Click on all the links – linkspam

I have my computer back, and I have a hundred thousand links (well not quite), to share with you.  Ones I’ve gathered while at work (where I had a computer) and ones I had ready to go before it took a week for my PC to be fixed. So let us begin, in no particular order…

Leah Moore guest posts on Warren Ellis’s blog on how the comic industry needs to tap more than the male market in “Thank Heaven for Little Girls“:

Girls read comics, not just Manga either. Girls read superhero comics, indie comics, autobiographical comics, historical comics, literary comics, horror comics, romance comics and even just plain terrible comics. Girls are comic fans. They want comics aimed at them, or aimed not at them, or just comics that are good. They want all the same things male comic fans want. They want to be sold to, they want to buy the cold cast porcelain model of Rogue looking badass and put it on their shelf. They want Wonder Woman underwear sets and Wolverine stationery for the new term. Women are just as whimsical, gullible, romantic and fanciful as men. They are capable of grasping the finer points of all the weird freaky made up stuff that we all commonly know to be “ACCEPTED CONTINUITY.”  They will talk about costume changes and characterisation.

In The Daily Texan, a University of Texan publication, “Bisexual students feel unrecognised in society“:

Bisexuals also encounter negative stereotypes and myths, Whalley said. Whalley said myths and stereotypes amounted to a general belief that bisexuals are excessively promiscuous and not trustworthy in relationships.

“That is a representation that we get from pop culture, but it does not reflect reality,” Whalley said. “No sexual orientation is the gold standard of monogamy; we don’t get to play ‘Monogamy Olympics.”

s.e. smith writes “Beyond the Binary: Self Doubt“:

Self doubt is normal. Being told to suppress it, and being forced to hide it, is also normal, but shouldn’t be, because we should be able to openly talk about the role self doubt plays in our lives. I know that for me, being able to explore those issues probably would have helped me feel more secure in my gender earlier, and could have helped me break down some differences between gender presentation, actual gender, and emotional constructions of gender.

Libby Copeland writes a piece on the history of polyamory and how it is a woman positive movement in “Making love and Trouble“.

The Afternoon Inqueery on Queereka covers “On Proving Oneself Straight and Teaching Kids How to Do It“:

Boys who won’t join ballet, even if they’re good at it. Girls who won’t play certain sports, because it would make their bodies “manly”. It comes with them from their child life and then they’re those grownups who won’t hang out (or won’t be too close to) people who they know are gay. Up to this day I have “friends” who can’t hug me in public for what “people might think”.

I can’t quite grasp where it starts, but it ends up as a vicious cycle in which people said to be straight won’t do things because society says it’s gay (because people said to be straight won’t do it). Which, to me, seems to be hurting everybody involved.

It’s the fear of being mistaken for, labeled as and, especially, turned into a gay person. A kind of fear that comes from many internal and external levels, and that is reinforced every time something is stereotyped into something only gay people do. A fear that makes people deprive themselves of stuff they love, just to prove they are what they should be (whatever it is they actually are).

Lesley writes “GDC Diary, Day 2: Video Games Have 99 Problems, and Bitches Comprise a Large Number of Them” at xojane.

What do you say to the LAAAADY writer, to this possibly unhinged, overexcited broad who wants to hear about your work? Women are not the demographic. If women play a particular game, it is most often an unforeseen side effect and not an intended outcome. If it is an intended outcome, then the game was likely designed specifically with women in mind. This can be both a good and a bad thing.

I experienced two outcomes to my LAAAADY proclamations: In one, the developer or marketing person would feel compelled to immediately switch gears and make the subject “palatable” to me, and ostensibly to all of ladydom thereby. In the other, people would talk to me the same way they’d talk to anyone else, and say, “Hi, this is my game!”

If I’m honest, as amusing as I occasionally found the former, I much preferred the latter. If your game is good, it shouldn’t matter who I’m talking to about it; good transcends gender. That’s all you need to know.

An article on CNN health by Dr. Charles Raison, “Love key to brain development in children“:

Myths inevitably survive long after they’ve been scientifically disproven. Such is the case with the fantasy that mental illnesses can be written off solely to genes and chemicals. Over the last decade a string of scientific discoveries has shown that the biology driving mental illness has at least as much to do with the environment as with chemicals or genetic inheritance. And it increasingly appears that the single most powerful environmental factor is the love – or its lack – that children receive from their parents. So in a very real way we parents are back on the hook for the lifelong emotional well-being of our kids.

The Masculine Femininities Zine has published issue 5, and there is a great piece included titled, “Dear Internalized Biphobia: An Open Letter To The Ugly Beast Inside Me” by Ofelia Del Corazon:

We’ve never had a healthy relationship and I am glad to say we are drifting apart. It’s been a long time since you showed when I was  eleven. When I went to mass where the priest said that birth control and abortions and homosexuality were all equally bad. At that point I knew I liked boys and everyone said that was okay, but I was just starting to figure out that I liked girls too. That feeling I got when I liked a boy was the same feeling I got when I really wanted to be a girl’s friend. Like her best best friend. That’s when I started praying at night that I would wake up and my bisexuality would be gone.

But it never worked and my bisexuality, and you, biphobia remain inside me. Still though it wasn’t all bad.  By the time I was thirteen I had reasoned that I was only half gay. I still had the option of squashing my squashing my feelings for other girls and I was thankful that I liked boys at all.

It’s sad that this next link had to be written at all, and I strongly caution you to NOT READ THE COMMENTS.  “Why Women Aren’t Crazy” at the Good Men Project:

When someone says these things to you, it’s not an example of inconsiderate behavior. When your spouse shows up half an hour late to dinner without calling—that’s inconsiderate behavior. A remark intended to shut you down like, “Calm down, you’re overreacting,” after you just addressed someone else’s bad behavior, is emotional manipulation—pure and simple.

And this is the sort of emotional manipulation that feeds an epidemic in our country, an epidemic that defines women as crazy, irrational, overly sensitive, unhinged. This epidemic helps fuel the idea that women need only the slightest provocation to unleash their (crazy) emotions. It’s patently false and unfair.

An old piece from 2009, but one that needs to be shared again, “Insufficient Evidence that Sexual Orientation Change Efforts Work, Says APA” from the American Psychological Association:

The American Psychological Association adopted a resolution Wednesday stating that mental health professionals should avoid telling clients that they can change their sexual orientation through therapy or other treatments.

The “Resolution on Appropriate Affirmative Responses to Sexual Orientation Distress and Change Efforts” also advises that parents, guardians, young people and their families avoid sexual orientation treatments that portray homosexuality as a mental illness or developmental disorder and instead seek psychotherapy, social support and educational services “that provide accurate information on sexual orientation and sexuality, increase family and school support and reduce rejection of sexual minority youth.”

Emily Dievendorf at the Huffington Post writes, “Bisexual Invisibility Has Dangerous Consequences“:

I believe sexuality, as a continuum with no easy boxes to fit into, is the most logical explanation for the variations we see in human sexuality. Labels are vile and unrealistic to me, an attempt to satisfy others’ need for simplicity when life just isn’t so. I have struggled with how I would explain myself, resentful that I had to at all. My partners have always known me to be fluid and I hadn’t considered it anybody else’s business. At a certain point I decided that I had to claim my place in the community because my own invisibility would be part of the perpetuation of others pretending I don’t even exist. I wrote ‘bi’ across my forehead and wore it proudly.

The excellent “A Doctor’s Manifesto for Fighting Transvaginal Ultrasounds” at Jezebel (which no doubt has been read by most people, but the more links the merrier):

Where is the physician outrage? Right. Here. I’m speaking, of course, about the required-transvaginal-ultrasound thing that seems to be the flavor-of-the-month in politics. I do not care what your personal politics are. I think we can all agree that my right to swing my fist ends where your face begins.

I do not feel that it is reactionary or even inaccurate to describe an unwanted, non-indicated transvaginal ultrasound as “rape”. If I insert ANY object into ANY orifice without informed consent, it is rape. And coercion of any kind negates consent, informed or otherwise.

Clementine Ford at the Daily Life writes, “Why women still can’t enjoy sex“:

Slut. I used to fixate on the unfairness of the accusation, particularly given that it seemed to be issued with no particular rhyme or reason other than the accuser’s desire to be hurtful. But recent events (including Limbaugh’s outburst) have made me realize that this isn’t about the kind of sex women are having or even the amount. It’s about the fundamental view that women should have only a peripheral relationship to sex and certainly no active engagement with it – and that these two things will determine if she’s a Lady worthy of respect or a Slut deserving of contempt.

Libby Anne at Love Joy Feminism (soon to find a new home), writes “Christian Reconstructionism, Gays, and Stoning“:

Christian Reconstructionism is a fringe movement, but it is a fringe movement that has put its fingers in politics and in the homeschool movement. I’m not actually concerned that this nation will ever turn to publicly executing gays by stoning, but I am increasingly horrified by the teachings of the Christian Patriarchy leaders I used to have so much respect for.

Glenn Mitchell writes at the Drum on, “No more silence: mental illness should be talked about“:

The stats that are put forward by the medical fraternity would indicate that around 20 per cent of people in Australia will be affected by depression at some point in their lifetime and 6 per cent will actually experience a major depressive illness – in today’s terms that equates to 4.5 million and 1.4 million people respectively.

When you look at it in those sorts of terms the numbers are truly staggering and alarming, especially when you consider the hundreds of millions of dollars that have been spent on road safety awareness as opposed to the issue of mental illness and depression.

Natalie Angier writes in the New York Times about a brilliant mathematician that I’d certainly never heard of, in “The Mighty Mathematician You’ve Never Heard Of“:

When Dave Goldberg, a physicist at Drexel University who has written about her work, recently took a little “Noether poll” of several dozen colleagues, students and online followers, he was taken aback by the results. “Surprisingly few could say exactly who she was or why she was important,” he said. “A few others knew her name but couldn’t recall what she’d done, and the majority had never heard of her.”

Noether (pronounced NER-ter) was born in Erlangen, Germany, 130 years ago this month. So it’s a fine time to counter the chronic neglect and celebrate the life and work of a brilliant theorist whose unshakable number love and irrationally robust sense of humor helped her overcome severe handicaps — first, being female in Germany at a time when most German universities didn’t accept female students or hire female professors, and then being a Jewish pacifist in the midst of the Nazis’ rise to power.

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