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.

• Heavy Competition for Racebending.com Facebook Ban

– “Hopefully we’ll be able to open a dialogue with Facebook soon on this subject. It did get us wondering, however: what does it take to get your group banned? What – besides open discussion of racial issues in American media – does Facebook consider “hateful, threatening, or obscene”?

As it turns out, we beat out some stiff competition for the ban. A few minutes’ searching Facebook groups turned up quite a lot of material. We were very surprised that these groups satisfy Facebook’s “Terms of Service” and merit continued broadcasting on the social networking site. Given that these groups are thriving under Facebook’s policies, getting banned is almost an accomplishment.”

• Degenderizing Disney

– “The Disney folks only have themselves to blame. They are the ones who took all the female characters from their films and repackaged them in a pink box with a pink bow and set girls afire. And they made a ton of money. Walk by the Disney store and you can’t help but be overwhelmed by the princesses that are everywhere.”

• Wait—What?

– Trigger warning for this megafail example of WTF were they thinking

• New review: Daughters of Earth: Feminist Science Fiction in the Twentieth Century

– “Jess McCabe reviews Justine Larbalestier’s collection of 11 stories and accessible essays, which provide an engaging introduction to feminist scifi”

• Spamjazzling (18th March, 2010)

– geek feminist linkspam

• It seems that Naked Women are Props for Robert Pattinson

– “The women in the above images have no personhood, they are simply objects and that is the way that women are routinely framed in the media. Is it really any wonder that women continue to lag behind in every social sphere, when our existence is only deemed necessary, when it serves the purpose of maintaining and uplifting patriarchy?”

• Regulation, safety and risk

– “Regulation is not about cutting out risk completely, and our regulators (ie the government) are dishonest when they present regulation in that way (eg the “drugs will kill you” style ads). Regulation is about weighing up the risks for society as a whole, and changing the risk balance in order to affect behaviour.”

• Perspective

– “Yesterday we had SBY address our Parliament – the leader of a country of 230 million people, heading a democratic government that struggles with serious economic and social development issues everyday. He was here to talk about development cooperation, security and intelligence sharing and international economic partnership in the forums of global power to boost living standards and enhance the social and economic ties between our two nations.

What did we bang on about?

Boat people.”

• Every Crooked Step Forward: Oh, Mary, Mary

– “Think about it. They have taken bad writing and given it characterization. They have given it a name. A girl’s name. Not because they’re sexist. But because that’s something girls do. Girls write about girls. They write about strength that real girls don’t have. They write about individuality real girls don’t have. They write about girls who are comfortable with their body and their sexuality, girls who are wanted, and have the power to turn a boy down, or the ability to say yes and still maintain their sense of self. They write about girls to whom bad things happen, a lot, who still manage to be good people, in spite of that. They write about girls who overcome their surroundings. They write about girls with power, and girls who grow into women who other people aspire to be like, and girls who get the boys everybody wants to have, and girls who make people sometimes uncomfortable with their inherent awesomeness. And that is not good writing because it doesn’t happen that way.”

Categories: linkfest

Tags: blogging, Read-ems, regulation, risk