Items of interest come across recently in my feed-reader. What did I miss? Leave your own interesting links in comments. Shameless self-promotion especially welcomed!
n.b. Comments threads have not necessarily been read. Some may be NSFW or triggering, so please report back any problems you encounter so the post can be marked.
- My life is not your life
- Dominique Strauss-Kahn and the Myth of Consent
- In His Own Words: Gil Scott-Heron (1949-2011)
- MANSPLAINERS MANSPLAIN LADY PROTEST, DETAIL HOW LADIES DID IT WRONG, POINT OUT LADIES ARE MISSING "REAL ISSUE" (WHICH CONVENIENTLY IS NOT LADIES)
- Are we really going to do this? Part 1
- Sons and Slutwalk
- Photos from Slut Walk Brisbane.
- Walk don't walk
– “So, I’m looking at some of the comments and emails that are flooding my inbox demanding to know all the inner workings of my life when I had the abortion that saved my life. And I know I don’t owe anyone an explanation, but…”
– “The question is how many groupies are actually out there? In the Colorado case, one of the attorneys for the raped women asked the football players a most telling question: “How many female students here at CU would you consider to be ‘football groupies’? One running back said, “About half.” Another player, a wide receiver, answered “a majority.”
In these guys’ minds, every other female student at Colorado would have sex with them, any time and anywhere.”
– Fantastic tribute to a poet, musician, philosopher and activist.
– just the headline, folks
– “I have a bigger problem than this, however, which is when this “critique” is made on the basis of media images. To take an example from, fittingly, a non-Australian context, the example that started this train of thought, see SlutWalk: A Stroll Through White Supremacy by Aura Blogando. There’s an image immediately underneath that title of some SlutWalkers. Now, for a start, as Lauredhel and I have discussed, I’m not a fan of pulling out an image of a few people just doing their thing as symbolic of white supremacy.
But there’s more than that: there are people in that photo who have features coded as distinctively non-white. As much as I have issues with some randomly picked people being made to represent white supremacy, I have a much bigger issue with non-white people being made to represent white supremacy.”
– “I want my sons to grew up to understand that there are three important components to a great sex life: safety, respect and consent. I want my sons to have lots of safe sex and sex with respect. It can also be passionate, wild, outrageous, kinky, uncontained, joyous,with women or men (or women and men), but they need to understand that the best sex involves respect and consent. Without those things it is not something that is shared and enjoyed – it is imposed. And there is no joy in that.
So I’ll be taking my boys to Slutwalk in Canberra. “
– “Slut is a word I have a difficult experience with. I’ve been called a slut just because I walked past someone. I’ve been called a slut because I turned someone down. A few of my friends have said similar, and at the Brisbane Slut Walk I attended today one of the organisers also echoed this sentiment. It’s actually one of the reasons why the protests are so important to a lot of people.”
– exploration of the issues/flaws surround SlutWalk from Octavia
Categories: linkfest
The 109th Down Under Feminists Carnival is up! 
The 105th Down Under Feminists Carnival is up! 
Hoyden About Town 
Awesome new radical feminist collective blog:
http://radicalhub.wordpress.com/
Please note that radicalhub states that it is a FAAB* only site on the front page.
[FAAB*- female assigned at birth – presumably this means genitalia]
Yes, it is a site specifically aimed at TERFs – trans-exclusionary rad fems.
Obviously that particular stance is one I don’t agree with, still I do find that rad fems excel at making me think. But very much worth noting that the posts, let alone the comments, are not safe spaces for many of our Hoyden readers.
No, I found that in a brief visit yesterday.
Yes, me too. I don’t usually agree [esp. not on trans issues], but I can use my cis-privilege to go there without serious damage to my wellbeing.
I’m surprised you linked to “my life is not your life” without linking (or mentioning) the earlier post describing her life-saving abortion. (It was re-posted on Salon, which is where it attracted most of the negative “pro-life” comments she is responding to in the “my life is not your life” post.)
I read Angry Black Woman, so I encountered them in order, and I was angry and distressed that after she shared such intimate details of a devastating medical emergency, she was expected to explain all these details about her life at the time, as though they would have made the slightest difference – she could have been the wealthiest, most privileged woman on the planet and still have found herself needing a life-saving abortion (although I expect such a woman would less trouble with doctors who “don’t do abortions” (spit)).
@Aqua of the Questioners, I mistakenly thought that there was a link to the earlier post in the post that I linked to. I also wanted people to go and read her there, and leave comments there if they want to talk about her experience. I tried not to give too many details here, because then people talk about it here, and that’s not the point of these linkfest posts.
Obviously, I totally agree with all your points about the intrusive nature of all those questions demanding that she justify having her life saved. That was also why I linked to this second post rather than the first – I expect readers here to already be pretty much on the same page about the benefits of life-saving surgery in catastrophic pregnancies, so it was the backlash that I found most obstreperating.