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

Month: June 2007

Attack of the 50-Foot Mikhaela

Mikhaela

Awesome feminist cartoonist Mikhaela Reid has a new book out, and she’ll be touring the country to promote it. She’s a pretty cool lady, so pick up a copy or stop by to see her in the following cities:

Sat Jun 9, 4pm | Detroit: Mikhaela Reid & Masheka Wood Cartoon Slideshow & Signing @ Green Brain Comics, 13210 Michigan Ave., Dearborn, MI

Tue Jun 12, 7pm | NYC: Masheka Wood & Mikhaela Reid Cartoon Slideshow & Book Launch Bash @ Bluestockings Books, 1720 Allen Street, NYC

Fri Jun 22, 7 pm | NYC: Planned Parenthood book event w/ Jessica Valenti, Mikhaela Reid & Amber Madison @ Think Coffee, 248 Mercer Street, NYC

Sat July 7, 2pm | DC: Cartoonists With Attitude Cartoon Slideshow w/ Ted Rall, Keith Knight, Mikhaela Reid, Stephanie McMillan, Ruben Bolling, Jen Sorensen, Masheka Wood & more @ Borders, 18th & L Streets NW Washington, DC

Fri Sept. 28, TBA | Boston/Cambridge: Mikhaela Reid & Masheka Wood Cartoon Slideshow & Signing w/ Center for New Words (location and time TBA)

TBA October, 7 pm | Brooklyn: Mikhaela Reid & Masheka Wood Cartoon Slideshow & Signing @ Rocketship (date and time TBA)

You can read Mikhaela’s writing and see more of her work here.

Feministe Weekly Review

I’m putting this up late, but this is (hopefully) going to be a new feature on Feministe: A weekly review of all the posts we put up on the blog, with short descriptions if the titles are vague. I’m shooting for posting it every Sunday night, so that come Monday morning you can have a look at everything you might have missed over the course of the week (this week, obviously, is an exception to the Sunday posting). I think it’ll go nicely with Self-Promotion Sundays, where you can see what other bloggers have to say. And finally, I’ll open the comments on the Review posts specifically for stories that you think we and/or Feministe readers might be interested in, and hopefully we’ll get to writing about them the following week.

Also, I think we need a more catchy name than the Feministe Weekly Review. Suggestions?

So, for the week of May 27th – June 2nd, the Feministes posted:

Read More…Read More…

Help Feminist Bloggers Attend the Allied Media Conference

This conference sounds awesome — and there are several bloggers who want to go but need a little help getting there. Brownfemipower has the list, which includes Fabulosa Mujer, Hermana Resist, Please Professor Black Woman, BlackAmazon, and The Primary Contradiction. If you have some extra cash, consider tossing it their way.

At the request of Roni in the comments, I’ll add that all of these women are fabulous women of color bloggers, who do not get nearly the blogospheric attention they deserve. I should have noted that earlier. And the Allied Media Conference looks like a pretty incredible event. Please help them get there.

I’m also going to move this post up to the top of the page every day or two for the next week so that it gets the attention it deserves.

Footballer’s Wives

WAG (Wife and Girlfriends) has officially entered the English language. All those manicured and makeup-slathered girls who cheer on their footballing boyfriends have made such an impact that they even scored their own reality TV show, book deals, and not to mention the generous allowances their significant others give them. Should we even care about girls like this and is it fair to look down on them?

I think many footballer’s wives are a sign of how modern Britain and even general Western society “rewards” women for being trophies and looking pretty. It is made to look like a glossy life being dubbed an “icon” and how you got there was solely by riding on the back of someone else. But what exactly will happen if the man dumps you? Will people still care if you are David Beckham’s ex ? Most likely not. Victoria Beckham is not as thick as she seems and I definitely do not think she will ever leave DB despite his extra-marital affairs as she knows that she is only famous to the extent she is now through her association of him. It just seems like a segment of women are backtracking by again allowing themselves to be defined through what their boyfriends do.

It may be that a young girl just fell in love with someone that HAPPENED to be a footballer or an athelete. Yet with footballers in the English Preliership league earning an average of £676,000annually ($1,347,413), is the allure of this lifestyle an incentive for some girls who just want to be with footballers?

I would like to know if it is the same over the pond in the US because in Europe and especially Britain, the ardent love for football means that certain women want to live in that world as they know that the money will always flow. Definitely not all women in Britain no doubt but I am seeing this alarming trend whenever I go back to Britain of girls dressing up to “find” men who are footballers in the sole aim of being their steady bird.

Round ’em up, move ’em out

RAWHIIIIIDE!

Ahem. Hi there. I’ve been coasting for the past week or so on the whole guest-blogger thing, which is great, because I’ve been pretty busy painting my apartment, installing new light fixtures, painting the dog, finishing the kitchen floor and stuff like that.

And now, rather than a real post, I’m doing a lazy round-up post, using emails that some of you have sent to the feministe gmail account (feministe (at) gmail (dot) com), or to my personal email. So here we go.

First, a request from Geeta, a Ph.D. candidate in engineering who’s beginning to get into literature: what are the books that inspired your feminism?

From Noelle: A calendar featuring the “Women of UW” has been pulled from the university bookstore.

Part of the reason may lie in an e-mail campaign started by some students who say the calendar objectifies women.

The whole episode has yielded some surprising lessons about business and about life for the five students who produced the work for their entrepreneurship class.

“I never would have guessed any of this going into it,” said junior Zach Meissner, who began as the group’s financial manager — and turned into its crisis manager.

Meissner said the students intended to produce “his and hers” calendars. But despite an eager group of males willing to pose, their market research showed consumers generally sought to buy only the female version.

Read More…Read More…

Speaking of the death penalty…

execution

Poor death row inmates in Alabama don’t have lawyers. And that’s really too bad, but to expect otherwise would be one of your hippie liberal pipe-dreams:

Nobody much likes the fact that Alabama does not provide indigent death row inmates with lawyers.

”Perhaps, in a perfect world, every inmate would have a lawyer at the ready at all times,” the state’s attorney general told a federal appeals court in a brief defending the practice last year. ”But we live in the real world.”

Three judges on that court, the United States Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit, in Atlanta, also made sympathetic remarks about a utopian alternate reality in which prisoners about to be executed might actually be provided with lawyers.

”If we lived in a perfect world, which we do not, we would like to see the inmates obtain the relief they seek,” Judge Joel F. Dubina wrote. The court unanimously rejected a class action suit from inmates asking for lawyers.

Read More…Read More…

Question

Does anyone know how to get paint off a dog?

Posted in Uncategorized

Give Me The Death Penalty Or Give Me Death

death penalty

Think that capital punishment is a little more complex than “kill the basard”? Sorry, Charlie, but you won’t be sitting on a jury to a murder trial anytime soon.

Basically, the Supreme Court has opened the door for prosecutors to remove potential jurors if those jurors demonstrate any personal ambivalence about the death penalty — even if they say that they are willing to apply it.

Writing for the four dissenters today, Justice John Paul Stevens said the majority had erased an important distinction the Supreme Court had long drawn between “mere opposition to the death penalty” and “an inability to perform the legally required duties of a juror.” Justice Stevens said the court’s precedents made it clear that no matter what a juror’s personal opinion about capital punishment, that juror should not be dismissed in the absence of evidence of unwillingness or inability to follow the law.

That’s an important point — there is a major difference between dismissing someone because they don’t like a particular course of punishment, and dismissing someone because they refuse to apply it. As the Times articles alludes to, the decision is problematic because it impedes the right of a defendant to face an impartial jury — a jury that’s hand-selected to be gung-ho about the death penalty isn’t exactly impartial in a capital punishment case.

But they’re probably only eliminating radical liberal anti-death-penalty hippies like me, right? Well…

Mr. Deal, the potential juror, said he did not believe the death penalty should be used very often. One appropriate use, he said, was when there was a high likelihood that a murderer would kill again if released from prison. Under Washington’s law, jurors who are sentencing a convicted murderer may choose only between death and life in prison without parole.

Read More…Read More…

Abortion: The More Dangerous, The Better

execute
Does this mean we’ll have to make a special place on Death Row for members of the Moral Majority?

Just when you thought “pro-lifers” couldn’t get any more abhorrent — after the clinic bombings, the doctor shootings, the attempt at forcing a nine-year-old rape victim to give birth, and the general misogyny — they go and do something like this and totally redeem themselves.

Read More…Read More…