Books can change lives.
From Rosalind:
I was hoping you could include this Huffington Post article
about Carmen Tafolla in your links round up. Ms. Tafolla is a
fabulous, feminist writer who has recently been tapped as the first
ever poet laureate in San Antonio, TX, just as her books have been
pulled from shelves in Tuscon schools.
Full dislosure (and why I’m submitting under my real name instead of
the anonymous handle I generally use): I’m an intern at Wings Press,
the publishing house which has printed a lot of Ms. Tafolla’s work,
including the recent anniversary edition of “Curandera,” the book
removed in AZ. (We even included a catchy little “Banned in Arizona!”
tag, because really, you just have to have a sense of humor about
these things.)
Carmen Tafolla’s website is www.carmentafolla.com
Thanks so much!
Rosalind
Donate to an abortion fund.
Older black vet killed at home when police are called for a medical emergency.
From Daydreamer:
As part of her floor speech pushing to reauthorize the Violence
Against Women Act (VAWA) on Wednesday, Rep. Gwen Moore (D-Wis.) told
the story of her own history of being sexually assaulted during her
childhood and then raped as a young woman.
The best birth control in the world.
From Ara:
It’s the first letter to Miss Manners that I’m pointing out here– it is ridiculous to me that in this day and age, we must protect the male ego so strongly that your options, according to her, would be to attend every event with the first boy who asks you, or never attend at all, because it would be rude to turn down one boy and then accept with another. (I’ll grant that it’s rude to accept with one boy and then change your mind because someone better asked, but there’s no indication this girl ever said yes to begin with.)
Shadows from another Place blurs the line between two cityscapes.
From Casey:
From Womanist Musings, some white guy bawwws to Renee about how he
wants to say the n-word without consequence (and sends her an icky
e-mail to plead his case).
From SunlessNick:
Republican Congressman tells female voters to support the Democrats (in a good way):
“Look at what they were wearing” has spread from rape to murder. I don’t know what to say to that.
An amazing fanfic on how Rue becomes the Mockingjay.
From Daydreamer and Spartokos:
Spartokos writes: Like a lot of Cracked articles, surprising amount of truth here. All
except the last one, where the author plays into the age-old “vagina
power” myth. Still worth a read, IMO.
On “fake geek girls.”
From Casey:
On July 12th, 2012, ISP are gonna start spying on their customers, if
you download any copywritten material, they could throttle your
internet or put you on a blacklist/restrict your internet access.
It’s time to arrest Grandma. In a move shockingly similar to an abusive partner, the state seeks to isolate teen girls from adults in their life who are willing to help them make choices about their reproductive health.
Disney Princesses go all versimilitudinous on your ass.
On Trayvon and class.
The Hunger Games and whitewashing.
In support of Amina!
10000 men supporting VAWA.
Abortions should require a permission slip.
From Spartokos:
Women should stay with abusive partners? WTF is this bullshit?
My name is not Alissa.
From CloudTigress:
On the off-chance that this SF_Drama link hasn’t been sent in
already, there is apparently a person going around befriending LGBQ
people on the Internet, getting their addresses, then forcibly outing
them to their families and anti-LGBQ groups in their native countries.
This needs a signal boost, at the very least.
From Jenica:
I just wanted to pass along a graphic that my team and I created
about the lack of women in math and sciences today, and the social
implications of why this happens.
Racist teacher calls student an unwanted piece of chocolate.
From Casey:
From ThinkProgress, Alaskan State Representative Alan Dick advocates
women only being able to get an abortion if their “impregnators”
signed off on it.
Arizona Rep. Terri Proud says women should be forced to watch an
abortion be performed before having one.
From Amy:
Are thin women the enemy? While we definitely have a societal problem of idolizing the very
thin as the one way to be beautiful, is this really the answer?
On Mary Sues.
More racism in WOW.
Racism and besmirching a dead child’s memory.
Clinic landlord turns the tables on anti-abortion protestors, but still faces constant harassment.
{ 43 comments… read them below or add one }
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Jennifer Kesler,
Do you mean fashion magazines, catalogues, or pattern magazines like Burda or Butterick? I don’t remember ever seeing anyone emaciated in pattern magazines (except maybe Vogue Patterns, but even there I think they’re just thin), but I have in fashion magazines like Vogue, where they’re selling a look rather than a particular item of clothing, and you can’t tell from the photo how the garment is actually constructed because that’s not the point.
Or are you saying I can never tell because of Photoshop?
Anemone(Quote) (Reply)
MaggieCat,
I have a phobia of anesthesia awareness, and I expect many other people do as well. My recall has generally gone as far as having the mask put on me and being told to count backwards.
The recording of surgeries never seemed strange to me, both for educational purposes (my transplant was done at a university hospital) and as valuable evidence in case something goes wrong. Being offered a DVD of my surgery was quite bizarre, though. (My cousin actually accepted hers. She watched it once while still heavily medicated and didn’t remember much, so she tried watching it again a month later and had to stop 30 seconds after pressing play.)
Patrick McGraw(Quote) (Reply)
Jennifer Kesler,
The “permission to record and use for educational purposes” part was was pointed out to me each time signed paperwork before I underwent surgery.
Patrick McGraw(Quote) (Reply)
Casey,
I agree, and that seems to be typical of Mary Sue’s commenters on gender-related topics. The article she references in her opening paragraph was a similar clusterfuck of women saying they’d been ostracized for their gender, and men rushing to ‘splain it was all in their delusional, female brains. I even used that comment thread as an example when I blogged about women not being accepted in geek communities.
But the comment in this thread that really made me stop and stare was Texty saying geekhood is defined by bullying. Which is an interesting definition of geekhood, but more importantly: why would you assume girls and women don’t get bullied or ostracized for liking weird things? In a thread filled with women sharing their experiences of bullying and ostracization both from non-geeks and from male geeks? That is an odd mentality, to support a fake geek girl meme by saying all True Geeks are bullied. Yes? And? Girls are bullied too.
I like what Dawn McCoy said on the subject: “I think the reason women are portrayed as overemotional is because there’s so many darn people being dumbasses to us.”
Sylvia Sybil(Quote) (Reply)
Sylvia Sybil,
It’s such an odd coincidence that after reading that article, a bunch of people on a forum I lurk on start invoking the ZOMG GEEK GURLZZZ!?!? NO WAI SHE’S A POSEUR meme: http://officialfan.proboards.com/index.cgi?board=WWE&action=display&thread=421034&page=1 (things don’t really get going ’til maybe the second or third page, they even invoke the “YOU’RE NOT A TRUE GEEK UNLESS YOU’VE GOT ENCYCLOPEDIC KNOWLEDGE OF [insert arbitrary geek thing here]” trope
Casey(Quote) (Reply)
Anemone,
I meant fashion mags. Other than that, I don’t know, but I would guess catalogs are more genuine, just because Photoshopping costs money and catalogs are given away for free.
Patrick McGraw, good! It wasn’t pointed out to a friend of mine once. She noticed it herself, and the doctor was perfectly happy to scratch that bit out of the agreement, but they certainly didn’t highlight it at all. (Then again, he said they didn’t film most of these surgeries – it was a minor and common one, as surgeries go.)
That’s awesome. I guess also that if you can’t relate to someone’s reasons for being upset/angry/hostile, you assume their feelings are unjustified. And if it never happens to people like you, you’re not going to relate immediately, if ever.
Jennifer Kesler(Quote) (Reply)
Alara Rogers,
Patrick McGraw,
Oops. Sorry! I don’t think I could even watch someone else’s orthopedic surgery — the sound of bone doing things bone should not do is too much for me.
I am a control freak with an anesthesia awareness phobia, but for me that’s why it’s better for me to be unconscious, which is probably why I didn’t think before making such a sweeping statement. After 17 years of being a frequent flier at all the nearby hospitals (ER nurses often recognize me) I’ve suffered my fair share of screw-ups, which is why for several years they had to hit me with tranquilizers before they could do anything at all because even saying the word ‘i.v.’ was enough to trigger a massive panic attack. When you reach the point where you can set off alarms on the monitors because they suggested the wrong word (like ‘prednisone’) and made your heart rate and blood pressure skyrocket, it’s far less traumatic to me to be completely unconscious.
When an anesthesiologist I’d seen more than once told me I have a tendency to semi-wake about halfway through I wasn’t sure whether to yell at him for planting that picture in my head or thank him for being honest so I can warn everybody else. (Luckily he told me that after a *non*-surgical procedure done under general because adequate pain management is pretty much impossible due to my tolerance for meds.)
MaggieCat(Quote) (Reply)
Jennifer Kesler,
I wonder if some kind of oversight for the health of models could be effective. I don’t know how consistently the consequences of starvation manifest themselves, and that approach would target specific models rather than the people hiring them, but I don’t think we can get around modeling opportunities selecting for exceptional bodies, and making starvation no longer a viable strategy for getting ahead, might be a step in the right direction.
The big problem with the Cracked article is that it falters between critiquing a perspective, and using it. I can definitely believe men feel like that success with women is something they spend their whole lives striving for but never accomplish, but the article falls down on not clearly recognizing it as a stupid, mythical, cultural meme, and not “because nature!”.
I’m still kind of glad to see a, largely dude-centric, comedy site even beginning to engage with the topic.
I’m a little curious at the “watch a video of an abortion before you get one” comment getting as much attention as it is. Not that it isn’t awful and ignorant, but as far as I can tell, it isn’t connected to a proposition, and there so much terrible stuff being put out that actually is at risk of becoming law out here.
I forget what’s been mentioned on Hathor specifically, but there’s “let employers decide if women taking BC should keep there jobs”(‘cept for the part where it’s still illegal on federal level) http://www.statepress.com/2012/03/12/senate-judiciary-committee-endorses-controversial-contraceptive-bill/ there’s the “let’s protect doctors who knowingly lie patients, so long as they were thinking about stopping an abortion” bill, also at leas one fun No abortions after 20 weeks bill http://motherjones.com/mojo/2012/03/arizona-outdoes-everyone-new-anti-abortion-bill?
It’s also appalling how the pro-life side seems to want to make laws for ideological reasons based on how they want things to be, and not with any consideration for how things are and how laws would effect real people. Like your “arrest grandma” link. Teenagers should have parents who care about them, and will act in their best interest when it comes their health, so lets not even pretend like we know that’s not always the case.
Quib(Quote) (Reply)
Quib,
Health oversight would probably be an ideal solution, but the problem is: how do we measure health? Many doctors fall into the “is skinny=must be healthy=I don’t need to run tests” trap, and also the “is fat=must have diabetes and stuff=will run endless tests and go into denial when they come back indicating good health” trap. BMI is crap. The idea of a healthy weight doesn’t always take into account muscle weight, skeleton weight… hell, I’m waiting for ANYBODY in medicine to notice how much breasts weigh, because a big pair can weigh 20 pounds or more. So two women of the same height, build and weight, where one has A cups and the other is very big, could be 20 pounds apart in weight for no reason other than how her breasts are made. (And no, they do NOT necessarily gain and lose fat on everybody. Mine have never varied with my weight fluctuations. They just are the size they are.)
The abortion stuff is just like time travelers have arrived from the Dark Ages to set things right. Some of these ideas are spectacularly bizarre, and the majority of voters don’t support any of it.
Jennifer Kesler(Quote) (Reply)
MaggieCat,
That’s one of the scariest things about anesthesia awareness to me. Being anxious and afraid about it makes it MORE likely to occur. Like it wasn’t already hard enough to control my panic attacks.
Patrick McGraw(Quote) (Reply)
LOL, somebody with more inane arbitrary definitions of what constitutes a geek just told me that because I don’t get into heated debates with other people about my hobby/tv show/vidya of choice that doesn’t make me a geek, I’m “only a fan” (BUT THERE’S TOTES NO SHAME IN THAT!). He also told me that liking sci-fi/fantasy/other geeky things doesn’t automatically mean I’m geeky but I DO “have good taste”. ROFL *eyeroll*
Casey(Quote) (Reply)
Jennifer Kesler,
I’m not a doctor, and I don’t know that this wouldn’t just be pointlessly invasive, but what I had in mind was more screenings for specific markers of malnutrition and (extreme) unhealthy eating, than an over all health assessment.
Quib(Quote) (Reply)
Quib, right, I get what you’re saying. The problem is, how do we enforce it? I would be against stopping models from working until they’re healthier, because that punishes the models. If you do something to their employers, well, how do you determine which employer is at fault? So, it couldn’t be a “meet these standard or X happens” type of law. It would have to be more like the govt assigning and oversight committee and expecting to see (a) improvement in the health of models from when the program first starts and (b) evidence that the industry itself is encouraging models to be healthy (by hiring women of varying sizes, and maybe even by educating them on health). It just all gets difficult when you try to put a quantitative measurement on it, and of course leaving it more subjective isn’t necessarily helpful either.
Jennifer Kesler(Quote) (Reply)
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