- Oh, Pottery Barn. I kind of love that this is a thing. While despairing that it is a thing.
- A Note On Post Deletions This, in many ways, encapsulates why I am so against post (and comment) deletions.
- History: The Sequel Things like this are why I love the internet. (Have I told you all the story about how my mother’s boyfriend from 1963 found me on Flickr? Because he did and it’s pretty awesome.)
- Racial empathy gap: People don’t perceive pain in other races. I shouldn’t be surprised by this sort of thing but I am. This makes me so sad–and makes me think about ways I can try to do better.
- Sold Out ”…sex workers and those members of the queer community who either can’t or won’t be assimilated into the fascist Borg can forget about getting any help or support from mainstream gay organizations, because it won’t be forthcoming.”
- Modesty: I Don’t Think it Means What You Think it Means This was a really thought-provoking read but I wouldn’t venture into the comments.
- Ladybusiness Anthropologist Throws Up Hands, Concedes Men Are the Reason for Everything Interesting in Human Evolution
Maybe the male gaze is the reason we ladies have breasts and butts that look the way we do. You know we wouldn’t carry all this around if we didn’t have to. And let’s not forget, female pleasure is really just a byproduct of the male drive to reproduce: the clitoris is just a woman’s adorably ineffective attempt at a penis.
- In The Wake of Man of Steel: A Timely Proposal
- The Sleeper Must Awaken: A Dune Primer I love this book but I wouldn’t say that it’s one of the great novels. /me whispers, “I like this Duke.”
- And so we pause for a moment from this feminist broadcast to bring you an important note about identity… This was mind-blowing for me to read. It made me think of Audre Lorde’s “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House”.
- White Feminists: Step Your Game Up
- How Venus Williams got equal pay for women at Wimbledon
- Johnny Depp and Gore Verbinski fail to bring The Lone Ranger back to life
- Native Appropriations on The Lone Ranger: I Saw The Lone Ranger So You Don’t Have To and Real Indians Don’t Care About Tonto
- For Paula Deen, Management Mess Leads to Career Meltdown I think the implication that if Deen had just paid up then none of this would have happened to be very, ah, interesting. Makes me wonder how much other nastiness is swept under the rug via settlements.
- David Rakoff’s Last Deadline Get your tissues out…
- The Rock ’n’ Roll Casualty Who Became a War Hero
- Stumbling Over Gender, and an Apology
- Charlie Pierce on the Fourth of July
- Iain M. Banks Gets Asteroid Named after Him
- Ten Writers Whose Success You’ll Resent This Year ”Slim novels are always deft, and powerful, like Joss Whedon heroines.”
- To the Pain Excellent new romance review blog. We can always use more of those. I would like to draw everyone’s attention to the Wounded Heroes? page: “We hope that this site can help weed out some of the less accurate portrayals of disabled characters and encourage readers to advocate for realism over perfection.”
- I was a Manic Pixie Dream Girl and then this absolutely wonderful rebuttal: Myths of glamor: faerytale archetypes & female form:
The manic pixie dream girl is that sweet-something who in the stories makes men to aspire to be better than what they are. The girl who inspires boys to open doors. The pretty wisp for whom young men supposedly lust. None of us, no matter how hard we try, are “that girl.” She is a crappy fiction, dreamed for screen, and I for one knew I was surely not meant to play that role.
No, I was the one with the crimson, pustulant acne, the constant sweat-stains under my pits, the over-sized breasts that appeared far too early, the greasy frizzy hair which was neither curls nor straight. In my teenage years I felt barely human, let alone mythical. And I don’t believe, not for a second anyone ever jerked off to the memory of my teenaged zit face.
For most of us, no matter how much mascara we wear we can never play the role of the manic pixie dream girl. And yes, it sucks, because from the time we are little girls we are taught that if we just become one single type of impossible, mythical being, we will be treated with basic respect and dignity. Which frankly is pretty shitty.
- A new story by Marissa K. Lingen is always a wonderful thing: “The Ministry of Changes”, set in the same universe as “Uncle Flower’s Homecoming Waltz”.
- The answer to ‘why?’ is WHY NOT?
- Insidious Language Kat Richardson on trying to find a substitute word for “bastard” that isn’t also a gendered insult.
- Divine Possibilities and the Clash of Expectations The bits from Paladin of Souls that Liz quotes are some of my favorites. There’s some troubling erasure of Liz’s unnamed friend in the comments. Everyone’s interaction with a text is unique and it’s not cool to imply that someone is reading wrong because their reaction was different.
- Mary Ann Rivers on a game she and her husband made up called Nut and poetry.
- I love this. Teacher Wears Same Yearbook Photo Outfit 40 Years In A Row
- Kate Elliott Talks Women In Epic Fantasy
- Kristin Cashore’s Current Work Breakdown, for Them That’s Interested
- ‘Use Your Voice’ Jessica Luther talks about what it was like to be in the Texas State House at the end of Wendy Davis’s filibuster.
Part two (which should post immediately after this one as part of a “hermaphroditic incestuous linkpost thingy”) will have two groups of more focused links: one about a discussion in the romance community about m/m romance and the second about the ongoing discussion in the science fiction and fantasy community about sexism and sexual harassment.