Everybody Loves Saturday Night

ARRRrrrrrr!

Stephen Colbert's pirate clip at the end of the Daily Show just totally cracked me up. It was so awful, I loved it!

Stephen Loves Me!

Tonight's district, Brooklyn's Fighting 11th...yeah, that's my district, and my representative who writes rap poems. Oddly, I think it took him almost the entire interview to figure out that Stephen wasn't serious.

But really, I feel that the selection of this district was a shout out to me personally, and by extension, this blog. Yeah!

Help me out on this one

Is it me, or did Maureen Dowd kinda sell out feminists on Monday's Colbert Report?

I understand that it's a satirical show (whether it's effective or not is for another post), and I understand that the guests interviewed are along for the ride. (At least, they should be--some of them don't quite seem to get it.)

But when Stephen Colbert asked what feminists wanted, or what feminism was about (something like that), and Dowd answered (this is paraphrased) that while in the 60s feminism was about not making women into sex objects, feminists of today are trying to get in touch with their "inner sluts," I felt sucker-punched.

I think she was trying to be funny. She may have been attempting something caustic and sarcastic, as if to say that she disagrees with this aspect of feminism. But my initial reaction was that she was flirting.

I am all for flirting. I am all for sexual self-awareness and owning your own sexuality. I do think this is a vital part of feminism--not letting anyone else dictate what you are or how you should look. But Dowd's comment was too glib. It was reductive. It was being coy at the expense of a movement that is still fighting the battle against women being used and viewed as objects--we're not over that yet and she KNOWS THAT.

Added 12/8: Not that I'm obsessing or anything, but I have more to say: it's not just that what Dowd quipped was reductive--if it was indeed a somewhat bitter quip leveled at young women today who take advantage of the 30+ years of the feminist movement and use it as an excuse to act out sexually without grounding it in socio-historical politics. What Dowd did was diss this generation's feminists who are actively working to make the world a better place for both women and men on social, environmental, political, and cultural levels.

So what do you say? Am I misreading her? Or did it bother anyone else?