GOP’s War on Women
With all of the focus on vaginas and uteruses these days, I have to say I do feel this is true.
If only this had been something I could have read when I was looking up these things! Full of accurate information and my favorite kind of silly-but-no-nonsense-older-sister-type talk.
Also good to read about, you know, just in case you wanna throw down for some long term BC, in case this election goes all Handmaid’s Tale on us.
Why, hello 2012 - please come in! May I offer you an episode of The Blasto Podcast? Would you like some extra gross with that? You’re welcome.
In this episode:
- David learns new things about sexuality, weirdos, and ears.
- Liisa keeps it light and brings up rape culture.
- Downton Abbey!…
2012’s very first episode of the Blasto Podcast! In which I explain the Kinsey scaled to my brother, and nothing gets weird at all. Nope. Not a thing.
A Christmas gift from my boyfriend. My older sisters at Jezebel would be so proud. (Taken with instagram)
“There’s a conscious purpose to this sort of behavior. Joking about getting pelted (or putting on the football helmet) sends a message to women in the classroom – and online: ‘Tone it down. Take care of the men and their feelings. Don’t scare them off, because too much impassioned feminism is scary for guys.’ And you know, as exasperating as it is, this kind of silencing language almost always works. Time and again, I’ve seen it work to silence women in the classroom, or at least cause them to worry about how to phrase things ‘just right’ so as to protect the guys and their feelings. It’s a key anti-feminist strategy, even if that isn’t the actual intent of the men doing it — it forces women to become conscious caretakers of their male peers by subduing their own frustration and anger. It reminds young women that they should strive to avoid being one of those ‘angry feminists’ who (literally) scares men off and drives them away.”
- Hugo Schwyzer
The Style Issue: St. Vincent
By Julie Klausner on August 14, 2011I wrote the cover story for September’s SPIN magazine about the fetching and nervous songwriter St. Vincent. Please read the article in full online, or buy the magazine with the pretty lady on the cover (and my byline!).
An article about St. Vincent written by my favorite female future (I hope) best friend Julie Klausner… and they discuss feminism and gender roles? I think my brain just exploded.
Interview: Wendy McClure Goes Back to the Little House on the Prairie
Full disclosure: My friend wrote this. Fullest disclosure: I really love Little House on the Prairie, am now super excited to read this book, and really, really love the below quote.
“People sometimes call Laura a tomboy, but she wasn’t a girl who wanted to be a boy — she was just a girl who did things, a girl who was adventurous and still a girl. It’s this idea of what it is to be a girl, that it doesn’t have to be either or.”
This is accurate, thoughtful… and heartbreaking. There’s this idea that women have to be perfect to get a guy, and there are so few good guys out there - unless you’re amazing, you couldn’t possibly deserve one. A girl should be so lucky to have ANY guy like her-if he’s a piece of shit, well… you still need to lose a little weight/be prettier/have some other, better physical asset to get one of the 4 good guys in the world. Don’t complain. You’re not that great anyway.
It’s ridiculously damaging, and something I’ve hurt myself with I think. We’re all people, and some of us are assholes, and some of us aren’t. When you’re in a relationship with someone, don’t be an asshole and don’t settle for being with an asshole just because you are a somehow flawed human being. We are all flawed, and being “not Megan Fox” is not a deal breaker flaw that means you need to settle for whoever.
“We socialise women to be afraid of one thing more than anything else: being alone. The anti-feminist opponents of progress are masters at exploiting that fear, urging women to resist the siren song of technologically assisted autonomy lest they find themselves growing old without a man. The anecdotal evidence that a great many men in Britain and the US do seem stuck in what the scholar Michael Kimmel calls “Guyland” – an enduring adolescence that seems to last decades – seems to legitimate the shrill jeremiads of the traditionalists. But the opponents of progress are wrong.”
