Debbie says: [cross-posted from Geek Feminism] No marginalized group can move forward without allies, and all of us have the opportunity to be allies as well as need allies. So it behooves us to look at what high-integrity, committed ally work looks like. And that’s why I want to tell you about my brother. When [...]

Lynne Murray says: In August of 2010, I posted here about feminist artist Brenda Oelbaum’s work turning diet books into papier mâché models of the Venus of Willendorf. Now Brenda is bringing her vision to the larger stage with “a national ad campaign to take down $66 BILLION Diet Industry.” She calls her project “DUMP [...]

Debbie says: Sorry we’ve been slow to blog this month. Laurie took a vacation and Debbie was dealing with a death in the family, but we’re both home now and blogging regularly until WisCon, when we traditionally take a week’s break. One of the stories we’ve been meaning to get around to is the inimitable [...]

Debbie says: A couple of months ago, Jessa Crispin at Bookslut was very actively recommending Depression: A Public Feeling by Ann Cvetkovich. I’m not prone to depression and I had never heard the phrase “public feeling,” but Crispin’s comments made me curious, and I picked up the book. [the] idea that depression can come from [...]

Lynne Murray and Debbie say: Peggy Orenstein, author of Cinderella Ate My Daughter: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the New Girlie-Girl Culture, blogs about her struggle with the creeping princess contagion: When I first started writing about the Disney Princesses, people assumed my beef was with the girl waiting around to be rescued by [...]

Laurie and Debbie say: (Cross-posted on Feministe) Our internet neighborhoods are buzzing over a particular piece of April fool nastiness, in which a movie reviewer, whose April Fool’s pseudonym is the rather descriptive L. Ron Creepweans, for Locus Magazine (the most prominent news magazine in the science fiction/fantasy world) thought he could be funny by [...]

Debbie says: One of the many good things about Nicholas Day’s article in Slate about the science of breast milk is that, pretty close to the beginning, he goes out of his way to say that “conversations about lactation always seem to require disclaimers,” and his is that lack of breast milk has never been [...]

Lynne Murray says: Debbie pointed out this Washington Post blog by Delia Lloyd about “plus-sized” Swedish department store mannequins and the storm of interest in them: Let’s face it. Part of the mannequins’ viral appeal was no doubt the illusion that they came from Sweden, that Nordic bastion of pushing-the-envelope cultural fare that brought us [...]

Laurie and Debbie say: Melissa McEwen at Shakesville recently delivered a very satisfactory smackdown to Richard Dawkins when he decided to discuss his opinions of abortion on Twitter. In this series of tweets, Dawkins said, “My criterion for “relevant to morality of abortion” is standard consequentialist morality. Opponents follow absolutist morality. Simple.” First, to quote [...]

Debbie says: I doubt there is a better analysis anywhere of the lack of female road narratives than this amazing piece by Vanessa Veselka. It is not a pretty story: By 2004, so many women had been found dead along the interstates that the FBI started the Highway Serial Killers Initiative to keep track of [...]