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Good Reads

Jill

What Would MLK Tweet? Baratunde Thurston on what Dr. King might make of Twitter. It’s kind of brilliant.

Get Paid. Hey, bloggers and journos — Yahoo News is hiring. Ladies especially, get on this one.

Sugar Mama. More men are marrying wealthier wives, but old issues about money, power and gender remain. And the conclusion is pretty ridiculous: “Ms. Zielinski, the fashion stylist, said her best friend, a man, told her once: “ ‘You are confident, have good credit, own your own business, travel around the world and are self-sufficient. What man is going to want you?’ He laughed, but I found that pretty depressing.”” Uh, I’ll marry her.

Why Not To Have Girls. Historical dolls. I would add Ke$ha and the above quote to that list.

Tunes. The Coachella line-up is announced, and it’s kind of amazing. Amazing enough to justify that trip to CA I’ve been putting off. But that said, the list is a little (a lot?) dude-heavy, huh? For some lady-tunes, Marion Cotillard does Franz Ferdinand.

Rest Easy. Myriam Merlet, an incredible Haitian feminist, died in the earthquake. According to Democracy Now, “Merlet was the Chief of Staff of the Haitian Ministry of Women and an outspoken feminist who helped draw international attention to the use of rape as a political weapon.” She will be missed.

Pig Skin. Tim Tebow, who is apparently some sort of big-deal football player, will be appearing in an anti-choice ad during the Superbowl. Nothing like a little male bonding over the control of women’s bodies!

Where Are the Women Politicians? So I love Ta-Nehisi Coates and I think he is brilliant. But, really? A lot of people have written quite a bit about the answers to these questions!

Boob Jobs. Another reason to oppose same-sex marriage: Men can’t breast-feed! So, uh… only women should be allowed to get married? And only to other women?

Well-Behaved Women Rarely Make What Now? Shockingly, dude who runs dude-mag is kinda sexist. AskMen.com editor-in-chief James Bassil says of his site’s “Top 99 Most Desirable Women” list: “All the top women we see in this list are pretty well behaved and respectable women. We don’t see a lot of them parading around in public unless it is in the framework of their careers.”

Foucault-Free. Jessica Valenti on feminist elitism, why popularizing feminism is a-ok, and why Serious Theory is an important component, but not the end-all be-all, to feminism.

The Guantanamo “Suicides.” Reports of “suicides” of Guantamo detainees were investigated, and are totally improbable — leading to the conclusion that someone murdered the prisoners there. The article will make you very, very sad and very, very angry.

11 thoughts on Good Reads

  1. Has anyone seen anything about this Gitmo murder thing in any news source outside of Harper’s? It really bothers me that this isn’t a bigger story.

    After a year of all this NIMBY bullshit, I get so frustrated when I hear stories upon stories of people who are getting tortured for being born Middle Eastern – and the stories they’ll make up for why they’re being held are ridiculous. “Once upon a time, he saw Osama in the marketplace and then looked the other way.” Yeah, clearly a Taliban cook would have lots of useful information for the CIA. I’m sure he wasn’t just doing a job like everybody does a job. But yeah, you don’t want the guy whose father says he can’t even make a sandwich held in America next to orange-jump-suited rapists and murderers because he’s better off getting tortured by otherwise uniformed white folk?

    Go fuck yourself, America.

  2. My daughter has an American Girl “Bitty Baby”. It was just about the only way I could find a baby for her that looked like her and had more then one outfit. My daughter is Asian and I didn’t want her to end up with a blond blue-eyed doll.

  3. A bit of housekeeping suggested:
    1. The Heisman Trophy winner’s name is Tim “Tebow.”
    2. The author and Baltimore-native’s name is “Ta-Nehisi” Coates.

    All good reads, though.

    1. Ha, whoops. I am the worst with spell-checking names. And I actually do know how to spell Ta-Nehisi’s name! Tebow, I’ll admit I don’t. Thanks Nick.

  4. I loved my American Girl doll growing up — I had to save up for the toys, which was a good lesson. Also, my mom bought the dress patterns and several of Samantha’s dresses ended up homemade.

    The woman that started the original company, a teacher named Pleasant Rowland, said she did so because she was upset to see how quickly girls were pressured to grow up, to care about boys and fashion and makeup and to put “childish things” like dolls away. She wanted to make dolls that girls would continue to love and play with into their tweens. The historical elements of Kirstin, Samantha and Molly (then the only dolls) were designed to deepen play and add an educational element.

    I was heartbroken when Mattel bought Pleasant Company. While I’m glad they added diversity (I’m glad someone is making racially diverse dolls like the Just Like You line) fundamentally they took a company that was about making individual dolls kids were supposed to cherish and hand down the generations and made it about selling as MANY dolls (a new one for each year?) and as much crap as possible. The flip side of the “Just Like Me” doll line is that your doll needs to have one of everything you have. It’s both materialistic and stifling to creativity! Wheeeee!

    I should really blog about this, since it’s obvious I have way too much to say.

  5. You are spot-on about most of the articles. However….

    “Why Not To Have Girls. Historical dolls. I would add Ke$ha and the above quote to that list. ”

    That article makes me very uncomfortable. I know it is sarcasm directed against materialism, but I live in a country where is a norm we are trying hard to break. It is a symptom of the devaluation of women in my society and the stranglehold of the patriarchal system, which is much stronger here than in the west.

    What I’m getting at, is that this is a very real problem, and one which is not faced by most Americans. And it disturbs me to see it used as a joke.

  6. Re: Ta-Nehisi Coates
    I too am usually a big fan and he is normally a great ally to women.

    But I feel like he should have added one more question to the end of this list, to complete this show of ignorance: “Why am I, a man, the first one to comment upon this?”

  7. I had two American Girl dolls as a kid, and they’re definitely not “reasons to not have girls” (a depressing turn of phrase, indeed). I loved reading as a child, and the books that went along with each doll were some of my favorites. Incidentally, my favorite doll, Samantha, had one particular book whose plot featured the 9-year-old Samantha meeting and making friends with her far-away aunt, a suffragette! Herstory, indeed.

  8. I have to agree that the title of the American Girls article is really… nasty. If it’s not appropriate to joke about rape, why is it appropriate to joke about the sex-selective abortion of girls? I couldn’t even bring myself to read the entire article, because the ‘joke’ was so repugnant.

  9. Nothing like a little male bonding over the control of women’s bodies!

    Funny, considering repro-rights feminism is “a little female bonding over the control of men’s bodies”. Also men’s lives, men’s income, men’s futures.

    But it’s okay, as long as it’s not women, right?

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