A veritable smorgasbord for you!
1. “Intimate Politics: A Roundtable”: a downloadable podcast of a panel of feminist scholars and their reactions (not book reviews, but further musings) to the book Intimate Politics: How I Grew Up Red, Fought for Free Speech, and Became a Feminist Rebel, by Bettina Aptheker.
2. “Who hates to hear they look great?”: amandaw on the “But you don’t look sick!” phenomenon and invisible disabilities.
3. “What are we doing here?”: magniloquence muses at length on the femisphere, its characters, and the dynamics of blogwars. Meta upon meta, lots to unpack here.
4. “Students use sex to promote healthy foods”: Two students in Canberra come up with the absolutely ground-breaking new idea of presenting scantily clad women’s bodies in order to promote a food group. Somehow, this is “Innovative!” national news.
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Filed under: Meta, Politics, Read 'ems, bigotry, birth, indigenous, interblog, language, racism
And most remiss in not thanking the delicious Guest Hoyden’s for helping Lauredhel keep the blog ticking over in my absence until after I’d made two posts today.
Thank you, thank you bluemilk, Helen on the Cast Iron Balcony, sajbrfem and Kate for such wonderful posts.
I had a great holiday in soft, deep snow that didn’t stress the joints the way that icy Australian snowfields usually do (’tis the vibrrrration, Cap’n, she’s shaking aparrrrt!). The kids enjoyed themselves, especially the ritual school holiday interlodge snowfight, and mr tog had a quiet lodge to himself with his laptop bein used recreationally only for most of the days (except the serious blizzard when we all stayed in).
On the way back home I sampled various coffees and cake on various occasions with the delectable Ampersand Duck, Zoe Crazybrave (with little Jethro) and Bernice Balconey with her lad (unfortunately missed Cristy Nopod and her Third Pea through an unfortunate series of minor events).
Glad to be back and able to spend more Hoyden time again though.
Filed under: blogging, blogmeet, travel
I’ve just tweaked the subscription service a little.
I was finding it wearing dealing with the few folks who decided that they’d rather reply to the comment notification emails than comment on the blog, so I’ve created a new address just to deal with the subscriptions and set up an auto-responder to nag people to comment on the blog instead of expecting an email reply (the tiny joys of blogging – aren’t they fabulous!).
So, if you have aggressive spam filters and don’t want to miss out on your “new comment” notifications, you might like to update them to reflect that subscribers will now receive notification emails from an account named “Hoyden About Town (do not reply)” and the email address sending them will be “hoyden.donotreply” at that gmail (d o t c o m) place.
Filed under: Meta, blogging
There were some long involved threads on ozblogs last week about Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Kim at LP, and those of us who agreed with her, got piled upon (twice) for disagreeing with some of Hirsi Ali’s suggestions about how to best end the oppression of women in Islamic cultures. The offended were a whole bunch of WOT-hawks who seem to think that Hirsi Ali’s many undeniable strengths and talents mean that somehow her opinions, agenda and tactics are above criticism. Their argument seemed to be that because Hirsi Ali has suffered sexist oppression justified by reference to Islam and she speaks of how such oppression needs to end through curtailing the power of Islam, that therefore her calls to eradicate Islam are the only plans for ending sexist oppression that should be listened to.
I’m not going to flinch away from mentioning female genital mutilation (FGM) here, because that seemed to be a core of the outrage: how could we criticise a women who wanted to end the genital cutting and mutilation of little girls? Of course, we never criticised Hirsi Ali wanting to end FGM: who doesn’t want to see the end of harmful physical mutilations?
We merely argued that her particular emphases and tactics seemed counterproductive rather than genuinely helpful to the goal of eradicating such harmful practices as infibulation (and never even got a chance to mention that by far the bulk of genital cutting is simple ritual labial marking which leaves minimal scarring on a par with piercing an ear, or that excision of the top part of the clitoral hood actually enhances sexual pleasure rather than diminishing it).
So, not waving away FGM, but now it’s back to the larger picture of women’s oppression by traditionalist male hierarchies. We can all agree that sexist oppression justified by religious teachings needs to end. Where many people have a problem with Hirsi Ali’s speeches on this is that she singles Islam out as somehow uniquely prone to being distorted by male hierarchies seeking to rationalise and justify the systemic oppression of women.
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Filed under: authoritarianism, blogging, interblog, islamophobia, middle east, religion, war
There’s a long and involved thread on Feministe right now about the much-bandied-about phrase “I hate children!” The guest blogger, Roy, wonders why open hate speech against children is perfectly ok, when it’s not generally acceptable against other group of disempowered and victimised people. For varying values of “not generally acceptable”, anyhow; much bigotry against women, against fat people, against old people, against poor people, against people with disabilities, against immigrants, and against some other groups seems to be still perfectly acceptable in many circles, or at least winked at.
There are many meanders and subthreads and analogies, but I’m just going to pluck out this comment by EG, as one of the ones that made me think. Following a discussion of “childish” behaviour and its putative unpleasantness and discourtesy:
We wouldn’t describe that behavior as “acting like a kid” if it wasn’t how kids acted.
Really? Right, because folk wisdom is always so very accurate. Does “act childish” mean “express enthusiasm and interest in the world,” “sit quietly by yourself and cut out paper dolls for two hours” or “learn everything there is to know about sharks”? No, it doesn’t. “Act like an adult”- does that mean harrass women on the street, drink too much, talk very loudly on cell phones in public places, talk very loudly right behind me when I’m at the movies, and commit murder? Because the overwhelming majority of perpetrators of such lousy behavior are adults. No. “Act like an adult” means “be on your best behavior.” So what does that mean? It means that adults control the discourse.
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Filed under: bigotry, family, interblog
I’m going to have to start writing proper posts more often. Along with the Blogocracy Round Robin initiative (see previous post), which was a welcome workout, I’m also going to be guest-blogging at Feministe for a week at the end of July June!
Jill has put together a roster of guest bloggers to fill the posting gap that’s due to Jill interning at a law firm this Northern summer and thus having less time for writing on the intertubes (law firms are sticky about browsing at work), and the roster includes ex-Feministe blogger and founder Lauren, as well as regular Feministe commentors Mikey, Little Light, Flea, Belledame, Trailer Park Feminist, Evil Fizz, kactus, SassyWho and Bean. Those who are regular readers of Feministe should appreciate just how varied that roster is in terms of various feminisms.
So, as Jill’s idea is to showcase a variety of voices rather than just cookie cutter feminism, I’m casting around for a few topics to cover that week that have a regional slant on feminist and progressive politics issues that are still of interest to the American majority readers of Feministe. Any suggestions (in comments please)?
Also, my own posting might be a little less frequent as I aim for more depth and analysis again in my posts. So I’m actively soliciting more guest posts here from people who have been commenting here for a while. Shoot me an email if you’ve got a post you’d like to see published at Hoyden. I’d like to see one or two guest posts a week, say.
Filed under: blogging, interblog
