Celebrating Mama’s Day
The Strong Families Initiative has a most excellent Mother’s Day card-generator that you can use to celebrate the radical women in your life. Why? Because:
...read morePolicing Native Identity
Apparently there’s been a big to-do over the fact that Elizabeth Warren, a Massachusetts Democrat vying for Scott Brown’s U.S. Senate seat, has Cherokee and Delaware Indian ancestry, and that ancestry was reflected in her listing as a minority law professor. People are mad! People are mad because Warren isn’t “really” Native American — she’s only 1/32, which is not enough Native American blood to count as “real,” I guess. Of course, as Sarah Burris points out, white-lady clubs like the Daughters of the American Revolution and the Colonial Dames of America don’t have percentage rules for their bloodlines — you’ve just gotta have one relative who fit the bill. And if being 1/32 Native American isn’t enough to make you “really” Native American, someone should probably tell the current chief of the Cherokee Tribe.
...read moreParthenogenisis
A Feministe reader working on a short story writes in with some fun hypotheticals. Respond away!
...read moreShameless Self-Promotion Sunday
Self-promote!
...read moreRIP MCA
Very saddened to hear the news that Beastie Boy Adam Yauch passed away from cancer today. The Beasties are one of my all-time favorite acts, and MCA seemed like a good dude. For all the misogyny of their early tunes, the Beastie Boys — and Adam Yauch — grew into feminist-minded social justice advocates. Yauch particularly focused on Tibetan freedom, organizing concerts, awareness-raising and co-founding the Milarepa Fund. Rest in peace, MCA.
...read moreThe Immense Barriers Between Us and Disaster
A great piece by Nicole Cliffe, about how parenting is imperfect and we try to draw lines, but we are only humans and we all make mistakes. Sometimes those mistakes have terrible outcomes; sometimes they do not. Sometimes we are lucky and sometimes we aren’t.
...read moreAll parents do something stupid at some point, and most of us get away with it. That’s the truth. Usually, it’s not doing meth while you’re pregnant, or putting your baby on top of a bear in Yellowstone so you can film it. But it’s something, and you usually get away with it. And if you get away with it, it’s a funny story, and you’ll eventually laugh about it with other parents. If you don’t get away with it, people will make themselves feel better about their own mistakes by pillorying you. But there’s no difference between people who do something stupid and get away with it, and people who don’t get away with it. It’s luck. Don’t kid yourself.
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There is no difference between me leaving her on the counter in that chair, and a parent who backed over their kid playing in the driveway. We pretend there is, because we want to think there’s an immense barrier between us and disaster, but there isn’t. Just luck.
Dinner Talk
There’s a post up in the Times Style section this week about dinner table conversation, and how it varies from family to family. The author notes that at her childhood dinner table, the parents did the talking and the kids kept to themselves. In the Foer family, no one ever asked “What did you do today?”; instead, the Foer father, “a lawyer who served on the board of the American Civil Liberties Union, led his children in debates about economic policy and civil rights issues, but with an open ear: a conversation about Reagan’s Star Wars policies might lead to a discussion about “why we couldn’t build a giant shield over the United States out of Legos.”
...read moreAmerican Pie part 39483
The latest installment of the American Pie movie franchise is hitting theaters. This time around, the characters are in their early 30s; hopefully this will be the last edition, and we won’t have to collectively suffer through nursing home boner jokes. Because as Feministe friend Allison McCarthy points out in the Guardian, the humor has gone from the simply crass and teenage-boy-ish to the straight-up sexist and rapey.
...read moreHey girl.
Single PUAs are on the prowl, and they would like you to know that they like your headband. Bitch.
...read more
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