...

Salma's Surprise

So, remember my post on Salma Hayek in which she was exaulted to Shero status because she breastfed an orphan in Sierra Leone, overcoming weird parent-child loyalty issues and giving an infant some physical contact much needed in the way of his development? Well,...

I Love Helen Thomas

Even though Bill O'Reilly called her the "Wicked Witch of the East," and Dubya moved her to the back row at press conferences and wouldn't call on her, despite the fact that she has been covering presidents in the white House since...

Putting the “Pf” in Pfizer

A team of scientists from the University of Naples Fernando II have made an amazing discovery. The gas responsible fot the unmistakable odor of rotton eggs can, when released into the penis, play a roll in assisting an erection. The doctors hope that the discovery...