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Category: relationships

Banned Books Week: Your banned-kids’-book reading list (updated)

It’s Banned Books Week, celebrating books that are absolutely, objectively horrible and mustn’t be read by anyone. They’re books that need to be blocked from school libraries, ejected from public libraries, struck from publisher’s lists and set on damn fire every time they’re encountered. Which means that most of them (although by no means all of them) are worth reading, particularly when it comes to books for school-age kids who shan’t be exposed to naughty language or mentions of sex. Because if there’s one thing that abstinence-only education has taught us is that if you never, ever mention it, kids will never do it.

So here are six banned and/or challenged children’s and young adult books to read to a kid this week in honor of Banned Books Week.

Yes, but still: Dude plants a flag and claims a kingdom in Africa

Yes, in the grand scheme of things, there are things of more urgent concern than one imperialist guy and his princess-obsessed daughter. But still, we have yet another entry into the saga of White Guy Plants a Flag in Africa and Calls Dibs:

Jeremiah Heaton, who has three children, recently trekked across the Egyptian desert to a small, mountainous region between Egypt and Sudan called Bir Tawil.

The area, about 800 square miles, is claimed by neither Sudan nor Egypt, the result of land disputes dating back more than 100 years. Since then, there have been several online claimants to the property, but Heaton believes his physical journey to the site, where he planted a flag designed by his children, means he rightfully can claim it.

And call his 7-year-old daughter Princess Emily, the fulfillment of a promise he made months earlier.

“Over the winter, Emily and I were playing, and she has a fixation on princesses. She asked me, in all seriousness, if she’d be a real princess someday,” Heaton said. “And I said she would.”

(My parents called me “princess” all the time*, and those assholes never even got me a Power Wheels.)

Heaton flew to Egypt in June and took a 14-hour caravan through the desert to land where “Bedouins roam the area; the population is actually zero,” he says, to plant the flag in what is now the totally rightfully claimed Kingdom of North Sudan. He then flew home to Abingdon, Virginia (originally home to the Mattaponi tribe of the Powhatan confederacy, while we’re talking about flag-planting), where he and Queen Kelly bought their daughter a tiara and ordered the family to address her as Princess Emily.

Lest this sound like some guy willing to go way, way far (like, a $1,500 plane ticket and 28 hours on a camel far) for a gag, the new king of North Sudan has expressed an intent to pursue formal recognition with other African nations, starting with Sudan and Egypt, possibly on the new letterhead he’s ordered. In the meantime, the royal family is discussing what to do with their new kingdom, thinking specifically about agriculture, since that’s what’s on Princess Emily’s mind. Because in the end, it’s all about her. And him. And love.

But the main intent, he said, was to show his daughter that he would follow through on the promise he made.

“I think there’s a lot of love in the world,” Heaton said. “I want my children to know I will do absolutely anything for them.”

*Sarcastically, when I was being a jerk

Pope Francis to childfree couples: Even your dogs suck

For all of the misogyny inherent to the Catholic church (and evangelical and conservative Christianity in general), newbie Pope Francis has gotten a lot of attention for his (relatively) more progressive views and policies in his year of service. And yet. On Monday, Il Papa celebrated Mass with a group of 15 lengthily married couples to celebrate their marital milestones and deride those selfish, fruitless couples who would rather have pets and vacation homes than kids.

VLOGGING – Virgins Literally Pop Cherries?

Finals are here, but we managed to squeeze out one last episode before semester’s end. Yes, it resembles the question we answered last time, but… Okay, we really just wanted to do a simple, non-intersectionality-laden question, to avoid extra stress on top of revising for exams. But even if you already know everything about virginity, feel free to watch if you want to be entertained by what we played whilst answering the question…

A big day for marriage equality in Oregon and Utah

On Monday, a federal judge threw out Oregon’s ban on same-sex marriage, on the basis that the state’s marriage laws violate the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment. The judge put his ruling into effect immediately, and couples began marrying across Oregon immediately after that, having lined up outside courthouses around the state in anticipation of the ruling. Also on Monday, a federal judge ordered that Utah recognize 1,200 same-sex marriages performed after the state’s same-sex marriage ban was overturned, but before the U.S. Supreme Court issued a stay on the original ruling. Monday was a big day for love.

VLOGGING – Can Virgins Have Oral Sex?

From outside, it probably seems we quit the Feministe vlog after just 4 months of vlogging. In actuality, despite scepticism from professors, we’ve been labouring for 4 months behind the scenes to reboot the vlog, brainstorming ways to deliver content with appeal beyond the feminist blogosphere. Frankly your mates and ours might need this more than you, if they never got sex education in school. So come, judge what we came up with. For one thing, it involves Call of Duty…