Well I’m slowing being poisoned by chocolate, and I’ve been recovering from a bad cold – so have some linkspam while I get my writing mojo back on (I have posts planned on pornography and one on Pell’s appearance on Q&A).
A great article in Salon about being bisexual in a small town in the US, “Rebel girls“:
“We need to talk,” said my mom. I was 14, and this could have meant any number of ominous things. We’d had many “talks” over the years, most of them related to my adolescent misbehavior, which arrived at 12 in particularly worrying form.
We sat together at our breakfast counter, she with a mug of Bengal spice tea, me with a glass of OJ. My mother was, and is, a very pretty woman, with bright blue eyes, skyscraper cheekbones, and an easy laugh. She sipped her tea and took a breath.
“Karen and I aren’t just friends, honey.” Her features tightened, but her eyes met mine, clear and steady. “We’re more than friends.”
“Yeah, I figured that out,” I said.
“You did?”
“Of course!” I gulped. “Jessica and me aren’t just friends, either, you know.”
“I had a feeling about that.” She nodded with a faint smile.
Mine was the most amiable coming out story I knew. If only the experience of my early sex life were so breezy.
N K Jemisin performs her awesome writing magic with “There’s no such thing as a good stereotype“:
The strong female character (SFC) is a stereotype. It’s gone beyond just a trope at this point. It’s ubiquitous; we see this character appear in films, in books, in video games — and because it’s a stereotype, we’ve started to “see” it in real life. Conservatives love Sarah Palin because she shoots things, and Ann Coulter because she thinks women should never ask for help, and should tote guns (and vote the way their husbands tell them). We celebrate images like this one, which has been all over my Facebook feed this week. We warn that the Republican “war on women” will “awaken the sleeping giant” — with violent, threatening language re what will happen when women fight back.
This is a good thing, right? We all know women can be strong. Us women can wield the big guns like the big boys. We can bring home the bacon and fry it up in a pan; we can do anything, everything, we can work and have babies and cut the cords with our teeth and then still get up and punch a motherfucker in the face with our brains –
– Yeahno. See, that’s the problem with stereotypes. They contain a grain of truth, sure, but the rest is all melodramatic bullshit.
Elisabeth Soep at Boingboing writes about, “The cool new thing with tweens? Sewing“:
Even so, while sewing’s getting more popular and more techie, Luna can’t totally shake the pastime’s old-lady associations among some of her friends. “Most of them think it’s cool because I always make stuff for them for their birthdays,” she says. “But one of my friends, when I say I have sewing on Saturday, so I can’t hang out, she calls me grandma.”
“Young women and girls are reclaiming that image,” says Luna’s mom, Mimi Ito. “They’re making things that are quirky and funky and tied to a punk DIY aesthetic.” Mimi thinks there’s a culture shift going on, even though we still have those old images of what crafting means.
Libby Anne at Love Joy Feminism writes, “My rights as a pregnant woman or the lack thereof“:
Growing up surrounded by people who were anti-abortion, one thing I heard all the time was that all that it would take to make pro-choice people change their mind was for them to get pregnant with a wanted child. They would then see clearly that it was a fetus was a baby, not a ball of tissue, and that it was a person, not just an inconvenience. Weirdly, my experience has been only the opposite.