Sexualized Ads Become "Obscene" When Guys are the Objects

So this video and news issue is a wee bit old, but the idea it raises isn't at all.

Apparently an in-store Abercrombie ad campaign (see video below) received complaints for being too sexual/obscene. Abercrombie has been doing this for years, for example, depicting cartoons of topless girls (yeah, they looked awful young) in pools and having threesomes in their catalog back when I worked in the mall 10 years ago. And in this day and age of hypersexualization of women's bodies and the general pornification of everyday life, you would think these ads must be awfully revealing to be so scandalous.

The thing is, the ads aren't that revealing. Not by far, and especially not compared to most ads we see everywhere. we. look.

Except that most sexualized ads we see are of women's bodies (I said most-I am well aware of the sexual and homoerotic tones of several cologne ads). However, the Abercrombie campaign includes some sexy images...of guys. And the marketing target is upper-middle class, heterosexual teens, both female and male.

via msnbc.com:

This is the part that struck me most:

"there's half naked guys running around--it's obscenity--is Playboy able to hang naked pictures in their store?"

Um, sorry dude, but the half naked men shown in Abercrombie ads is not the same as fully naked Playboy pictures. Like, at all. It's more like Victoria's Secret ads (and even then not quite the same there either)...and oh yeah, they are able to show those, and not only in their stores, but on billboards, the sides of buses, every f*cking magazine you pick up, not to mention, the goddamn TV!!

The ads are only 'scandalous' because guys are being (mildly) depicted as erotic objects of heterosexual desire. And this just doesn't happen. Even when there's male (frontal) nudity in movies, it's typically either goofy or is not eroticized. Women as sexual objects, as seen as serving a sexual function for men (being sexually desirable rather than having sexual desire) have functioned in a particular way in western patriarchy, along with wife/mother, to produce female ideals whose value relies on seeing women in terms of how they function for men's benefit. This is the very definition of objectification--defining (a person) in terms of how you already see them to be, in how they're useful for you, rather than seeing them on their own terms. Men are really only able to objectify women in this way because such narrow and all-defining judgment is never returned to them; they are rarely, if ever, made the objects of female-centered desire. It's awfully hard to objectify someone when you recognize they have their own desire--and that you might not be up to their standard.

I'm getting a bit off track, and I'll continue to blog about that in the future, but getting back to the anxious guy...his comments are screaming male privilege. The fact that these images bother him so much can be attributed to him rarely having to be faced with the eroticization of his own body, even in the mild Abercrombie images of guys in jeans showing a little buttcrack. What's fascinating is that he is so bothered by it. I'd like to say that he's finally getting a small taste of what women go through, but that's not even close to the truth: he has the luxury of being able to avoid dealing with the images by walking out of the store. These kinds of images (and so much more) are simply unavoidable for women--we can never just walk away, because they're there whenever we turn around.

Another fascinating thing about his comment was his analogy of these images to Playboy images. On an obvious level, he's so wrong, because, um, come on, they're nowhere near close: they're not the same degree of nudity, not the same degree of sexualization (there's little about the Abercrombie poses that are seductive or vulnerable), and not the same intent. On another level, they are similar, because sexualized women's bodies are so commonplace these days, that we wouldn't even blink an eye if we were to replace the guy in the Abercrombie ad with a woman. We probably wouldn't even think it was racy, or even that sexual. So his analogy, in a way, speaks very much to the ubiquitous sexualized female body and the rarely eroticized male body.

Finally, what I'm also quite interested in regarding this video news story, is that the campaign included images of girls, depicted in much the same way as the guys are...yet he never mentioned being bothered by the "obscenity" of those! When we take this reaction, and think about the male anxiety around male nudity in general, and especially gay male sexuality (but of course, not lesbian sexuality), it it very clear that, in popular culture, sexuality becomes 'obscene' when it does not reinforce heteronormative masculinity. Images are only seen as improperly sexualized when it's the male body on display for a (presumed) het female audience.

(Cross-posted to The Reaction)

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What's wrong with this article? Marriage and Taxes, part 2

Especially in light of my critique of 'marriage'-centric social organization, check out this article from CNN.com:

"Study: Single parents cost taxpayers $112 billion":

Divorce and out-of-wedlock childbearing cost U.S. taxpayers more than $112 billion a year, according to a study commissioned by four groups advocating more government action to bolster marriages.

hmm...what's wrong with this so far? (hint: it's something to do with the premise of the article)

Ok, I'll tell you.

1. It implies that divorcees and parents who are unmarried are not 'taxpayers.'
2. Thus, it positions those not divorced or single parents--married people, single people (aka not-yet married), and married parents--as the 'ideal taxpayer-citizen'

And that's just the first paragraph.

Next:

Sponsors say the study is the first of its kind and hope it will prompt lawmakers to invest more money in programs aimed at strengthening marriages.

Could it possibly be that our social and economic structures heavily favor married parenting, and that's what needs to be investigated, rather than 'strengthening marriage'??

Two experts not connected to the study said such programs are of dubious merit and suggested that other investments -- notably job creation -- would be more effective in aiding all types of needy families.

...which is good, especially since I heard on NPR recently (I can't find the show reference! aah!) that divorce and income are correlated (and ya know, 'the sanctity of marriage' etc. is of utmost important to preserving 'traditional' --read: patriarchal capitalist --values).

There's more:

Scafidi's calculations were based on the assumption that households headed by a single female have relatively high poverty rates, leading to higher spending on welfare, health care, criminal justice and education for those raised in the disadvantaged homes.

Right, because there's a natural connection between single mothering and poverty, apparently, so we need to fix the 'single mothering' rather than, say, the 'feminization of poverty' or the socio-economic structure that perpetuates single-parent (mother) poverty.

See, there's two problems here with our socio-economic structure:

1. The assumption of two parents present and sharing a home. The model used to be male breadwinner/female domestic servant. Now, women are 'allowed' to have economic independence but continue to bear the homemaking burden.
   
2. Women are paid less money, plain and simple.
   

So in a single-parent family where that single parent is a woman, she's doubly screwed economically.

At the end of the day, the article--along with the study and those who commissioned it--assumes the natural and neutral center of American life (ought) to be marriage and specifically, married-parenting. Further, they conclude that we should tell people how they should structure their networks of association in their life because it would cost less in government expenditures and because they are deviating from some sort of arbitrary 'normal'. Sure marriage is the norm in American society; that doesn't make it natural. It's still an arbitrary primary structure of social relations.

Sure sounds like life, liberty, and all that jazz to me!

cross-posted to The Reaction

see my part 1 here

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McCain defends masculinity by resorting to sex-based insults

OK, so this has been mentioned everywhere, but in The Real McCain by Cliff Schecter, he claims that McCain responded to his wife's comment about his hair thinning by calling her a 'cunt.'

From the book, via Feministing:

At one point, Cindy playfully twirled McCain's hair and said, "You're getting a little thin up there." McCain's face reddened, and he responded, "At least I don't plaster on the makeup like a trollop, you cunt." McCain's excuse was that it had been a long day.

For the record, trollop means "prostitute" or "promiscuous woman."

(Interestingly, dictionary.com phrases this to imply that a prostitute is a particularly promiscuous woman, as if prostitution as sex work and individual promiscuity for one's own pleasure -not work- are in fact conceptually related).

See my previous posts on sexed bodies and gendered insults, and on gendered language more generally.

No further comment required.

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Thesaurus.com Says 'Female' is Equivalent to 'Weaker'

Both feministing and Jezebel reported this week that a Thesaurus.com entry has shown up for the word "weaker" where the only two entries are "female" and "lady." The entry has been removed so you can view the screenshot here.

My guess is this was supposed to be some sort of a joke, since not only have those two synonyms been removed, but if you look up "weaker" in Thesaurus.com, there is no entry for it, period, only for "weak." From looking at the site, though, it doesn't seem to be user-generated so if it was a joke, it was an "inside" one or a hacker--I hope.

Not only am I bringing this up because it is so blatantly sexist, not to mention completely unproductive, say for a student needing a real synonym, but because this connects a great deal to my previous post about gendered-language and the denigration of the female that is encapsulated by the term pussy, but also because language politics in terms of gender/sexuality has been popping up in the news. A couple weeks ago, weakness was aligned with femininity in the recent commentary on Obama's bowling performance, and Christopher Hitchens' characterized (gay male) Andrew Sullivan as acting like a 'lesbian' in order to insult him.

This Thesaurus.com incident proves how deeply embedded these associations are in our culture-- whether it goes to show that woman is "officially" connected to the meaning of "weak" or that a hacker understood this cultural connection and attempted to embed it into institutional discourse.

The synonyms they provide for the "weaker" synonyms "female" and "lady" are seems to be taken from the actual entries for various woman-related terms. And as long as we're talking about language and thesaurus.com, lets do some word analyzing.

"female":

noun-amazon, babe, beauty, broad, cutie, dame, doll, dowager, duchess, femme, filly, fox, gal, gentlewoman, girl, lady, madam, mama, matron, petticoat, pinup, seductress, she, siren, sis, skirt, temptress, tomato, wench; adjective-changeable, child-bearing, delicate, effeminate, effete, fair, feminine, fertile, gentle, girlish, girly, graceful, ladylike, maidenly, matronly, modest, muliebral, oviparous, petticoat, pistil-bearing, pistillate, pure, refined, reproductive, sensitive, she-stuff, shy, soft, tender, twisty, virgin, vixenish, weak, womanish, womanlike

vs. "male":

noun- ape, beefcake, boy, bruiser, buck, bull, chap, dude, father, fellow, gent*, gentleman, guy, he, he-man, hunk, jock, john, macho man, papa, stud, tiger, tom, wolf; adjective-macho*, manful, manlike, manly, potent, virile

Notice anything? Perhaps an emphasis on sexual appeal in terms of being female and sexual action in terms of being male? Perhaps mostly terms of confidence, self-identity, and positivity for male while female terms are largely relational (not individual), object-like, or negative.

Looking closer at these listings for each...

• Most of the entries for female and male regarded adults. However, while "girl" is among the 12 listings for "female," "boy" is not listed among the 14 listings for "male." I suppose there's a significant difference between a boy and a male, whereas between a girl and a female, not so much.
  
• Curiously, "men's movement" and "misogynist" is part of "male" while women's movement is absent from the "female" listings.
  
• "Drag queen" is under the "female" listings (not male).
  
• "Matronly," and "daughter" are part of female, while "family jewels," "virile," and "male pattern baldness" are in the listings under "male" (though male pattern baldness is notably not part of the definition of male), rather than "fatherly" and "son."
  
• There is a separate entry for "gigalo" under the male listings, but not "prostitute" under female. Maybe that's because pinup, seductress, temptress and vixenish are all definitions of "female," and "call girl" is one of the first listings under the search for "girl."
  

So how about looking at "girl":

babe, baby doll, bird, blonde, bobby-soxer, boytoy, broad, butterfly, canary, chick, coed, cupcake, cutie, dame, damsel, daughter, deb, debutante, doll, female, filly, gal, jail bait, lady, lassie, mademoiselle, maid, maiden, minx, miss, missy, mouse, nymph, nymphet, piece, queen, schoolgirl, she, sis, skirt, spring chicken, teenybopper, tomato, tomboy, virgin, wench, witch, woman

vs. "boy":

buck, cadet, chap, child, chip, dude*, fellow, gamin, guy, half-pint*, junior, lad, little guy*, master, punk*, puppy*, runt*, schoolboy, shaveling, shaver*, small fry*, sonny*, sprout*, squirt*, stripling, tadpole*, whippersnapper*, youngster, youth

Looking at the girl/boy listings, of which there were 50+of each...

• In the first few for "boy" were such listings as "boy wonder," "office boy," "mama's boy," "playboy"--one for boy's employment, one for a non-boyish boy, one for a boy's intellectual genius, and one for a man's (active and selfish) sexuality.
  
• In the first few for "girl" we listings like "girl Friday," "bachelor girl," "call girl," "cover girl"--one for girl's employment, one for her marital status, and two for her (passive) sexuality.
  
• Note that tomboy (the arguably female equivalent of mama's boy) is part of the definition of girl whereas mama's boy it outside of the definition of boy itself. This here reveals how ingrained how threatening troubling gender roles is for hegemonic, heteronormative masculinity in a way that it isn't as much for girls...so long as they are also "reproductive" and "pinups."
• Several of the terms for girl referred to sexuality, while the terms for boy simply referred predominately to youth. Even further, the sexual terms are those of the ubiquitous male fantasy of girls' sexuality: virgin and nymph, whereas the sexual terms related to (adult) "female" tended to cluster around her dangerousness: temptress, seductress.
• The boy is primarily a young man, whereas "girl" seems to have a discursive function of its own, producing a sexualized and appearance-oriented image of young femininity that will be coupled with being wifely and motherly as an adult female.
  

You might be thinking, "it's just Thesaurus.com...what's the big deal?" Well, Thesaurus.com and Dictionary.com are heavily used and are considered reputable sources. And words mean things. Language shapes thought, and what we are able to think. So long as we overload terms for female with passivity, sexualization, objectification, and motherhood, and male with activity, active sexuality and prowess, we will continue to think of men and women in these terms. Think about it--what do we call a woman who's sexually active--slut, loose, whore? What do we call a passive male sex object? Um, hunk...maybe? Or meaty? And of course juxtapose those terms with "delicate," "weak," and "sensitive," and maybe now we're seeing this isn't just an issue of a word or two.

And when "mama's boy" is an anomaly of "boy" while "tomboy" is part of the definition of "girl," we have some serious heteronormativity in our language. And when nymph and virgin, doll and cutie are the way we think of young girls rather than simply being not-yet women, some light is shed on our incredible social problem of girls' sexualization and the sexualization of the young and vulnerable (even if legal) in general. And why is there no term for an intelligent girl, like we have for "boy wonder"....just "cover girl"?

When we can't think without words, when we understand that words do not simply reflect our thought but actually shape it, we can begin to understand that they're not just words.

*for more of the same, check out dictionary.com for "woman" and "man."

cross-posted to The Reaction

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"Torture Porn" or Female Empowerment? Neither? Both?

Women's e-news has an interesting article about "torture porn" directors positing their work as "feminist." This descriptive category, coined by David Edelstein of the New York Times (and frequent Fresh Air film reviewer), refers to recent films such as Hostel and Captivity.

One part of the piece in particular struck me:

"Men are making films and calling them feminist when they don't understand the feminine experience," Soloway [a consulting producer of ABC's TV show "Dirty Sexy Money" ] said. "It's their salute to how they see female power."

I find this quite interesting and also don't doubt this is likely the directors' intentions. Isn't it interesting though to see what "power" means to these (male) directors and how it looks when taken up by a woman? But in their unproblematic and uncritical depiction of sex-violence, they don't see how both are gendered realities, and in women's daily lives are combined as a means of controlling and possessing women. This lack of contextualization makes their rendering of them more in collusion with gender-based oppression than fighting it.

Further, it leaves the idea of (masculinized) power and its role in maintaining racist, heterosexist patriarchy uncriticized. Women are depicted as powerful so long as they control the violence done to them (brutally done and graphically depicted) by violence of their own.

Lindsey Horvath, who works in film advertising and is president of the National Organization for Women's Hollywood chapter says, [...]

"Essentially I watched an hour and 45 minutes of a woman being stalked, drugged, nearly raped and terrorized," she said. In the end, the character escapes and kills her attacker. "It's like as long as the woman kills the guy at the end, then of course it's a female empowerment movie."

For the reasons listed above, I find the rationale that the eventual "triumph" of the female character overrides and makes unproblematic the rest of the depictions in a film unconvincing. The ends apparently justify the means. In a way, the sexualized violence throughout the film may also function to make palatable the fact that "the woman wins," that the woman takes control of herself back from (symbolic) masculine domination.

Further, I really have to doubt that people see movies like these because the woman wins in the end.

I must admit I am fascinated by the way gender and sexuality is produced in horror films. Some recommended reading from my reading "wish list":

The Naked And The Undead by Cynthia A. Freeland
Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film by Carol J. Clover

Also check out Ax Wound 'zine.

Thoughts?

UPDATE 3/20: Women's E-News writer Rachel Corbett has a more detailed discussion up at Alternet.

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Randon Act of Feminism for February/March : Gendered-Language Watch

I've decided to start a monthly "Random Act of Feminism"- a suggestion of something you can do to make feminism or feminist thinking visible in daily interactions with others. Among all of this cultural analysis, feminism is both useful and relevant to everyday life!

We're halfway through February, so this will be a 2-month deal, which is actually pretty appropriate considering February and March are the token "appreciation" months for women and African-Americans. Which in my book pretty much boils down to this:

image credit: Guerilla Girls

But this Random Act regards women and people of color (in addition to other social minorities) specifically, so in a way, I suppose it's "appropriate."**

Without further adieu....


Gendered-language watch
In conversation (your own and others'), watch how people are described. Typically, we use "identity" descriptors only with reference to women, gay men, lesbians, people of color, non-Western ethnicities, (and also non-Christian religions)...in other words, the default category for a "person" is a white, hetero, male. A person is only someone "other" than that when specified.

This is what's referred to as "ex-nomination" (coined by the semiotician Roland Bathes)-being 'unnamed'. What is unnamed is what is seen as a 'natural' commonsensical category. Those of us who are not white heterosexual men become those with "marked bodies"-bodies who must be named to be identified. In other words, people who are women, or black are designated as such (as if identifying them according to said label adds particular meaning to who they are as a person), while white hetero men are simply "people," and are thus permitted to establish meaningful identities in ways not shaped by said societal identity labels.

Listen for it-you'll be surprised. Start correcting your own speech and kindly point it out in others'. Usually these identity markers are completely irrelevant to the context of what's being said-and using them continues to produce the default category of "person" or "human" in line with how it's been posited throughout history, and how it's been assumed to be in disciplines such as science, psychology, and philosophy: white, heterosexual, and male. This is a subtle way that norms around gender, sexuality, race, class, &,... are reproduced on a daily basis, through interpersonal interaction. "-isms" (sexism, racism...) need not come in the form of legal discrimination-they often happen in little moments throughout the day in ways we often don't realize...until someone says "hey, wait a sec..."

**These token "history" months are case-in-point. I do not wish to take away from their usefulness-during those months, the promotion of minoritarian history seems like worthwhile endeavors and more people are exposed to those histories than might otherwise be. Indeed, it is sad that traditional disciplines are so WHITE that they are even necessary. But, they are a good example of what I'm talking about as far as exnomination goes. I hear so many people say, "Well, when will we have a men's history month?" The simple (and to me, obvious) answer: every day of every month of every year, in newspapers and classrooms nationwide, is the teaching of men's history. It just isn't called that. "Neutral" history is really the history of dominant culture-it just gets the "privilege" of being called plain-old "history". Why? Oh yeah-because of exnomination, baby!

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the problem with 'pussy'

I am particularly troubled by the word "pussy" being used as an insult where I find other terms for (female and male) genitalia used as insults as less problematic. The difference, as I see it, is in the particularly gendered meaning of "pussy"; it is an insult because of its explicit (negative) link to femininity by the definitions of both slang usages (vagina, and also weak, wimpy, etc.) . The denigration of the female is what makes it insulting, and I don't find this to be the case with other genital-based insults.

my first blog post is dedicated to patty:

Consider: scene from South Park, "Fun with Veal"

Doctor: He's very luck you got him here when you did. He was in a very advanced state of vaginitis.

Randy: Vaginitis?

Doctor: It occurs when a person stops eating meat. Those sores on his skin were actually small vaginas. If we hadn't stopped it in time, Stan would have eventually just become one great big giant pussy. [ed: become attached to a cause for injustice, have compassion for the oppressed, and turn into an emotional wimp]
...
Stan: Well, I guess we learned something today: it's wrong to eat veal because the animals are so horribly mistreated, but if you don't eat meat at all you break out in vaginas.

[I also can't help but see a-perhaps unintentional-insinuation toward 'meat' as penis-in not eating meat, Stan was acquiescing his masculinity by disposessing himself of meat-the penis, the symbol of male power . As in, cease to be/have a man (read: be a non-heteronormative man or a lesbian), and you become like a woman-a pussy-which clearly isn't a good thing. Also, as in: "don't be a pussy, grow some balls."]

Keep this scene in the back of your mind as you read.

I am prompted to write this posting from recent conversations with people about the politics of words, and more specifically, slang (for more on this topic, look for my future posting about the "naggers" South Park episode). I am writing specifically on my distaste for the word "pussy" in it's secondary slang sense (as an insult meaning weak, wimpy, or to define slang with slang, without "balls," it's first slang definition being vagina). Further, I want to explain how I see this particular word functioning differently than other derogatory terms for sex organs, male or female.

First, what does "pussy" mean? Weak, wimpy, passive, gutless, spineless, able to be "fucked over", one who just "takes it"; it tends to be used when someone is seen as "overly" (whatever that means!) sensitive or emotional or caring, or is unable to "handle it"-stress, pressure, etc. Do we see a pattern? Yes!-these are all traits that are traditionally associated with women. When has pussy traditionally been used? As an insult to men-not that unlike "stop acting like a girl." However, as feminism has pushed society into recognizing that, hello!, these are not traits of women by nature, Western culture still recognized these traits as feminine even if they no longer are necessarily considered traits of females. And subsequently, "pussy" as an insult is now directed at women as well. To have called a woman a pussy in earlier times would have been redundant.

Why is "pussy" as an insult offensive? Well, I think that is self-evident: using a part of the female anatomy as an insult for someone is degrading, especially when said anatomy has been thoroughly denigrated by Western cultural ideology as ugly, unclean, smelly, who in its adult form is deficient and whose role in sexual practice is considered to be passive and secondary. I am not saying this is what everyone thinks as individuals, but this is our ideology-our system of cultural values that reinforces existing ways of thinking and presents them as natural-"the way things are." Not only is "pussy" an actual insult, but we find actual pussies (meaning, vaginas) to be plain icky and in need of physical and chemical alteration.

So what do I think of other anatomical terms used as insults-dick? cock? and the motherload-cunt? The bottom line for me is that I typically don't use any of these terms as insults. One exception I can think of is a strategic/political one: I will sometimes call a sexist man a "dick." I use it rhetorically because of the phallocentric nature of sexism, where power comes by (seeming to) possess the phallus, which is not literally the penis, but rather is symbolized by the penis. Thus, I may refer to a misogynist, phallocentric, sexist man as a "dick." In that way, I'm being ironic. But I digress...

While I choose to not use the body's sexuality as an insult to anyone, I still maintain a qualitative difference between how pussy vs. cock, dick, and yes, even cunt, function. Sure, they are all negative, insulting slang terms. Dick means something like jerk, and cock usually indicates an excess of assertion, aggression, self-centeredness; I think of them in similar meaning and usage to the term "bitch," which also makes a reference to gender (a female dog), and is usually the word of choice when referring to women (it seems odd to me to think of a woman being called a "dick"). And I can't think of a definition of the word cunt, but to me, that is the worst possible insult you can give a person. And while I am less than thrilled that a term for vagina is also the ultimate insult, it and the male terms do not trouble me like pussy does.

Why is that? Do I have a double standard? Not really. I do not see the insulting quality of dick, cock, or cunt to be in their negative reference to said gender. Is cock an insult because its meaning is linked to the derogation of it's referent-the penis, or being male? How about for dick? And I'm unsure abot cunt, but for right now I'll err on the side of saying no, it doesn't either. The very thing that makes pussy an insult is its explicit link to femininity. It is insulting because it 'feminizes' its recipient, and being feminized is a bad thing because being female and traits associated with femininity are bad! negative! insulting! And not just for men, as an affront to their masculinity, like it used to be (think: army trainees). Under liberal feminism, women have gained equal rights and respect in that women are seen to be able to behave "like men," rejecting those oh-so-terrible traits simultaneously produced and denigrated by Western culture as "feminine". So, now the pussy insult for women too, whose excessive display of certain "female" traits is seen as a bad thing (unless, of course, "excessive femininity" involves sexual exhibitionism). The insulting term loses its force if it changes to something other than pussy; it has particular meaning only because of the affiliation between women, and-quite literally-their vaginas, and what pussy as an insult is meant to convey. And that simply is not the case for dick, cock, and cunt. Pussy is an insult because of its gender connotation, the others are in spite of their gender connotation.

Food for thought: what other term might we use in place of pussy to insult someone for weakness/wimpiness? Oh I know, fag! And that's a related topic for another day...

Oh, and the next time someone calls you a pussy, consider replying:

Wow, thanks! I didn't realize you thought I was a sensuous, aromatic, pleasurable, warm, delicious, sexy, exciting, sensitive, pleasing, responsive, channel of life?! I appreciate you sharing that with me!

and tell them why using sexist and offensive language makes you an, er, um, dick. :-P

 

UPDATE 2/15/08: from feministing.com:

Time magazine's Mark Halperin recently said, in an interview for a Sirius satellite radio show,

And I can tell you, [John Edwards is] really skeptical of her ability to be the kind of president he wants. But, he kinda thinks Obama is..he thinks Obama is kind of a pussy. He has real questions about Obama's toughness, his readiness for the office.

Halperin has since apologized for his oh-so-creative, junior-high-level insult. He really used "pussy" in the classic derogatory sense: men trying to show they're more masculine by using derogatory feminine terms to describe other men. So it's offensive not only to women (way to use a term for our anatomy as an insult! awesome!) but also to men (mocking them for not conforming to male stereotypes).

Case in point!

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