Items of interest come across recently in my feed-reader. What did I miss? Leave your own interesting links in comments. Shameless self-promotion entirely welcome!
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.

• The orca slavery lawsuit: a plea to avoid reflex ridicule

I also hope people will consider the point made by Colbert – that we live in a country in which the argument that nonhuman animals can be “people” who can be enslaved is ridiculed but corporations are granted the legal rights of people:

• The best of the rest of the internet
  – linkage from an Inappropriate Woman
• Reclaim The Night: Open To ALL Women? « Something More Than Sides

Reclaim The Night marches have rightly come under fire for being transphobic and openly hostile to trans women. “Women Only” often means “cis women only” when used in feminist spaces.

This is something many activists have been working to challenge, with positive results.

• Links of Great Interest: THIS IS HALLOWEEN! Oh. Wait.
  – links from Hathor’s Legacy
• Because Amber Cole is Just a Kid and Boys Learn to Be Boys

The onus is always on women keeping themselves safe, on women not putting themselves in positions to be attacked or exploited. And when something does happen, when teenagers being teenagers suddenly becomes a nation newsstory, everyone wants to talk about what the girl should have done to prevent herself from being in the situation.

Once again, we aren’t talking to the boys.

So if the boys don’t know what is wrong, or why what they did was wrong, they will never know. Because we don’t talk to boys in that way. We want them to muddle through on their own, we allow them to consume messages that say the path to proving your masculinity lies in dominance, in the subjugation of women for sexual means. Because that’s all this really is. A boy, thinking he could be seen as cool, if he could get this girl to do this thing while his friends watched. A girl, thinking she could win this boy, by doing this thing, not realizing this wasn’t a game she could ever win.

• When Cheaters Prosper

All weekend I was thinking about this “jealousy” question, and I just kept coming back to all the different ways the game is rigged. People aren’t jealous and they don’t want privileges. They just want a level playing field, and they want Wall Street to give up its cheat codes

• How the WHO medical manual is used to stigmatize sexual variation
  – Great article on how psychiatric evaluation of trans and crossdressing folks seems to be mired in long-discredited gender stereotypes and old-fashioned prudery.
• the HAES files: is the body mass index a good measure of health?

“The BMI was formulated, by a mathematician, not a medical physician, to provide a simple, easy-to-apply mathematical formula to give a broad, society-level measure of weight issues. It has absolutely no scientific or medical basis. It is based purely on a crude statistical analysis. It measures a general society trend, it does not predict.”

Categories: linkfest

Tags: Read-ems