Patterico's Pontifications

10/3/2014

I’ll Take ‘What Is Always Unflattering’ For $500, Alex. Answer: What Is Women Without A Sense Of Humor

Filed under: General — Dana @ 6:52 pm



[guest post by Dana]

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I don’t know about you, but I am spent. The news is so depressing that I thought along with my glass of wine and grilled skirt steak in a citrus marinade, some Friday amusement was in order.

Let’s go for the target rich: Some humorless women got their knickers in a twist this week because of an offensive Jeopardy! category: “What Women Want”. Female viewers pursed their lips in disbelief: Sexism!

• “Some help around the house; Would it kill you to get out the Bissell bagless canister one of these every once in a while?” (Answer: A vacuum cleaner.​)

• “A few moments of quiet to do this, especially the one edited by Will Shortz in The New York Times.” (Answer: The crossword puzzle.)

• “Time to exercise; perhaps a class in this discipline named for founder Joseph, who initially called it Contrology.” (Answer: Pilates.)

• And: “A pair of jeans that fit well, like the 525s from this brand.” (Answer: Levi’s.)

An actress named Sophia Bush started the Twitter ball rolling:

.@Jeopardy? For a “smart” show, you just got srsly stupid RT @DJRumspringa: ARE YOU SERIOUS @Jeopardy?? pic.twitter.com/LEZcSw8K5A #SexismIsUgly
4:34 PM – 29 Sep 2014

This was followed by some pretty funny huffy tweets:

Hey @Jeopardy that “What Women Want” category was straight up sexist. A vacuum? Tea? Really? How about equal pay instead.

Seriously @Jeopardy?How about end to rape culture, equal lay, access to reproductive healthcare, not patronizing stereotypes #whatwomenwant

What women want is not to be married to a lazy immature dickhead that helps clean his own house and raise a family, not tea! #Whatwomenwant

And in case you don’t fully understand why this seemingly trivial issue matters in a BIG way:

But little shit matters, because stuff like this — how we reflexively think about gender when no one makes us think even a tiny bit harder — reveals our biases. It proves that many people don’t recognize that there ARE bigger issues for women than how they look, how tight their Pilates game is, or where the tea is, and that it even matters when you reduce them to such trivialities.

(Of course, no mention was made about the female obsession with looks, Pilates and well-fitting jeans. Not to mention the millions of dollars spent of securing the aforementioned.)

P.S. And for the record, I’ve never met any moderately-aged woman who is not on an ongoing quest to find that one perfect fitting pair of jeans. Myself included.

–Dana

CDC Officials to Quarantined Relative of Ebola Patient: Sure, Go to the Store!

Filed under: General — Patterico @ 7:28 am



The lede is buried nice and deep inside this Washington Post story interviewing a relative (of the girlfriend) of Thomas Duncan, the man with Ebola. The story begins before the visit to the hospital and before the involvement of federal officials. It begins, in fact, with a traveling Ebola-contaminated blanket:

[Duncan’s daughter Youngor] Jallah took a quick trip to Wal-Mart and bought a $50 brown cotton blanket. When she returned, she draped it over Duncan’s shoulders and then gently lifted him by his back to try to get him to drink some hot tea. That’s when she looked into his eyes and knew in her heart that things were very bad.

. . . .

[T]he family continued to wait, watching people come and go through the emergency room. All the while, the neatly folded blanket that hours earlier had covered the first person in this country to be diagnosed with Ebola lay on the chair next to Jallah. The virus can be contagious on surfaces from a few hours to a couple days depending on the material and exposure to sunlight.

The patient himself apparently got the virus from touching someone who had been infected. So, knowing that touch and contaminated surfaces can spread Ebola, what did the CDC do? Told Jallah and her partner to go to the store:

Three days later, on Wednesday evening, Jallah and Yah were visited in their second-floor apartment by health officials from the state and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The officials took everyone’s temperature and told them that they should not leave the apartment.

“We don’t have any food,” Jallah said. “What do we do?”

She was told that she and [her partner Aaron] Yah, but not the kids, could go to the store.

Your federal government at work, protecting you. Whatever would we do without it??

UPDATE: Via Ace, here’s Obama scolding Bush for being unprepared on avian flu, and specifically decrying the lack of a “Pandemic Flu Preparedness Plan.” Hey, is there an Ebola Preparedness Plan? Hey, does that Plan contemplate telling quarantined folks to go ahead and toddle on down to their local neighborhood grocery?


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