feminist blogs

Alex Tchekmeian, maker of clever violently misogynist t-shirts.

Alex Karekin Tchekmeian is the creator of a “Cuttin’ Up Hookers” t-shirt, complete with graphics. And he is so proud of his little design that he showed up on Ren’s blog to have a good laugh about how “I actually support hookers, in all reality. ;) …PS, hookers sure don’t complain when they take my dolla dolla bills yall! So all’s well that ends well, say I.”

Adorable, ain’t he? And Alex just gets better:

Oy vey.

Please don’t ever compare jews to hookers or gays again. That is just plain insulting, and you should know better if you really are one.

A better analogy would be to “beat up bums,” “Superman strippers” or “kill Republicans.” You know, keeping with the whole “low-life” theme here. (no offense to anyone)

Look, I respect your right to dissent. But you should also respect my right to exercise free speech. Which I see absolutely nothing wrong with.

Apparently you guys are too uptight to get my shirts - but plenty do. It’s no different than a comedian. Should he quit simply because a few find him offensive? Shit, if that were the case, half of Jewish comics would be flipping burgers right now!

Look, I have some advice. Have a coupla tequila shots and come back when your sphincters have relaxed a notch. Lighten up, life is fun!

Seriously, just relax:

Ok, fair enough then.

I and many young men and women find my shirts uproariously funny.

A few harpies on the internet don’t.

We done yet?

Or would you like me to send you a complimentary Cuttin T-shirt?

Well, count me as one of the internet harpies. But at least count me as someone who passed eighth grade civics (note to Alex: People on the internet saying you’re an asshole are not infringing on your free speech rights).

Alex thinks that he is pretty hilarious, and he’s under the impression that lots of people agree with him. So, in support of our new friend, I offer the following contact information (which belle took from his website from his website) so that you can tell this fantastic businessman just how much you appreciate his work:

http://www.aktenterprises.com/tchekmeian.php

Alex Karekin Tchekmeian

AKT Enterprises
11929 E. Colonial Drive #166
Orlando, Florida 32826

(T) 888.429.0666
(F) 407.574.3012

Email
alex@aktenterprises.com

Company Web Site
www.aktenterprises.com

General Company Contact
info@aktenterprises.com

Thanks to Buried Alive for breaking the story, and belledame for sending it on.

This is going to be fun.

I do love being quoted in the New York Times as saying that “I see a scary animalistic black man, a primal scream, and a beautiful white woman.” Ah, context!

I first saw this ad when I was in Germany, and took note of it mostly because the dude is smokin’ and because I was surprised to see men kissing on television (we don’t get that in ‘merica):

Then I saw it again on TV in the gym a few days ago. In the USA. Guess which part was cut out.

I’m a day late on this, but TigTog is celebrating international kilt day. And it is glorious. Head over there and check it out.

Menace to society?

The obsession with the headscarf is having a profoundly negative effect on Muslim women around the world. Luckily, feminist activists are standing up for the rights of all women to attend school and hold public office — no matter what they wear.

Under Turkish law, women who cover their hair cannot attend university or enter public buildings. The laws were passed in the name of secularism; in reality, though, they’re powerful tools of oppression, and particularly of male power to dictate which kinds of women are acceptable in certain spaces. Because make no mistake about it — in Turkey, this is about class as much as religion:

Ms. Benli’s family came to Istanbul from rural Turkey before she was born. They were part of a huge wave of migration to cities that began in the second part of the last century, as uneducated religious Turks sought work in newly developing industries. In the process, Turkey changed into an urban society from an agrarian one, with more than 70 percent of the population living in cities today. By the 1990s, their children began to go to college.

Still, the state remained divided by class, and the secular elite who controlled the state through institutions like the military and the judiciary watched warily as growing numbers of covered women, whose mothers had not been educated, entered campuses.

Ms. Benli was the first person in her family to get a college education. She earned her law degree before the state began to enforce the ban in the late 1990s. But her two years of additional graduate work was stopped by the restriction, an interpretation of an earlier court ruling. A 300-page master’s thesis at Istanbul University law school had to be orally defended on campus. Her mother, also covered, pressed her to remove her scarf, to no avail.

“I just couldn’t do it,” Ms. Benli said in an interview in her small law office this week. “I left the room crying. They marked me absent.”

She says the reasons, deeply personal and hard to put into words, are a combination of her relationship to God and her aversion to accepting what she sees as misplaced authority.

“This is related to my private life,” she said. “It’s my personality. My wholeness.”

In one particularly traumatic example, as told to Ms. Benli by several of her clients, a university rector forced several women to uncover their heads in front of him, in order to obtain his signature to allow them to transfer out of the college he was taking over and no longer allowing them to attend.

The state, she said, was saying, “No matter what you think, I can make you do what I want,” an attitude which, if obeyed, made one feel “degraded.”

MS. BENLI contends passionately that the ban moves Turkish society backward by keeping women like herself out of skilled professions. The women in her generation of the family include a doctor, a dentist and a teacher, but their daughters have fewer opportunities.

“There’s a sense of defeat,” she said. “Now, the objective is to have a family, to make a nice marriage. They do not have the ideals we once had.”

For the past decade she has been defending cases of covered women who argue that the state has violated their legal rights. She has medical students who cannot get their diplomas, a housewife who is not allowed to take driving lessons, a woman whose husband, a civil servant, takes another woman, uncovered, to official ceremonies as his wife.

Because of her scarf, which is also banned in public buildings, Ms. Benli cannot defend the cases in the courts, and so has to send uncovered partners to do so for her. Last month, one of her law partners took up the veil, and now they are both looking for new partners.

(more…)

You’ve gotta hand it to the assholes over at Hot Air — just when they couldn’t get any more trite, racist and misogynist, they do.

Thanks to Matt for the link.

That’s what I think of when I read this NYT article about skinny male models, sent along by Pizza Diavola.

Wasn’t it just a short time ago that the industry was up in arms about skinny models? Little over a year ago, in Spain, designers were commanded to choose models based on a healthy body mass index; physicians were installed at Italian casting calls; Diane von Furstenberg, the president of the Council of Fashion Designers of America, and Anna Wintour, the editor of Vogue, called a conference to ventilate the issue of unhealthy body imagery and eating disorders among models.

The models in question were women, and it’s safe to say that they remain as waiflike as ever. But something occurred while no one was looking. Somebody shrunk the men.

I realize that some men have eating disorders, but it’s quite unlikely that they’re looking to fashion models for inspiration/beauty standards in quite the same way that women — who, after all, are pushed to value themselves solely on how well they fit into prevalent beauty standards, which are right now extremely difficult for most women to pull off — are. Men aren’t exactly looking to the tents in Bryant Park for their inspiration. Nor is there — yet — the intense downward pressure for male models to get skinnier and skinnier, until they start dropping dead when they step off the catwalk.

Indeed, men who do have eating disorders often are athletes rather than models. Any sport that has weight classes, such as boxing or wrestling or horse racing, will produce athletes who are not only weight-conscious, but who will go to extremes to maintain a weight at the top of their weight class. My brother wrestled in high school and college (and my mother, who had few social outlets, got reallyreallyreally into being a Wrestling Mom). Weight was never really an issue with him, since he competed in the Heavyweight class, which more or less had no upper end. Though he did once try to get into the 191 class (he’s 6′3″). Fortunately, that didn’t last long, since it made him cranky as hell, not to mention weak and unable to compete as well as he wanted to.

But since our high school had a giant gym with an indoor track, we often hosted kids from New England for the Summer Olympics tryouts (the prize was a trip to the University of Northern Iowa in August! Woo!). Which meant that the Wrestling Moms were asked to host kids from around the region who competed in the tryouts. (In fact, I’ve already written here about one of the guys we hosted, who eventually became one of the first blind climbers to climb Everest — and who was identified as one of the first gay climbers to climb Everest on a local news program).

What got my mom was that these kids who stayed with us (there were two; Erik the blind guy, since we were willing to take his guide dog as well (though our dog wasn’t too happy with that, so Wizard stayed in our finished basement — not a bad deal, since it was the coolest place in the house) and Josh, who was fairly obsessive in his Iran-Contra hearings watching) were sucking weight, and all they wanted to eat was broiled fish and vegetables. Which did us all good, really, but it made all the stories my brother had told of guys running until they passed out (indeed, it seemed like at least one guy died in Iowa every summer), or getting put onto an exercise bike in the aisle of the bus to pedal all the way to the out-of-town match hit home.

Indeed, if guys have skinny role models, they’re likely going to be rock stars, who are not only rather notable for their thinness, but also notable for their drug use. But given the number of paths to acceptability open to men, it’s not seen as imperative for men to emulate male models *or* rock stars. That’s not to say that men don’t have looks pressure on them, but it’s not the same kind of pressure that’s on women. As I said, there are many paths that men have to acceptability, and if rock-star looks are foreclosed to them, they can choose another path.

So why all the fluttering about male models just beginning to slide down the low-body-fat slope? Perhaps it’s just that once a problem becomes one that men deal with, it’s suddenly a real problem, no matter how long women have been dealing with it.

Really, there are no words for this: the new John Galliano men’s collection, inspired by Carnevale and … Abu Ghraib. Complete with hoods, nooses and fake-blood chest and head wounds.

What the hell was he thinking? *Was* he thinking?

Perhaps it was some misguided attempt at commenting on Abu Ghraib, but it’s hard to see how that can possibly be done during a fashion show in a way that doesn’t trivialize what the victims of Abu Ghraib went through.

Pictures below; may well be triggering. (more…)

I just bought a caftan.

And I *love* it.

There’s now a t-shirt just for you. Two pages of shirts, even. And all the proceeds go to NARAL — what could be better?

Thanks to Laurie for the link.