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

Clean Up Your Desktop!

Lauren

And you thought my usual round-ups were big? Ha!

Some of these links may be considered vintage, as they have been waiting for me to write on them since before my pilgrimage to Graceland. Consider it my duty to spread the intellectual wealth.

Feminism
Pinko Feminist Hellcat breaks from the blogging big boys and others willing to trade reproductive rights for other political gains: Abortion is wonderful. In related news, were you aware that there are abortion facts? Not just propaganda? Holy. Roni discusses this new information with commentary on mothers and abortion.

Scott Lemieux discusses abortion and the counter-immobilization myth. Dadahead suggests we reframe the abortion issue altogether (read this post too while you’re at it).

Charlie gives us an eloquent story about reproductive choice in his family and Dr. Charles relates a story of a teenager’s delivery.

Fred Vincy begins talking to his children about sexism and comes up with laudable insights and questions.

PandAmanda righteously skewers Phyllis “Co-Ed Bathrooms” Schafly. Also on Pandagon, Jesse discusses the personal and political and explains why he is pro-choice.

Young Iraqi women are going to Syria to make money for their families. As prostitutes. If that’s not enough for you, let’s see another example of the freedom America granted Iraqi women.

Too sexy for my dignity: Becky writes on conforming to femininity standards in order to fit in. Jill wrote on this idea recently and the discussion in the comments was quite exciting. Manogirl discusses her body politic on her blog, based in part on a series of comments by myself and Jill in a different post, a series that inspired me to buy a teensy black bikini and wear it to the mom pool and not give a shit.

Lyndsay’s widely-read post on “nice guys” set off a furor in the liberal blogosphere. Guess some people can’t handle the truth:

…self-proclamations of niceness come across as vaguely menacing. The logical inference is that the speaker doesn’t believe that women want to be treated well and that he might just drop the whole nice act. After all, if he thinks women like being treated badly, he might feel entitled to give them what he thinks they want.

With friends like these… Read PFH’s post on American Apparel if you haven’t already and stop buying their clothes!

The (non)reality of benefit scrounging teenage mothers refutes the assumption that women get pregnant to take advantage of goverment benefits. Like that makes any sense.

A pill for men may be on its way.

Shakespeare’s Sister tells a story remarkably similar to my own. Want to know how to reduce the spread of rape culture?

Politics
Karl Rove’s America and George Bush’s White House: The facts don’t matter anymore. Also, see the Great Rovian Sit N’ Spin.

Ginmar discusses personhood and Iraq through pictures she took on her last tour.

The Kung Fu Monkey explains why “liberal Hollywood” is horseshit.

George W. Bush, after faking center, throws deep right. Aunt Jenna’s response to the SCOTUS Roberts nomination is priceless.

It was a matter of time until someone designed a drinking game out of Scotty’s “ongoing investigation” PR bust.

How to take back America, a suggestion for those of us reluctant to carry the flag of the Democrats.

Culture
Paul from Wizbang gets the ebonics debate entirely wrong when he writes on the decision for Oakland schools to begin looking at African American Vernacular English (AAVE) from a linguistic and cultural point of view as a supplement to their regular curriculum. I hate the term “ebonics” because it is loaded with all sorts of political meanings that never should have been attributed to the dialect when it became a hot button issue in the 90s. Anyhow, Paul shows ignorance of the linguistic, cultural, and educational value by pretending that AAVE is English butchered rather than another cultural dialect in a living, evolving language. John McWhorter comes at the issue from a linguist’s perspective and I find it wholly more considerate and well-informed than Paul’s. Moving along…

Leaving the Table, Coming Home: Terrence responds to an article detailing a minister’s comments about teh gay. To wit:

“Sisters making more money than brothers and it’s creating problems in families … that’s one of the reasons many of our women are becoming lesbians,” Wilson said.

…“Lesbianism is about to take over our community. … I ain’t homophobic because everybody here got something wrong with him,” he said. “But … women falling down on another woman, strapping yourself up with something, it ain’t real. That thing ain’t got no feeling in it. It ain’t natural. Anytime somebody got to slap some grease on your behind and stick something in you, it’s something wrong with that. Your butt ain’t made for that.”

At Reappropriate, Jenn points out yet another set of racist, sexist shock jocks and their disparaging remarks about every stripe but white. Suggestions for action included.

Education
Ten Tips for New Teachers gives me some tips I could use next semester while I student teach, and some I can do without. Nonetheless many of the tips have helpful hints on how to get started implementing the author’s suggestions. This post also includes a healthy reading list at the end if you want more resources.

Anne writes a bit on the Educational Technology class that she was required to take this summer. I took the same class, a class that on day one begins with, “Okay, today we’re going to learn how to make a folder on your desktop.” In my opinion, she summarizes quite well the things that are wrong with the implementation of useless technology in the classroom.

Learn Something
Lynn writes on Emma Goldman’s disillusionment with the Soviet Union.

Can men give birth?

Someone believes that he should make royalties off of someone’s tattooed celebrity body.

Lorraine navigates the sacred and the erotic.

Fun
See Annie the Cat do some fancy tricks.

I know you like Twisty Faster, but if you want to hear the spinster aunt in action check out a song she put out with her all-girl punk band in 1997. Can I be a spinster aunt if I have a child? I mean, if spinster aunts rock like this I want in on the gig.

18 thoughts on Clean Up Your Desktop!

  1. “buy a teensy black bikini and wear it to the mom pool”

    Oh hell, you’re a MILF now.

  3. Christ. I post over forty links for you guys to read and you stop at the word “bikini.”

    And David, no MILF jokes. I get them enough.

  5. I think the links are really apperciated. I for example have lost a little bit of respect for Paul at Wizbang. At the risk of being rude, I’d like to point out a recent post I made about the ebonics debate.

  6. I’m no more likely to respect ebonics as a “dialect” than I am to do the same to Internet slang. Sure, it’s a fascinating sociological study, but in my opinion (and bear in mind than I am an anal retentive English student), its use as speech follows the same trend as any other vernacular, including Southern drawls, acronym heavy internet speech, and simply poor grammar: it’s a nasty excision of language, vaguely reminiscent of Newspeak.

  7. I particularly liked the link about educational technology. Here at Big State University Somewhere In The American West, educational technology is all the rage, and it often strikes me as trying to find a reason to put technology in the classroom, rather than examining whether or not certain technologies fit a classroom setting.

    It’s probably Luddite-esque for me to say this, but I’m still not particularly impressed, for example, with PowerPoint as a teaching too. It has certain advantages, but I think it gets used for the “gee whiz, look at sliding panels!” factor more than anything.

  8. Actually, Linnaeus, I’m with you. Many implementations of technology in the classroom are about the bells and whistles and have little benefits on the output of whatever lesson.

    Last semester I got to visit a classroom that did a pretty good job at using the multiple technologies available to them. Unfortunately our ed tech classes don’t cover those materials and instead focus on Microsoft products and turn computers into babysitters with webquests.

  9. Heliologue, the point with the supplemental AAVE is to expose high school students to cultural linguistics, definitely college material, in a way that is socially relevant to the students. Instead of viewing it as a way to further reinforce Standard English, this supplemental AAVE is being characterized as another liberal bad idea that tells black kids they’re too stupid to learn English (Paul makes that very clear in his post, as do his commenters).

    Because English (especially Lit) teachers have a difficult time defending their relevance to their students, I don’t see this as a bad idea at all. The evolution of language is interesting, and considering the population of urban black kids in the school, this kind of supplemental work both honors the cultural history from which the dialect evolves and smashes the idea that AAVE is dumbed down English.

    I think it’s a cool idea and I’d love to see the curriculum.

  10. T Heliologue So Zora Neale Hurston wrote in street slang? Have you even read any black works of literature written in dialect? This is why we need multiculturalism in schools. The idea that if something is black, it is automatically stupid or wrong is in fact a racist idea. We should be proud that people have the creativity to think of eloquent ways to express themselves, even under oppressive conditions instead of saying that the white way is the only correct way.

    When ee cummings or Ezra Pound innovated the language, they were geniuses, but somehow Gwendolyn Brooks or Nikki Giovanni are just using street slang and ‘poor grammar’? I simply do not think so.

  12. Heliologue wrote: I’m no more likely to respect ebonics as a “dialect” than I am to do the same to Internet slang.

    y’all know the difference between a dialect & a language, don’t ya? a language is a dialect with an army.

    any other vernacular, including Southern drawls, acronym heavy internet speech, and simply poor grammar: it’s a nasty excision of language, vaguely reminiscent of Newspeak.

    profuse apologies Lord Heliologue! despite efforts to edumacate the unwashed masses they still speak with their own tongues! shall we cut them off, sir?!

  13. any other vernacular, including Southern drawls, acronym heavy internet speech, and simply poor grammar: it’s a nasty excision of language, vaguely reminiscent of Newspeak.

    Newspeak was indeed an excision of language, designed to obliterate concepts in people’s minds by removing any reference to them in the lexicon.

    English dialects as spoken by black people–or people from the American south, or the Ozarks, or any of the other diverse geographical and cultural spaces in this country–are nothing of the kind. They contain a full contingent of different words that together make up a full language.

    Not the same thing.

    It’s also a little weird to hear someone equate the language spoken by an oppressed, isolated minority with a language imposed by facist leaders in order to oppress and homogenize people.

  14. This is true: the analogy is not entirely sound. I knew this as I was typing it, hoping to assuage the shortcoming with the inefficacious “vaguely reminiscent,” but certainly the fault here is mine.

    I must also admit that my original post was needlessly polemical, but I hope you will afford me some sympathy, as the various mutilations of English I’ve had to put up with (by everyone, mind you: I’m not referring to a specific racial group) both in real life and in my inestimable time spent on the Internet. I’ve seen xanga.com and I will never be the same.

    My problem with most vernaculars is this: they tend towards contractions or simplifications of the language. Certainly, they each bring a new phraseology and a new set of idioms to the table, some of which find their way into the mainstream language, but they also seem to be a hindrance when their users are incapable of speaking the parent language; that is, the larger language to which the vernacular is a subset. Zora Neale Hurston or Langston Hughes using vernacular in illustrating the history and plight of American (and other) Blacks is, in my opinion, not quite equatable to a modern black teenager who can’t write a term paper. At what point is a vernacular harmful in the sense of preventing its speakers to interact with the dominant culture?

  15. Thanks for posting the “tips for trainers” stuff. As a math tutor who’s trying to find their footing, some of it seems very helpful.

  16. Oh, and on the language issue: it’s not as if (1) Ebonics and “standard” English are mutally exclusive, that one who is fluent in one cannot ever understand the other, and (2) that anyone ever speaks the “dominant language.” We all share in the “mutilation” as heliologue says. The sad thing is, we will all sound like dinosaurs or curios in a couple decades. Why all the fuss? If simplification is the problem, then is complexity necessarily always the answer? I’m seriously asking.

  17. As someone who loved reading about linguistics when I was in high school (and invented private languages together with my sister), I would have loved a supplemental curriculum on ebonics – or any other dialect.

  18. Shad, I think part of the answer is in that high school students repeatedly feel they are being unchallenged. Introduction to Linguistics is a fun curriculum because it involves problem-solving, fun cultural facts, and a lot of sitting around trying to locate a glottal stop. Sing the old Batman theme song, etc.

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