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

Weekend Reads

Lauren

My apologies for putting off the Weekend Reads for a few weeks, but I’ve got some excellent stuff to get us back in the habit.

THE HEARTLAND: I don’t know why I haven’t seen much about this yet in my corner of the blogosphere, but Iowa is the first midwestern state to legalize gay marriage. GO IOWA!

RAVEN’S EYE: At the brand new blog (okay, a few weeks old since I’ve been running late) Raven’s Eye, there is an excellent essay on quilting as art and an act of resistance. Raven’s Eye is a group blog for women of color, cis and trans, that seeks to represent more WOC’s lived experiences. It’s a great read with lots of prestigious bloggers taking part.

KNOW YOUR COMPANY: Kyle Payne, “feminist” blogger and “ally” turned sexual predator, is out of jail and back to blogging like nothing happened at all. Renegade Evolution and Natalia Antonova have some words for him.

DIY ABORTION: Wisconsin teens have turned to animal medication to induce abortion, and conservatives are predictably blaming liberals instead of asking why teenagers don’t have access to safe, accredited health care.

BYSTANDER BEHAVIOR: When a woman in Queens was raped at a subway station, two transit workers stood by and opted not to intervene. Later, when she sued them for not answering her cries for help, a judge “concluded a token clerk and a subway conductor had no responsibility to intervene and were following work rules by not confronting the rapist.”

LEGENDARY LATINAS: Frau Sally Benz put together a whole slew of excellent posts on influential Latinas, starting with Frida Kahlo. Check them all out here.

PEOPLE ARE PEOPLE: Or are they? It’s disturbing what this police chief considers “people” — “If I see three or four young black men walking down the street, I have to stop them and check their names,” said [Homer, Louisiana Police Chief Russell] Mills, who is white. “I want them to be afraid every time they see the police that they might get arrested. We’re not out there trying to abuse and harass people, we’re trying to protect the law-abiding citizens locked behind their doors in fear.” — and until this culture changes police and state brutality will not stop.

CODIFYING MALE PRIVILEGE: Aunt B. has a thoughtful post on why it’s necessary to pass MRA-styled laws for family courts that aim to, literally, protect men from women, when men in the family court system can petition for joint custody or request paternity tests anyway, concluding that such laws preserve the vision that the world is men’s to glide through.

SAME ‘OL: I really do love the X-Files, Scully especially, but watching it again all these years later, I realized the gender roles are just as oppressive and banal as they are everywhere else on television.

NO. 1 LADIES’ DETECTIVE AGENCY: The new review at Racialicious is up, and having seen it myself their review is right on. It’s a sweet show with lots of potential, and Jill Scott and Anika Noni Rose make a diabolical pair. The only thing Latoya didn’t touch on: the horrible accents. (For further reference on rillah bad accents in premium programming, see True Blood.)

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11 thoughts on Weekend Reads

  1. I personally love (/sarcasm) how Kyle Payne blogged about his jail time and placed it under “Skeletons” in his bio like that washes away his crime. I’m not sure why he is considered a feminist blogger at all. His writing is very stilted and wordy. It’s hard to follow his train of thought. He is just not worth listening to at all.

  2. I’d be a lot happier with the Raven’s Eye post about quilts if it were accurate. Unfortunately, there was a huge, glaring error almost at the beginning of the page, which forces me to question the accuracy of the whole thing. 🙁

  4. Thanks for the links!

    Bah. Just commented on Kyle Payne’s blog. I’m interested to see how he reacts.

  5. I’m sure there is, but that doesn’t excuse claiming that Harriet Powers is the first documented African-American quilter when she’s not by at least thirty years. Bad history is bad history.

  6. Annie,

    He’ll delete it. Trust me. The only reason worth commenting is to get one of your own links removed from his blog.

    It’s just my personal recommendation, so take it or leave it, but I do in fact suggest that everyone stay far, far away from him. Seriously, just my extremely limited contact with him has convinced me that he is extraordinarily bad news. And by “extraordinarily bad news” I mean “thrives on the potential of triggering/hurting other people.”

  7. BYSTANDER BEHAVIOR:

    (The link doesn’t work for me, but I found a NY Daily News article for it.)

    Though it comes as a surprise to a lot of people, there’s no general legal requirement for people to help other people, even if there’s no danger to themselves. (There are specific situations where people in certain specific professions have a duty to help.) Unless you are in one of a very small list of professions, you have no duty under the law to lift so much as a finger to help someone in danger.

    Of course, that doesn’t mean there isn’t a moral obligation to do something, and that the TA workers couldn’t have done more to help the woman. But a fear that doing anything to draw a violent criminal’s attention to oneself is dangerous is pretty widespread in NYC. This “culture of being intimidated,” as I call it, is one of the things I really don’t like about The City.

    This has come up before with the NYC Transit Authority and caused a good deal of outrage. I thought that the rules had been changed so that they were required by work rules to at least call for help if they could do so without endangering themselves. According to the newspaper article, they contacted the NYCTA command center; I don’t know whether calling 911 — if that were even possible — would have gotten a faster response.

  8. From Kyle Payne’s “Disclaimer” page:

    Recognizing my limitations, of which the above paragraph is a brief and partial summary, I take seriously the need for me to think critically, engage in self-scrutiny, and to listen more than I talk.

    Is it hard being that oblivious all the time? Or does he just revel in self-referential irony to an impossible degree?

  9. Pingback: Femmostroppo Reader - April 8, 2009 — Hoyden About Town

  11. From Kyle Payne’s “Disclaimer” page:

    Recognizing my limitations, of which the above paragraph is a brief and partial summary, I take seriously the need for me to think critically, engage in self-scrutiny, and to listen more than I talk.

    Yeah that exact kind of boilerplate about “listening and learning” annoys me so much…now I don’t feel so guilty being annoyed by it.

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