Shrub

Via Majikthise, Brad Hicks has a good analysis of “Baby, It’s Cold Outside.” There’s not much more I can say about the analysis, but the responses in comments are quite interesting, particularly in how the song is defended. It’s illustrative of the ways in which the status quo with respect to rape and consent gets defended. Aesthetic Defense [...]

Plenty of people have commented on the Missouri rape case where a judge decided that once penetration had been consented to, there really wasn’t any crime. And as plenty of people have pointed out, this is a monumentally stupid ruling. (Trigger warning.) Reading the narrative, it’s pretty clear that what consent there was was very [...]

Just when I was starting to feel like I was getting old , the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services comes through and treats me like a kid again:

Now the government is targeting unmarried adults up to age 29 as part of its abstinence-only programs, which include millions of dollars in federal money that will be available [...]

It’s been a while since I’ve heard good news on the reproductive rights front – it’s been abortion bans and “conscience clauses” for so long. Yesterday the New York Court of Appeals issued a decision in Catholic Charities of the Diocese of Albany v. Serio upholding a provision of the Women’s Health and Wellness Act which [...]

Amy Gahran has a good post up about apologies and why they’re necessary. The post was sparked by Amy Alkon ‘s advice column about cheating, entitled ” Along Came Polyamory .” Understandably, many polyamorous folk were miffed at the equation of the concepts. (It’s hard enough figuring out who’s okay with the concept without it being confused with…[Read more]

(…and we all screw up at some point.) From Hugo Schwyzer ‘s post on the Valenti/Althouse incident , after he himself got called on an offensive comment he made:

For the record, I will happily pose for a picture with anyone. If the local leader of the Klan came by, I’d stand for a photo with my arm around him and [...]

There’s been a bit of a kerfuffle this weekend over Ann Althouse ‘s treatment of Feministing‘s Jessica Valenti. (I’m not going to call it “Boobiegate.” It’s been over thirty years since Watergate; can we stop framing everything in terms of the Baby Boomers and let that go the way of Teapot Dome?) What It Was About The short version: [...]

(I’ll be away for the next few days at Fan Expo Canada in Toronto. If anyone else will be there and wants to meet up, drop me a line. As far as I know, Harlan Ellison won’t be there.) Dora has written a great post on the subject of Ellison’s behavior at the Hugo Awards. If you [...]

“I’ve had it with this m*****f***ing sexism on my m*****f***ing plate!” Over on Feministing, Sailorman recently commented about an entry on The New York Times “Dining & Wine” blog concerning the increasingly infrequent practice of giving menus without prices to some patrons at restaurants. ( Feministe has commented on this as well.) The actual…[Read more]

This is disappointing. I’ve seen Beyond Good & Evil and The Longest Journey cited as exemplars of “feminist video games”, but not much beyond that. Of course, there’s the larger question of what would make a game good from a feminist perspective. In addition to being good from a gameplay perspective, I’d say such a game would include [...]

In the comments of my earlier post on the idea of alpha males jeffliveshere asks:

What would be an example of a man calling another man on sexism that doesn’t also fall into the problem of domination hierarchies–if, indeed, we (men, women and those of other genders) find ourselves steeped in them like fish swim in water?

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Jeff over at Feminist Allies has a series of posts up on the intersection between feminism and “alpha males.” In his latest post (part three of the series), he writes:

The first prominent train of thought in this regard is along the lines of “the term “alpha male” is just too fuzzy a term (or is an inappropriate [...]

What do you do when someone makes a claim of personal experience that just isn’t believable? Specifically, do you accuse them of fabricating the claim? I’m sure many of you have heard by now about the anti-choice blogger who mistook an Onion article for a serious editorial . In a response to that article, he made the claim [...]

Earlier this month, Collie of Collie’s Bestiary posted about her experiences with Planescape: Torment .

A short while ago I started playing the computer game “Planescape: Torment,” and stumbled across this issue again, with painfully eye-opening results. Keep in mind, this game won numerous awards for its storytelling and quality in 1999, the…

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I recently saw a commercial for the Sony Bravia which billed itself as “The World’s First Television for Men and Women.” At first, I thought they were advertising something like this, but after checking out the web site it turns out that it’s just a marketing campaign for a high-end HDTV. I’m trying to figure out what [...]

So my latest infatuation is Terry Moore’s comic Strangers In Paradise , which I discovered through the immensely fun Scans Daily Livejournal community. It’s well-drawn and well-characterized, and is erasing that reluctance to check out indie comics that the hipper-than-thou movie adaptation of Ghost World instilled. What struck me, though, was a…[Read more]

There have been quite a few discussions lately – on Hugo Schwyzer’s blog , at Punk Ass Blog , and at Pandagon (also this post ), Saucebox and Neurath’s Boat – about young men who think that feminism and heterosexual male sexuality are incompatible. Which is even more interesting given the discussions here and Putting the “Fist” in “Pacifist” …[Read more]