Items of interest found recently in my RSS feed. What did I miss? Please share what you've been reading (and writing!) in the comments.
- Pat Robertson And CBN Friends Are Tripping Again
- Women Dressing Up Like Little Girls Dressing Up Like Women
- One simple rule
- Carnival Against Sexual Violence 81
- Gang rape as entertainment
- Names
- That’s not the word I’d be using
- The “scum of the earth” sentenced at last
- School days
- dude loses job, woman blamed
- Why isn’t the Richmond gang rape being treated as a hate crime?
– the annual excursion into halloween hysteria
– eek
– “If I could teach everyone in the world one thing about wheelchairs, it would be this:”
– fantastic links, as usual
– “My friend Steve said that a better name for the haunted house might be “The Mutilated Vagina House,” and I asked him, rhetorically, why there weren’t more mutilated penises in the mix. He replied that no one would come, and he was right.”
– Just read this from amandaw.
– “Just another example of the trivialisation of sexual offences in our community.”
– “Come on. None of this has anything to do with justice. It’s all about pandering to the alternately frightened and spiteful in marginal electorates.”
– “I don’t understand the system we have for starting kids at school. When my mother was a kid, you started school on your 5th birthday. I understand this is how it works in New Zealand as well. At the end of the year you start, you are assessed to see if you are ready to go on to year 1 or you need another year of kindy. It’s a pretty even split and so there’s no big deal about staying in kindy. That way readiness for year 1 can be based on the child’s progress, not a calendar date.”
– “You know what, Cly of Brisbane? Boys can sometimes look nice too and want to be made to feel sexy. Boys walk down the street sometimes and just pray a woman would holler out of a passing car. It’s about valuing the entire person, not just how well they do their job.”
– “the Richmond case provides an unusually clear-cut example of how violence against women, just because they’re women (as opposed to black/immigrant/Jewish/gay women) is considered normal. Why? Because it was in this very same town last year that the gang rape of a gay woman was prosecuted as a hate crime. “
Categories: linkfest
The 109th Down Under Feminists Carnival is up! 
The 105th Down Under Feminists Carnival is up! 
Hoyden About Town 
“[M]ost of the candy sold during this season has been dedicated and prayed over by witches,” Daniels wrote.
The hell? How many witches does he think there are? And do we* all work at candy factories? (Let alone getting into what witches are).
* I’m not a witch, but I am something that he wouldn’t distinguish from one.
Inevitably in the last article, someone brings up the slippery slope.
A good opinion piece on ob/gyn services and Catholic hospitals: http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/society-and-culture/women-are-being-failed-by-our-hospitals-20091102-htcd.html
Amazingly, the majority of the comments (so far!) are pretty good. I doubt that will last.
And in addition to what the author says: this is a good reason to encourage homebirth – it would free up beds for the women who really need them. (Not that homebirth would solve the problems raised by the author – far from it! – but it could easily be a piece of the solution.)
Oh, Jo, that’s awful. We just need to get RID of public Catholic hospitals, nationwide. The situation is ridiculous and dangerous and completely unacceptable.
Lolz, I read that as “decapitated and prayed over”. I was wondering why anyone would buy headless jelly-babies and what not 😛
re: the School Days link.
I wish the school system did that in WA. How many kids would get to Year 1 with a better chance of personal academic success because they were ready, not because of some pre-determined age rule that assumes all kids are the same? The whole ‘the kid should stay with their age peers’ thing hasn’t always sat well with me, because I’ve seen kids who have been pushed through the years, even though they’re not coping (and haven’t been coping for a long time) and by the time they hit high school it’s a lot harder to get them up to speed than it would have been in primary school (and by that time they have a real negative attitude to learning and have behaviour issues as a result)…