A clip from the BBC comedy series 'That Mitchell and Webb look' It takes a very interesting look at how sexist TV advertising is...

There is zero chance that she will not be approved. There are zero reasons for her not to be approved.

The Republican Majority is using it to build cred with its dwinding racist base, in the process showing off how sexist, ignorant, hypocritical and intolerant they can be.

But what really makes the hearings a sham is the mainstream media's broadcasting this showing of Right wing abuses of a Latina woman.

We don't need to see them doing it. They don't deserve to be given the attention.

For an example of hypocrisy, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse nailed the conservatives putting on a show grilling Sotomayor.

Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C told Sotomayor, "Unless you have a complete meltdown, you're going to get confirmed."

I can't imagine him saying that to a man. 

I've long felt that a key battle conservatives have been fighting is against the feminine archetype. This manifests itself in many ways, including sexist, even misogynist language.

Let's hope that as the media enables this right wing attack-fest, where senators are getting incredible opportunities to show off their anti-abortion, pro-gun positions, that the media will also show, in the instant replays, just what neanderthals these white males are.

Rob Kall is executive editor, publisher and site architect of OpEdNews.com

A couple of weeks ago, guest Hoyden Orlando asked why Triple J’s first draft of a “potted history of music” failed to showcase significant numbers of women. (The history has since been edited.)

The “Hottest 100 Of All Time” has since aired, and audiences have been shocked to find that only two songs in the top 100 – two! – were sung by women. Only six female-fronted songs made it into the second batch of 100, so it wasn’t as though the men just edged women out in the final vote – women are just overwhelmingly absent. This sort of discrepancy doesn’t happen by accident; we can quibble about the locus of the problem till we’re blue in the face, but it’s a clear sign of entrenched, largely-invisible sexism in action. Quibbling about the locus is pointless because the locus is everywhere. This is the Matrix.

TripleJ afternoon talkback show Hack today called for a bit of feedback on the testostofest finale. It was great to hear people phoning in making intelligent and feminist observations – women and men both.

A couple of folks stood out as particularly unhelpful, of course, too. One bloke phoned in talking about how women just can’t sing with the same emotion as men can, which was an eyeroll moment. And JJJ presenter Zan Rowe was flailingly defensive, taking the “It’s not us, it’s you!” approach and saying over and over and over again that it was “democratic” and not Triple J’s fault, instead of engaging with the issue in a substantive way or taking responsibility for a plan of action.

The show can be downloaded (it will be up for a week) at the Hack site.

Originally posted at Hoyden About Town.

The geeks they are a-buzzin'. It all began a few days ago with a Livejournal blog in which a science fiction and fantasy writer wrote about the misogyny, racism and homophobia which permeates these genres.

I know where she's coming from and I straight-up agree with her argument. There is a paucity of simple respect and human understanding which would enable authors to create women who are not token geishas (or, given the genre, wild assassin women, escaping court hookers or muscly babes in bronze breastplates), non-white characters who are not noble magical heathens with psychic abilities and a strong connection to the earth, or perverted gay interplanetary warlords. It is odd that writers in fantasy and SF, the most imaginative of genres, can describe entire fictional planetary-wide alien societies with precise detail, but still not reflect the fact that women are the biggest group in society, and not all hot and young either.

We should take it as given that sex, race and sexuality bigotry manifest in cultural works just as they do in society. Outrage against such bigotry is met with bafflement by apolitical people who simply don't get what the big issue is and are too lazy and complacent to fight the status quo. That's pretty much what happened in the subsequent online reaction to the original blog.

Some manifestations of SF and fantasy are worse than others. The TV series Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which I loved, served up characters who are "strictly of the Caucasian persuasion", as one black vampire in the series quipped during his own brief role. And for every Battlestar Galactica, with its great women, there's a homosocial all-male fantasy fest like the film Dark Knight. What will it take for the film and TV industries to change? It'll take women who are feminists and non-white people who actively fight cliché and under-representation.

Let's go back to where it all started and talk about books. I am a lifelong feminist, a non-white angry political female and the admiring daughter of a successful female scientist. I love science fiction and fantasy precisely because these revolutionary genres can counter traditions of all kinds (and break a few laws of physics and biology into the bargain). The intelligence and breadth of their fan-domains, their active use of the net and their often eloquent and knowledgeable arguments, mean that we can actually discuss sex, race, whatever, and the debate gets somewhere.

I can't be bothered to crawl to some sexist, racist, homophobic white male straight writer and beg for a shred of understanding, when there are so many authors who don't need to be taught how not to be woman-hating racists. Check out Jaine Fenn, Guy Gavriel Kay, Mary Gentle, Liz Williams, Sarah Hall, Jacqueline Carey, Catherine Asaro, Nancy Kress, Hope Murless. William Gibson has great heroines. Connie Williams is dark and intense. The old classics Philip K Dick, Isaac Asimov and Arthur C Clarke represent some pretty heavy robot love. You want cool women and gay guys? There's the classic Darkover series by Marion Zimmer Bradley, Gwyneth Jones, Octavia Butler. Ripping space quests? Ann Aguirre. Want some young heroines for growing girls? Tamora Pierce, Trudi Canavan, Tanith Lee, Karen Traviss, Sheri Tepper, Tricia Sullivan, Justina Robson, Storm Constantine. The highest of high speculative fiction? That'll be Doris Lessing, I reckon. A take on old Icelandic myths? Betsy Tobin with Ice Land. Want some undiscovered treasures from the heyday of feminist science fiction? Try Josephine Saxton, Jody Scott, Joanna Russ, Octavia Butler, Marge Piercy. There are too many to mention.

The problem of how exactly to stop misogynists despising women, racists despising non-whites and homophobes despising gay people remains. The haters hate because they love it, it's a buzz and they're bullies. But science fiction and fantasy lovers must never forget that ours are the genres which imagine wild solutions. Ignore the bigots, log onto Amazon and get browsing, buying, recommending and commenting - better still, get writing. An entire universe of true human (and alien, and animal, and angelic, and cyborg, and part-werewolf, part psychic vampire) diversity awaits.

Bidisha's debut novel, Seahorses, was published to critical acclaim when she was still a teenager. Her second novel, the thriller Too Fast To Live, was published in 2000. She is now a regular contributor to Newsnight Review, Front Row and Saturday Review as well as guest presenting for The World Service books show, The Word, and various other TV and radio assignments.