Healing the Toxic Intoxication of Fat Hatred
I recently tried once again to read George Orwell’s 1984.
As always, I got a few chapters in and had to stop because it was so depressing that I couldn’t live in Orwell’s evocation of mind-controlled totalitarian world for a minute longer. One thing I did get out of the experience was adding one more time reading the early chapters including the Two Minutes Hate scene. Early in the book the hero, Winston Smith takes part in his office’s mandatory daily group hate ritual, an exercise in bonding and mind control.
...read moreThe Beauty Curse: Help Fund a Graphic Novel
Journalist Eric Pape is raising funds to create the graphic novel The Beauty Curse, about gendered attacks in Cambodia. Details of the project are here. The inspiration for the book:
...read moreA lovely read
This interview with Maurice Sendak is just wonderful, and you should read it.
...read moreNaomi Wolf and the Sacred Vagina
Oy Naomi Wolf. Why are we all still referring to you as some sort of feminist thought leader? I am very happy for you that you are having wonderful earth-shattering shivering mystical sex. You are correct that the vagina and the brain are, in fact, part of “one whole system” — the same way that the left hand and the brain or the nose and the brain are also part of one whole system (the human body, for the slower to catch on). I even think you’re probably correct that many women (most women?) could be having better sex, and that our own cultural constructions of sex (begins with a boner, ends with ejaculation) are not only centered almost entirely on male sexual experience and desire but also thwart female sexual pleasure and understand a woman’s experience with and desire for heterosexual sex only in relation to a man’s (assumed to be neutral, standard and true) definition and understanding of sex. All of that is bad for women, in and out of the bedroom. But here, as explained by a lovely reviewer in the New York Review of Books, is where you lose me:
...read moreGreetings from Western Mass and an offering of Sagan
Hey folks, I’m Brigid. You may remember me from last year. I’m a queer femme writer, sometime environmental researcher, and anthropologist at heart. I recently relocated from Washington, DC to Western Massachusetts, where the beer is crafty and the humor is always self-referential. I enjoy science fiction, political art, and arguing amicably about things I [...]
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Maeve Binchy, Childless, Soulless Automaton
Well, this is a lovely and moving tribute to a much-loved writer who’s passed away. Among the obituaries for the much-loved Irish novelist Maeve Binchy, few omitted to mention that she was childless. Once, that was the norm for successful women writers. These days, when even lesbian authors such as the Poet Laureate Carol Ann [...]
...read moreOkay, seriously.
Come on, Peter Jackson. You’re the guy who condensed a thousand-plus-page epic into three briskly-paced films, and now you’re stretching The freakin’ HOBBIT into three movies? Blahblah Erebor blahblah Dol Guldur blahblah Necromancer. Dude. The Hobbit is a simple story, a kids’ story, really. Three hundred pages. If you want complex, make a film of [...]
...read moreFeministe Book Club: Catching Fire, Chapters 19-27, and Mockingjay open thread
This thread is open for discussion of Part III of Catching FIre and for the entirety of Mockingjay. Why? Because I hated Mockingjay but am sure there are some of you who didn’t and would like to discuss it. Ready, go.
Next up: We’re done with the Hunger Games trilogy. Any suggestions for future reads? Preferences for wait times before launching into the next book (if at all)? It’s summertime, which means a) plenty of opportunities to crack a book, unless b) you have grownup responsibilities, which so frequently multiply during the summer, which isn’t fair. Your suggestions in comments.
...read moreBook You Should Read: Some Of My Best Friends Are Black
Tanner Colby has written a fascinating history of segregation/integration in America, which looks at how and why the racial integration process has utterly failed. He travels across the country to look at four key social pillars: schools, housing, the church, and the advertising industry. What he finds is that black people and white people in America are living parallel but separate lives — and that the white side of things retains a hold on power, money and influence. I will be writing a full review very soon, but in the meantime, you should pick it up.
...read moreA hymen primer for romance novelists
On the list of psychological dangers presented by poorly written romance novels (e.g., the fetishization of virginity, the romanticization of abusive stalker vampires), the portrayal of the actual devirginification process itself doesn’t necessarily hover right at the top. But as a writer and a pedant, good God do I get cheesed off by anatomical inaccuracy. And while I’m not aware of scores of young women having penetrative sex for the first time and saying, “Whoa, whoa, whoa–that is not how it was in Fifty Shades of Grey!” (although they may well be out there), I feel the record should be set straight.
...read moreFeministe Book Club: Catching Fire, Chapters 10-18
Ready, go.
Next up: Next Saturday, June 30 (for real, this time), we’re going to finish up the book with Part III, chapters 19-27.
...read moreAbsent Mothers in Urban Fantasy
Urban Fantasy — the bringing of the fantastic (vampires, werewolves, magic, fae and so much more) to a modern, real world setting — has become ever more popular as a mainstream genre. From Twilight to True Blood to The Vampire Diaries, it is now firmly entrenched on our televisions. The books regularly reach the best seller lists – this isn’t a fringe genre. It’s here, it’s huge and it’s here to stay.
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