Chloe Angyal

Originally posted at Splice Today

­Last week, I wrote about the controversy over the “Save Second Base” breast cancer fundraising campaign at Princeton University. I wasn’t th­e only one. My friends Amelia and Gracie wrote an op-ed column in our college paper, The Daily Princetonian, explaining why the slogan “Save Second Base” was problem­atic for so many members of the campus community. Neither Amelia nor Gracie nor I received much support from members of the campus community. We were called some pretty unpleasant names, accused of some pretty awful things (one of my friends described me as being “on a crusade to ensure that women lose their breasts to cancer”), and were generally chastised for pulling funding away from a worthy cause simply because the advertising for that cause didn’t suit our tastes (for the record, we think it’s an incredibly worthy cause, and we all donated last week). 

Every year at Princeton University, the student group Princeton Against Cancer Together (PACT) holds an event called Manicure for the Cure, where they bring in beauty school students to do manicures for Princeton students in the days leading up to spring formals. Formals are this weekend, so advertisements for Manicure for the Cure are all over campus.

To advertise, they're using the slogan "Save Second Base." The phrase "second base," in case you don't know, refers to foreplay involving breasts, as in "I kissed Jenny under the bleachers and made it to second base." "How far did you let him go, Jenny? To second base?" If it sounds antiquated and ridiculous... that's because it is.

“We now live in a country where a generation of Australian women don't even consider themselves feminists, having rejected the term because they think they'll be labelled a lesbian and won't get a boyfriend if they use the word.” That was the sound of Sydney Morning Herald blogger Sam de Brito explaining to Australian women the importance of adopting feminism, both the worldview and the label.

De Brito, who pens the blog All Men Are Liars, laments women’s reluctance to adopt that label, explaining that “fearful, insecure men and the politicised lesbian activists who hijacked the feminist movement in the 70s and 80s can take equal responsibility for this perception problem.”

That was the sound of all of de Brito’s women readers snorting coffee out of their noses. So let me get this straight, Sam: women shouldn’t be afraid of feminism and its accompanying stereotypes about man-hating lesbians. And they wouldn’t be afraid, if those damned man-hating lesbians hadn’t screwed everything up back in the day.

Cross posted at RH Reality Check

 

 

 

If you watch the O’Reilly Factor, Glenn Beck, or pay attention to any other Conservative media these days, you’ll know that America is rapidly becoming a socialist nation. More specifically, we’re becoming Sweden. The Daily Show has done some hard investigative reporting into what the impending socialist nightmare will mean for America, noting that Sweden is burdened with unfathomable horrors like universal healthcare, paid parental leave, annual paid vacation and, of course, really hot women. But The Daily Show has missed some of the other awful things that Americans, and particularly American women, will have to suffer through when America succumbs to its inevitable wealth-redistributing, ABBA-loving Scandinavian fate. Here are a few of the very worst ones: