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. (I’m also aiming to add more tags to individual reader posts, to provide better indexing and help more with the similar posts feature, so if you want to suggest a tag to be added, just let me know)
- Was Elizabeth Lambert's meltdown a guy thing?
- "The Rules": They're baaack!
- Get Off Your Fat Asses!
- Bad Messages from Problematic Blog Posts
- Why Do We Need Transgender Day Of Remembrance? Well…
- Application For Seekers 2012 (Please Hire Mil Millington And His Girlfriend For This Show)
- The question that hurts
- Further thoughts on the Random Academic Sentence Generator
- Do mothers want to be at home?
- Same Old Story: Best-Books Lists Snub Women Writers — Politics Daily
- Check Please!
- Carnival Against Sexual Violence 82
- Sixth Carnival of Feminist Parenting
- Slut Shaming Comes To Twitter: #youknowurahoeif
– Mary Elizabeth Williams dissects some hyperventilating about a woman behaving unsportingly
– Classic Harding critique
– “Oh, wait:”
– “I appreciate what the author, Matt Blum, is trying to do, but there’s a real some of these things are not like the others problem with his list”
– “The core part of any TDOR service is reading the list of names of people we lost from the time after we held the previous year’s event to the current one. As that list of names is read, a candle is lit in remembrance of that person.”
– Hahahahahahaha
– “My child is two and a half now, and although I’ve been getting this question since he was about one, it’s gotten more frequent, the older he gets:
“Any plans for number two yet?” or worse still “When’s number two then?”
Firstly, let me explain why I think this is a feminist issue, rather than just a “you’re being bloody rude” issue.”
– a language-usage nerd’s delight of a post
– “Is the whole discussion a trick question? Parents are really asking for more flexibility in their workplaces not less jobs for them. And yet the question seems to be rephrased to us as an either/or.”
– “The conservatives are right: affirmative action is huge blemish on the face of our nation. And until we stop giving awards to men who don’t deserve them over women who do, we’re sunk.”
– A modest proposal from taddyporter
– strong and disturbing reading, as usual
– another great set of links
– “There I was, tweeting the ridiculousness of my day, when once again I was reminded that to be a woman is to be subject to constant discipline and shame. Whether it is twitter or a weekend afternoon of mindless television, somewhere in the message will be a reminder that my body makes dirty and inherently less than.”
Categories: linkfest
The 109th Down Under Feminists Carnival is up! 
The 105th Down Under Feminists Carnival is up! 
Hoyden About Town 
Glad to read the article about men being given the literary awards, because the list of finalists for the Miles Franklin Award this year made me grind my teeth. Not only all men, but all white male established getting-on-a-bit authors who have already had all the regocnition they could possibly need. The judging was conservative, over-cautious and, above all, lazy.
Elaine Showalter was on the RN bookshow a month or so back talking about the exclusion of women from the literary greats lists. She made the interesting point that it seems to be getting worse. Back when people were first making lists of great American novels, Harriet Beecher Stowe was often at the top. She also had some really fascinating things to say about literary movements valorizing male writers versus the pathologizing of prolific or intensely intellectual female writers as odd loners.
From Lizzie Skurnick’s article: “Our default is that women are small, men are universal.” That is a beautiful summary. I think it may also explain why certain of the books that make the greats list strike me as hollow, puffed with their own self-importance.
Pavlov’s Cat also had a great article a fortnight ago [link]