In defense of the sanctimonious women's studies set || First feminist blog on the internet

Month: May 2007

What Feminists Do In Their Free Time

For whatever reason I’ve taken it upon myself to watch the entirety of “The Sopranos” this month, and tonight my goal is to finish up Season Five. Yes, I know what’s coming. My beloved Adriana is getting wacked, and even though Carmella was finally getting some she’s getting back together with fucking Tony. Damn. I have tons more to say about the series but I’m saving it until the whole thing finishes up on June 11th.

In the meantime, a little story and a littler complaint:

The subject of my tube-watching goal came up at Chef’s workplace the other night, and Chef reports that some of his coworkers were shocked. A feminist?! Watching The Sopranos?! And the kicker, She loves gangster movies??!

Why, yes. Yes, I do.

Which leads me to question what the hell people think feminists do, exactly, in their free time. Chant the lyrics to Meredith Brooks songs while dancing pantless over a runway of mirrors? By moonlight? Trade baby-cookin’ recipes, and then argue over why we always find ourselves in the kitchen? Discuss about Very Serious Things approved by Gloria Steinem, our glorious leader, with pen and paper in hand, brows knitted in Very Serious Concern? Get together (angrily) and glitter paint anti-man protest placards?

I don’t even know.

UPDATE: What the cool feminists are doing tonight: Radical Hot-Off — Bel Biv Devoe or NKOTB?

Jewelry for Nerds

Seeing these pairs of earrings makes me wish I hadn’t stretched my earlobes to 8 gauge rings I can’t remove by myself. That said, nothing beats Chef’s ears.

via Chaos Theory (If you haven’t noticed, I get half my weird and interesting links from Jennifer, so if you want to cut me out of the middle I suggest you cruise over to her blog where she aggregates cool links from all over the place all day. I’ve been cribbing off her for a couple of years so it’s about time I offer a shout-out.)

True Love Waits (‘Til 16.3 Years of Age)

Turns out evangelical teens are as slutty as the rest of us:

Teenagers who identify as “evangelical” or “born again” are highly likely to sound like the girl at the bar; 80 percent think sex should be saved for marriage. But thinking is not the same as doing. Evangelical teens are actually more likely to have lost their virginity than either mainline Protestants or Catholics. They tend to lose their virginity at a slightly younger age—16.3, compared with 16.7 for the other two faiths. And they are much more likely to have had three or more sexual partners by age 17: Regnerus reports that 13.7 percent of evangelicals have, compared with 8.9 percent for mainline Protestants.

Sit down before you break your neck getting to church, Little Johnny, because part of this is due to a verbiage issue. With the advent of megachurches, the number of people identifying as “evangelical” has grown even if their values don’t match the churches they attend.

Further, as the research has been telling us, even though evangelical parents tend to talk to their kids about not having sex, even the True Love Waits crowd gives in to the urge and when they do so they’re less likely to use protection than less motivated virgins.

In a quiz on pregnancy and health risks associated with sex, evangelicals scored very low. Evangelical teens don’t accept themselves as people who will have sex until they’ve already had it. As a result, abstinence pledgers are considerably less likely than nonpledgers to use birth control the first time they have sex. “It just sort of happened,” one girl told the researchers, in what could be a motto for this generation of evangelical teens.

So, abstinence-only philosophy works, except when it doesn’t. And when it doesn’t it’s more dangerous than doing it, so to speak, with contraceptives.

(via Chaos Theory)

A Young Feminist Designer Writes to Project Runway



AuH2O, originally uploaded by JillNic83.

I’ve written about my good friend Kate Goldwater several times before — Kate is a feminist, environmentally friendly fashion designer who recently opened a store called AuH2O in New York City’s East Village (7th St. between 1st and 2nd Aves). Kate and I were both members of NYU’s pro-choice organization, and even though we’ve both graduated we’ve remained good friends. Kate is an awesome activist, and one of the all-around best human beings I know. At 23 she has her own line of clothing, owns and runs her own store, shows her collections at fashion shows, and has some of her menstrual blood art featured in an online museum — and now she’s entering the blogging world. At HuffPo, no less.

Kate writes an open letter to Project Runway after they rejected her twice. See, Kate is very against sweatshop labor. Her clothes are all environmentally-friendly. And, unsurprisingly, that doesn’t mesh well with PR’s vision. [Disclosure: I am obsessed with Project Runway].

It’s a great piece, so you should head over, read it, and comment. And yes, one of the pictures is of me, and I look kinda weird. But the dress is great, and I ended up buying it from her.

More of Kate’s work can be seen here, here and here, plus on her website. A few examples of her work are below the fold. And congrats, Kate, on all your successes!

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The forced pregnancy brigade targets rape and incest survivors and women with health complications in Colombia



Pro-lifers: They love children so much, they’ll do everything in their power to force an 11-year-old rape and incest victim to give birth against her will, after she was impregnated by her step-father.

Anti-choice activsts staged a protest against abortion rights in Colombia this week — to mark the one-year anniversary of a legal decision that allows abortion for rape and incest survivors and women who face serious health- and life-threatening complications if they carry the pregnancy to term.

The article I linked to, from an anti-choice website, says that “Abortion was legalized on May 10, 2006, when the court decided to allow abortion in cases of rape and in case of any risk to the mother’s health. The ambiguity of the ruling effectively made room for abortion in almost any situation.”

That actually isn’t true at all, but the fact that anti-choicers will straight-up lie isn’t exactly news. And while these fine “pro-life” individuals are protesting the rights of incest and rape survivors to terminate pregnancies and of pregnant women taking steps to preserve their own health, Colombia — and Latin America in general — continues to face a substantial public health crisis with regard to clandestine abortion. According to the last available statistics from the World Health Organization, unsafe abortion is the third leading cause of maternal death in Colombia. Despite the total illegality of abortion in Colombia before last year, one in four Colombian women between the ages of 15 and 55 has terminated a pregnancy. Almost half of adolescent Colombian girls under the age of 19 has had an abortion.

Before the ruling a year ago, Colombia, Chile and El Salvador where the only three countries in Latin America to prohibit abortion entirely — no exceptions for rape, incest, health or life. Now Colombia is off that list because it offers these very limited exceptions. Unfortunately, it’s been replaced by Nicaragua.

Colombia’s restrictive abortion policies did nothing to decrease the abortion rate. Making abortion accessible to rape and incest survivors and to women whose health and lives are threatened by pregnancy is a small step in the right direction, but it’s a significant one. It’s a decision that has undoubtedly saved lives.

And yet “pro-lifers” oppose it. They organize against it. They’re so pro-life that they would rather have rape and incest survivors, and women who face serious physical consequences from pregnancy, seek out illegal abortions that are known to be physically harmful or even deadly. I really shouldn’t be surprised by this stuff anymore, and I suppose I’m not — but I’m still thoroughly disgusted and deeply repulsed.

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Mid-Week Fluff

I already posted this at my other blog, but it’s this week’s Video That Makes Lauren Happy.

Why? Because kitties do what kitties do, and Scooby just wants to bite his babies.

Marketing Elmo’s World

As companies futher develop methods to perfect brand identification and market to target demographics, some controversy has been stirred in recent years over marketing aimed at children — if one should do it, what age groups can one ethically target, and how. Children don’t usually balance the checkbook, we know, so what can companies do to inspire parents to shower their spawn with corporate gear?

“The Littlest Shopper” covers many of the tactics used to market to children, namely brand recognition in the three-and-under set and the dubious tactic of calling everything on the market “educational.” Apparently very little on the market for babies and toddlers is truly educational, in what we generally think of as “education,” and what we ought to be getting for and doing with very young children should generally be “interactive” — what block fits where?, sing a song sing-along, peek-a-boo, and what is this called and what does it do?

Susan Gregory Thomas’s new book, “Buy, Buy Baby: How Consumer Culture Manipulates Parents and Harms Young Minds” covers the issues above, as well as how these toys and so-called educational tools are now another extension of our lifestyle chic, corporate-molded identities. It’s beyond BabyGap and $500 strollers, folks, we’re into territory where companies will have us believe that if Baby doesn’t get her Elmo and her Baby Einstein she isn’t going to get into college.

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Favorite Dude of the Day:

Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva.

Just weeks after Pope Benedict denounced government-endorsed contraception during a visit to Brazil, President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva unveiled a program on Monday to provide inexpensive birth-control pills at 10,000 private drugstores across the country.

Silva said the plan will give poor Brazilians “the same right that the wealthy have to plan the number of children they want.”

Way to go, Silva. Brazilian has an astoundingly high abortion rate — higher than the U.S. rate — and abortion is generally illegal there. Unsurprisingly, about 4,000 Brazilian women die from illegal abortions every year, and many more are injured. Accessible birth control will certainly help. But attitudes about birth control and sex can be pretty influential. The Catholic Church isn’t doing much to help on that end.

Silva, however, deserves big kudos for this one.