Jessica Valenti's Backstory

Got done earlier today reading through Robert Stacy McCain's year-and-a-half-old, long form review of Jessica Valenti's Sex Object (published in 2016), which amounts to a considerable public service for those of us determined to avoid memoirs from people who have no right to be taken seriously writing them (e.g.). Valenti, who turns 40 this year, has mostly had a career based on holding the right opinions and airing them on Twitter and on various blogs, including her now-former project, Feministing. But the disturbed, and at times depraved individual behind her writing has evaded the public eye.

Her (mis)adventures take her through New Orleans party school Tulane (at $50,000 a year!), where she flunks out, to turn back up at SUNY Albany (the inevitable Woody Allen gag is worth recalling). She wastes her time with rich dissolute boys, "chiseled" boy toys, and a litany of other bedroom mistakes. We understand where her penchant for blaming everything bad that happens to women on men comes from, because the other choice — taking responsibility for her mistakes — is beyond her capacity. (As McCain puts it, "One of the amazing things about the patriarchal oppression of women is how guys with too much money so easily locate women with an appetite for free cocaine.") She hates her husband, and fears (probably rightly) that he reciprocates ("I feel like I might hate him and I suspect he feels the same"). The penalty for being Jessica Valenti is being Jessica Valenti.

Dirty Jobs

Some links contravailing the narrative about women and dirty jobs:

• "Agency 'a man's world': Women sewer workers sue DEP over unfair treatment"
• "City tunnel worker sues over sex bias" 
• "The pay's OK but the hours stink: Pair become Britain's first female SEWAGE apprentices"
• "Daughters of the Mountain: Women Coal Miners in Central Appalachia"
• Women coal miners in early industrial Britain 

I came across these in another discussion elsewhere. Not that these aren't real, but they're far from routine, and still lack evidence that women are either currently knocking at the door of such opportunities, or have in the past in large numbers in the absence of better prospects. (The link on coal mining particularly is interesting, inasmuch as it was used as propaganda against women in such jobs.) Men still form the vast majority of the labor force in difficult, dirty jobs; and in the case of the first two, it's a matter of an arguable jackpot situation, depending on the damages sought. Certainly, the commentariat is remarkably absent in these matters. One does not see, for example, a Jessica Valenti demanding there be more female coal miners, or an Amanda Marcotte stumping for more men in the veterinary medicine field. Always, it is STEM fields, because

1. Science is important
2. Women must do important things
3. Women must be scientists

even if "you go first" applies.