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

Month: November 2008

Feministe Live-Blog: A Preview

As I mentioned in my previous post, Feministe will be live-blogging all night tonight as the polls close and the results come in. The whole shebang will start at 6, but to get you excited, here are our live-bloggers (info and bios will be updated as I get them):

Little Light

DeviousDiva

Natalia: Natalia Antonova is editor of GlobalComment.com. She was born in the USSR, lived most of her life in North Carolina (c’mon and raise up), and is presently working in the Middle East.

Mikey: Mikey is a heartbroken young lawyer in Brooklyn. When people ask, he says he’s a community organizer. He just bought three huge cupcakes from Crumbs. He will eat them all right now. He misses David Foster Wallace and palls around with feminists. He was Lil’ Wayne Palin for Halloween.

Renee

Terrance

Daisy: Daisy is a 51-year-old feminist, grandmother, old-hippie herbalist and tarot-reader, redneck southerner, and lifelong political junkie. Her first presidential campaign involved leafleting door-to-door for George McGovern at age 15, in which she first learned what it was to have unpopular opinions! (That war threatened to go on forever, too.)

Katie: Katie Loncke, 22, spends her time healing from a recent four-year stint at Harvard, where she double majored in social theory and feminist studies, and co-authored a progressive/radical student blog called Cambridge Common. She works at a book store, cooks for her friends, writes letters by hand, and participates at a queer-and-POC-friendly meditation center near her apartment. Like Obama, she’s got the black-dad-white-mom thing going on. Unlike Obama, she has never danced on national television. Katie is a long-time fan of Feministe.

Allison: Allison Martell is a student and journalist in Toronto, Canada. Last summer she guest blogged about economics and feminism for Feministe, and her own site is at www.economicwoman.com.

evil fizz: evil fizz is attorney who works for the US government. She would tell you more about her work, but it is the government after all. She lives outside of Seattle.

Anna: Anna is a public high school teacher in Brooklyn, New York and the co-creator of Macha Mexico: A Lesbian Guide to Mexico City, an English-language blog about queer life for women in Mexico City. Even though she has some major reservations about the institution of marriage, as a dyke and a native Californian she is closely following Proposition 8 in addition to the presidential election.

Jessica: Jessica Stites is an assistant editor at Ms. magazine. When she’s not rabidly following election results, she likes sci-fi and word games. Geek the vote!

Plus the Feministe crew. Yeah, it’s gonna be awesome. See you in a few…

Ballot Initiative Results

in 2006, I remember running around like a madwoman, trying to find the results of the South Dakota abortion ban initiative.  The media was so busy reporting on the Dems taking control of the House that it was incredibly difficult to find.

Not so this year, it seems.  CNN has got us covered with a table that they will update with incoming results on ballot initiatves all across the nation — including Measure 11, Amendment 48, Prop 4, and Prop 8.  Keep it by your side, and in a few hours you can start obsessively hitting “refresh” along with me.

Feministe: Your Place to be on Election Night

Just wanted to remind everyone that Feministe will have extensive election-night coverage, including a neat little widget that updates in real time as the polls close and the results come in. We’ll also be live-blogging all night — and in addition to the regular Feministers, we’ll have some guest live-bloggers, many of whom you’ll recognize. And as always, the live blog will be open for commenter interaction.

Everything is gonna go down starting at 6pm, so get your popcorn ready, put your Obama pins on, and let’s party like it’s 1992.

What’s your state of mind?

The NY Times has this fun little thing going on called a word train. People type or click on the word that best describes their mood regarding the election.  You can submit every hour, if you like.  Then you can look at the words that everyone chose, the ones that Obama supporters chose, and the ones that McCain supporters chose.  You can also view the results from all day, or from a specific hour.

I’ll admit that I’m getting a little bit of optimistically perverse pleasure out of seeing the words that Obama supporters chose versus the ones that McCan supporters chose.

I’m energized.  What are you?

Voting never felt so good

The fabulous ladies at Babeland are helping to pound one out for Obama:

Sure, it’s going to be gratifying voting for Barack Obama Tuesday (sorry one McCain reader), but the folks at Babeland want to make you feel even more gratified. Like, between your legs, if you know what we mean. The sex toy shop just sent over a press release, declaring that every voter that comes into their shop next Tuesday (and through the 11th) will receive a Silver Bullet vibrator, or a Maverick (pictured). That second one is for the men out there, and to put it conservatively, it’s a…sleeve. All you have to do is “bring your voter registration card, ballot stub or your word of honor that you cast a ballot on November 4th” and they’ll hook you up with the goods, which will probably help keep stress levels down until the election results are in.

via Gothamist. Thanks to Helena for the link.

Can I Vote?

I just called my brother to see if I could hitch a ride with him down to the polls later on today. (I could walk, but it’s a mile each way and I’m lazy so I’d prefer not to.) I was really sure that he was planning on voting — for Christ’s sake, he’s holding an election watch party tonight. But when I asked, he sounded all nervous and unsure. So I said: “What, are you not planning to vote???” He told me reluctantly that he wasn’t sure if he was registered.

I personally knew that he was. He registered the exact same way that I did, for extra credit in high school when he was 17, and he still lives at home. But he might not have bothered to go check. And he also didn’t know how to check.

So how do you check? canivote.org

Please, remember that URL just in case.   And it never hurts to call up friends and family to double-check that they have voted or are planning on voting.  As it turns out, without directly asking you never know.

And yes, even now, third party candidates matter.

I think it’s fair to say that I’ve been a bit swept up into the Obamania as of late. And you know what? Why the hell not? Conservatives like to mock and sneer at the enthusiasm that people have for Obama like a high school bully snickers and jeers at anything too earnest (and yet they cheerlead unabashedly for their #1 Crush, Sarah Palin). But liberals can fall into that cooler-than-thou bullshit, too: picture a self-conscious hipster who wrinkles their nose at gross displays of genuineness. I don’t claim to be immune; I’ve certainly been cynical and suspicious of the hype. But not right now. I think people in this country, especially people of color, really need this kind of hope, this kind of inspiration, this positive energy. I gotta say, it’s a great feeling to walk down the street in True Blue Brooklyn and look people in the eye and smile and feel that simple, basic sense of alliance with so many more people than usual, despite the differences, conflicts, and barriers that will still be there between us come November 5. Barack Obama may be solidly entrenched in the limited two-party system, but if he can do this for us, then hell, more power to him.

However: that doesn’t mean that now it’s all right to forget about third party candidates. Latoya Peterson gives us an excellent reminder of that over at Racialicious, asking “What’s the Deal with the Green Party?” and answering her own question with a thorough and much-needed look at the remarkable McKinney/Clemente ticket.

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