Get your ropes and hats, cowgirls and cowboys. It’s time for a round-up. Many of these are ancient in the Land of Blogdom, but bear with me as I dump my desktop.
The Countess takes on a particularly nasty Father’s Rights manual that details how better to break the law to get back at your ex-bitch and manipulate the courts to sway in your favor. Chances are these methods won’t work, but hell, all’s fair in love and war.
The Happy Feminist details her family’s articles of educational faith, a long story of immigration, mobility, and class consciousness. Good stuff here.
DJW of Lawyers, Guns, and Money, writes why he, too, is a feminist, a thoughtful reflection on how his grandfather was bound by gender expectations that stunted his life’s dreams. An unexpected take on how feminism benefits men with comment-worthy implications.
The good folks at Something Awful take apart a few open misogynists, and I have to say I laughed out loud.
The blogger at A Magpie’s Book of Hours offers an interesting essay written by “Fatima Mernissi, a Moroccan feminist and professor at Mohammed V University, who grew up in an enclosed harem, unable to leave except once a week when she could walk, escorted and veiled, to the Hammam, or Turkish baths,” titled Size 6: The Western Women’s Harem. There is much in this essay ripe for discussion and I’d like to see what others have to say on it.
Chad at Physician, Heal Thyself writes an awesome reflection on growing up in an age of hip hop and race consciousness and the incident that inspired his essay, the kneejerk disgust he sees in white boys criticizing the genre without much knowledge before Tupac and Biggie on an airplane. I have a few people I’d like to read this essay, see also: music dorks who like to be “in the know” and think Old School begins and ends with Tupac.
The Language Guy looks at sexist language.
I like my women like I like my chicken: battered. An exercise in “context.”
About a month ago, a woman emailed me this essay she’d written for the Margins Discussion Forum, challenging my feminism because I am not explicitly anti-porn. Although I wrote her back I didn’t get anything in return, thus I figured I’d offer it here for discussion. Please note that in her essay she feels great distress over the topic, so I’d like to honor her with any discussion by not criticizing her emotion and denigrating her for her beliefs. I’d like to address her essay at a later date, and intend to do so.
At Alternet, Deanna Zandt discusses the beginnings of a completely digital world of pornography. Some of the things mentioned in Zandt’s post and the accompanying Wired article (NSFW) have interesting implications in regards to common feminist arguments against the porn industry.
Aspazia writes in response to a former student who hates feminists and feminism. This is a strong reconsideration of the personal side of anti-feminism, and a strong defense of why feminism and other social activist groups are needed. See also: HF’s Has feminism been so successful that it is now superfluous?
Ramsin Canon of Gaper’s Block comes out swinging against the pharmacists and pharmacies that refuse to dispense emergency contraception in Phase One of Operation Barefoot and Pregnant. See also: I should stop watching informative television.
Edited to Add:
At ZNet, keeping with the porn theme I’ve got going here, Gail Dines and Robert Jensen make the case that being anti-pornography is a matter of consistency in our analyses of oppression, i.e. “pornography is to patriarchy what commercial television is to capitalism.” via The Uncommon Man