Notable News: Week of June 1-7, 2013

I don’t know about you, but I’m glad it’s Friday.  My kids have one last recital tomorrow, and after that, we’re done with performance season.  It’s always a lot of fun, but it’s tiring!

Here are a few of my favorite posts this week.

1. Femininity

I appreciated Megan Gahan’s Reclaiming Femininity because I, too, have struggled with accepting the frillier parts of womanhood.  I suppose all I would add is that being feminine isn’t about rejecting or embracing lace and ruffles and high heels.  It’s about the freedom to choose without shame.

2. Sexism

Sarah Moon continues her series “You Are Not Your Own” with this post about gender roles and dehumanization.  The photos she’s used to illustrate animalization and objectification are strikingly horrible.  Lately, I’ve started seeing some things creeping into my various social media timelines in which men are dehumanized in similar ways.  The answer to the objectification of women is not to do it to men, it’s to stop doing it.

3. Masturbation

Rachel Held Evans gathered 7 different perspectives on the subject and shared them on her blog.  I highly recommend reading it, and if you’re feeling strong, read the comments as well.  Unfortunately, there is still a lot of shame both in the act and in discussing it, so even if I don’t entirely agree with some of what’s been said (and generally think that “Christian” perspectives lack the necessary knowledge of basic human biology), I’m glad people are talking.

4. Writing

Feeling creative?  Like to write?  My fellow writers/bloggers Tamara Woods and Michelle Liew are running the Creative Buzz Hop.  Go check out the prompt and write something, then link up with them.  You’ve still got nearly a week for the current prompt, so get writing!

5. Dialects

These maps of regional dialects in the U. S. are interesting.  I don’t know whether it’s because of bias in the questions or because of my specific location or because my parents weren’t natives to the city in which I grew up, but quite a lot of these were wrong for me.  You can check it out and see if it fits for you.

6. Headdesk

A friend introduced me to this Tumblr account.  She sent me this one a few days ago and it made me laugh out loud.  It may have made me snort, though I won’t confirm that.  I also really, really like this one.

7. Cartoons

Two really good ones this week from Naked Pastor: Rob Bell’s bullshit and emotionally invested preconceived stereotype of women.  Boy, can I relate to the last one.  The one and only person I’ve ever blocked from my blog and my Twitter feed (other than bots, of course) certainly had quite a lot of it.

8. Slut-shaming

Here we go again.  I’m not really interested in the lives of celebrities, but this article made me furious.  It’s not so much about morals as it is about how people who otherwise don’t care who gets into bed with whom think it’s okay to go off on Kate Winslet for having children with the men she’s married.  It’s framed in such a bizarre way that we would not see if it were a man and his successive wives.  It’s also something done to non-celebs all the time, particularly non-white women.  Back when I was a school nurse, we had a student who was the middle child of ten.  He mother was not married at the time the girl was at my school, but she had a very young baby–which meant she was open to the ridicule of the staff.  I remember saying at the time that we didn’t know her life or her circumstances and we needed to shut up (and thankfully, my principal and the girl’s classroom teacher backed me on that).  Even then I knew that the attitude was both misogynistic and racist, though I didn’t have quite the words back then to describe what bothered me.  Anyway, we need to shut up about Kate Winslet, since we don’t actually know her whole story or her life and it’s not any of our business regardless.

9. Superheroes

I love these wonderful drawings of favorite women superheroes wearing more practical–and less skimpy–clothes.  Honestly, I wasn’t quite sure at first about the drawing of the men in skimpy costumes because (as I said above) I don’t think the answer is to objectify men.  But I think that’s the point of the drawing–that it’s equally bad when we make it all about paring down the costume so we can see ripply muscles and, er, other endowments, as well as underscoring the impracticality of saving the world in a bathing suit.

Have a great weekend, everyone!