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.
- Radical Readers: Feminisms for Dummies
- I’m a Death Panel
- A Comparative Free Write: The Wedding Industry vs. The Baby Industry
- What’s Accessible To You?
- Feminists hate babies
- The Rise Of The Tenthers
- The underweight brain
- Leave old movies alone, please.
- We are the new world order, apparently
- The Western woman's body is still subject to regulation
- Bristol Tories brand lottery grant to youth LGB group "outrageous"
- when no-one hears you scream
– from frau sally benz: “It is here! Our online feminist book club!”
– “Ever wondered what, exactly, happens in those conversations that Sarah Palin is so determined to prevent? What is a Death Panel, after all? Now your questions can be answered from someone who has actually done the deed.”
– “How is it that more people are interested in what kind of crib I will need than how my writing schedule will alter? How is it that more people are interested in the date of the ultrasound that will announce gender than the date I get a nuchal translucency screening that tests for Down Syndrome? When I do articulate feelings, why are my worries and fears minimized to a scattering of pulp when I muse aloud about my career, my ability to move and travel, the unknown, unpredictable future and that, yes, I am choosing this, AND, yes, am still scared? “
– “Different bodies, need different kinds of accommodation.”
– “… until I clicked over to the article that Sweet Machine is referring to in her post and I was surprised to find myself, straw feminists aside, agreeing with a lot more of that article than I expected.”
– Teabaggers, Birthers, now Tenthers. The GOP scratches around for another way to cry foul on Obama.
– Quixote gets all sciencey in response to latest claims about obesity
– “I will admit that part of my loathing for this practice comes from the fact that I just don’t trust most prominent directors to do justice to the original piece. Look Jonathan Demme’s abominable Manchurian Candidate 2: Electric Boogaloo, for example. “
– Did you know that feminism is a movement funded by secret societies? Join tor in wondering where your cheque is hiding.
– otherwise why on earth are so many column inches devoted to the bare arms or legs of one politician’s wife?
– “Quite how the blatent inequality in attitudes towards young people?s sexuality – the fact that kids and teens aren?t bullied for being heterosexual – managed to escape the editors is beyond me.”
– “An Aboriginal community has petitioned for refugee status as displaced persons as a result of the Northern Territory intervention. You’ve really got to put that into the perspective of the other events that led to people being refugees: natural disasters, civil war, persecution. Then you’ve got to realise that this is right here in Australia, where we complain about the cost of cappucinos and losing the Ashes.”
Categories: linkfest
The 109th Down Under Feminists Carnival is up! 
The 105th Down Under Feminists Carnival is up! 
Hoyden About Town 
Re: Katie Roiphe’s assertion that feminists hate babies. Utterly fascinating, when compared to her complaining, in May, about how so many women post pictures of their children as their facebook icon and have boring discussions about their children at dinner parties!
Except that Katie Roiphe didn’t say that feminists hate babies – at least in this article she didn’t. Putting aside the strapline (which I suspect she didn’t write at all – do they write them themselves at Slate?), all we have on feminism is this:
With a caveat or two, I agree with this particular assessment. Also, quite a bit (though not all) of what Roiphe wrote about her personal experience of the first six weeks rang true to me, and mothering/parenting pleasure is a subject rather close to my heart that I’ve been writing about for a while. There was some inappropriate universalisation; but I don’t find it anywhere near as offensive as a vocal-minority childfree commenter gang at Shapely Prose seem to, and their simplistic approach tends to contain quite the same universalisations, often phrased more offensively.
Roiphe’s universalisations are applied more to mothers and mothering experience, but also somewhat to “feminists”, where she seems to be talking largely about the middle-class white American feminist movement. My understanding – and I’m open to correction if I’m wrong – is that one of a number of key disagreements that womanists have with the ‘feminist movement’ is the way it has traditionally treated mothering and family life.
Bad shorthand, sorry. Meant the article with the “Feminists Hate Babies byline was fascinating, compared to previous piece on how women are “disappearing” behind images of their children online, and how it signifies a greater social denial of women as individuals separate to their motherhood.
Put together, she seems to be saying that it’s “okay” to be obsessed with one’s newborn (with some confusion between “newborn stage and “Maternity Leave” as if they were, yep, Universal and the same thing; There is an opium-den quality to maternity leave….Of course, in my drugged baby haze I do occasionally recognize that the baby will not always be six weeks old…”, but not right to still be endlessly fascinated by one’s child once they become a toddler; ”A little kid talk is fine, of course, but wasn’t there a time when we were interested, also, in something else?”)