feminist blogs

Post a short description of something you’ve written this week, along with a link. Make is specific — don’t link your whole blog.

And, ugh, Happy Daylight Savings.

So obviously this week’s Friday video is this, if by some chance you have not seen it (warning on the video — there is nudity and violence and lots of, to put it gently, problematic content):

…that is a lot of Tarantino and a lot of product placement, and Gaga going on with her latest girl-power thing, and I’m kind of surprised that Beyonce went along with all that weirdness. But yeah, damn. That is a video. Unsure how I feel about it, and Gaga is always controversial, so have at it.

Now, the Random 10. Leave yours in the comments.

1. Lykke Li – Everybody But Me
2. Grizzly Bear – Lullabye
3. Yeah Yeah Yeahs – Shame and Fortune
4. Portishead – Over
5. Cass McCombs – Jonesy Boy
6. Ecstatic Sunshine – Little Dipper Big Dipper
7. Band of Horses – St. Augustine
8. Rufus Wainwright – Across the Universe
9. Ted Leo and the Pharmacists – Army Bound
10. MGMT – Electric Feel

A New York subway ad campaign tells women “Abortion changes you.” Lori’s take says it all — forced pregnancy changes you, too.

Elsewhere in New York, one of our many worst New York nightmares came true – a woman was out at a bar, turned down a man who wanted to dance with her, and then he followed her into the bathroom and beat the shit out of her. According to the New York Times, “The attack was so vicious, according to the police, that the woman sustained a broken eye socket and a broken nose, and possibly a fractured skull.” And the guy who did it still hasn’t been found.

A Mississippi high school decided to cancel prom rather than allow a lesbian couple to attend. Because it’s ok if girls go to prom together because they can’t get dates, but not ok if they go because they actually like each other. The ACLU is suing.

Is banning abortion about “morals,” or is it about theocratic intrusions into our personal lives? Amanda says it’s theocracy, in a very compelling piece.

Nickels for Change: College students Cassie and Rebekah are adding nickels to their jars every time they hear bigoted language around their school. At the end of the year, they’ll be donating all the money to a social justice organization. Head over and see how you can help.

Hero Granny!

One million women are hospitalized every year in Latin America and the Caribbean due to complications from unsafe abortion (pdf). There are more than 4 million abortions in Latin America and the Caribbean every year; of the 4.1 million abortions performed in 2003, all but 200,000 were unsafe. The majority of those safe abortions took place in Cuba, Guyana and Puerto Rico, where abortion is permitted under some circumstances and performed by trained medical professionals.

Men have it bad when it comes to unemployment, but statistics may obscure the hit taken by single mothers.

Heavy Metal: Angela Gossow on women, rock and kicking ass. I’m not a metal fan, but she’s an inspiring woman.

Missionary Position: Yup, Christian evangelists actually call their strategy for converting Muslims “the camel method.” Not to mention the offensiveness of this kind of missionary work in the first place.

Rape victims world-wide are denied justice and dignity. A report from Amnesty International.

Liz Cheney’s smear campaign targets Obama officials and the most basic Constitutional principles. It’s shameful, and this piece is a must-read on an important issue.

Passion, Freedom and Women: A fascinating BlogTalk Radio segment.

The Race and Gender Wealth Gap: The median wealth for Single Black Women: $100. Single Hispanic Women: $120. Single White Women: $41,000.

Only some conspiracy theories are welcome at the Huffington Post. 9/11 Truthers are out, autism-vaccine-linkers in. Scary, since the Jenny McCarthys of the world are bringing a lot of disease and death to the children they claim to care about.

Is this article for real? (via Jezebel). Treating fat people like people should do just fine.

Law, Lies and the Abortion Debate: the Times on the various anti-choice infringements upon women’s health and rights.

Bart Stupak, he of the anti-abortion activism in health care reform, has a pro-choice Democratic primary challenger. Let’s hope the party gets behind her.

And that Stupak guy? He’s not actually against subsidizing abortion. He’s against subsidizing abortion for poor women.

Apparently old ladies don’t like sex! Echidne breaks it down.

Ms. Magazine has a new blog. Check it.

Hiram Monserrate, who was booted from the New York State Senate after slicing his girlfriend’s face with a glass bottle, is running to replace himself. His platform? Family values. His opponent will apparently “destroy our way of life” by supporting gay rights. Unlike Monserrate, who will keep our way of life perfectly in-tact by living — unmarried! — with a woman he physically abuses.

Finally: If LOST were Baywatch.

A must-read article about race, class, caste and the American prison system. A few facts from the piece:

• There are more African Americans under correctional control today — in prison or jail, on probation or parole — than were enslaved in 1850, a decade before the Civil War began.
  As of 2004, more African American men were disenfranchised (due to felon disenfranchisement laws) than in 1870, the year the Fifteenth Amendment was ratified, prohibiting laws that explicitly deny the right to vote on the basis of race.
• A black child born today is less likely to be raised by both parents than a black child born during slavery. The recent disintegration of the African American family is due in large part to the mass imprisonment of black fathers.
• If you take into account prisoners, a large majority of African American men in some urban areas have been labeled felons for life. (In the Chicago area, the figure is nearly 80%.) These men are part of a growing undercaste — not class, caste — permanently relegated, by law, to a second-class status. They can be denied the right to vote, automatically excluded from juries, and legally discriminated against in employment, housing, access to education, and public benefits, much as their grandparents and great-grandparents were during the Jim Crow era.

The mass incarceration of African Americans over the past 30 years is primarily related to the War on Drugs — a convenient cover for a program essentially targeted at the black community. The talking points all came back to the supposed rates of drug-related violence, but that doesn’t exactly compute with historical fact:

President Ronald Reagan officially declared the current drug war in 1982, when drug crime was declining, not rising. From the outset, the war had little to do with drug crime and nearly everything to do with racial politics. The drug war was part of a grand and highly successful Republican Party strategy of using racially coded political appeals on issues of crime and welfare to attract poor and working class white voters who were resentful of, and threatened by, desegregation, busing, and affirmative action. In the words of H.R. Haldeman, President Richard Nixon’s White House Chief of Staff: “[T]he whole problem is really the blacks. The key is to devise a system that recognizes this while not appearing to.”

The vast majority of people arrested for drug-related offenses are non-violent, and are arrested for possession rather than selling. Just read the whole thing.

Have you seen this “bitch list” that has been circulating around the interwebs? If you haven’t, you probably shouldn’t, because it is simultaneously sad, disturbing, and bizarrely creative, especially since it reportedly comes from a third grader. So I will not waste your time or mine by critiquing it, but I will say that I’m disappointed “feminist bitch” didn’t make the list. Perhaps it’s on one of the missing pages? Or maybe we’re just covered by the “instigating bitches” category.

I just like this photo.

Why a Big Mac costs less than a salad.

Wait people still make the “short skirts will get you raped” argument? For real?

Let’s hope Rush Limbaugh is a man of his word! Especially awesome is that when he threatens to leave the U.S. if health care reform passes, his destination of choice is a country with a pretty great universal health care system. Applause all around.

Some thoughts on pornography, men and misogyny. A topic I will hopefully write about later!

William Saletan takes on the “abortion is genocide” campaign, pointing out that guns are really killing a lot of African-Americans, but the “pro-life” movement doesn’t seem too concerned — in fact, they’re unapologetically pro-gun.

The numbers are provocative. But there’s something odd about the billboards. The child who appears beside the text is fully born. Abortion doesn’t kill such children. What kills them, all too often, is shooting. If you wanted to save living, breathing, fully born children from a tool of extermination that is literally targeting blacks, the first problem you would focus on is guns. They are killing the present, not just the future. But the sponsors of the “endangered species” ads don’t support gun control. They oppose it.

Two months ago, the Violence Policy Center issued an analysis of black homicide rates based on the latest FBI data. The national U.S. homicide rate is 5.3 per 100,000 people. Among whites, it’s 3.1 per 100,000. Among blacks, it’s 20.9 per 100,000. That’s four times the national rate and seven times the white rate. In 82 percent of black-victim homicides in which the fatal weapon can be identified, it’s a gun. And 73 percent of those gun deaths are inflicted by handguns.

The report calculates that in 2007, the most recent year for which data are available, blacks were 13 percent of the U.S. population but suffered 49 percent of all deaths by homicide. And the problem has been getting worse: From 2002 to 2007, the number of young black males killed by guns increased by more than 50 percent.

Maybe that’s why blacks, unlike whites, strongly favor gun control. In a Pew poll taken last year, whites said by a plurality of 50 percent to 44 percent that it was more important to protect the right to own guns than to control gun ownership. But an overwhelming majority of blacks, 72 percent to 20 percent, said it was more important to control gun ownership.

Saletan highlights the hypocrisy of anti-choicers raising a stink about race, when gun fanatics have pretty solid Klan roots — or, as he so beautifully phrases it, “People who live in glass hoods shouldn’t throw stones.” Indeed.

Well this is messed up. A UMass Amherst student allegedly raped an alumna of the school back in October. The alumna reported the rape to campus authorities, and apparently opted to go through the university’s disciplinary process instead of filing a formal complaint with the police. The dude confessed to the rape, and “was found responsible for sexual assault.” Which is a pretty serious crime.

His punishment: Deferred suspension. Meaning that he is allowed to continue living on campus, and he’ll graduate on time.

This is especially troubling when we know that campus rapists are often serial offenders, and when the university disciplinary process is supposed to be a way for sexual assault survivors to avoid the stress of going to court. Instead, it seems like too often the university is trying to cover its own ass and avoid a public relations nightmare instead of advocating for its students.