Laurie Says:

Deb is on an electronic free vacation in the Florida Keys having a wonderful time.

I’m frantically getting ready for my Seattle, New York City and Boston trips in February, so life is pretty dense. That’s why it’s been a little quiet here.

I’ll be blogging by myself this week till Deb gets back this weekend. Then we’ll trade places as solo bloggers while I travel.

The Feminist Carnival is out at girlistic.com. Honestly I haven’t had a chance to do more then glance at it yet – check it out.

I did read It is time for a feminism of the monstrous by little light at taking steps.com and it really knocked me out – read the whole blog.

“What I say may be in a language incomprehensible, but there is a time for that, and it is right now, because this is a monster’s creed. It is for the cobbled-together, the sewn-up, the grafted-on. It is for the golden, the under-the-earth, the foreign, the travels-by-night; the filthy ship-sinking cave-dwelling bone-cracking gorgeousness that says hell no, I am not tidy. I am not easy. I am not what you suppose me to be and until you listen to my voice and look me in my eyes, I will cling fast to this life no matter how far you drive me, how deep, with how many torches and pitchforks, biting back the whole way down. I will not give you my suicide. I will not give you my surrender.”

I’ve been doing a lot of printing and if I can figure out how to post them on the blog (usually Deb’s job) I’ll have some new photos up in this week.

Lynne Murray sent me these links and commments about some blogs she really liked on Fat Chicks Rule. Lynne says “No!” to name calling–“Yes! to full information.”

Lynne Murray says:

Lara Frater comes up with some very interesting materials in her Fat Chicks Rule Blog.

Thanks, Lara! I found her recent gems all fascinating, but two items caught my attention. One was her link to information on No Name-Calling Week. A project that seeks to focus national attention on the problem of name-calling in schools, and to provide students and educators with the tools and inspiration to launch an on-going dialogue about ways to eliminate name-calling in their communities. .

Lara provides another very interesting link to Sandy Szwarc’s incisive
examination of the real health and financial costs of weight loss surgery.

I’ve been horrified recently to see television ads for the lap band version of weight loss surgery that make it sound like a minor cosmetic procedure. I second Lara’s warning about the graphic surgery picture at this link! I scrolled down past that in a hurry! But the article was comprehensive, and necessary, particularly in considering how difficult it is for those contemplating these surgeries to get real information.

Szwarc points out that “[C]omplications are often not factored in the risk-benefit considerations or are significantly downplayed in most research. Hence, the information does not reach consumers in a real way or get entered into public debates.

After trying unsuccessfully for years to get countless articles published describing the lives of surgery survivors and the complications, risks and precautions; especially the special risks for women of childbearing age and growing children; it became apparent to me that mainstream media’s interests are not neutral.. These complications are too extensive to discuss here but objective reports show them to be much more extensive and prevalent, and to increase over time, than many prospective patients believe. Patients facing overwhelming complications can sometimes only rely on each other for help. Complication rates are also much higher than the immediate post-op problems reported in most bariatric studies because most occur after patients leave the hospital and are rarely connected with the surgeries.” [Italics in original]

feminist carnival, trans, transexual, gender, feminism, gender queer, weight loss surgery, fat, body image, size acceptance, Body Impolitic