Family Values at American Power

I thought some folks might grumble at bit at yesterday's post on Ann Althouse.

Cracker asks in the comments:

Professor you have referred to this blog as a "family blog".

You have recently commented on the suspect "values" of Family Broadcast Companies.

If my daughter is studying "Civics" in her 7th grade class.....and I recommended not only to her, but other classmates of hers that "American Power" has a good take on "conservatism" as it stands right now in our country and there is No indicator that you have to be 18 to view its content.

How do you suggest I respond to her, and her classmates, and perhaps her instructor ..... questions about the blog authors obsession with another blog authors breasts (nipples, tube tops, farrah etc etc.) ... as related to family values, content responsibility, and of course any hypocracy indicators that could possibly be applied not only to the "American Power" blog, but in a wider net, the entire conservative movement right now....

Check the comments for my response at the post.

I'll add further here that I'm not for one moment "obssessing" with Althouse's breasts. In fact, I'm not sexually objectifying Althouse at all. Like perhaps millions of adolescent boys in the mid-1970s, I had a poster of Farrah Fawcett on the wall in my bedroom. Does that disqualify me today, as late-40s heterosexual male observer of popular culture from commenting on a fellow blogger's dress and sexuality in a picture from the 1970s?

Check Althouse's comments if you want sex talk, where one visitor says: "Those some nice looking tits. Great rack. You could serve dinner on those things." This commenter also suggests when he meets Althouse "we are definitely going to get to 2nd base."

Althouse responds: "Not if you keep chickening out."

And besides, as noted yesterday, Althouse is a notorious breast blogger, and she's instigated some of the web's greatest flame wars with her observations on Jessica Valenti's breasts. By posting pictures of herself in a tight-fitting shirt, does Althouse succumb to same self-objectifying promotion as other women whom she's criticized? Valenti didn't like it when Althouse accused her of poking her breasts out while standing for a photo opportunity with former president Bill Clinton:

Last year I had my own run-in with online sexism when I was invited to a lunch meeting with Bill Clinton, along with a handful of other bloggers. After the meeting, a group photo of the attendees with Clinton was posted on several websites, and it wasn't long before comments about my appearance ("Who's the intern?; "I do like Gray Shirt's three-quarter pose.") started popping up.

One website, run by law professor and occasional New York Times columnist Ann Althouse, devoted an entire article to how I was "posing" so as to "make [my] breasts as obvious as possible". The post, titled "Let's take a closer look at those breasts," ended up with over 500 comments. Most were about my body, my perceived whorishness, and how I couldn't possibly be a good feminist because I had the gall to show up to a meeting with my breasts in tow. One commenter even created a limerick about me giving oral sex. Althouse herself said that I should have "worn a beret . . . a blue dress would have been good too". All this on the basis of a photograph of me in a crew-neck sweater from Gap.

Perhaps folks take all of this a bit too seriously. There's was a personal context to my post that didn't need elaboration, or so I thought. It doesn't matter anyway. While this is a "family blog," what I wrote last night is hardly disqualifying. My earlier reference to being a "family blog" was to crude vulgarity, which I do not employ. Plus, every once in a while I'm going to shake it up around here and discuss off-topics that are completely germaine to the blogging medium. In any case, I'm a man, and as Little Miss Attilla notes, "There is a marked tendency for heterosexual men to be interested in women." For some proof of that maxim, see Robert Stacy McCain, breast-blogger extraordinaire, who pronounced last November "International Natalie Portman Cleavage Day in the blogosphere."

Look, I often have young students sitting in the front row in my classrooms showing so much cleavage it's as if their endowments are about to burst out on their desktops. Actually, I think it's a bit much. I will, of course, continue to write about these things as a participant in the web's social commentary. I would think folks would find this much more acceptable than the Democratic Party's agenda of providing abortion services to 15 year-old girls or Disney-ABC's "family" programming that glorifies teenage pregnancy and underage drinking.