feminist blogs

This post is a part of the THIS IS WHAT A YOUNG FEMINIST LOOKS LIKE blog carnival. According to some (ahem, Newsweek and the New York Times), young feminists do not exist. Those same people also say that young people don’t care about reproductive rights and equal pay for women. As a young woman myself, [...]

Read more global feminist posts at Gender Across Borders.

Today is the 90th anniversary of the passage of the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, also known as Women's Equality Day. You probably (hopefully?) know that the 19th Amendment gave women the right to vote (okay, theoretically…this was many years before the passage of the Voting Rights Act so in reality we are probably [...]

This 8-minute video from Powering A Nation documents the fight of Kindra Arnesen to save her family and her Gulf Shores community. It’s a stirring portrait of how one family has been affected by the oil spill and is trying to fight back:

Via NPR.

(View original at http://thesocietypages.org/socimages)

These Bed Stü shoes, sent in by Dmitriy T.M., are meant to appear as if they are covered in oil accumulated while cleaning up the BP oil spill in the gulf.

According to Selectism, 100% of the proceeds are going to help wildlife affected by the spill.

So Bed Stü makes no money on this collection, but gains a great deal of publicity and, potentially, good will from consumers.  And then some dude is going to be wearing shoes that look like they’re covered in oil at a garden party.

This looks to me like an example of “conspicuous conservation.”  The term was originally derived from the phrase “conspicuous consumption,” defined by Wikipedia as “lavish spending on goods and services acquired mainly for the purpose of displaying income or wealth.”  Conspicuous conservation, then, is the (often lavish) spending on “green” products designed mainly to advertise one’s environmentally-moral righteousness.

If you wear regular shoes and donate to the gulf spill clean up, your altruism is entirely invisible.  But if you buy these hideous things, everyone gets to know what a nice guy you are.

(View original at http://thesocietypages.org/socimages)

According to Time, Kazakhstan tobacco farms contracted by Philip Morris have allowed children to work alongside their parents.  This practice is outlawed because of the hard nature of the labor, the harmful pesticides used to protect the tobacco, and the fact that nicotine is absorbed through the skin.  Last year Human Rights Watch completed 68 interviews with workers, documenting 72 cases of child labor.  Philip Morris, who claims to oppose child labor, reportedly thanked Human Rights Watch for the information.  Below are photographs of children on the tobacco farms.

A boy harvests tobacco:

A child’s hands covered in tobacco residue:

A father and his son ride to work:

Drying tobacco:

Don’t miss the little boy in the Mini Mouse t-shirt:

(View original at http://thesocietypages.org/socimages)

You may think you have unlimited access to water, but just because it flows like the Nile River doesn’t mean it’s never-ending. If you live in a developed country, it is most likely in your culture that you should bathe everyday (which includes washing your body and hair). If you don’t bathe every day–don’t tell [...]

Read more global feminist posts at Gender Across Borders.

Sometimes the fight for gender equality must be fought at a macro level. Sometimes, the ideas for which we fight become overwhelming and seemingly unending. It is easy to forget that battles for equality are fought by people; people who eat, sleep, laugh, and cry just like the rest of us. Until a few days [...]

We have already discussed the imperialistic and racist dimensions of Eat, Pray, Love. Today, a movie based on this book is coming out and it is predicted to be a huge success. So why is there such a huge (mostly female) following the book and movie about what one reviewer calls a "pampered princess on constant display" with a "petulant, overblown ego"? Female life choices are still pretty

Many in the U.S. hadn't heard of "blood diamonds" until the popular film with Leonardo DiCaprio. The mining and sale of diamonds from Sierra Leone, the Congo and other African countries have long financed and fueled war, slavery and unspeakable violence in parts of Africa.

While there is a regulatory system in place that arguably reduces [...]

As of yesterday afternoon, when Federal Judge Walker overturned Proposition 8 in California, gay rights in the US have been looking up. Thousands celebrated in California and across the country last night, and rightfully so. And yet, true equality, especially when it comes to the military, still seems so far off.  Since Obama was elected [...]