Is there anybody more pathetic than Liberal journalists? Trump managed to get them off the PP massacre and onto the last week’s story of celebrating Muslims with just one interview.

Turn on MSNBC if you don’t believe me. It’s so easy to manipulate these losers that even Trump can do it.

All Dem female senators (except Warren, right?) endorsed Hillary for president. No big surprise there. They know very well that women – friendly policies only ever get promoted and adopted by female politicians. Which is obviously not the same as saying that all female politicians promote women – friendly policies.

Plus, Bernie is notoriously weak on women’s rights. Like any honest Marxist, he believes that gender equality will follow from economic equality. And as feminists, we know that’s bunk.

I’m watching America’s Next Top Model reruns, and it’s curious how insistently the contestants are exhorted to “show your personality” and “be yourself.” These expressions obviously ask the women to do the exact opposite: to hide their own self and personality behind the mask of a fake persona. People don’t need to make efforts to manifest their real personalities because they already do that by default.

There is a lot more variation in the body types of the models than in the personality they are told to adopt. For some mysterious reason, “personality” has come to mean being exuberant, gregarious, effervescent, and over the top (i.e. like the way I am.) Everything else is dismissed not as a bad or inadequate personality but as no personality at all.

Here is the paradox, though. These women compete to be runway / photo models. And this is a profession where having an impassive, blank face is obviously more valuable than being super talkative and funny. So the contestants are pushed towards a behavior that will handicap them professionally. Everybody knows this but the socially acceptable definition of “personality” is stronger than any practical consideration.

P.S. By the way, here is a small exercise to determine if you have a healthy body image. Watch a couple of episodes of the show, look at the models’ bodies (female models if you are a woman; male models if you are a man). If as a result of the experience you think, “These models are beautiful. I’m beautiful”, and you feel no tension between these ideas, you have a healthy body image.

Today is December 1, and that means I have exactly one month left to wind down my crazy research extravaganza that has lasted for a little over a year. The house is filled with library books that cover every available surface, my brain boils and gives me the weirdest dreams known to humanity, and the neighbors probably know me as the lady with the crazy hair who walks around in a daze, mumbling and bumping into trees and mail boxes.

One article has been handed it with final revisions completed. Now I have to finish revisions on two more articles, do one last rereading and editing of the book, and submit a book proposal to some publishing houses. 

After that, I’m ready to vegetate for 55 days.

My university is organizing a “Muslim Challenge.” In the course of the event, women will be handed out free hijabs to “get a glimpse of the experience of veiled Muslims.”

No activity is planned where “veiled Muslims”  will be encouraged to get a glimpse of the experience of women who do not consider themselves anybody’s property.

It is especially cute that the activity is being announced right after a TA at a neighboring university beat a 14-year-old girl for not wearing a hijab.

I guess this answers my question as to whether there is anybody else left anywhere interested in remembering – no, not the concept, that shit is dead – but at least the word “feminism.”

I understand it when people say “Russia and Turkey are the same” as a humorous gesture of sorts. But when this is said seriously, it scares me because one needs to amputate all memory of very recent events in order honestly to see no difference.

Let’s just look at a single little difference between the two countries. Who annexed a large territory from a neighbor by threatening to use nuclear weapons?

Annoying and distasteful is one thing – and Erdogan is obviously is all that and more, but seriously and calmly deploying nuclear weapons, as Putin recognized he did in order to annex the Crimea, is in a different order of magnitude. And by the way, everybody who was there when the threat was made took it very seriously, as we saw from later events, so let’s not start pretending that we know better and qualifying the threat as not serious.

I have no interest in “defending” Erdogan but I’m tired of false analogies, carelessness, and people’s persistent need to deny that the world is complex and varied and that things don’t need to be “just like” anything else.