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Showing posts from June, 2013

Bits and Bobs on Feminist Theory #6: Gender Equality

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Equality is the fictional top of a really fucked up, cold, hard-to-live-on mountaintop. Men are at the top of that mountain, chilling out, maxing, relaxing all cool, but women are still trying to grapple up the side of the mountain and get to flat land. That is not to say that the mountaintop is awesome. There are TONS of problems! The air is thin, there's no electricity. It's cold, so you can't grow shit to eat; but you can pitch tents, get shelter, stay warm, and basically live in relative safety. All the while, WOMEN ARE HANGING OFF THE SIDE OF THE MOUNTAIN. It's not that men don't have it bad. It's that women have it worse, and because we have it so much worse  (hello, hanging off a mountain here) it is necessarily a priority to get us up to the top of the mountain before we can start tackling the mountaintop problems. How can I help you insulate your tent against the cold if you refuse to help me get to the top of the mountain? Not to mention, an intersecti

Here Is A Thing That Happened: My Photo Made It On The Front Page!

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You will have to take my word for it because this front page image is terrible and you can't read the caption, but MY PICTURE MADE IT ON THE FRONT PAGE TODAY! *runs around in circles screaming in excitement* Finally. Something is going well this month. I literally spent 2 hours (LITERALLY literally, not figuratively literally) walking around Port-of-Spain covering this story, so it feels good to have my work pay off. Woohoo! It was pretty cool too. A cement truck caught an overhead wire and pulled down three electricity poles and bent another, and the three poles fell on three separate cars because MURPHY'S LAW. Ah well. At least no one was seriously injured.

Sound Off: A Note on Body Image

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Editor's Note: This post originally appeared on this blog on January 3rd, 2011.  I am republishing it because I think it's a message that bears repeating.  I t has been lightly edited for style and grammar.  Read some of the subsequent writing I've done on body image in the following posts: Changing the Conversation: The Dove "Real Beauty" Campaign and the Debate on "Real" Women Changing the Conversation Pt. 2: The Dove "Real Beauty" Sketches via  inside thought Makes you cringe a little doesn't it? When I first saw this photo in  December,  it honestly just made me sad. Sad for this woman, sad for myself, and sad for the industry that makes this kind of thinking so ubiquitous.  The sad fact is that millions of women feel this way about themselves because of the severely restricted standard of beauty that is perpetuated within the fashion industry.  I spent the last two weeks of the semester writing two different papers on digital manipulat

Things I Love: Disney Burlesque!

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via MadHanz MORE DISNEY FANART! This time, it's Disney princesses as burlesque showgirls. Check out the other girls over on buzzfeed , and check out more of the artists work on his tumblog !

Music/Movies: A Little Party Music From Baz Lurhman's The Great Gatsby

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I AM OBSESSED WITH THIS SOUNDTRACK. Seriously, listen to it.  I saw the movie about two weeks ago with a friend, and the music was easily the best part. I loved the way the music was almost another character in the movie; clearly noticeable, but not distracting from the other elements of the film. I especially loved the way Ja-Z was able to blend contemporary rap and R&B with jazz and swing to create this incredible exciting new and relevant sound that was still evocative of the 20's. Loved it through and through. Let me know which sings are your favourites in the comments below! Continue Reading My Brilliance! >>>

Bits and Bobs on Feminist Theory #5: On Abortion As (NOT) Murder

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"A three-day-old human embryo is a collection of 150 cells called a blastocyst. There are, for the sake of comparison, more than 100,000 cells in the brain of a fly. The human embryos that are destroyed in stem-cell research do not have brains, or even neurons. Consequently, there is no reason to believe they can suffer their destruction in any way at all.  It is worth remembering, in this context,  that when a person's brain has died, we currently deem it acceptable to harvest his organs (provided he has donated them for this purpose) and bury him in the ground. If it is acceptable to treat a person whose brain has died as something less than a human being, it should be acceptable to treat a blastocyst as such. If you are concerned about suffering in this universe, killing a fly should present you with greater moral difficulties than killing a human blastocyst."  -Sam Harris Truer words. They have yet to be spoken.

Here Is A Thing That Happened: My Birthday Sucked

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via mydamnchannel I don't want to talk about it.  I'd much rather obliquely solicit pity on the internet. As is my right. Poo.

Bits and Bobs on Feminist Theory #4: More People Are Feminists Than They Think

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It's pretty clear that very few people actually understand feminism, or what the intersectional feminist movement actually stands for. It really bugs me that so many people (including people I know) are so adamantly against identifying as feminist, and feminism in general, when so much of the way they live their lives makes it pretty clear that they're feminists. And it's not that I advocate forcibly applying labels to people. I don't. But it upsets me that people who agree with 90% of the same feminist philosophy that I do, will advocate for reproductive rights in one breath, and call feminism outdated and obsolete in the next. Feminism needs a complete rebranding before the pver-arching idea of "hairy lesbian bra-burners" disappears forever, but until then, it's actually not that hard  to do the research, read the theory, and actually understand the tenets of the philosophy you claim to be so vehemently against.

House Stark Is Full Of Hipsters

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Arya Stark as a graffitti loving hipster via Moshi-Kun Do you love Game of Thrones, or do you LOVE Game of Thrones? While I haven't managed to catch up on this week's ( apparently tragic ) episode of #GoT yet, (Poor person with a basic cable budget, and a reporter's schedule. Judge me), these wonderful illustrations by Tokyo-based, French graphic designer, Mike Wroebel, are just enough to get me through another day of missing the epic-ness of the Red Wedding .  (And I accidentally glimpsed the lead-in to that article while I was pasting the link and now I know there was a massacre. SPOILERS EVERYWHERE! :/) This awesome illustration of badass Arya Stark was my favourite, but head over to his blog to check out other equally awesome illustrations of Daenerys Targaryen,   Brienne of Tarth , Jon Snow and a few others as super hipsters of the 80's. You won't be sorry. I promise! EDIT: I finally watched Sunday's episode and FUCK. Somebody should have prepared me for