Start your weekend with this wee oriental small-clawed otter pup, only a few days old. She has four sisters, and they all live in Budapest. Via la doctorita.
Please feel free to use this thread to natter about anything your heart desires. Is there anything great happening in your life? Anything you want to get off your chest? Reading a great book? Anything in the news that you’d like to discuss? Commiserations, felicitations, temptations, contemplations, speculations?
[US politics might be better taken to the latest thread on the subject.]
Categories: arts & entertainment, fun & hobbies
Otterday! And Open Thread 
100 books by women in 2016 
Today was a singing day 
Hoyden About Town 
I have nothing to say except BABY OTTERRRRRRRR.
(Hey, it’s Friday evening here, cut me some slack.)
zomg that thing is so cute!
Hi everyone! Hope the weekend means lovely things for you.
Um, something to say…Today I realized I don’t have the patience for jigsaw puzzles anymore. I’m too addicted to the internet.
She is seriously beautiful. I was watching a doco earlier on honey badgers – also beautiful in a not quite so sweet way. This one’s cute though:
I did jigsaw puzzles once. Then the intarwebs ate my brane.
I have a 3D Millennium Falcon that I never did finish…and now my credibility is permanently shattered.
I have been guest posting at feministe this week and decided to spend the week unpacking privilege simply because I don’t feel that it get enough attention in the feminist blogsphere. Once again a lot of the commentary was either what about meh or more racial appropriation. Why can some people simply not acknowledge their privilege? Even the responses on my blog were for the large part disgusting. The thing is I don’t believe that privilege is such a hard thing to understand it is more a unwillingness to accept. Any thougts?
Renees last blog post..Feminist Parenting A Radical Act Of Love
Did anyone else read the Redwall books by Brian Jacques? I love the otters in there–they’re ace.
Renee: I read your posts at Feministe this week with great interest (I’m hesitant to jump into the commenting pond there for some reason). I think the thing that’s hard for a lot of otherwise open-minded privileged people to come to terms with is how darn pervasive their privilege is. It seems like a daunting task to combat it.
Which is no excuse. But it’s my experience, anyway, with trying to work out what’s problematic in my own privileges.
Redwall books drove me MAD. MAD I say. Those damn crazy moles. And all the food! Not to mention he’s worse than Tolkien with the “your race determines whether you’re good or bad.”
Otters were pretty cool though.
Renee, I think it’s tied up to people’s desire to believe that they’ve earned what they have. No one wants to believe things are that unfair even when they realize it’s unfair in some ways. So their minds go immediately to “I don’t have anything to do with this.” Doesn’t excuse them, but I think it explains them.
LOGALOGALOGLALOGALOGLALOGALALOG
Heh, thanks for that memory Bene.
Renee, I’m pretty much staying quiet over there, as I am trying to on non-trans or american politics related threads here. But I really want to thank you. Your discussion of privilege has given me insights into my own life and made me realize how much I really don’t understand.
I just want to thank everyone for their support and your answers here. Tomorrow is my last day over there and I cannot say that I am completely sorry. While Lauren and Cara did speak in my defense I find that space so completely hostile sometimes. At my own blog I would have just given a few of them the old FU and moved on but in someone elses space you have to engage differently. Time spent there reminds me of why I lurked on blogs long before I started commenting and blogging myself.
Renees last blog post..Feminist Parenting A Radical Act Of Love
Well, it’s cocktail hour at Casa Bene! I don’t know if the weather’s cooled too much for tequila.
Ah – I wish it were cocktail hour here…soon to come, I feel a week of celebration is in order once this damned essay is handed in. It’s really quite the challenge to read the relevant cases on the Australian Constitution’s ‘implied’ freedom of political communication (many), find some common threads of legal reasoning amongst seven judges going seven ways, show you comprehend the area, find an argument about the development of the corresponding ‘common law right’, and throw in a little political/philosophical commentary as the marker seems to want – all in 5 pages, 12 point font, double spaced. “I think I can, I think I can…”
That sounds… mind breaking. I’m waiting on my wife to come home from a week in Tupalo. We are considering moving there for a job, but it’s extremely, extremely, conservative and reactionary. If you don’t mind I’m going to rant for a second, I need to get this off my chest. It was my first experience since transitioning, and since starting to learn more about feminism that I encountered patriarchal abuse and and conspiracy. I had known it existed and tried to stop it when I saw and heard it, but …. It just wasn’t like this. The things I learned here and other feminist blogs snapped into my mind and I started checking off things that had happened to this poor girl and her mother.
One of my wife’s coworkers basically broke down and told me about how her daughter had been shamed out of a private Lutheran school. The son of the main pastor, who was himself the youth pastor, had been trying to hook up with her and 5 other girls, including sending them graphic photos.
She went to the cops, and the police didn’t even bring the young man for questioning. They talked to his father, and then came to her and told her that she didn’t want to press charges because nasty things would be said about her daughter. That she would be responsible for breaking up that church, and that he had already been punished.
His parents took away his cell phone and computer. For the few weeks until he returned to seminary school. That Sunday they gave a speech about how the outsiders they let into the school have been corrupting their holy church. She was one of two non-church members that attended the school.
Since then, her daughter has dropped out of school to get her GED, is now pregnant, and is going to keep the child. The coworker is going through a messy divorce with an abusive husband who hit both of them. She had nowhere to turn to, and has been just sitting on it for months.
I’m no counselor. I know only the basics of what is likely to happen if she files charges… and I didn’t know what to tell her other than to make sure her daughter knows that she is there for her, and that what everyone else involved did was 10 loads of steaming fresh bullshit. I didn’t even know who to contact to try to get help for them. I still don’t know. But I do know that what this blog and others has provided me helped me listen to her, and I think, help give her hope and let her know she’s not alone. So thank you. I don’t think any of the people who spend hours and hours writing, thinking, trying their best to make the world a better place get thanked enough.
So thank you. Everyone.
Oh wow, Polerin, that’s awful! Hugs.
Did this happen in Tupalo? Or where you live now?
Hi Renee – just wanted to let you know that I really enjoyed your posts at Feministe too.
Oh god, polerin. That’s horrible, yet not entirely uncommon…because I know a similar story with a happier ending that happened at my mother’s church. What a mess.
Drinks for all those what partake and non-alcoholic ones for those who don’t.
FP: yeah it’s been eating at me a bit. I want to help more, but I have no clue what to do. It was in Tupalo, or I’d have contacts that could help her. Seeing her loss of hope and fear for her daughter really made it evident that what everyone here was saying is important, and that I need to shut up and listen (which is hard for me). 😛
**hugs**
((((polerin & Renee))))
I’ve been out of it today with some sort of bug, but wanted to note that I found Renee’s posts at Feministe especially strong. I don’t comment there much any more – I just don’t have time to read all the threads, and too many nasties get through for my taste too (I can see the value of having a site where the nasties are out in the open with many strong challengers, but it doesn’t feel like a safe space to me).
polerin, it’s exactly that sort of conspiracy that many of us have seen happen more than once that feminists get accused of being paranoid about whenever it’s described. But it does happen.
@polerin that is a terrible story. I hope that that family gets the help that they need.
@tigtog thanks so much and compliments from you mean the world…you simply rock it as a blogger.
I have just been thinking so much lately about safe spaces. It seems to be such a difficult thing to find. Feministe puts out great stuff, especially Cara however the comment section sometimes is so loaded with privilege it can make one ill. It is not the only blog like that though, feministing comes to mind for the same thing. People are reading posts about privilege but either not understanding, or in complete denial about it. I am finding even my own blog occasionally getting inundated with privilege denying trolls. I don’t know what the solution is, but it really does get frustrating.
Renees last blog post..Feminist Parenting A Radical Act Of Love
Cheers Renee – what a lovely compliment. I needed that because a 2l plastic jug of milk was dropped and the corner shattered and I now have milk all over me and my kitchen floor. Yarboosucks.
And it’s only when you spill milk that you get WHY you are warned not to cry over it! It goes EVERYWHERE!!!! Milk, ready to get smelly and gross! It’s cryworthy!
I learnt the hard way some years back why you don’t keep a stack of UHT milk cartons on the top pantry shelf when you have a mouse infestation.
Brrr.
Arrrrrrrgh, Renee: I’ve only just read the thread where alllll those people are falling over themselves to justify hitting children.
*vomit*
Ye gods, what a triggering, upsetting thread. My mom hit the two youngers once or twice, and me a couple of times pretty bad (like on the top of my head with a hairbrush), but it was my older sister who really…yeah. Spatulas were broken on that child. My dad was always good except this one time–I was little so I don’t remember why, I just remember it happening, I assume I was being a real brat–he picked me up by my collar/shoulders, carried me into the bedroom and slammed me down on the bed. Blechh.
(((Renee)))
(((Polerin)))
In other news, I’ve been trying to get my little sister into feminism, and she’s interested and learning and she gets it, which is great. The only problem is that she comes to me to ask, basically, if she’s allowed to enjoy certain things. Like songs or movies that aren’t the most woman-positive. (Brandi You’re a Fine Girl was a recent example.) She wants to know if it’s okay to like them anyway.
I’m trying to get across that that’s something she gets to decide for herself. I know for me I enjoy a lot of things that aren’t the best (loved Harry Potter for a long time), but there’s a point at which I find I can’t ignore how women (or POC or LGBTQ etc) are being treated.
*sigh* Lots of shit’s been going on lately, or I find myself remembering old shit. Makes me tired. Makes me glad to be moving north for college.
@Lauredhel…Yeah I had to stop commenting on the spanking thread because it was to triggering for me as a survivor to see people justify it. I honestly fear for the children of those people. It literally made me physically ill. The fact that it was written by a survivor meant nothing to these women as they “asserted their parental rights” to abuse.
Tigtog–I love badgers, of all sorts, so thanks for that honey badger picture, and for the original one of the otter…so cute.
Bene/Polerin–I read the Redwall books. Logalog, EULALIA! Hey, there were badgers there too…
Renee–I just wanted to say that I, too, enjoyed your writing at Feministe. It’s not a blog I read frequently–Pandagon’s enough of a non-safe space for me–but if there’s a good guest-blogger (lately, you, Ren, and Latoya), I’ll read. So good job, you’re an extremely talented blogger and your words can really make me think.
Genevieves last blog post..Video Time
For what it’s worth, Genevieve, I find Feministe a much better read all round (posts and comment threads) than Pandagon. Both in quality and safety. Both can be subjective, so you might not find the same thing.
I agree with Lauredhel, particularly if you just read feeds and not the comments necessarily.
…yes, I’m a bit chicken.