Lee responded to his comments by defending her African American ancestry and natural hairstyle. “Women come in all shapes, sizes, nationalities, and levels of beauty,” she asserted in her comment response. “Showing little girls that being comfortable in the skin and HAIR God gave me is my contribution to society.” She ended her response by thanking the viewer for watching the station’s broadcasts. Station leaders later fired Lee for violating the station’s social media policy.
“A promise is a promise” said the UN, but did India keep its promise? Or will it keep its promise?
Hardly. It neither has the intent or the ability because it truly doesn’t care for its women.
If it had, in roughly about a month after the gangrape, Delhi wouldn’t have witnessed roughly two rapes a day and the figures of the National Crime Records Bureau would have shown at least a temporary blip.
So because patriarchal culture emphasizes that women must be likable, our bold and sometimes morally ambiguous TV heroines often face more scrutiny than their male counterparts.
Stereotypes of poor people abound. People frequently assume that my parents are unintelligent, ignorant, and bad parents. They treat me as an anomaly, an escapee from a uniformly horrible situation that they can pity and make fun of. People who know me treat me as an exception to a classist rule, not realizing that their upholding of that rule allows people who don’t know me to stereotype and mistreat me.
The idea of our age is that Great Ideas can be simplified, reduced, made into convenient, disposable nuggets of infotainment — be they 18-minute talks, 800-word blog posts, or 140 character bursts. But can they — really? Could Aristotle really deliver the resounding, history-redefining message of the Nicomachean Ethics in…eighteen minutes? Or a series of “thought leader” blog posts on LinkedIn? Or would that, in a very real sense, cheat you and I of the power and purpose, the meaning and message, the very import and impact of the larger body of work?
I had no idea you could make pennies glow! Just heat it up and suspend it over acetone.
It’s full of sex, zombies, and really annoying internal monologues. It pokes fun at Seattle, erotica, horror novels inexplicably filled with albinos, and people who spend too much time on their hair.
It’s the pressure cooker of the last six months of a dev cycle. It’s the people that just go home and don’t give a shit. It’s running out of time, but wanting it to be the best thing ever. Finite time; finite people. Plus, [there's] the lack of sleep and not seeing your wife or your kids. You go through the summer working ridiculously hard and not getting any time off. In that kind of situation you’re not going to be with your kids. You don’t get that back.
What a clever idea! Print this out and stick it on the front of your fridge.
It seems like trash-talking Australia is a popular past-time over at the BBC. I don’t agree with everything Madeleine Morris says. Anyhow, limes have been ridiculously expensive for a loooong time now.
How to use the other 90% of your mind to increase the size of your breasts!
Cornelius Walker talks to his son about yoga pants (which have become a bit of a big deal on The Good Men Project lately);
“But what if she does want you to comment?” he asked, always looking for the loophole. “She’ll let you know,” I replied. I thought to add, “and if you’re married to her, the answer is always ‘you look great’” But there’s no need to perpetuate that tired stereotype…
It was that year that our first rape victim was brought into the hospital. After being raped, bullets had been fired into her genitals and thighs.
I started to ask myself what was going on. These weren’t just violent acts of war, but part of a strategy. You had situations where multiple people were raped at the same time, publicly – a whole village might be raped during the night. In doing this, they hurt not just the victims but the whole community, which they force to watch.
Three videos. One to make you cry, one to make you laugh, and one to confound and inspire you:
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As the mailman said to me this morning, have a wonderful weekend!
And just about every blog post and book listing collects a trolling comment from someone who didn’t like it, didn’t read it or didn’t agree with it (or all three) and isn’t shy about speaking up with a sharp tongue.
For those people, the message from the creator of the work is clear: “It’s not for you.”
Gambia has recently introduced a four day work week. Sounds amazing yes?
Grace has bee writing a series on TV tropes concerning women’s work. From her post Not That Kind of Secretary;
In real life, the role of administrative assistant is, statistically speaking, woman’s work. But at a time when four out of ten recession-era postgrads are working whatever jobs they can, the real world image of assistant work has recently transformed from a sometimes sexist and racist cliche to a reliable job in an uncertain economy.
Noisebridge as a community believes you have the free speech right to use such imagery without having to ask permission — especially those who you might be implicitly criticising or commenting upon. Such a right is encoded in the existing nature of trademark and copyright with the idea of fair use.
Sadly, knowledge of such rights have been eroded over the years by the repeated claims of copyright maximalists, who would have you believe that you must beg to refer to us in your film — or even that you would be beholden to us if, for instance, you parodied our disrespectful attitude to your concerns with the following image, which includes both of our identifying marks, the Noisebridge(TM) circuit, and the Unicorn Pissing A Rainbow(TM).
For just as instagram has taught us that with the right filter applied, any moment on earth can look more beautiful, more profound, perhaps we will see stop-motion animation elevated to the form that documents our shared social existence, six seconds at a time.
This post was
written by Bella Blithely (contact) on February 2nd, 2013 at and was filed under Threads from the Web and tagged with the words
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Organizations with reach and leverage ought to be taking more risks, doing more generous work and creating bolder art. That’s the most responsible thing they can do.
An open letter from the Westminster Library staff to their local councillors;
The solution to unemployment cannot be to fire people, and the solution to debt is not to cut income generating, job creating, and crime preventing services. Not only is it a statutory requirement to provide this service, it is our moral obligation to do so.
And speaking of Girls in Suits, check out Tomboy Tailors which will soon launch in San Francisco. From their website, the whole thing sounds incredibly awesome;
Our customers are butch/boi lesbians, trans-masculine individuals, and women of any identity who have a strong sense of self-expression and like to wear fine custom-made clothing.
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Good Spirit News reviews Cocoa Leaf Liqueur. I’d really like to try out a cocoa leaf margarita!
Edinburgh has been a bit cold this week. We even had snow! I really crack up reading about these weird and wonderful snow vehicles over at Dark Roasted Blend.
The idea is that the parts of the publication process that academics do voluntarily — editing and refereeing — are just as they are for traditional journals, and we do without the parts that cost money, such as copy-editing and typesetting.
After nearly 130 years, Australian icon and folk hero Ned Kelly is finally buried in consecrated ground, according to his wishes.
…the use of models who are more representative of the actual population could ultimately help girls and women to develop a healthier attitude to eating.
Well duh!
The freakonomics blog explores the effect of wage negotiation on the wage gap.
Doesn’t Gemma look lovely in trousers!? I’d hesitate to call it “1930s Lesbian” though…
American Duchess is giving away a beautiful pair of shoes! I’m a sucker for T-Straps and Spectators, so this is almost too good to be true…
Launchistory discussed one of the most successful pirates of the 19th century, Cheng I Sao, dubbed “The Pirate Queen of China.” Pretty darn impressive;
Cheng I Sao was never captured by the Chinese navy or by foreign bounty hunters. In a desperate attempt to end the ordeal with the Red Flag Fleet the Chinese government set up a diplomatic act that would offer Cheng I Sao amnesty in exchange for peace in 1810. Cheng I Sao went to the royal court negotiated, and agreed with the terms.
Over at the Good Men project the editors have published Trey Malone’s suicide letter in full. While heartwrending to read, there is a lot we can learn here;
I blame a society that remains unwilling to address sexual assault and rape. One that pays some object form of lip service to the idea of sexual crimes while working its hardest to marginalize its victims.
An amazing interview with the director of Citadel, Ciaran Foy and his influences over at i09;
Foy was attacked by a pack of 14-year-old kids and beaten with a hammer. Afterwards Foy found it difficult to leave his own home. He couldn’t even get past his own front door. Years later, Foy has turned the crime into a pretty kickass horror movie about packs of crazed feral teens who roam the UK streets looking for more babies to add to their brood.
Ava DuVernay’s new film Middle of Nowhere breaks the mould for women of colour on-screen. See the review over at Bitchmedia:
On screen, the fullness of black womanhood has been flattened to a one-dimensional trope – she is rarely funny without bitterness, or lonely and sad without letting her emotions bleed into histrionics or melodrama.
John Franklin Stephens wrote an amazingly eloquent open letter to Ann Coulter after she called Obama a “retard”:
After I saw your tweet, I realized you just wanted to belittle the President by linking him to people like me. You assumed that people would understand and accept that being linked to someone like me is an insult and you assumed you could get away with it and still appear on TV…
Well, Ms. Coulter, you, and society, need to learn that being compared to people like me should be considered a badge of honor.
No one overcomes more than we do and still loves life so much.
Come join us someday at Special Olympics. See if you can walk away with your heart unchanged.
Sure, there are people out there who will disappoint you. But expecting to be ripped off poisons all your interactions instead of saving you from a few dead ends. An open mind and an open heart usually lead to precisely that in those that you are about to deal with.
What Trump has shown us is that we’ve for far too long valued such outdated values as respect for others, tolerance of their points of view, an empathetic understanding of what they care about, and an unwillingness to screw over a bunch of elderly people to make a few more bucks.
What Chris Brown’s tattoo tells about violence against women;
This is very typical of how batterers, rapists, and other men on a dominance trip over women tend to act. They want to brag, but they also don’t want to be caught out openly advocating for violence against women. So they test boundaries, see how much they can get away with.
As we continually replace real life with ever shorter digital updates, what happens to the memories we build for ourselves and the people we serve? More and more, we don’t remember what actually happened to us, but what we’ve encountered digitally. It scales, but does it matter in the same way?
Over at A Beautiful Mess they’re making beautiful beeswax candles. I can almost smell how lovely they are from here!
Google unveils it’s most important search capability so far: The Bacon Number. Speaking of bacon, apparently bacon costumes will be the big thing at Halloween this year.
I said I wouldn’t speak for all ladies, but I may try to here: it’s not that we want to be treated like porcelain creatures, fragile and easily upset. We certainly don’t. We also don’t want to be sexually threatened just for existing. There must be some middle ground here: how about treating us as equals?
Ashley Judd fights back against speculation about her puffy face;
That women are joining in the ongoing disassembling of my appearance is salient. Patriarchy is not men. Patriarchy is a system in which both women and men participate. It privileges, inter alia, the interests of boys and men over the bodily integrity, autonomy, and dignity of girls and women. It is subtle, insidious, and never more dangerous than when women passionately deny that they themselves are engaging in it. This abnormal obsession with women’s faces and bodies has become so normal that we (I include myself at times—I absolutely fall for it still) have internalized patriarchy almost seamlessly. We are unable at times to identify ourselves as our own denigrating abusers, or as abusing other girls and women.
She walks out of the hotel into the New York morning. A song by Paul Simon’s son is playing. A magical jolly homeless black man stops her on the street to say, “Why don’t you smile? Does your heart hurt? Oh girl when I look at you I just want to say Hello New York!” This magical jolly homeless black man will appear at the end of every episode, saying something wise and innocent. It will be like a tag. Skrillex.
The Womanist says its all about whining white women;
I agree that we need more images of women in the media, but Girls is not the solution for the erasure. ‘Woman’ should not simply mean White woman. If we have to have a homogenous cast, would it have been that hard to make even one of these characters likeable? I cannot think of a single area that Girls is successful in. If you missed the pilot episode consider this your warning.
You will most likely have several womanly items to carry around with you. For example: gloves, car keys, a compact mirror, a loaded gun, a spare gun, and more. To carry all these items you will need a sturdy and stylish pocketbook. Although a lady can never have too many pocketbooks, try to coordinate with your outfits. Keep an eye out for large pocketbooks that could discreetly hold small children. Children do the best manicures, so make sure to snatch one up the next time you see one!
What we think we look like and what we actually look like are often completely different. Tom Hussey shot the following photographs exploring the relationship between residual self-image and aging.
How amazing do the ladies of the Itty Bitty Titty Cabaret look swanning around the Helsinki Botanic Gardens?!
We increasingly live in a society driven by the visual. Our days are filled with images, whether on the pages of a magazine or through idle clicks across the internet. A select few of these photos may be considered to be pleasing or beautiful as an art form – perhaps a portrait taken by Irving Penn, or a magnificent flight of fancy assembled by Tim Walker. However, the relentless exposure to snaps of other individuals invites us to become judges of appearance, whether we want to or not.
These days, I keep to myself. Sort of. I make vegan related zines and buttons in my online shops, I tag delicious meals I create #vegan and, above all, I lead by example. To me, this method is more effective. I don’t come off as pushy or militant. I simply show people how easy it can be to live vegan (in Seattle, WA, USA anyway). People respect that, and I feel like I’m able to reach out to more people because I’m not scaring folks away with frightening images and stomach-churning videos.
Lady Doctors! Yes! I really wanted the next doctor to be a woman. Like really wanted it badly. This is so much more awesome than I could have imagined.
So some of the femme Doctor cosplayers I interviewed were clear about their motivations, but even the ones who were less conscious were clearly making up for what they saw as a lack of female protagonists. While there are plenty of awesome companions, there are no female heroes in Doctor Who. The companions are, definitionally, sidekicks. And femme Doctor cosplayers are very aware of this. They want to be heroes, not followers and sidekicks, however badass. And Doctor Who does not offer them a hero that matches their experience, who looks anything like them. So they invent her.
