Obama’s package on C-SPAN2!!!!

There was package on display Wednesday afternoon on C-SPAN2. It belonged to Sen. Barack Obama. He was talking on the Senate floor about the burdensome cost of higher education. He was wearing a black blazer over black slacks. The slacks were tight around his mid-section, especially in the front. The bulge of his package registered after only a quick glance. No scrunch-faced scrutiny was necessary. There wasn’t an unseemly amount of bulge showing, but there it was. Undeniable.

Wow. That’s a really innappropriate paragraph for WaPo to run, right? And, okay, they didn’t. No, they just ran this:

There was cleavage on display Wednesday afternoon on C-SPAN2. It belonged to Sen. Hillary Clinton. She was talking on the Senate floor about the burdensome cost of higher education. She was wearing a rose-colored blazer over a black top. The neckline sat low on her chest and had a subtle V-shape. The cleavage registered after only a quick glance. No scrunch-faced scrutiny was necessary. There wasn’t an unseemly amount of cleavage showing, but there it was. Undeniable.

Regendering is a fun little game I learned from Pandagon and PunkAssBlog. If you think something written about women is kind of offensive or annoying but you’re not sure, just switch the genders around and see if it’s still offensive, because often we’re so used to reading sexist or ridiculous tripe about women that we don’t even really recognize how sexist or silly it is until the same thing is written about men.

P.S. While we’re on WaPo and gender here, did anyone see this article?

Mom’s in the House, With Kids at Home

Having a mother in Congress can be tough on children, too, said Wilson, from New Mexico.

“There are times when they want me to be just a mom,” she said. “They’re very patient, very tolerant of people who want to talk to me in the grocery store and things like that. But sometimes it’s too much.”

When that happens, her 10-year-old, Caitlin, makes a fist like an “O” and then points her three middle fingers downward like an “M” — a signal that she wants an “ordinary mom,” Wilson said. “We all have that moment when we ask ourselves — are we doing the right thing?”

I’m not sure how I feel about it. On the one hand, it does bring up some valid points about the public opinion struggles congresswomen with young children deal with. On the other, it still seems to imply that kids whose mothers are away are somehow uniquely suffereing (as opposed to those whose fathers are away), or that there’s something different about a mother leaving her child for work than a father doing so …

Edit: Ugh, and now Ann Althouse, Self-Proclaimed Proprieter of All Boob Sightings Everywhere, weighs in with one of her now-famous attacks of the fact that women have women’s bodies and sometimes this is evident in public.

Or are you going to say that “flaunts” is too active a verb? She has cleavage. Just happens to have it. Just happens to wear a top that happens to be low enough that you can see it if you happen to have eyes. Just happens to wear it to the Senate floor to give a speech about the cost of education. Are you going to say that we ought to be giving attention to the content of that speech and not to the presentation of the woman who would be President?

Yes. Yes, Ann, I am going to say that. I am going to make the radical statement that we should be paying attention to what a presidential candidate has to say about education policy and not the fact that she, like 99.9 percent of her fellow females, has boobs.