feminist blogs

I wrote a piece last year around this time about the significance of feasting, mostly to counter all the Adbusters' Buy Nothing Day emails and blog posts I'd been reading. Really, there are only so many times you can see "don't buy anything today; Americans are baaad" [sure, that's massively reductive, but play along with me] before it starts sounding a lot like beginning of year weightloss product adverts. This year, I'm seeing a more interesting trend in my blog bubble. A trend towards recognizing that celebrating the whole "First Thanksgiving" thing with the whole Pilgrim/Indian/kid in turkey outfit concept is basically like a big middle finger to native folk. And really, do we need to shoot another middle finger? One of my LJ friends (who shall remain nameless) doctored a cutesy Pilgrim-Indian decoration with smallpox references, which I think was a fun, snarky way to encourage others to pause and think about the insultingness of our happy little icons. Because these things seem relatively silly to us grownups, but I think they root into our heads as little kids and give us slightly twisted ideas about this country. I hate Pilgrims, quite frankly. I don't hate pilgrims, mind you, but the whole Mayflower thing. It creates this idea that the colonies were all founded by religious emigrants, which is patently untrue. Hello, Virginia? Jamestown? First - well, arguably second or third - colony, totally mercenary. And this fiction that we're a nation founded by Puritans gets twisted into thinking that we share - or at least should share - a single morality. Which we clearly don't now. I think that's a good thing. I'm not saying we need to do away with the whole day-of-thanks concept. Rather, could we just stop with the fiction around the founding of the country? Maybe make the thanks more about family in our discussion of it - as it is in our practice of it?

There's no doubt about it! I am badly in need of sex (with another person--or several other--that is). It has been 7 months (SEVEN MONTHS!) since I last had sex--probably six and a half months since I last had sexual contact with another person!

Last night I just had this persistent craving for another body (not any body in particular). It was like craving chocolate! Needless to say, the craving went unfulfilled.

And today I realized I'm like (almost) the only person I know in town (ok so I don't know many) who hasn't recently gotten, is currently getting, or will be getting sex (at least I assume that people in relationships are having sex...maybe that's a bad assumption to make, but at least they have a shot). No fair!

At a gay bar tonight I was given lessons on how to make random hookups happen. A friend and I are planning to give it a try next semester. I think it will take many, many shots! Hooking up has always happened to me by dumb luck...and I gotta say that is quite nice when suddenly, out of the blue, w/ out you're having had to expend any energy at all someone just offers you a hook up--how great! But this is grad school and so there are fewer parties and they seem more respectable...thus apparently much of my former activity at parties can no longer occur. Damn. Which pretty much means the only chance for sex is at bars....but that requires activity on my part! Sex has never just fallen into my lap at a bar dammit!

D. says the trick to hooking up is 1) to go alone so you don't have a comfort zone to go back to when you get rejected, 2) to put the goal of getting laid above all else (like pride or shyness), 3) to realize that it's not gonna work the first few times you try, 4) to accept rejection, and 5) to talk to the target's friend(s) first so that you a) can see if the person is available, b) can get the rejection indirectly if that's what's coming, c) can enlist help, and d) will know their name the next morning when you have breakfast w/ the fuckee and the friend.

Let's hope all this advice works!

I mean, vibrators and all: totally wonderful and more consistent and talented in their production of orgasms than a person is, but sometimes you just need a body. Besides, vibrators can always be incorporated into sex with another person right? ;-) The best of both worlds!! Though I just read a study that said only 10% of those surveyed use sex toys during partner sex. What are you people doing?! Get with it.

A smart kitty would be lapping the floor clean, not crying over spilled milk.

Still, I have to wonder what would have happened if Clinton had upheld his promise to complete the integration of the Armed Forces. Could the country have been any more divided than it is now?

And what if just one of the 45 Democratic senators in the 106th Congress had stood up for universal suffrage? Even if the House of Representatives would have confirmed Bush anyway, shouldn't the Democrats have united in condemnation of voter intimidation?

Expediency is a lousy platform.

A reminder...

Women comprise 15 percent of the total military (Army, Navy, Marine Corps, Air Force).

Military Personnel Statistics as of Sept. 30, 2003:
Total military	1,434,377
Total women in military	215,243	15.00%
Total officers	227,851
Female officers	34,796	15.27%

Captain Barbara A. Wilson, USAF (Ret) has gathered a boatload of information about Military Women Veterans.

A couple of weeks ago, I did a little blog re-configuration that resulted in the RSS feeds being published to the wrong location until today. I don't think anyone missed it, but just so you know... should be fixed now.

The continuing news coverage of the election gradually went from exciting and a little funny to downright sickening last night. It's not so much the Kerry loss as what seems to have happened to Congress - centrist Democrats losing against semi-evangelical right wingers. And the thing the newsfolk kept coming back to around was "moral values". The BBC has a good article on the subject: [see link]. This election was exciting, if frustrating, from the "you've been served" primary days when Dean et al called Bush out and challenged each other surprisingly little. But the voting last night - or rather, the spin on the voting last night - fundamentally challenged my view of how this country is divided. See, my own experience leads me to believe that most Republicans actually share my views on most everything. They just disagree on what's important and how to solve the problems we all see. I think we can't let go of social issues, the stuff the press is calling "moral values" and still be a decent people; they think we can't address social issues without individuals and business feeling safer. But I always thought most non-extremists could agree that it was wrong to deny someone a basic civil right - marriage, for instance, based on any difference between ourselves and others. I always thought that most people were iffy about the ethical question of abortion, for instance, but understood a need to keep it legal as long as we weren't effectively protecting a woman's jurisdiction over her own body by preventing unwanted pregnancies. I figured the things we really disagreed on were logistical - like, how to fund adequate healthcare, or what the best form of education reform must be. But it seems that "moral values" - the things that amount to believing that one life is of greater value than another (a murderer should die, someone who isn't born yet shouldn't, a hetero couple is deserving of civil rights a gay couple isn't, etc.) - are the issues that most effectively got people out to vote on the right. My centrist pro-choice Southern EMILY's listers lost. Most (if not all) states with referenda on gay marriage and civil unions went the path of discrimination. At least it was close in a lot of places. At least the vote was gotten out. But that makes the results that much more unsettling. People weren't voting on the other side based on economic and defense issues. They were voting, to put it meanly and bitterly, for hate. Which means this country is surprisingly divided over social issues - things that I wish we wouldn't even legislate - not conflicting priorities. I miss the real Republicans, the ones who were embarrassed to court Southern racism in 1960 (not that I ever knew that party, but it sure sounds nice). Damn. It's going to be a long four years.