And speaking of adding 2 cents to the HuffPo forum on women and Palin (see previous post, below), here’s Virginia Rutter chiming in already with 8 cents of her own! -GWP

Here’s why. Because I believe that the “women against” gambit feeds into the identity politics of Sarah Palin that make her so damn scary. Ironically, by mounting a “women against” campaign, we make her a “woman’s candidate.” And that is what is driving us f-ing crazy. (At least one poll shows a boost in support from Republican women.) Maybe I read too much Foucault back in the day (or perhaps have more recently seen too much Rove?), but I am telling you this looks like a tough one to handle.

Her identity politics are about “I’m a hockey mom so respect me.” “I am an authority figure, so don’t question me.” “I’m a Christian, so don’t doubt me.” “I am a woman, so don’t get feminist with me.” On the facts, womenagainstpalin are totally right. On the politics of it, it doesn’t work. So, I am not going with womenagagainst. Instead I’m sticking with “she’s more Bush than Bush.” (Pun intended? Oh gosh, no.)

Do check out this forum compiled by Feminist.com’s Marianne Schnall over at HuffPo today. Marianne asked a number of women (and I’m honored to be one of them!) to answer 3 questions about Sarah Palin and the election. Explains Marianne,

As a woman, I have been feeling a bit overwhelmed and shaken by this election season, the highs and lows of it all. On the one hand, I have been feeling powerful — everyone is talking about women and our decisive influence in this election. Even the cover of the September 22nd issue of Newsweek is asking, “What do women want?” It’s a good question. So many important themes and dialogues have been raised during this election season — about identity politics, what we expect from a woman leader, sexism in the media, diversity in the feminist movement, what masculine and feminine values are, and about Sarah Palin and the “Palin effect.” It all made me want to talk to other women, to get clarity, to gain insight. I tried to think about what I, personally, could do to contribute to this dialogue.

I can’t wait to read what the others wrote–the others being Isabel Allende, Joan Blades, Eve Ensler, Melissa Etheridge, Gloria Feldt, Kim Gandy, Elizabeth Lesser, Courtney Martin, Kathy Najimy, Amy Richards, Deborah Siegel, Eleanor Smeal, Gloria Steinem, Loung Ung, Alice Walker, Jody Williams, Marie Wilson.

Come stop by and add your 2cents!

Today’s tidbits on a new generation of men:

1. Men with sexist views earn more dough. According to a new study published in the Journal of Applied Psychology, sexist men in the workplace are likely to out-earn their more modern thinking counterparts. Um, really? The BBC reports, and feministing and Broadsheet respond.

2. More single men live at home with Mom and Dad than do single women. While as recently as 1980, only six percent of men reached their early 40s without marrying (compared to five percent of women), by 2004, that percentage had increased to 16.5 percent of men (and 12.5 percent of women). Even more telling, 55 percent of American men aged 18 to 24 live with their parents and 13 percent between 25 to 34 years of age still live at home, compared to only eight percent of women. Read the rest in HNN.

3. Teenage fathers are on the decline. But boys who become Baby Daddies face unique challenges as young men thrust into responsibility. As reported in ABC News, Levi Johnston, the expectant father of Bristol Palin’s unborn child, joins a small minority of his peers by becoming a teenage father. Overall, only 1.7 percent of teenage males were fathers in 2002, a decline since the early 1990s. In fact, the majority of teen mothers are impregnated by men age 20 and older. And ABC News reports that while there are many support services for teen mothers, teen fathers are often left out, despite studies showing that they are more prone to delinquency, reduced educational attainment, financial hardship and unstable marriage patterns.

(Thanks to CCF for the heads up on items 2 and 3)

Via Bitch PhD comes news of an Obama fundraising campaign engineered by Ayelet Waldman (writer, DNC Blogger, former HipMama) whereby you donate $250 through this link, forward your email receipt to Ayelet along with your mailing address, and she’ll send you ten randomly-picked signed books by one of these authors.

Free books AND support for Obama (who, unlike SOME presidents of ours, actually reads)? It doesn’t get much better than that!

The Feminist Press’ Gloria Jacobs and Feministing.com’s Courtney Martin Discuss Sarah Palin from Brian Lehrer Live on Vimeo.

Nicely done.

PBS is doing a poll which asks if Palin is qualified to be VP. Supporters have organized a yes campaign–and the “yes” is at the moment winning. If you have strong feelings about this, please take literally 1 minute to go to: http://www.pbs.org/now/polls/poll-435.html and vote!
And please feel free to send this on.

I’m thrilled to welcome ya’ll back from the weekend with this month’s post from GWP regular Courtney Martin. Please do check out the questions Courtney leaves us with at the end, and feel free to share links in comments. Courtney is doing some amazing work on youth and political engagement (hint hint: her next book) and any links you post will be of great interest to us all! -GWP

Generation Next
By Courtney Martin

In such a tight presidential race, it’s not surprising that pundits are suddenly stuck on looking for the demographic that could have the biggest influence on the outcome in November. One of the key groups that the media is finally analyzing in a sophisticated way is the youth vote. Yes, we are more complex than just “the youth go CRAZY for Obama.”

The Nation’s Peter Dreier just published a piece with the following framing:

Democratic Party strategists believe that in key swing states, a dramatic increase in turnout among young voters–and African-Americans–can be the key to victory for both Obama and the party’s candidates for Congress. Campus activists, meanwhile, view the Obama campaign as a means to catalyze a new progressive youth movement among the Millennial (18- to 29-year-old) generation that they hope, unlike the political crusades of the 1960s youth rebellion, will be part of a broader, multigenerational coalition.

Dreier also worked in the following critical stats:

After steady declines in turnout since 1972, young voters reversed the trend in the 2004 presidential and 2006 mid-term elections. In Democratic primaries and caucuses, the number of young voters increased from 1.1 million to 4.9 million. (In contrast, Republican primaries attracted only 1.8 million youth voters.) A Harvard study found that compared to the 2004 primaries, the youth vote quadrupled in the Tennessee primary and almost tripled in Iowa, Georgia, Missouri, Mississippi, Oklahoma and Texas.

Really critical food for thought. I thought I’d leave you all with some questions that the mass media has consistently failed to ask, and that even Dreier (who generally does a great overview, didn’t touch on in depth):

-How is the progressive movement doing in building a youth movement that can last for years to come, not just jumping on the Obama band wagon?
-Is the progressive youth movement being funded adequately? (I asked and answered this one in my recent column at the American Prospect.)
-What issues are most important to youth? (Answer: the same ones that are important to “the old folks”: the economy, the war, and healthcare.)
-How are young women responding to Palin? Michelle Obama?
-How are voter mobilization organizations targeting non-college enrolled youth? (Too often the media acts as if the majority of 18-28 year olds are enrolled in school, which is actually not the case.)

Please leave links to places that are answering these questions adequately in the comments section, if you run across them! Let’s hold our media accountable to explore these issues before it becomes too late to address every last little obstacle between Obama/Biden and the White House.

Just when you thought that with the interesting yet complicated angle Palin is injecting into red state feminism, we might onto something new, Christina Hoff Sommers is back fanning the flames of the mommy wars by arguing that in building her case, Betty Friedan made a fatal mistake that undermined her book’s appeal at the time and permanently weakened the movement it helped create.

According to Sommers in a New York Sun article titled Reconsiderations: Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, Friedan not only attacked a postwar culture that aggressively consigned women to the domestic sphere, but she attacked the sphere itself – along with all the women who chose to live there.

I seriously can’t wait for Stephanie Coontz’s reconsideration of TFM (which is in the works). We need it, bad.

And while we’re at it, Newsweek reports that a new study finds that children of privileged families fare worse when the mother works outside the home–but what does the research really tell us? Read it and see.

(Thanks to Steve Mintz and the Council on Contemporary Families–on whose Board I now sit!–for the links.)

Thanks to all of you who responded to this month’s GWP poll. You have spoken, and we listened. We’re keeping the “feminist” in our tagline, rather than changing it to “gender.” And, thanks again to a reader’s suggestion, we are shortening it a bit. The new tagline will read:

“Bridging Feminist Research and Popular Reality”

Group launch is just around the corner…for reals!

Atlas Shrugged by Greg Zehner, over at HuffPo

…and, always, Purse Pundit.

Other links to what’s going on, in terms that make sense to the layperson? Please share!