Very-ish
Not Your Damsel - Examining gender and sexuality in pop culture, media, society, and politics.
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A Depilatory Problem
Dear Connecticut State Supreme Court, You Have Failed
The GOP Had to Push Somebody Over a Cliff
Writing Elsewhere
Book Reviews - YA, Urban Fantasy, Horror, and Dystopian fiction
Pink Raygun - Pop culture and entertainment
Three If By Space - Pop culture and entertainment
Word of the Nerd - Pop culture, comic books, and entertainment
Today in labor history, June 10, 1963: President John F. Kennedy signs into law the Equal Pay Act, prohibiting wage discrimination based on gender. Forty-nine years later, women are still making 77 cents for every dollar men make doing the same work.
If they’re not going to pay me as much as men, leaving 23% early is the only acceptable compromise.
(via amezri)
With twice as many women as men expected to lose their jobs in the public sector, women hit hardest by services and benefits cuts and concerns that as state services shrink women will have to fill in the gaps, women may find hard-won gains in sexual equality are rolled back,…
Melissa McEwan, of course, on the terrible bargain. My life as a woman, as a queer person, as a fat person, is not your thought experiment. (via sanitywatchers)
This really struck a chord. Even my boyfriend, feminist that he is, can have this reaction when I’m in tears after an NPR story. This is my fucking life. Excuse me if I can’t remove the personal.
(via curiousgeorgiana)
I reblogged this before, but I like it a lot so I’m reblogging it again.
This whole thing is the reason why confrontations with people that I consider friends always leaves me crying. Like, I get so angry and so flustered because it’s not just some stupid game to me, like it is to them. It’s something that’s real and personal.
(via liquidiousfleshbag)
“Why do you have to take this stuff so personally? ask the intellectual, clever, and engaged men, who have never considered that the content of the abstract exercise that’s so much fun for them is the stuff of my life.”
This has been my entire problem/experience with grad school. I go to a university known for their emphasis on critical theory and political theory. But the men in my classes, for them, there is nothing at stake. They’re great on class issues. They’re all intense Marxists who fully understand why we’ve gotten to where we are, but none of them have read critical race or gender theory. In all honesty, I’m starting to think that it’s because class is something that you can disown or hide away that you can’t with race, gender, or sexuality. I’m not saying class is escapable or class is fakeable. But my personal hypothesis (this is backed by nothing more than trying to figure out why intelligent, sensitive, critical human beings cannot talk about race or gender) is that I think it’s easier for them to be critical about class than about race or gender because class is something they know they engage in but that they can concretely change. Try talking to them about gender, and what they hear you saying is you’re trying to talk to them about how they, personally, have fucked up towards the women in their life. Class is material! Class is systemic! Class gets us all! And yet they can’t perceive of anything else as systemic without hearing a personal attack on themselves.
Anyway, that’s the place I’m at with the manarchists and brocialists in my institution, if that made any sense. Class behaviour seems more mutable and lets them excuse themselves more because CAPITALISM! but them? They would never be racist or misogynist. One last thing to add: there’s a reason why the closest friends I have in my grad school are either female, POC, queer, or some combination of the above.
(via lau-ra-sau-rus)
This essay seems more painful each time I read it. It articulates a particularly difficult aspect of my relationship with my late father in a way that I would never have dared, yet it is only the heartbreaking truth:
There are the jokes about women, about wives, about mothers, about raising daughters, about female bosses. They are told in my presence by men who are meant to care about me, just to get a rise out of me, as though I am meant to find funny a reminder of my second-class status. I am meant to ignore that this is a bullying tactic, that the men telling these jokes derive their amusement specifically from knowing they upset me, piss me off, hurt me. They tell them and I can laugh, and they can thus feel superior, or I can not laugh, and they can thus feel superior. Heads they win, tails I lose. I am used as a prop in an ongoing game of patriarchal posturing, and then I am meant to believe it is true when some of the men who enjoy this sport, in which I am their pawn, tell me, “I love you.” I love you, my daughter. I love you, my niece. I love you, my friend. I am meant to trust these words.
(via utternutter)
[re-reblobbing for more commentary]
(via 14kgoldnyc)
Everything above. Every damn day.
(via cactustreemotel)
Reblogged for commentary.
(via always-tete)
(via monanotlisa)
The Republican party may not have won the public opinion war over birth control coverage, but they’re willing to try it again.
And this time, with more money.
Introducing “Conscience Cause,” a new 501c4 that is ready to fight for religious employers’ rights to deny birth control coverage to their employees.
Once more, the talking point is that it’s not about women’s health, but freedom of religion. And it must be true… after all, there’s a woman in the group!
“I do not feel that it is reactionary or even inaccurate to describe an unwanted, non-indicated transvaginal ultrasound as “rape”. If I insert ANY object into ANY orifice without informed consent, it is rape. And coercion of any kind negates consent, informed or otherwise.”
“It is our responsibility, as always, to protect our patients from things that would harm them. Therefore, as physicians, it is our duty to refuse to perform a medical procedure that is not medically indicated. Any medical procedure. Whatever the pseudo-justification.”
Thanks to Phil Plait for the heads up on this one.
If you value women, the health of Americans, science, privacy, or freedom, PLEASE READ THIS AND REBLOG.
From the site:
Senate bill 1387, better known as the Mandatory Ultrasound bill, would mandate that women who are seeking an abortion would be required to have a mandatory Ultrasound. This is a case of government overreach into the the private lives of Idaho Citizens and interferes in a joint medical process between a family and their doctor.
• SB 1387 is government intrusion by writing into statute a specific medical procedure that may not be necessary.
• This requirement inserts politicians into the medical room and sets aside doctors and the patient.
• Currently, government mandated medical procedures are only done on those arrested for criminal offenses or for the mentally ill, and neither are required to pay for it.
• The standard of care in the medical profession needs to remain with doctors NOT in the government’s hand.
• The bill places a financial burden on women who must have the ultrasound done; thus placing a discriminatory financial barrier on poor women.
• There needs to be a medical exception where a doctor can exercise judgement for terminating wanted pregnancies that result in early fetal complicationsContact Gov. C.L. “Butch” Otter
By phone at (208)-334-2100
By email: http://gov.idaho.gov/ourgov/contact.html
By Fax (208)-334-3454
Submitted by danikamcclure - it’s their home state!
SIGNAL BOOST!!!
(via stfuconservatives)
Today in Palo Alto, California, members of the Raging Grannies Action League said that men who want drugs such as Viagra to treat impotence should be required to have strict testing before receiving said drugs.
The Grannies applauded Ohio State Senator Nina Turner who has introduced a bill requiring that physicians take specific actions before prescribing Viagra and similar drugs, including giving a cardiac stress test and making a referral to a sex therapist for confirmation that the patient’s symptoms are not solely attributable to one or more psychological conditions.
The photo was taken of members of the Raging Granny VRB (Viagra Review Board) in response to moves by Republicans to limit women’s right to reproductive health. Members of the Review Board are all women who came of age before Roe v. Wade. From their headquarters in Palo Alto they announced that they are old enough to know what it was like to live before women’s reproductive rights became law of the land, and they will do all they can to make sure that the US does not return to that era.This is priceless. I ♥ it!
(via tygermama)
The Right Wing decided it wanted to play Monday Morning Quarterback with my lady parts this year. It seems like an odd choice for a recreational activity, especially since there’s no legislative or medical reason to suddenly introduce radically restrictive and dangerous legislation on women’s health and bodies. Maybe someone should introduce them to Pinterest instead.
Here are our Top 10 Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Attacks on Women’s Rights (just in the last 6 months!)
- The Blunt Amendment. Reasonable religious exemptions weren’t enough for Roy Blunt. This amendment would have allowed your employer – not your doctor - to decide what kind of health care you could get based on his or her own personal moral or religious convictions.
- The All-Male Birth Control Panel, or the Man Panel. Congressman Darrell Issa convened a panel to discuss the coverage of birth control – but refused to include any women.
- Susan G. Komen Foundation defunds Planned Parenthood. Komen opted to cut off funding to the largest provider of reproductive health services in the US because of their new VP’s objection to a mere 3% of their activities.
- Rush Limbaugh Calls Sandra Fluke a Prostitute and a Slut. After Sandra Fluke stood up for women everywhere, Rush Limbaugh took to the airwaves and called her a prostitute and a slut for speaking out in favor of birth control coverage. He also said she should have to put videos of her having sex online to compensate the taxpayers who “are going to pay for your contraceptives.” Classy.
- Forced Trans-Vaginal Ultrasounds. Republican legislators in Virginia invited the commonwealth into the exam room when they proposed a bill that would require women seeking abortions to undergo an invasive, medically-unnecessary vaginal probe before their procedure.
- Texas defunds Planned Parenthood. Under Governor Rick Perry, the state of Texas banned funding to Planned Parenthood because it provides abortion services. In the end, though, this fight has only served to hurt low-income women looking for breast cancer screenings, birth control and pap smears.
- Women in the Military Should “Expect” to be Raped. Responding to a 64% increase in the reports of rape and violent sexual assaults in the military, Fox News pundit Liz Trotta responds, “What did they expect?” She goes on to say that there is a bureaucracy of people to support these women who are being “raped too much.”
- Foster Friess Suggests Women Put Aspirin Between Their Knees. Rick Santorum supporter, Foster Friess, reminisced about back in his day when ladies put aspirin between their knees for birth control. Back in his day, people also died of polio.
- Santorum wants to deny birth control coverage because he thinks it’s available and affordable. Despite the fact that most forms of birth control still require a prescription and 1 in 3 women have reported struggling to afford birth control. Santorum feels there is no barrier to access, so it shouldn’t be covered by insurance.
- Mitt Romney doesn’t understand a woman’s reproductive system. Romney has publicly supported “personhood amendments,” which would ban abortion by declaring life begins at conception. When asked about how this affects birth control, Romney seemed to be completely unaware that hormonal forms of birth control stop implantation, not conception and would be banned under any personhood amendment.
And it’s only the middle of March.
(via tygermama)
