Shameless Self-Promotion Sunday

After two months guest blogging at The F Word, I’m delighted to have been asked to join the team as one of the regulars.

So here’s the link to my first post – you asked for shameless self-promotion, I have a feeling this meets the criteria, no problem!

Helen G

I respond to a commenter who thought it was necessary to point out to me that giving birth is nothing remarkable.

I wrote about anti-feminist, anti LGBT Ms. Schafly who is being given an honorary degree by U. Wash.

http://queersunited.blogspot.com/2008/05/ding-dong-witch-is-getting-honorary.html

http://www.queersunited.blogspot.com

I and some other Stanford students just finished a graphic novel about the disturbing phenomenon of acid attacks against women in Cambodia. Our book has been featured in the San Francisco Chronicle and on BoingBoing, and I’m super excited about it.

We’re putting it online for free in addition to our print run, and you can read it here.

It’s not to do with blogging, but it is to do with feminist issues, and you did say “shameless,” so…

I’ve been spending the week looking at the attempts by certain anti-abortion MPs in the UK to distort, misrepresent and outright lie ahead of a Parliamentary vote on reproduction law next week.

Further thoughts about Deborah Jeane Palfrey’s death, and the role of feminism (and feminist blogs) in the ongoing struggle for sex workers to be recognized as fully human.

A productive conversation about sex work, economics, college, stereotypes, and more.

A personal testament to the power of social media to get you laid.

(Three links… I’m sure this’ll go into moderation. I’ll take my chances!)

I outlined the new ‘extreme porn’ ban law in the UK including a summary of the House of Lords debate.

Oh noes! Teh_Ebil_gays – A school district not too far from where I live is debating banning the women’s centre from teaching about healthy relationships because healthy relationships also include gay ones. It’s a morality issue!

And, an extra-special rant about dealing with my so-called inclusive political party here in Canada.

I ranted a bit about Obama’s interview with The Advocate on my newest blog.

An only slightly incoherent rant about how anti-intellectualism and sexism in combination make high school really suck.

Some thoughts on PDA with my girlfriend and generation gaps.

In a post entitled Homosexuality In A Colonial Framework, I wrote about the struggle for GLBT rights in India. It deals specifically with the fact that by not decriminalizing homosexuality, India is turning its back on its pre-colonial history when such things were readily acceptable.

In the Doll Test: White = Good and Black = Bad, I confront a test that was recently redone on black children wherein they associated only positive characteristics with white dolls and negative characteristics with black dolls. It leads to an analysis of the ongoing effects of slavery on the black psyche as well as issues involving white privilege.

Finally in Virgins of Paradise, I review commentary of a Saudi Cleric. It seems that he confirms that men will indeed receive virgins in the hereafter, he further specifies that these virgins will be white virgins. In this case women of color are not even worthy of being exploited. I also examine the of the issue of how womens bodies are used to sell different, ideologies and commodities.

GT 2008-05-10: Rapists in Uniform #3: Six women have come forward in the past four months about being subjected to unnecessary and humiliating strip searches at the hands of the Stark County, Ohio sheriff’s department. The most recent, “Elizabeth” was coerced into removing her clothes even though she never said she was suicidal, and left locked in her cell, naked, for eight hours. She’s now afraid to give her last name or show her face in press interviews, because she’s afraid of retaliation against herself or her family for speaking out.

Sheriff Tim Swanson says it was all done By The Book, which is apparently supposed to mean that it was O.K. It’s becoming increasingly clear that Stark County sheriff’s deputies are repeatedly using strip searches as a form of retaliation, to control and punish women they find uppity, unruly, or otherwise troublesome, under color of the law, and then, to crown all, to insult their victims by saying they did it all For Her Own Good.

I look back at some of the instances where other people assumed some sort of right over me.

Here is a blog entry I wrote about privilege. It was in response to a bunch of questions i got after I changed my facebook status to indicate that I was annoyed by heterosexual privilege. thanks!

two posts about bisexuality.

here, about how the default assumption is that bisexuals just want to sleep with men: http://daland.livejournal.com/102058.html

and here, about how bisexuals are seen as vectors for STIs: http://daland.livejournal.com/102312.html

Not mine, but still worth sharing…

Although I haven’t been posting much lately, I couldn’t let Mother’s Day go by without posting about Romona Moore.

I do the math and figure out how much we really value mother’s work in this country.

I did a post about the WNBA embracing the media’s emphasis on female athlete’s appearance and adherence to femininity by including fashion and cosmetic seminars in their rookie orientation. No joke.

I also write about the lack of representation of “sexy men”/how sexy seems to be assumed to indicate women in Forbes.com’s Sexiest Hollywood Celebrities and in Gigwise’s top 50 sexiest album covers.

I also wrote about that icky Dairy Queen commercial at the beginning of the week.

*why they don’t. sorry, hahaha.

Actually, now that I think about it – my favorite thing written on my blog this week was written not by me, but by a commenter. I wrote about Hebden Bridge, a town in England where 20% of the population is lesbian. In response, a friend wrote about her own experiences as someone who is clearly lesbian living in a society where just ‘looking gay’ draws attention. She ended her comment with the lines:

“So, kudos to normalcy in Hebden Bridge. I will have to be content with living vicariously through them for the time being. If any of the lesbians up that way are reading this post, next time you are waiting at the cross-walk give your partner a kiss in public in my honor.”

It is amazing how close I’ve been to her for years, and never seen that merely ‘looking straight’ is such a privilege in our society.

I’ve finally got around to ranting about annoying people changing my name for me all the damn time.

Finally finished my thought on the Clinton campaign’s embrace of GOP anti-intellectualism.

I posted a multimedia project, protesting the sexist ads of Canadian Club whiskey. I created a new ad, entitled “Your Mom Had Groupies,” featuring older female musicians whose work I love. I hope that more people will submit their own ads, suggestions, or catchphrases, and that I can put together a lot of these entries to make a playlist of lesser known older female musicians, as well as a series of ads to send to Canadian Club protesting their exclusionary ad campaign.

You can read the entry here

lots of people wrote about UConn’s Rape Trail earning its name, so did it.

I blogged about how we deal with issues of anti-gay rhetoric, and how we feel/ seek to stop this kind of language
http://queersunited.blogspot.com/2008/05/open-forum-thats-so-straight.html

I realize this doesn’t quite fall under Shameless Self-Promotion Sunday, since technically it’s Tuesday now, but I did just finally talk myself into posting a sort-of description of my own struggle with remembering some childhood sexual abuse. Here’s the post. The whole blog is brand new and I’m a little insecure about it, but my friends don’t know about it and I don’t think anyone’s reading it so I figured I’d take advantage of some shameless self-promotion, even if it wound up being shameless self-promotion for no justifiable reason. :)