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.
- Mindblowing SF Lists
- Straw Feminist Weekly: The baby-hater
- Today in Feminist History
- Six Women Murdered, Three Still Missing, and Nobody Seems to Notice
- Women Athletes: Choose Between Strong and Sexy
- Senator Kennedy and the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act
- Dawkins, Creationists and Holocaust-deniers
– “We have to be responsible for keeping track of and highlighting and celebrating and giving notice to our own and recording the accomplishments of our best. Because no one else is going to do it for us. If they’re not ignoring, they’re actively suppressing. Neither of which is acceptable.”
– “Straw Feminist Weekly: We define feminism so you don’t have to!”
– Only 89 years ago
– If you guessed just from the title that these women are not white or from nice areas, yes. No improvement on the status quo there.
– “It’s easy to focus on the extreme cases and miss the trends. If you’re a successful woman in sports, and the press and the audience can accuse you of not being a woman, they will. But if they can’t find ground for that accusation, they’ll accuse you of not being womanly enough. “
– One of many tributes to Ted Kennedy
– “The danger in Dawkins’ rhetoric is that creationists will claim that Dawkins regards them a Holocaust-deniers or equivalent to the Nazis (not that they can resist linking Darwin to Nazi Germany). The distinction is clear but that will not deter the stupid.”
Categories: linkfest
The 109th Down Under Feminists Carnival is up! 
The 105th Down Under Feminists Carnival is up! 
We are Bad PR for Real Feminism Alert #28654
http://www.thepunch.com.au/articles/you-can-still-be-a-feminist-in-four-inch-heels/
(h/t Helen on teh Twit)
.-= Amanda´s last blog ..Memphis: National Civil Rights Museum =-.
oh yes, we are trying to take women’s high heels away!
Actually, like most physios I have fundamental biomechanical objections to the damn things for daily wear, but if people want to do some extreme grooming/accessorising for a night out on the town then go for broke.
Broken ankle that is! I don’t know if the soreness afterwards would really be worth it. Even if you didn’t break an ankle.
So much fail in this article, I really don’t know where to start — basically “intersexed people need to be ‘fixed’ in order to make cisgendered people more comfortable”.
After reading it, my face looked like this– D:
Feminists hate babies?? OMG! Why didn’t I get the memo? I’d better quit my job at the childcare centre and abandon all my long term goals. For the good of feminism!!!
What do I do with the children? I’ve had them now, I think I’m stuck with them.
Just read this at ScienceBlogs, one of the women injured in the Pittsburgh fitness club shooting wasn’t insured and has big medical costs to cover. America, my dear, get your frigging act together on health care!
http://scienceblogs.com/thusspakezuska/2009/08/who_needs_health_insurance_whe.php
.-= Amanda´s last blog ..Memphis: National Civil Rights Museum =-.
The cognitive dissonance on healthcare in the States hertz my brane. I understand how cynical spinmeisters have seeded the rhetoric, I just wish the people they are exploiting saw through them more easily.
The biggest reform the USA needs is decoupling health insurance plans from employment. How many people in the USA are scared to leave a job they hate with an employer who is exploiting them terribly, all because they’ll lose their health insurance? It gives big business way too much power over their workforce. Which is of course why the plutocracy is fighting this so hard – it’s not just about insurance company profits, it’s about every employer losing a huge source of leverage over their employees.
Having a system of private insurance for those who want more than just the safety net level of healthcare works much better for individuals when it’s their own money that pays the premium rather than their employers’. This should be obvious to the highly individualistic American patriots, but the corporate spinmeisters have successfully clouded the issue by playing on the old Cold War tropes of “reds under the beds” if single-payer healthcare becomes a reality. It’s a Newspeak doublethink masterpiece, but it’s very sad to see it work so well.
In a recent post on marriage at Pandagon, there were all these people in comments going, “oh we got married for the health insurance” and I had never come across this utterly alien concept before and had to stop and work hard to get my brain around the idea. It is still totally bizarre to me when I think about it.
.-= Amanda´s last blog ..Roadtest: bandit.fm =-.
I first came across that one a couple of years ago on a US blog discussing SSM equality – it’s one of the big reasons to push for it in the US, so that SS couples can have the better healthcare plan provided by one partner’s employer cover the other partner for the gaps in their employer’s crappy healthcare plan, just like het couples do.
But still. Sure, part of the marriage tradition has always been about financial pragmatism, despite all the romantic fluff, but having too many key financial security elements tied into being married is a recipe that allows all sorts of abuse of the partner with lesser financial security. Who wants to feel not only that getting married is the only way to have adequate healthcare, but also that staying married is the only way to have adequate healthcare?
I’ve never asked any of my acquaintances who’ve split up about what happens with health insurance here, but since it’s fairly simple to combine two single health insurance plans into a couple or family plan, even for de facto relationships, I imagine that other than some tedious paperwork it’s not too complicated to go back the other way for couples with no children. I guess sorting out whose plan the children are covered under is one of the things that has to be negotiated in separation/divorce proceedings. Anyone who’s been through it want to chime in?