sorry, maude, you didn't make the list

• Julianne Escobedo Shepherd offers a list of 10 (American, prime time) “TV shows that changed the world.” It includes some of the usual suspects (Ellen, Mary Tyler Moore, the original Star Trek) but leaves out so many other possibilities. Where’s Yogi and Boo Boo in the same bed all winter, or all the early variety shows with interracial love-song duets?
• Seattle PostGlobe, the spunky li’l local news and arts site started by ex P-I reporter Kery Murakami (and for which I posted a couple of pieces), is closing up shop after two years and change. With Murakami gone to Long Island, NY and many other original volunteer contributors off in other jobs (or other careers), the site had mainly become a spot for Bill White’s film reviews. Without the funding to maintain the site’s operation, let alone to build it into a stronger endeavor, its current boss (and cofounder) Sally Deneen is pulling the plug. She’s keeping it up in archival form.
• In other local media news, technical workers at KIRO-TV have been at a labor impasse for some15 months now. The IBEW Local 46 claims they’re just trying to preserve contractual language “that respects their individual and collective rights that are afforded to them under federal law.”
• Copper thieves have no respect for anyone or anything. Not even for the local branch of Gilda’s Club. That’s the drop-in cancer support center, named after Gilda Radner and housed in that fake Monticello office building at Broadway and East Union.
• The bicyclist struck by a hit-and-run SUV Thursday? He was a photographer and office worker for an international health agency. And how he’s dead.
• Wherever there’s a business with a predominantly male clientele, there’s somebody trying to attract female customers. The latest result comes from the UK branch of Molson Coors (you did know those beer companies had merged years ago, right?). They’re test marketing a pink beer for women. Even stranger: It’s called “Animée.” Which begs the question, would Sailor Moon drink it? How about the Ghost in the Shell?
• Lee Fang sees a cartel of “shadowy right wing front groups” spending lotsa bucks to get Congress obsessed with “the deficit” (i.e., with dismantling anything government does to help non-billionaires) instead of the economy. I don’t think the drive is all that shadowy. These outfits, their funding sources, and their biases are well known and well documented—and still scary.
• Dan Balz sees today’s Republicans as being at war against Democrats, against the middle class, against women, against sanity, and now against one another.
• Remember: Tonight (Saturday the 30th) is the annual Seafair Torchlight Parade bisecting Belltown and downtown along Fourth Avenue. This year’s grand marshal is smaller-than-he-used-to-be TV personality and Sounders FC spokesmodel Drew Carey. (The organizers tried to get someone else for the role, but they bid over the actual retail price.)

• Yay to New York for approving gay marriage. We almost forgive you for that dumb NYT paean on Fri., lauding the Portland Timbers soccer team for being almost as successful as the Sounders.
• In other sports news, the UW is soliciting naming rights to the soon-to-be-remodeled Husky Stadium’s “field,” starting in 2013 and continuing “in perpetuity.”
• Big corporations don’t want to be forced to reveal how their CEOs’ salaries compare to their average payrolls. Ah, poor zillionaires….
• Rolling Stone had a harrowing piece a while back about a teenage girl who set herself up as an Internet fashion plate and video blogger, only to attract adult lechers and worse.
• There’s a new art gallery in town, Prographica, specializing in “fine works on paper.” In one of those happy coincidences, its staff includes a UW MFA grad named Kimberly Clark.

Katie Baker had a great essay topic: “How to Talk to a Woman Without Being Rude, Creepy or Scary.”

Unfortunately, her essay never gets around to actually saying how.

Instead, she talks about wolf whistles and catcalls as evidence of men hating women.

She doesn’t quite get that, to some extent, these men might be liking women, or at least thinking they are.

Which raises an even better premise: “How to tell a woman you like her, without her thinking you hate her.”

Any suggestions? (Proactive, positive suggestions, that is. Don’t tell what NOT to do, tell what TO do.)

At AlterNet, Clarisse Thorn asks the musical question, “Why do we demonize men who are honest about their sexual needs?”

Her answer: Because many women see men, particularly straight men, particularly unfamiliar men, as potential threats. It’s one thing to disdain a woman as a “slut.” It’s vastly more dehumanizing to dismiss a man as a “creep.”

At my sometime stomping grounds of  Seattle PostGlobe, Eric Ruthford writes about a potential PR campaign to curb demand for child prostitutes.

He writes of such campaigns in other cities, campaigns based on shaming the “John,” or on stern lectures about criminal penalties.

He also quotes Debra Boyer, a local anthropologist who’s studied child prostitution:

“We need to somehow educate people so that they can see what harm they’re doing,” she said. “How do we create empathy in people who have objectified women?”

You’re not going to persuade these men by using words like “objectifying.”

And you’re sure not going to persuade these men by objectifying or stereotyping them.

Instead appeal to pride, to dignity even.

Say “Your sex drive can bring life. It can bring joy. It can even bring love. Or it can contribute to a living horror.”

Say “You really want to give your money to a pimp, so you can contribute to a child’s hell?”

Say “You’re better than that.”

Say “Make love, not hurt.”

Ruth Rosen at AlterNet ponders “Why Women Dominate the Right-Wing Tea Party.”

Rosen finds at least a half-truth in the conservative womens’ claim to be the true heiresses to Susan B. Anthony and co., who had campaigned for Prohibition with the same fervor with which they had fought for women’s suffrage.

In the ’80s, the late antiporn crusader Andrea Dworkin wrote an essay called “Right Wing Women.” She admired those women for many things. She particularly admired their sexual prudery and also their dream for a world driven less by macho posturing and more by rules and traditions.

The left-O-center conventional wisdom is that there is, or ought to be, a singular collective entity of Women. This big gender-encompassing entity would, by its very nature, be of one mind on most major sociopolitical issues. This mass of Women would always support gay rights, progressive politics, peace, ecology, humanitarian aid, legalizing pot, outlawing fructose, and every other left-O-center stance.

I say fifty-two percent of the species won’t ever think exactly alike.

Gender is but one of countless factors influencing a person’s social and tribal identity. There’s also family, education, religion, economic caste, nationality, ethnicity, culture, subculture, sub-subculture, et al.

Every culture has included women who identified themselves as traditionalists. These women have always sought relative security from a hostile world in the realms of home, family, and clear rules for behavior. The lobbyists and politicians backing the various non-unified tea party strands know how to market their wares to these women.

And so should we.

What do progressives have to offer to traditionalist women?

We offer more careful stewardship of the land.

We offer more economic opportunity for more people, including working-class families.

We offer greater personal freedoms for everyone, including those who follow various religious faiths.

And as (non-Hispanic) whites slowly lose majority status in this country, we offer a vision of cultural diversity that respects minority cultures, including minority cultures that used to be majority cultures.

Hi-tech designer/author/pundit Clay Shirky has seen too many of his NYU female students fail to become industry movers n’ shakers. His conclusion: Women today just aren’t good enough braggarts and liars.

They’re still building large buildings somewhere! Specifically, in Chicago. That’s where the new 82-story Aqua Tower, designed by a team led by Jeanne Gang, is said to be the biggest building ever commissioned from a female-led architectural practice.

It’s full of curves.

This month’s Atlantic Monthly cover story bears the supposedly provocative title “The End of Men.” Essayist Hanna Rosin declares male dominance is or will soon end in vast stretches of western society—almost up to (but not yet including) top corporate/government leadership. She cites a steadily increasing female dominance in high-school graduation and college enrollment rates. She surveys a post-industrial developed world that declares little need for either muscle-bound labor or macho posturing. And yes, she dutifully mentions Lady Gaga’s videos as somehow symbolizing women’s new-found smugness or something like that.

But I couldn’t help but notice the mag’s cover icon. It’s a male symbol with a drooping arrow. Just like the logo of ’80s local (and all male) punk band Limp Richerds, one of Mudhoney frontman Mark Arm’s several secondary projects.

As the Elliott Bay Book Co. prepares to leave Pioneer Square a business neighborhood without an “anchor tenant,” the Square’s major retail industry, big rowdy bars, is also in decline. The J&M shuttered altogether (it’s rumored to be reopening under new management as less of a bar and more of a cafe). Others are rumored to be in trouble.

I remember the glory days of the Square’s nightlife scene. I remember that milieu’s signature street sound. You’d stand in front of the pergola around midnight on a Saturday. You could hear, from five different bars, five different white blues bands, each cranking out a mediocre rendition of “Mustang Sally,” each band slightly out of tempo with the others. It was a cacophany only avant-garde composer Charles Ives could have dreamt up.

That scene was already waning before the infamous 2001 Mardi Gras melee gave the Square a bad PR rep.

Fast forward almost a decade. Today’s loci for bigtime drinking are Fremont, Pike/Pine, and especially Belltown.

Belltown’s bar scene has its own signature street sound. It’s the arhythmic clippety-clop of dozens of high-heel shoes trotting up and down the sidewalks of First Avenue. Creating this sound are many small groups of bargoers, small seas of black dresses and perfect hairdos.

These women, and their precursors over the past decade and a half, are the reason Belltown won the bar wars.

In my photo-history book Seattle’s Belltown, I described the rise of the upper First Avenue bar scene:

“After the Vogue proved straight people would indeed come to Belltown to drink and dance, larger, more mainstream nightclubs emerged. Among the first, both on First Avenue, were Casa U Betcha (opened 1989) and Downunder (opened 1991). Both places began on a simple premise: Create an exciting yet comfortable place for image-conscious young women, and the fellows would follow in tow (or in search).”

To this target market, the Square was, and would always be, too dark, too grungy, and too iffy. The condo canyons of Belltown, in contrast, were relatively clean (if still barren) with fresh new buildings and sported (at least some) well-lit sidewalks.

The state liquor laws were liberalized later in the 1990s, leading to more and bigger hard-liquor bars. Casa U Betcha and Downunder gave way to slicker fun palaces, all carefully designed and lit, with fancy drinks at fancy prices to be consumed while wearing fancy out-on-the-town clothes and admiring others doing the same.

And, aside from the occasional Sport, nearly all these joints sought to attract, or at least not to offend, the young-adult female market.

You’re free to make your comparisons here to the high-heeled and well-heeled fashionistas of HBO’s old Sex and the City.

I’d prefer a more local comparison, to Sex In Seattle. In case you don’t know, that’s a live stage show that’s presented 17 installments since 2001. Its heroines are social and career strivers, less materialistic and less “arrived” than the Sex and the City women.

And they’re Asian Americans. As are Sex In Seattle’s writers and producers.

As are a healthy proportion of the clientele at Belltown’s megabars these days.

These customers want many of the same things Belltown residents want. They like attractive, clean, safe streets with well-lit sidewalks.

They may make a little more noise outside than some of the residents want to hear.

But we’re all in the same place, geographically and otherwise.

(Cross posted with the Belltown Messenger.)

You already know about the hit blog/book Stuff White People Like. It’s a gentle satire on the ways and mores of the upscale NPR/Starbucks/REI subculture.

One guy named “Macon D” has taken the same premise, cut out the funny business, and created a serious examination of modern ethnic attitudes.

As he explains,

I’m a white guy, trying to find out what that means. Especially the “white” part.

His site: Stuff White People DO.

Mattel’s got a Web page where you can vote for Barbie’s next profession. The choices offered, of course, disappoint.

I mean, Let’s have some Barbie jobs for the modern age:

• Twitter Update Ghost Writer Barbie!
• Bankruptcy Attorney Barbie!
• Life Coach Barbie!
• Goldman Sachs Bonus Barbie!
• iPhone App Designer Barbie!
• Outplacement Counselor Barbie!
• Doggie Daycare Barbie!
• User Experience Consultant Barbie!
• Day Spa Towel Maid Barbie!
• Chinese Barbie Doll Assembly Worker Barbie!

UW researchers, trying to figure out how to interest more young females in computer science courses, have hit upon a novel idea—make the classrooms and lab rooms less nerdy-looking.

Hooters just opened in South Park, the first national chain restaurant in that defiantly unchained pocket neighborhood.

(Update 10/11/09: I got there today. It’s really in Boulevard Park, a tiny commercial strip separated from the South Park neighborhood by a lonely highway overpass. A McDonald’s already exists along this strip.)

I don’t particularly care for Hooters.

I really don’t care for essays that attack Hooters from the standpoint of simplistic gender-ideology, such as Lindy West’s piece in the Stranger.

On the other hand, I love the comment thread following West’s piece.

The commenters hit upon some important points West had elided past:

• Is Hooters’ food really any good? (Some say yes; others insist on the superiority of locally-owned hot wing emporia such as Wing Dome.)
• Is the “Hooters Girl” image demeaning to all women? (Some say yes; some say no; I say there’s no such thing as “all women.”)
• Is it wrong to use sex to sell stuff? (If so, many commenters note, the Stranger would be at least as guilty.)
• Are West and the Stranger contradicting their “sex positive” stance? (I say no, they’re simply overriding it with a stance that’s even more vital to “alt” culture—the stance of sneering at anything to do with “the wrong kind of white people”.)

West, most of the commenters, and I agree on one point—the Hooters Girl look (apparently inspired by the sorority-slut uniforms in the 1979 sexploitation film H.O.T.S.) is, to all of us, decidedly unsexy.

And the whole Hooters aesthetic/experience conjures association with/nostalgia for fraternity-sorority bonding, but is profoundly anti-intellectual and anti-education. The apparent ideal Hooters customer is an adult who went to college but didn’t learn anything.

…victims of discrimination by female theater-company managers?