Posts By Rebecca Schoenkopf
Wednesday, February 22, 2012 / 11:01 am
And They’re Back!
After almost a month, the GOP field graces our evening with the 435th debate of the season!
by Rebecca Schoenkopf
Tags: Newt Gingrich | Rick Santorum | Mitt Romney | Ron Paul | gop | debates
What have you done with yourselves the past month? Haven't you missed Rick Santorum pouting and whining and being a dick? And Mitt Romney, with his surprisingly dorky and inarticulate stammer? And Newton declaring war on any and all comers? And Ron Paul, with his trademarked litany of Sensible Things?
My little brother Cakeyboy and I didn't know how we would live without them, after sharing our evenings with them like eight nights a week. But now, praise Jesus, they are back: tonight, 5 p.m. Pacific, on CNN–Your Home for Whatever.
(“Come over for the debate,” I wrote last time to my little brother. “I will roast us a chicken! Be there, or don't eat a chicken!”
“You had me at debate,” he answered back. “And again at chicken.”)
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Monday, February 20, 2012 / 7:15 pm
My White Privilege at County-USC
In which I exercise my privilege, and head to Cedars.
by Rebecca Schoenkopf
Tags: health | women's health | breast cancer | breasts | commie girl | county usc | healthcare | obamacare
I have been seen at County-USC for the past two weeks. And I have jilted them like the most faithless lover.
With the exception of one primary care doctor about whom I do not have generous thoughts, the staff there has been compassionate and able. One nurse practitioner in particular gave me the most competent breast exam in history; it felt wonderful, like therapeutic massage.
But it was too much to bear for what might be months on end, the standing in line 90 minutes to drop off a prescription, waiting hours and hours for each appointment, and then being sent first to finance, where they were not as kind but just couldn’t understand why I didn’t have Medi-Cal, and kind of got a little huffy when I said I have no insurance – as if I would be at County-USC if I had insurance, I spit, very very rudely, and I am ashamed, but it’s not like it’s not true.
So I determined that if I in fact have an incredibly rare and particularly lethal form of breast cancer – inflammatory breast cancer, and I’m not even linking it here, because it’s stupid and gross – then I cannot have the levels of stress that come with navigating County.
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Wednesday, February 8, 2012 / 2:12 pm
Thinking About the GOP Field With a Lump in My Breast
What a bunch of boobs.
by Rebecca Schoenkopf
Tags: Newt Gingrich | Rick Santorum | Mitt Romney | Ron Paul | women's health | Planned Parenthood | feminism! | gop | breasts
Almost 15 years ago, my big sister Sarah called me with very important news.
“I just want you to know,” she said. “Being 30? I have never felt like more of a woman!” It was heartening news for a 25-year-old me.
And now, with my right breast sore and a large lump behind my nipple, I have never felt like more of a woman either.
Planned Parenthood will see me Friday morning – thank you, Planned Parenthood – but until then, I can sit here and be angry, or I can sit here and be angry and think about the GOP.
I have seen a lot of articles wondering why women don't like Newt Gingrich. Really, media? You have to ask?
It's not the cheating – Democratic women still love Bill, mostly, much of the time.
It's not Newton's policy choices. What, besides the moon colony and shutting down the government when he doesn't like his seat on Air Force One, have most folks even heard about?
It's that every time a wife gets sick, he is Mr. In The Wind. You'd think the “character counts” (no blowjobs) folks would feel a little squicky with a track record of callously leaving wives to die cold and alone. And it turns out, at least, the women do!
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Thursday, February 2, 2012 / 12:14 pm
Planned Parenthood Love Letter
What they did for a teenaged me.
by Rebecca Schoenkopf
Tags: health | Planned Parenthood | Susan G. Komen | women | feminism!
With the Florida primary over and no more GOP debates for almost a month (SADFACE!), we liberals have had a momentary breather to focus on other things. And judging by Twitter, that other thing this week has been the Susan G. Komen Foundation’s defunding of breast-cancer screening at Planned Parenthood. (The whole thing seems on its face to have been led by a Georgia Republican new to the Komen Foundation. The Atlantic article linked above details the whole sordid thing.)
We have all had a nice little primal scream about it online, but I would like to say what Planned Parenthood has done for me.
1989. I am 16 years old, and I have started having sex. Thanks to California’s excellent high school health classes, I am all up in birth control like everybody’s business. I use condoms every time (it’s the era of Big AIDS) but also know I need backup so I will not be a sad teen mother and can have a super awesome life.
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Tuesday, January 31, 2012 / 2:08 pm
I Am MOCA’s Abusive Husband
I wouldn’t hit you, baby, if you didn’t make me so mad.
by Rebecca Schoenkopf
Tags: arts | culture | MOCA | Priuses
Got up to MOCA Grand this past weekend to enjoy the Weegee: Naked Hollywood show. (Pictures of crowds waiting for celebrities were by far our favorites. His distorted faces of celebrities left us cold–we’ve seen so many of them by now, and could only give him intellectual rather than emotional props for having basically invented Photoshop.)
So it was all well and good, and it was nice seeing about 5,000 people in a gallery. BUT!
The first thing we saw in a gallery devoted to new acquisitions was a white canvas painted with the slogan, in black, “I drive a Prius.” And MOCA had paid for it.
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Friday, January 27, 2012 / 12:51 pm
Reason No. 147 Why We Can’t Have Nice Things: Arts Commissions
They would have denied the Watts Towers if they’d had the chance.
by Rebecca Schoenkopf
Tags: art | Richard Serra | Anita Garouni | folk art
You know what I hate? Besides the rest of it? Arts commissions!
“But Commie Girl!” you’re whining in your usual fuddle, “Arts commissions are full of people who care about art and want to beautify our city! How could you take your usual shiv to them?”
Easy! Arts commissions are full of stuck-up bureaucrats enforcing their staid aesthetic; they’ll approve just about any twisted hunk of metal if it’s got the name “Serra” attached; and they would have denied the Watts Towers if they’d had the chance. They don’t get folk art, and never have. In Fullerton, the arts commission that oversees the small percent of developer money that must go to public art has approved hideous statues of girls doing rhythmic gymnastics, and I think that in itself should DQ all arts commissions for good.
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Wednesday, January 25, 2012 / 2:15 pm
AAARHR! Attorney/Bassist Joe Escalante Explains the Big Media Lawyers Are the Real Pirates
Perhaps you didn’t know nor care too much about SOPA/PIPA. But you ought to.
by Rebecca Schoenkopf
Tags: SOPA/PIPA | online piracy | Joe Escalante
Perhaps, like me, you didn’t know nor care too much about SOPA/PIPA (Stop the Online Piracy Act, and the other one), but believed your friends on the left when they hyperventilated that it would be the end of the Internet, and thus the world. (And like me you noticed their keening wails when every one of the Republican candidates stood onstage in South Carolina and was better on the issue than our own beloved President O). But believing them wasn’t the same thing as caring.
Leave it to Joe Escalante, who managed to make a lunchtime radio show about copyright and intellectual property law fascinating, to explain the problem both concisely and harrowingly!
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Wednesday, January 11, 2012 / 5:00 am
Harry Gamboa Jr. Tagged LACMA
The founding member of ASCO on “Spray Paint LACMA,” Obama Administration deportations, and raging against the machine.
by Rebecca Schoenkopf
Tags: art | LACMA | Harry Gamboa Jr.
It was almost 40 years ago that the members of ASCO tagged the outer wall of LACMA, declaring the museum to be their own.
Harry Gamboa Jr. talks to us about the curator who brought ASCO’s wrath down—and why he’s still driven by political rage.
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Tuesday, January 10, 2012 / 5:00 am
Sometimes It Rains: Date Rape Trauma Can Linger
Why Rachel, seven years after she was date raped, is still angry at the makers of Rohypnol, the criminal justice system, and us.
by Rebecca Schoenkopf
Tags: women's health | sexual assault | Rohypnol
We all remember (right?) the scene in Broadcast News where William Hurt tears up while interviewing a woman who was date raped—a phenomenon that had been unnoticed in the US until then. (“My cousin,” mouths Joan Cusack, nodding sadly, to the other women watching. It was a silent epidemic.) After that, attention flared. Women who were in college in the mid-90s will remember their first Take Back the Night rally—and maybe even their second.
But there hasn't been much attention paid lately. Not even after a December report by the Centers for Disease Control found that on average, 24 people per minute are victims of rape, physical violence, or stalking by an intimate partner in the United States—or more than 12 million women and men a year.
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Tuesday, January 3, 2012 / 5:00 am
Goodwill Toward Men: Commie Girl Goes to the Seaside, Meets Bigot!
The year of our lord 2011 was a stupid year, and everybody seemed to be looking deliriously forward to a year that would maybe n
by Rebecca Schoenkopf
Tags: bigotry
“Hey lady in the hotpants!” I shouted. “YOU LOOK FANTASTIC!” She was already down the street a ways, and her friend had to tap her to look back. Once she realized random strange women were complimenting her and her legs and her peach-like ass, she was very happy indeed, and punched her boyfriend and said, “SEE?”
Stupid boyfriend!
New Year’s Eve in Santa Barbara, and I haven’t been with a crowd more unifyingly happy since Election Night 2008. It was love and joy and sex and dreams and all that vintage Mick Jagger nonsense, and men and women were effusively yelling at strangers about their roiling gorgeousness. Men dressed in kilts and tuxedos; women in spangles and fur.
