Lynne Murray says, In April I saw the river of short comments on Twitter marked by the hash tag #thingsfatpeoplearetold. Brian at http://red3.blogspot.com/ started the topic, which garnered 2000 original tweets in 48 hours, and he rounded up some responses to it in this post and in a guest post on Shakespeare’s Sister he summed [...]

Laurie says: This month is the 200th anniversary of the birth of Harriet Beecher Stowe, a major figure in the abolitionist and other social change movements of her day. .. .. Harriet Beecher Stowe (June 14, 1811 – July 1, 1896) was a American Abolitionist and author. Her novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin(1852) depicted life for [...]

Debbie says: I don’t have much to add to this post on Sociological Images. Lisa Wade says: The tie isn’t a generic masculine symbol, but a class-specific one. More, it ties fatherhood into the idea of being a breadwinner. What is significant about a Dad? The fact that he works so hard for the family. [...]

Lynne Murray says: When I checked in on the irrepressible Dave Roche, whose memoir, The Church of 80% Sincerity, I reviewed here in 2008, I had no idea that Dave had gone and joined a gang–a gang of five to be specific–and taken part in a film, Shameless: The Art of Disability. Filmmaker Bonnie Sherr [...]

Laurie says: These three ads got me thinking about the way people often deny the reality of racism and prejudice when we experience it in advertising. It seems to me that we experience advertising as part of our everyday world, rather than our more public world permeated with politics, rationales of war, catastrophes, celebrities etc. [...]

Laurie says: I took this photo of Tsunaoka Sadako in the small building where she worked.  It was where she wanted to be photographed and it was a day when the workshop was closed.  There were a group of people there including her husband and some friends and a student of Becky Jennison’s from Kyoto [...]

Laurie and Debbie say: Jos at Feministing has a piece on “the daughter test,” , in which she references a recent ongoing conversation among some influential men in the media, who seem to be concluding that designing the law to protect their daughters is A Good Thing. Steven Levitt, co-author of the Freakonomics books, says: [...]

Debbie says: Zach calls himself “debaser9779,” on YouTube. I don’t know what he’s debasing, but he’s out to deconstruct gender in a big way. This one uses Madonna’s lyrics. Other videos are based on songs by Lady Gaga and T-Swift, and are called “Gender Neutralizing: Porn This Way” (part of a larger “Gender Neutralizing” series) [...]