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 moreChastened?
Here’s the tl;dr for this post: Dawn Eden made herself a nuisance to this blog and others about five or six years ago. Just Google her name along with that of pretty much any feminist blogger or blog and you’ll see what I mean. Now she’s reared her head again, mentioning me and this blog (and my reviews of her first book) in an interview about her new book. I don’t care all that much about what she said about me, personally, but the interview and book bring up a lot of issues that Dawn and I (as well as other feminist bloggers) have gone at each other over before and which I feel merit a response. Dawn has long been an engaging if fundamentally dishonest writer, particularly on the subject of feminism and women’s sexuality, and in the interview and her book, she accuses feminists of, essentially, causing child sexual abuse by supporting sexual freedom for adult women. In addition, there’s a good bit of inside-baseball stuff about the Catholic church and the clerical sex abuse scandal, and how Dawn addresses – or rather, fails to address – that scandal in the context of a book, written from a specifically Catholic perspective, about using Catholic writings and teaching as a means of healing from childhood sexual abuse.
...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 moreFeministe Book Club: The Hunger Games Chapters 1-4
Ready, go.
LATE UPDATE: This Saturday, May 12 we’re going to close out Section 1 with chapters 5-9.
...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 moreBreaking: Teens who get accurate information about sex make better decisions about sex
Teens getting all sexed up! Having babies! Getting TV shows! Day care in high schools! Babies right and left! Teen pregnancy is more rampant than ever, right? No?
...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.
College sports, Title IX, and the legacy of Pat Summitt
As University of Tennessee women’s basketball coach Pat Summitt takes her retirement, Sports Illustrated’s Holly Anderson reflects on Summitt’s career, women’s sports, and Title IX.
...read more
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