feminist blogs

Post what you like, as you like it. Self-linking makes me giggle like a small baby.

This video might not be SFW:

1. A buncha links on “triggering” and “calling out”
2. Sex, Gender, and Toilet Signs. A discussion of gender in bathroom signs. This is awesome, partly for the discussion, and partly for the enormous variety of signs that the blogger has collected and categorized.
3. Who are the girls who need to bypass parental notification laws by going to a judge? It’s explained here, in painful and lengthy detail. This blogger really knows what she’s talking about; well worth reading.
4. “Charles Darwin … imagined a world in which organisms battled for supremacy and only the fittest survived. But new research identifies the availability of “living space”, rather than competition, as being of key importance for evolution.” Interesting idea.
5. Great point: But thinking of “choice” as the opposite of “discrimination,” as Brad Peck of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce did in his blog post about the pay gap, is wrong. Discrimination and opportunity shape choice, and as long as women see an unfairly matched, uphill battle in every election, they’re unlikely to jump in willingly unless they have an unusual amount of resources or support.
6. Gov. Barbour Implicitly Criticizes GOP’s Tough Talk On Immigration
7. “The talented Ukrainian artist Vladislav Erko has created an absolutely amazing deck of playing cards based on authentic traditional Ukrainian costumes.”
8. Riz Khan on Afghan Women: “One thing that Riz Khan’s program brought to light is that the damage done to women’s rights is not just a result of Taliban rule nor is it just a result of occupation. The problems have preceded both the Taliban’s rule and U.S. occupation and thus cannot be expected to be solved in just nine years of occupation.”
9. The Argument For Getting Rid Of The Home Mortgage Deduction. Interestingly, what everyone says — that this deduction was created in order to encourage home ownership — isn’t true.
10. Female Impersonator reviews The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. I really liked it, and would argue that it is a feminist novel (although not a perfect feminist work, but what is?).
11. “South Sudan is planning to literally re-build its city centers from scratch…into the shape of… safari animals.” No, really. It’s worth clicking through to see the proposed city plans.
12. Note to White House: It’s ugly out there. The base actually matters. Do something. Fast. Although really, I think it’s too late. I’d be delighted to be wrong, but I think the Democrats are going to get creamed in two months.
13. The Quest for a Solid Ice Beer Tray
14. Republican Candidate Michael Stopa’s Anti-Atheist Bigotry Ignored.
15. I need a (non-copyrighted) drink
16. Quote: “Really? No ‘more horrible person [can] be imagined’ than Alice Walker? Maybe if your imagination really, really sucks.”
17. The economy is going to keep on sucking for a long, long time.
18. Prostitution on CraigsList: the US and Singapore
19. Ted Rall, of all people, argues that our mission in Afghanistan is doing some good.
20. MLK’s Movement Was More Interested in Justice Than Harmony. There are also some really nice photos in this post.
21. The Death Dealer — Rebecca Dart’s kitteny take on the famous Frazetta painting.
22. I really like this 1916 photo of a mother and her son, a marine. Not sure why.
23. You think your hospital experience was bad? This man’s was worse.
24. Eunomia (one of the best foreign policy blogs out there — and I’m saying this about a conservative blog!) discusses and defends Feisal Abdul Rauf’s most controversial statements.
25. (Yet Another Reason) Why immigration could help America
26. Paul Krugman: This Is Not a Recovery
27. The Ethos of an Advocate in an Adversarial Model of Democratic Discourse: “Indeed, I worry that the whole premise of a “contest of advocates” model is that there is someone sitting in the jury box, someone being convinced. But the more we sort into ideological tribes, the smaller the pool from which one might draw such a jury.”
28. Should Retirement Be Nasty, Brutish, and Shorter?
29. This cartoon cracked me up.
30. A record backlog in immigration courts
31. Propaganda Posters of World War Two. Includes some anti-American posters the Axis countries created!
32. On fatphobia, thin privilege, and “eat a sandwich!”
33. Below: An image from The LowBrow Tarot Card Project

[Crossposted on "TADA" and on "Alas"]

Felix Salmon writes:

Never mind the stimulus vs austerity debate: here’s something that both sides should be able to get behind. It’s a simple legislative fix which increases tax revenues without raising taxes; which increases the demand for housing; which increases the economy’s productive capacity; and which boosts wages for American workers. It’s about as Pareto-optimal as legislation gets. So let’s open the borders, and encourage much more immigration into the US!

Salmon links to this report from the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco. Giovanni Peri, the author of the report, compared states with high levels of immigration to states with low levels of immigration, a sort of “natural experiment.”

For example, in California, one worker in three was foreign born in 2008, while in West Virginia the comparable proportion was only one in 100. By exploiting variations in the inflows of immigrants across states at 10-year intervals from 1960 to 2000, and annually from 1994 to 2008, we are able to estimate the short-run (one to two years), medium-run (four years), and long-run (seven to ten years) impact of immigrants on output, income, and employment.

Peri found that immigration is strongly beneficial:

First, there is no evidence that immigrants crowd out U.S.-born workers in either the short or long run. Data on U.S.-born worker employment imply small effects, with estimates never statistically different from zero. The impact on hours per worker is similar. We observe insignificant effects in the short run and a small but significant positive effect in the long run. At the same time, immigration reduces somewhat the skill intensity of workers in the short and long run because immigrants have a slightly lower average education level than U.S.-born workers.

Second, the positive long-run effect on income per U.S.-born worker accrues over some time. In the short run, small insignificant effects are observed. Over the long run, however, a net inflow of immigrants equal to 1% of employment increases income per worker by 0.6% to 0.9%. This implies that total immigration to the United States from 1990 to 2007 was associated with a 6.6% to 9.9% increase in real income per worker. That equals an increase of about $5,100 in the yearly income of the average U.S. worker in constant 2005 dollars. Such a gain equals 20% to 25% of the total real increase in average yearly income per worker registered in the United States between 1990 and 2007.

Basically, the US employment market is not a zero sum game. When immigrants come to the US to work, that benefits them (which is a strong reason, in and of itself, to favor opening the borders), but it also benefits us.

It’s also worth remembering that “life without competition with low-skilled non-Americans” is not an option on the menu. American workers will experience the downside of competition even if every single undocumented immigrant was somehow magically deported. But if those undocumented immigrants aren’t in the US, then Americans receive far less of the benefits. As the Economist blog wrote a couple of years ago:

Another possibility is that immigration also increases labour demand. This becomes especially important when we remember two other things. First, the one point upon which everyone can agree in this debate is that immigration substantially increases the productivity and earnings of the immigrants themselves. Secondly, we need to ask how the importation of low-skilled workers is different from the importation of goods produced by low-skilled workers abroad. Absent immigration, Mr Borjas would argue, wages would be higher in America and lower in trading nations. As such, price competition for tradeable goods would press down native worker wages.

Why is that important? Well, for one thing, it suggests that it’s difficult to separate cross-border flows of workers from goods. For another, when comparing outcomes, we need to remember that immigrants are still around whether they immigrate or not. In other words, immigrants might lower the wages of domestic workers, but immigrant consumption demand is much higher when they work on the American side of the border. If they do not immigrate, they’ll still be competing with native workers via imports of cheap products, but they’ll also be buying far fewer American goods, because they’ll be a lot poorer. It’s still difficult to know how things play out in the end, but one shouldn’t pretend that the proper comparison is a domestic labour market with immigrants versus one without.

Notably, even George Borjas — the best-known (and almost the only) economist arguing against immigration — calculates that in the long run, immigration has no effect on US worker’s wages overall (he predicts that immigration lowers the wages of high-school dropouts by nearly 5%, but raises the wages of other Americans, including those with only a high school degree). And Borjas reached his results not through empirical examination of what’s actually happened in the real world, but through an abstract calculation in which he considered only the downside of immigration, but didn’t account for the economic benefits at all.

So the worst-case scenario from Borjas is 1) Not all that bad (some workers gain, others lose, but overall there’s no difference), and 2) based on the dubious assumption that immigration provides no economic benefits to native workers. On the best-case scenario, we have strong benefits for everyone, immigrants and natives alike. And let’s not forget, fighting “illegal immigration” is expensive.

For that reason, it just makes sense to favor open borders (for all immigrants, I’d argue, except violent criminals) and immediate amnesty for all undocumented immigrants.

Further reading: The immigration category at the Ambrosini Critique. And the immigration category at Cardiff de Alejo Garcia. And the study from the Federal Reserve of SF, which is really pretty readable.

[Crossposted on TADA, where anyone can comment. Comments on this post here on "Alas" are restricted to feminists and pro-feminists only.]

Click on the cartoon to see it larger.

When I was researching this cartoon, I came across several different women reporting they get harassed more often when they’re on a bicycle. So I decided that in one panel the woman should be riding a bike. But it turned out I was lousy at drawing a bike, so I actually had to use photo reference, and redraw it several times. So I probably worked harder on that one panel than any other in the cartoon.

Then, when I finalized the cartoon’s layout, I ended up cropping 90% of the bike out of that panel. Oh well.

It was 47 years ago today…

There are those who are asking the devotees of civil rights, “When will you be satisfied?” We can never be satisfied as long as the Negro is the victim of the unspeakable horrors of police brutality. We can never be satisfied, as long as our bodies, heavy with the fatigue of travel, cannot gain lodging in the motels of the highways and the hotels of the cities. We cannot be satisfied as long as the Negro’s basic mobility is from a smaller ghetto to a larger one. We can never be satisfied as long as our children are stripped of their selfhood and robbed of their dignity by signs stating “For Whites Only”. We cannot be satisfied as long as a Negro in Mississippi cannot vote and a Negro in New York believes he has nothing for which to vote. No, no, we are not satisfied, and we will not be satisfied until justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.

(Thanks.)

Anime director Satoshi Kon (Perfect Blue, Tokyo Godfathers, Millenium Actress, Paprika) died of cancer earlier this week, age 46. He wrote a long statement about his death, which his family posted on his blog, and which blogger Makiko Itoh has translated into English.

While my wife was running around getting things in place for my escape, I was pleading with doctors “If I can go home for even half a day, there are things I can still do!”, then waiting alone in the depressing hospital room for death. I was lonely, but this was what I was thinking.

“Maybe dying won’t be so bad.”

I didn’t have any reasons for it, and perhaps I needed to think like that, but I was surprisingly calm and relaxed.

However, there was just one thought that was gnawing away at me.

“I don’t want to die here…”

As I thought that, something moved out from the calendar on the wall and started to spread around the room.

“Oh dear, a line marching out from the calendar. My　hallucinations aren’t at all original.”

I had to smile at the fact at my professional instincts were working even at times like this, but in any case I was probably the nearest to the land of the dead that I’d ever been at that point. I really felt death very close to me. [But] with the help of many people, I miraculously escaped Musashino Red Cross and came back home, wrapped up in the land of the dead and bedsheets.

Read the whole.

I draw my comics at a shared space in Portland (Oregon), on SE Foster.

We’re currently looking for mild-mannered, friendly writers, cartoonists, visual artists, and anyone else who wants a affordable workplace share a usually quiet, air conditioned work space.

- Large desks (5 x 2.5 feet).
- High speed internet and utilities included.
- Open 24/7.
- Microwave, refrigerator and half bath.
- Close to food, comics shops and other awesomeness.
- On the 14 and 17 bus lines.
- $90/month — which is, frankly, incredibly affordable.

I can say from experience, being able to get out of the house to work is really, really nice, and boosts productivity. If you’d be interested, drop me an email.

Fantasy Magazine has posted a new story by Mandolin, “Where Shadows Meet Light.”

Mandolin commented to me in IM that this story “relates a bit” to my nelly screamer post (although the story was written well before that post). “Since the main gay character is feminine, and I decided to go with that because feminine gay men need depicting and celebrating; it’s a valid gender presentation; and avoiding them can smack of anti-femininity.”

Here’s how the story begins:

Princess Diana’s ghost emerges at night. There are other ghosts, presumably, but she doesn’t see them. She only sees the living.

At first she haunted Charles and Harry and William, but eventually it grew too painful to think about her life. She even grew tired of the longtime pleasure she’d taken from blowing into Elizabeth’s ear while she slept, making the old woman’s dreams as disturbed and uncomfortable as she had made Diana’s life.

She went overseas to America where she’d once visited the White House and danced with John Travolta in a midnight blue velvet gown that sold at auction for a hundred thousand pounds. This time, she traveled between ordinary houses, some white and others beige and mint and yellow. It was easy to find people she could haunt there, people who owned memorabilia with her face on it, but whose distance from the British Isles meant they didn’t know every detail of her reported life, giving her enough room to dwell and still keep her secrets.

That’s the first three paragraphs — for the rest, you’ll have to click through.

(Crossposted on “Alas” and on “TADA”)

David Post writes:

The National Jazz Museum (who knew there was such a thing?) has apparently acquired a true treasure trove of early jazz recordings. The collection — nearly 1,000 discs! — was recorded in the 30s and 40s by William Savory from on-the-air radio broadcasts, and includes performances by Lester Young, Benny Goodman, Coleman Hawkins, Lionel Hampton, Billie Holiday, Teddy Wilson, and many others of the great names of jazz (from the greatest era of jazz). Savory, apparently, is something of a legend in recording engineer circles, and many of the recordings are of stunningly high quality (and many of the performances masterpieces).

If you’re like me, and consider American jazz of the 30s and 40s to be one of the great artistic outpourings of all time, the story induces something like a swoon of ecstatic delight. [...]

So needless to say I can’t wait to hear the reissues. But alas, that may never happen. As the original article noted (with additional commentary here), the potential copyright liability that could attach to redistribution of these recordings is so large — and, more importantly, so uncertain — that there may never be a public distribution of the recordings. Tracking down all the parties who may have a copyright interest in these performances, and therefore an entitlement to royalty payments (or to enjoining their distribution), is a monumental, and quite possibly an impossible, task, and it may well be that nobody steps forward with the resources to (a) undertake the efforts required and (b) take on the risk of liability.

In a passage that’s worth reading twice, Post goes on to write:

…copyright, inherently, operates to the detriment of the public when applied in retrospect, to works that have already been created. Lester Young, alas, can no longer be incentivized to produce these performances — they’ve already been created. We won’t get any more brilliant performances by Teddy Wilson if we protect these works. All we — the public — get from applying copyright here is a restriction on our ability to encounter magnificent works of art. Now of course, copyright is only ever applied in retrospect, and if we always ignored it when applied to already-existing works it would cease to exist, and would therefore no longer serve its incentivizing function prospectively.

And there’s your copyright balance; what we seek is a way to give creators enough of an incentive to create, but not too much, because too much gives us, the public, too much of an impediment to actually enjoying the works that have already been created.

Here’s the thing: Most creators need very little incentive to create. Yet our laws pretend that if we don’t have a monopoly extending to decades after our deaths, most creative sorts will hang up our pens and brushes and saxophones and go “oh, heck with this! I’d rather pump gas.”

Music only has value when it is heard. If it can’t find an audience, it’s dead. A copyright regime that kills music is one that needs reform.

There’s a brilliant comic strip, Barnaby, which is – rumor has it — not being reprinted because the creators’ family is unrealistically waiting for someone to offer Peanuts-size royalties. Or maybe they just loathe their father and want to see his legacy of art forgotten. Maybe they’re just used to seeing enormous sums of money from Harold and the Purple Crayon, and so don’t think it’s worthwhile to let their father’s comic strip see daylight, because they have no souls and think art is crap. Or maybe they have other reasons.

But I don’t really care, because they didn’t create Barnaby. They didn’t write it, they didn’t draw it, they have basically no moral right to that work. In particular, they have no right to lock up another person’s creative legacy in a vault, and deprive the reading public of that work.

Keeping a comic strip out of print, when there are plenty of publishers who’d love to print it, is no different from grabbing the Mona Lisa and chucking it into a fire. It’s censorship, and it’s a kind of censorship they’re only able to accomplish because copyright laws irrationally give them that right. I do think there are many situations where the creator of a work has a right to keep it from the public. But why should people who didn’t create the work have that right?

Yes, legally, they’re the heirs. But why should copyright be passed down to heirs at all? Is the thought that if Crockett Johnson hadn’t been able to imagine his heirs keeping his work out of print forever, he never could have motivated himself to draw a daily comic strip at a time when drawing comic strips was admired and extremely rewarding?

How does this situation benefit anyone? How am I, as a cartoonist, encouraged to create new works because I can see that Barnaby is being kept out of print, and because I can imagine my hypothetical future heirs deciding to keep my own work out of print? I don’t think I am.

I think I’m just being robbed as a member of the reading public. And I think Crockett Johnson is being robbed of one of the things that matters most to almost any popular artist — an audience.

This is an open thread, open for whatever sort of posting your blessed little hearts desire. Is self-linking allowed, you inquire? My darling, not just allowed, adored, I reply.

I’ve watched this video by Everynone, “Words,” several times over:

More links (a lot of light links this week, for some reason):

1. A cartoony flow chart explaining the process of legally immigrating to the USA. Note the path if you’re an unskilled immigrant without relatives here.
2. Predatory Lending and Health Services. More exploitation by the folks bringing us weight loss surgery.
3. Being bigoted doesn’t require being overtly hateful or expressly wishing people harm.
4. Jane Austen’s Fight Club
5. It’s not a mosque near the WTC that the right (and, to be fair, some cowardly asshole Democrats) object to. It’s mosques being built in the USA, period.
6. There are some amazingly great comics at What Things Do.
7. “One of those dreaded ‘swallow shit or ruin the evening’ moments.”
8. Justin Bieber’s ‘U Smile’ Slowed Down 800 Percent Becomes Haunting New Song/a>
9. Are We Looking At A Genderless Future?, Newsweek asks. My answer: No, we’re not. But if we’re lucky, maybe we’ll look at a future with a lot more variety and freedom of genders. (Via.)
10. Why helium balloons should cost $100 each.
11. “But to me the most disappointing aspect of the way Wonder Woman is currently being presented is not the diminishment of her powers but of her iconic stature.” I agree. (Fortunately, they’ll probably revert to the iconic WW within five years.)
12. Rachelmanija has some thoughts on Heinlein. She argues that feminists get so pissed at Heinlein in part because of the bait-and-switch his books perform.
13. All the Sad Young Literary Women. The comments contain a lot of recommendations for female-authored fantasy and science fiction.
14. Gavin Berliner, the man behind floating head movie posters
15. It’s kids downloading manga that’s causing the economic problems of manga publishing. Not, you know, the economic collapse. Those darn kids! (Meanwhile, I owned an overflowing boxful of cassette tapes with illegally copies music when I was a teen, and I bet most of the people complaining about the downloaders did something similar when they were kids.)
16. 45 Beautifully Designed Book Covers. My favorite is the cover for The Annotated Nose.
17. “Think of the U.S. embassy in Iraq as a kind of well-armed anchor baby.”
18. How to be civil, in cake form.
19. Private prisons cost more than public prisons. They just appear to cost less because prison companies bid low in order to get contracts.
20. Neptune recently finished the end of its first orbit since its discovery in 1846!
21. How Republicans Really Balance State Budgets
22. Video from Shuttle booster falling back to Earth. So. Very. Cool.
23. Kevin Moore responds to that “Oh, what has become of 20-somethings?” article in the Times.
24. How to make an easy paper model of a tricorner hat, for drawing reference.
25. It’s amazing how many clients who hire illustrators are really like this.
26. “So the problem, you see, is not that Cordoba House is too close to Ground Zero. It is too far away.”
27. If Captain America had a baby… that baby would live in terror.
28. A Worldwide Revolt Against Poverty Wages
29. Nerd movies are consistently worth about $10 million in ticket sales on the first weekend. Nerd appeal is not wide appeal, it seems.
30. What Does Obama Really Think About Gay Marriage? A Telling Timeline.
31. Lastly, I enjoyed looking through 1979 Semi-Finalist’s list of her 100 favorite comic book covers (and 15 alternates). They weren’t the 115 I’d have chosen, but she gave her reasons for choosing each one, which made it interesting. Of her 115 selections, these three are my favorites:

(Crossposted on “Alas” and on “TADA.” “Alas” is, if not “safe” space — no such thing, alas — intended to be relatively pro-queer space.)

Stephen Fry was recently listed number three in The Independent’s “Pink List” of 100 admired lesbian and gay celebrities. The Independent also included a “Rogues Gallery” of non-approved queers, in which they listed minor British celebrity Louie Spence. Who is Louie Spence, you ask?

Anyhow, on his blog, Fry printed this letter from his friend Kim Harris:

Very nice to see you ranking high on The Independent’s Pink List. Quite right too. They made one vast and vastly suggestive mistake, though. They instituted a Rogues Gallery and frogmarched Louie Spence into it. Do you know who I mean? He’s a big old lisping, nelly screamer at Pineapple Dance Studios (Sky something) whom Joe Sixpack has clasped to his bosom because he’s sweet and funny and fabulous. Brightens the day, cheers the hour. There’s another reason the public loves him, but we’ll get to that in a mo. The compilers of the List, however, hate him because – well, can’t you guess? What’s the least imaginative, least penetrating thing you could possibly say about an unreconstructed flamer? That’s right – he “perpetuates the stereotype.” Christ on a marmalade cross but that pisses me right off.

Occupying the top spot was the rugby player, Gareth Thomas, who came out (finally) last year. Well done for that, boyo, I suppose. Can’t have been easy. It usually isn’t for most people, even on the Liberal Riviera where we’re all supposed to be basking today. Now, you can see where I’m going with this, can’t you? Gareth is a “real man”. He was married to a real woman. Louie is not and was not. If only we could all disport ourselves like Gareth the straights won’t hate us whereas if we all carry on like Louie….ach, how quickly these cowardly, self-oppressed, social-climbing McCarthyites forget where they come from. If I remember rightly, the whole Gay Lib thing wasn’t engineered by “real” men at all. It wasn’t sponsored by marines or scaffolders or rugby players. It was ignited by…ah, yes: drag queens.

So, instead of getting a hate on at poor Louie, instead of frantically trying to patrol their butch and instead of gussying up their drool for Gareth into blather about bravery, these creeps should remember the Rainbow. They should remember Diversity. They should remember Tolerance. They should remember that in evincing a distaste for effeminacy they’re simply making an exhibition of their own misogyny.

Fry added:

By singling out Louie Spence for lofty disapproval, by sneering at his “mincing” they are turning their back on, dissociating themselves from, insulting and demeaning a fine man and whole way of being. An authentic, strong, charming and loveable person, every bit as “courageous” as the others on the list, certainly more courageous than me, Louie deserves respect and support, not insult and derision. Do they want people like him not to count, do they see him as being guilty of a choice in his manner and his demeanour, just as homophobes everywhere accuse all gay people of choosing their sexuality and preferences? How dare they of all people dismiss a gay man in a few contemptuous, bigoted phrases because he doesn’t fit the “type” that they think a gay man should exemplify?

Hear, hear.

(Emily, Sex Nerd, also has some comments.)