...or the free-market system? How in the world could we ever live without ads telling men that they should act like jerks (and buy our products) and women that they should be incredibly vain in the name of self-confidence (and buy our products).

Well, come on. What else are they going to talk about? It's not like there are wars going on or...oh, wait...

Do the butt implants come with free anal bleaching or is that extra?

Sorry--I didn't mean to submit an incorrect email address. Honest!

I'm new to feminism, and have a hard time drawing lines like this. For instance, while I find it totally offensive and repulsive that the term "muffin" was explained on the news, I feel that way because of all the news that SHOULD be reported upon...not for any feminist reasons. The term muffin is quite evocative. And a little bit funny. And we call a man's gut a 'beer belly'. I'm not sure where this line should be - the line between humor and sexism. Hm.

So Dr. Diana, with "odalisques" are you seeking "muffin" status? I like your little jelly (belly?) roll. You need to switch to FOX11 and "Good Day LA" for the real, or not, news.

Janelle, I think the idea that "muffin" is sexist is the context it was used in (there may be other reasons, but your point about the beer belly term, as a whole, is comparable and a good point). It seems that there would be no reason to point out the term for a woman with too-tight jeans, especially on a news report. I've never heard the term "beer-belly" described on the news, though I hardly watch television news, since it's pretty terrible anyways. The fact that an aspect regarding a woman's appearance was strangely noted with a definition of an intended dereogatory term supports the general concept that women are scrupulously critiqued in regard to their personal appearance in a way that men aren't in the media (and this very often trickles down to larger perceptions of women). It'd be like defining the term, if there is one, for when a male politicians' thick neck bulges past the collar of his shirt on air.

Exactly. Women's bodies are subject to more intense and acceptable scrutiny. If you spend too much time highlighting male anatomy on tv someone might suffer homosexual panic and murder his neighbor.

I ran across a blog today that presented a photo of Ann Coulter and invited readers to submit Photoshoppings of the photo. As much as I despise Coulter, I can't help but feel uncomfortable about people bagging on her appearance.

There is so much about Ann Coulter that is worthy of bagging--why focus on her wrinkles or her hair or her "horse face" or call her "MAnn"? I'm afraid the answer is because she's a woman. Well, OK, I KNOW the answer is because she's a woman. Our perceived beauty is public domain and subject to public scrutiny, so instead of just exposing Coulter's ridiculous lies detractors attack her looks because that's the default when evaluating women. It makes me uncomfortable having them on my side.

Hugh Heffner with those three identical blondes hanging on him is sickening. Then there is Flava Flav dressing as a pimp with women fist fighting one another around him. We are surrounded with the idea that a man can be as old or as unattractive as he wants to be as long as he is a "pimp." Of course the reverse is Jerry Hall's reality show Kept, where the premise is an older women who pays the way of a younger man while he fakes being interested in her.

Thanks, Sean and Shell, those were good replies. But I still have questions.

Sean, you said it was the context, not necessarily the terminology in and of itself. I, too, object to the context (though I don't even have a television, so obviously don't watch the evening news). I object because I want news to be informative, instead of like junior high. I would object with just as much disgust if an anchor made a comment like, "And boy! Did you see the beer gut on that guy?!" Its inappropriate and unprofessional and downright mean. Not qualities I look for in the news.

I don't think just because the comment was about a woman - despite the larger context of society in which women are more commented on vs. men - makes it sexist. I could, however, be wrong.

No Janelle, you aren't wrong. Dr. Blaine and crew like to turn all of the ignorance and hate in this world into a case of gender, race, class warfare. For some people, I imagine this is an understandable reaction to being victimized by morons of a particular group - for others it is simply intellectual laziness. Legitimate studies on gender differences do exist, but they don't involvecommenting on the moronic chatter of the local news casters. A good example of true scholarship in gender differences is the article Ding et al. 2006 "Gender Differences in Patenting in the Academic Life Sciences" out this week in the journal Science. Note that the authors aren't in the Women's Studies department. Big surprise.

Juno, local news in LA is a fairly big deal, since many people do watch the LA local news. So the "moronic chatter" you mention is going out to many, many people, and could likely have an effect as to how gender is continually portrayed in the media, or pop culture, possibly contributing to individual ideas and stereotypes about the genders. Just because Dr. Blaine deals with pop culture doesn't make her criticism any less scholarly. And the argument that I believe she is making, and that I certainly am, is that one would almost never hear a comment about some physical feature on a man, but that commenting on a woman's body is much more acceptable, and practiced in much higher proportion.

To Janelle, when I said context, I didn't just mean "within a news report." I should have been more clear. What I was getting at was that you are right--either comment, about muffins or beer-bellies, is inappropriate--but there wasn't a comment about beer-bellies, only muffins. Only one group was degraded, women, not men; and this type of portrayal is common, where women are held to standards of appearance that men aren't, at least in the media. You're right that the single comment does not make it sexist, but Dr. Blaine is simply making note of yet another time that women are held to beauty standards where men aren't.

Sean,
The reason that Dr. Blaine's criticism is less scholarly is because it amounts to little more than subjective cherry-picking. The human brain is an awesome correlating machine. If we have an agenda or strong beliefs, it is very easy for us to find unjustified connections between unrelated phenomena. We often hear what we want to hear and ignore what contradicts our assumptions.
I can cherry pick a counter example to anything you can find in support of your views. "Shell" earlier commented on an attack on Anne Coulter's appearance and that it wouldn't happen if she were a man. Well, isn't Al Franken's book entitled "Rush Limbaugh is a big fat idiot"? Franken isn't just talking about his fat head, he's also taking a cheap shot at his weight – or at least that’s my subjective take on it. I can think of many pop culture examples that belittle overweight men - for instance the Mansierre on Seinfeld, almost anything related to Homer Simpson, Ramsay on Hell's Kitchen calls the men "fat slobs" but not the women, and so on. My examples by themselves are only useful in that they contradict yours – but they don’t mean anything. If you think the comments about women far outweigh those about men, then collect some data. Sit through every episode of the local news for six months and count the number of comments specifically about women's bodies vs. men's. Dr. Blaine has an interest in female corpses in pop culture - how about counting the number of male corpses vs. female corpses in TIME or AFI's 100 greatest movies? If you aren’t willing to be rigorous, than you’re more interested in furthering your agenda than you are in acquiring knowledge and hence not a scholar.

Only one group was degraded, women, not men; and this type of portrayal is common, where women are held to standards of appearance that men aren't...
Ah, I get it. Sean, thanks for your clarification. It's not that 'muffin' is necessarily an inherently sexist term, nor is it that the newscaster WASN'T being unprofessional in the extreme. It's that this kind of thing - degrading women - happens all the time, under our radar for the most part because we're so used to it. If it had been a man, folks would have sat up and noticed, and it would have been noteworthy. Said of a woman, it was just another bit of chatter on the news.

Juno, I understand all your points, believe me I do. I am continually frustrated by the quality of feminist scholarship that I read...but only recently did I recognize that if I stumble blindly into any field in academia, I'm pretty frustrated by the quality of scholarship that I read. In any area, there's a lot of crap out there, a bunch of stuff that's not bad, and a bit of stuff that's quality academic work. Good friends of mine in the know in academia (and, actually, Dr. D herself at one point) have turned me on to good feminist scholarship. It is out there, but like any area of scholarship, there's some wading to do to find it.

Regarding Dr. Blaine in particular, I find your complaints valid, but not sound. Dr. Blaine's examples on her website are indeed presented in a correlary manner. Point of fact, she did not go through and watch a thousand newscasts and count female sexist vs. male sexist vs. bigoted vs. -ist free news reports and report back to us the statistics. But it occurs to me that this blog is not intended to be a statistical reporting forum, nor does it appear to be a place in which Dr. Blaine posts her academic work (before or after publication). While Dr. Blaine references scholarship in her blogs, makes use of her critical thinking abilities, and clearly draws on her academic education, this blog (like all blogs) is not intended to be an academic press. She got her PhD from UCLA, and her dissertation was on corpses of women in western culture. UCLA is not the kind of school that hands out PhD's for the asking, so I'm guessing she has, in fact, done some fairly rigorous academic work on the matter. (I haven't read her dissertation so I don't know. If this is the kind of discussion you want, though, I'd suggest reading it (most academic departments/libraries allow outside parties to check out or buy dissertations from past students) and contacting her directly.

For my part, I'm pleased this is a blog forum, in which we can all discuss feminist issues encountered in day-to-day life (like the word "muffin", its use on the news, and whether that constitutes sexism in the media), even if we don't all agree.

Janelle, thanks for your reasoned response. I suppose you are correct that Dr. Blaine's blog isn't an academic press. However, I suspect that one reason she gets a lot of flak on her blog is that she doesn't make much of an effort to distinguish between her personal views, as expressed here and in letters to the Daily Trojan, and her scholarship. The line is fuzzy, and I question whether or not it is intentionally so. It's a good way to simultaneously throw around one's weight as an academic without having to offer up specific claims for scholarly scrutiny. I think I'm done harping on this - I just hope readers will take a moment to question the significance of Dr. Blaine's armchair anecdotes.

I appreciate Dr. Blaine's courage.
I think we on the Left should also be careful about criticizing people on the basis of their personal appearance. I stopped looking at Dependable Renegade a long time ago. I got tired of the way she remarked on how Rice looks like a Klingon, that Laura Bush has a bad face lift and a big butt and so on. Or that people look old. She's a woman. She should know better.
I used to do stuff like that, but I have reformed.

Juno, thank you for bringing to light the other allowed and accepted discrimination in our society. Dr. Y-B has choosen to focus on how females are treated in our society and so offers what ever examples she finds of their mistreatment. But, not to worry, fat people are running neck and neck with women for the most openly and acceptably discriminated against. But, just to bring this back to the purpose of this blog, in our society fat women are viewed as less acceptable than fat men.

"But, just to bring this back to the purpose of this blog, in our society fat women are viewed as less acceptable than fat men." Hank, what body of evidence says so? Should we just take your word for it?
Oprah, Rosie O'Donnell, Rosanne Barr, and Queen Latifah are all full-figured very-wealthy women that, as far as I can tell, have few male counterparts in modern pop-culture. On a personal anecdotal level, I have always found that everyone I've ever known finds it far more acceptable to point out a man's fat gut or man boobs (in person), than to point out a women's big thighs - despite the fact that the man may be just as sensitive to the comments. Hank, the truth is that the topology of human social interaction is complex and our generalizations and anecdotal stories just don't do justice to reality. I know that may upset your "us vs. them" world view, and it doesn't make for easy testing of a simple academic hypothesis (hence the huge amount of junk scholarship in the social sciences), but it's the truth.

Juno, who is us? Who is them? So, are you saying that fat men and women are socially acceptable. Is it you position that the "full-figured" women you mentioned are the rule and not the exception? Do you believe that fat men are ridiculed more than fat women or that fat men are less socially acceptable that fat women? Let's take a look at it. I admit to being short on references, perhaps you could lead me to a few that show your position... Um, what is your position?

Oprah, Rosie O'Donnell, Rosanne Barr, and Queen Latifah are all full-figured very-wealthy women that, as far as I can tell, have few male counterparts in modern pop-culture.

Danny Devito? John Goodman? Vince Vaughn?

Hank, Janelle makes my point with her rebuttal. None of the names that she mentioned came to mind because I was more concerned with making my point than with knowing the truth (I thought of Farley and Belushi, but they are dead). Counterexamples can be found for almost any conclusion that is supported only by cherry-picked examples (a hallmark of many pop culture studies and Pentagon intelligence summaries). I don't have an informed position on whether fat men or fat women are more socially acceptable, but I'm willing to bet that neither do you, and neither does Dr. Blaine. Such a question is riddled with complexity. How would we even start to ask this question in a rigorous way? How do we define "acceptable"? What are our criteria for deciding who is fat? Do we mean everyone in the U.S. when we say "society"? One example of a tractable question might be "What is the average salary of women vs. men with a particular BMI in a particular profession". That might tell us something, but even this specific question might have a lot of variables that would make our analysis difficult. Might the results only tell us about whether employers find fat women or men more "acceptable"? What if we chose to look at how toddlers feel about their parents weight? Might the answer not be quite different? My point is just that we live in a complex world and we learn very little from cherry-picked examples. At best they serve to further our prejudices, at worst they get us into wars.

Just a side note to add: Fat Joe, Big Pun, Notorious B.I.G., Bubba Sparks and more. The rap/music community is loaded with overweight "lovers." That is still a frontier where a heavy set women is shunned.

While this comment thread began as a discussion (as usual) over whether or not Diana knows what she's talking about when she points out the obviously unequal views we all have of men and women, it seems to have shifted to become a much more sound discussion about what it means to be a fat person in general. While living in the UK this summer, I read this article that examines a question asked by Malcolm Gladwell (of "Tipping Point" fame if you need a frame of reference): "Is fat the new race?"

It seems that we all believe it's okay to criticize fat people, but because we're culturally reared to constantly physically evaluate (or "check out" if you will) women, it's not surprising that fat women in tight clothing have been referred to as muffin tops and (in the LA Times) as sausage casing girls.

In short: Fatties all get a bad name, but women are over-represented in these mainstream criticisms while they continue to be under-represented on oh let's say, your company's payroll.

Just to over-clarify a bit more: THAT'S WHAT WE CALL SEXISM.

Liz... Queen Latifah, Da Brat, formerly Missy Elliot, Sista Souljah are, or were, full figured...most other female rappers are at least bootylicious!

Merci, thanks for informing us that we ALL share the same views on women and fat people. Of course We must, for after all, We are Borg!

Juno- Latifa lost weight and had a breast reduction, Da Brat wasn't heavy when she started in the biz. Missy Elliot was hidden in jumbo costumes until she thinned out. No, I'm sorry. It is not ok for a female to be fat in the rap industry. As far as "bootylicious" goes...that was a name give to Jay-Z's g/f Beyonce. Jay-Z isn't hangin' with a "fat" girl by any means.

Liz, "bootylicious" is a much older term. It was fairly common in the early 90s (Bonita Apple Bum days...maybe before your time). It simply refers to women with attractively-large backsides.
As for the Queen, I don't see how her recent desire to be free of chronic back pain has any bearing on her commercial successes throughout the 90s. Frankly, I think your being a bit disrespectful to her by denying her accomplishments in the face of such a superficial and sexist industry.
I'll take your word for it that heavyset female rappers are underrepresented - I'm just pointing out that many of the blanket generalizations tossed around in this blog don't do justice to reality.

Holly Madison, Bridget Marquardt, and Kendra Wilkinson. (I have their names memorized)

And I don't think anyone is being sexist or degrading. Women degrade themselves by wearing cloths that gives them a "muffin". If you’re fat, don't wear tight jeans.....

P.S. Same rule applies to spandex

Merci: Cherry-picked lists and undocumented statements are typical and somewhat acceptable for a little undergraduate like yourself because you are trying and still on your way up. But DYB has a PhD and yet is unable to defend her positions in any rigorous way. And she apparently likes to advance feminism by going to burning man where she likely spreads HPV to young people like you. That whole story on her blog about how at her first burning man some dirtbag played her is almost too painful to read.

Feminists are scumbags.