Items of interest found recently in my RSS feed-reader. What did I miss? Please share what you've been reading (and writing!) in the comments.
- The Truth About Weight Loss Maintenance
- Racial Identity Cannot be Determined by Casual Bystanders
- MAMA W/PEN: Just How Early Does Halloween Sexism Begin?
- Street harassment reporting app now available for iPhone and Android
- Boy story
- Accepting apologies on line 1
- Happy Veteran’s Day! You Don’t Exist!
- Can anorexia lead to unplanned pregnancy?
- Rape Charges Are Dropped in Relation to Victim Who Threatened Suicide on Courthouse Roof
- The incoherent critiques of Jon Stewart
- Men can fake it, too
- Because everyone knows you've got a right
- Undermining women with power
- Mass Extinction #6
- The Mass Libel Reform Blog – By Simon Singh
- No, not sexualisation. Objectification. Say it with…
- Bad writing, bad reading
- US air travellers get a wake up touch up
- He Would Never Hit a Girl
- Psychic Kids
– “I’ll take brisk walks and avoid junk food most of the time. I’ll do the same things that a naturally thin person would to feel healthy and stay reasonably fit – that’s HAES. But, I will not exist at the razor’s edge of starvation and exhaustion in order to have a fashionable body and a doctor-approved BMI.”
– “Firstly, how one person reads another person’s race is not going to be how another observer reads it. As such, establishing any kind of criteria for whether someone fits the particular features of an ethnic/racial group is impossible. That is, in addition to being really, really racist, of course – seriously, do the people who pull this stuff not realise that the whole system of racialisation emerged from attempts to determine superior and inferior features that all people of a particular background supposedly shared?”
– “So what do the disguises I chose for these here babies say to them, to you, to me?”
– Check it out
– “Another hilarious facet of Hollywood dudes’ remarks is their cogent assessment of the condition of existing solely as an accessory. It is obvious to them that relegating a sentient being to the role of one-dimensional second banana degrades that sentient being, which sentient being would then logically suffer psychological damage as a result (Ken’s “complex”). Yet it eludes them that this is precisely the condition they have imposed on the female characters in their own film,
– “He seemed like cream of Jesus on toast, so how could they know? Nobody could know! And as for the uncomfortable fact that a bunch of people, including me, seemed to know exactly how Obama would turn out and were saying so loudly in 2008—well, that was just coincidence. “
– “I think about how many times I would pick my kid up from daycare after PT, in my full Navy PT gear, and someone would ask me if my husband was in the Navy.”
– “You see, just because a woman isn’t menstruating doesn’t mean she can’t get pregnant.”
– “In the last post, I stated that allowing an accused rapist to directly question hir own alleged victims is an act of witness intimidation. Though it is not the victim’s fault and likely not the prosecution’s either, the decision to drop charges has proven the system to condone and outright support precisely that. The decision to dismiss the charges has effectively told rapists that they now have a legal avenue through which they can intimidate victims into dropping their cases. They can legally bully and harass their victims in an open court until even the prosecutor think that the effort just isn’t worth it, anymore.”
– “That’s possibly what’s most upsetting to me about Stewart’s critique. It’s incoherent. He wants anti-corruption journalism, but when journalists actually do that, he gets antsy because it requires digging up information that will allow the audience to make judgment calls.”
– “The men I talked to also prove that women aren’t the only ones who fake orgasms to avoid bruising their lover’s ego. “
– “Spot the weasel word here.”
– “Apparently you’re obsessed with your looks if you change your clothes each day for work. Seriously, what the fuck?”
– “It’s been sixty-five million years since the last one, so this is an unprecedented opportunity for ecologists to study such an event.”
– “You can read more about the peculiar and grossly unfair nature of English libel law at the website of the Libel Reform Campaign. You will see that the campaign is not calling for the removal of libel law, but for a libel law that is fair and which would allow writers a reasonable opportunity to express their opinion and then defend it.”
– “When you really dig down to what lies at the root of these fears, it’s stuff like girls being confronted with scantily clad, gyrating images of their gender. It’s about girls growing up to believe that their main value lies in their appearance. It’s about things like make-up, fashion and eating disorders (very different phenomena, I know, but all connected to beauty culture).
But these things aren’t new, nor at their heart are they about sex (and nor, for that matter, do they impact only children and teenage girls). In fact, there’s a very handy old-fashioned word to describe just this process. It’s called objectification.”
– “The point is that the people so eager to jump into the comments box to defend something that is not being attacked, and in so doing try to demonstrate what literature-lovers they are themselves, are revealing themselves as bad, careless, sloppy readers.”
– So, anybody keen to visit the US right now?
– “Do you see why it isn’t enough just to teach our sons not to hit girls? The young man in question absorbed that lesson to the letter. What he did not learn was not to hurt women, not to threaten or intimidate them in order to control their behavior.”
– “Okay. In case you don’t see what’s wrong with the above paragraphs, let me unpack it a bit. Basically, a group of grown adults are singling out children who are troubled, who feel scared and isolated, and who claim to be haunted by evil spirits and possessed by demons, and telling them their problems can only be fixed by learning how to use
their psychic powers in front of television cameras for the financial benefit of said adults. Clearer now?
If there ever were a case that screams exactly what the harm is in letting psychics go unchallenged, this is it.”
Categories: gender & feminism, linkfest, Politics, Science
Hoyden About Town 
Thank you kindly for your linkage!
You’re most welcome – that was one story I wanted to blog about but couldn’t find the words – you said it perfectly.
What an embarrassment of riches.
It’s a double-edition, really – I forgot to put one up on Friday and kept on going through my feed-reader and marking links to share, so it ended up being huge by Sunday.