forthwritten

Biggest linkspam ever! I'm going back to Nottingham tomorrow and had over 300 tags open...

Women and feminism
The Mosuo Matriarchy: 'Men Live Better Where Women Are In Charge' - mixed feelings about this because it's an explanation of a culture by a) a man b) not from that culture, but it's an interesting glimpse.
Can men be feminists? - TW: rape apologism
Look, Kitten, I Am Too A Feminist! Fauxminism and Men - identifying problematic behaviours in male "feminists" which indicate that they don't really get it
Why Women Claim Public Spaces As Our Own - problems with men's participation in Reclaim The Night marches and how they might participate. I'm hesitant to take part in such marches because the harassment I experience is so rarely what cis and trans women experience, and it feels like it's a space for them that I don't have a right to. And I am totally fine with that.
Thoughts on the “Dark Side” discussions - geek feminism
Anatomy of an unsafe abortion
My Illegal Abortion
I debated whether or not to share this story - "So when people (men) want to talk about “legitimate” forms of assault, tell girls they should be nice to strangers and give men the benefit of a doubt, tell them to consider it a compliment, tell them to ignore the bad behavior of men, I want them to be forced to feel, for even one minute, what it feels like to have so much verbal hatred and physical intimidation thrown at them for nothing more than being female and not wanting to share" (TW: threats of violence)
This is what it’s like to be harassed on the Internet (TW: threats of violence and rape)
Man versus beast - "My penis didn't come with an instruction leaflet, or even adequate washing instructions, but somehow I've brought the beast under control [...] What grates is the idea that all men are passive slaves to our sex drives, lumps of meat attached to our penises like a little old lady being dragged along the pavement by a Doberman in heat, rather than capable adults making conscious choices"
Organisational Response to Sexual Violence in Activist Groups: Six Common Mistakes
Confronting Partner Abuse in Activist Communities (.pdf) (TW: abuse and violence
Anna Carey: From the X case to Pussy Riot: why I'm still a feminist, 20 years on
How to be a Popular Internet Feminist in 2012: A Guide. - humour with a bite
Feminism – a spent force or fit for the 21st century?
The Kissing Sailor, or “The Selective Blindness of Rape Culture”
Rebecca Watson: It Stands to Reason, Skeptics Can Be Sexist Too - "I spoke out about sexual harassment among atheists and scientists. Then came the rape threats"
Jack Halberstam: Whither Feminism?: Gender and The New Normal

Feminism and intersectionality
Oh hi feminism, are we having this debate again? I think we are! It's not like this has been done before
Tiger Beatdown: Feminism has abandoned me
An open letter to Caitlin Moran
Bim Adewunmi: What the Girls spat on Twitter tells us about feminism
Stavvers: How to be better: on intersectionality, privilege and silencing
Caitlin Moran and Lena Dunham are great, but take note Vagenda - feminism isn't just a white, middle class movement
"Intersectionality", let me Google that for you
Rhian Jones: On things that surely shouldn’t need saying.
Black Feminists: Dear Vagenda Editors…
Chitra Nagarajan and Lola Okolosie: You don't need an MA in gender studies to know that race matters to feminism
Bitch magazine: Why I Didn't Run the Caitlin Moran Interview
Rebecca Omonira Oyekanmi: Caitlin Moran's comments are just one example. Too often our media sees only shades of white

And relevant to this discussion:
Why I Don't Want To Talk About Race - my god, an essay on TGMP that doesn't make mewant to stab thngs?

Black people can’t talk to white people about race anymore. There’s really nothing left to say. There are libraries full of books, interviews, essays, lectures, and symposia. If people want to learn about their own country and its history, it is not incumbent on black people to talk to them about it. It is not our responsibility to educate them about it. Plus whenever white people want to talk about race, they never want to talk about themselves. There needs to be discussion among people who think of themselves as white. They need to unpack that language, that history, that social position and see what it really offers them, and what it takes away from them

The Distress of the Privileged

LGBQA
Rob Watson: A Gay Dad's Perspective on the Hate-Note-Writing Father, and a Letter to My Own Sons
On "The Queer Art of Failure" - "Non-conformist queer perspectives offer radical alternatives to notions of "success""
Junaid Jahangir: We're Queer. We're Muslim. Get Used to It.
Orlando Cruz: 'I wanted to take out the thorn inside me and have peace' - "The Puerto Rican, who became the first boxer to declare publicly that he was gay, explains his long and traumatic struggle against fear and prejudice and his fight to be true to himself"
Sandi Toksvig: 'I don't understand boredom'
AIDS quilt goes digital
Ruth loved Naomi as Adam loved Eve - an interpretation of Ruth and Naomi as a lesbian couple
Poly, privilege, race, and class: New voices

Trans*
Paris Lee: Lies about transgender people (and how to spot a rubbish journalist)
Letters For My Brothers: Transitional Wisdom in Retrospect - "an anthology of essays written by post-transition men who share the wisdom and guidance they wish they’d known at the beginning of their journey into manhood"
when mansplaining goes too far: buck angel on trans women and its follow-up, on the “disclosure” myth and the cissexist imagination
Janet Mock on the Freedom of Telling Her Own Story
Stephen Burt: My Life as a Girl
Goodbye Katie, hello Ben - interesting perspectivefrom a parent but ugh, pronouns
Trans* publications by UK organisations
LGBT Students In Scotland Driven Out Of School By Homophobic And Transphobic Bullies - can I get a "fsck you, S_onewall"?
I'm not a girl, I just look like one: femme identity, gender and queerness
Who Is Who: Pronouns, Gender, and Merging Selves by Dana Levin
25 Things I Do To Make My Body Dysphoria Feel Smaller and Quieter
Free Hugs, or Markgraf’s Comic Convention Adventure - cosplaying as a non-gendered alien and the responses this elicits

Disability
Telling the story? The Commodification of Impairment and Disability in Post-Conflict Sierra Leone
The end of the affair: disability and feminism
Naomi J: The Relevance of the Bible (To Disabled People)

Academia
Martin Eve: Unpaid research internships reveal a dangerous hypocrisy in academia
Toward A More Inclusive Backchannel: An Unusual Call To Action
Mary Macfarlane: PhD Writing up: What I Learned
Check the ill Q&A behaviour - about Q&As at book readings, but goes for academic conferences too
'Postgraduate study is the next social mobility timebomb'
Academic Men Explain Things To Me
Twitter and safe academic spaces
Being Inappropriate - social media as an academic
Want to Change Academic Publishing? Just Say No - "If a for-profit business cannot prosper without demanding huge amounts of free labor, then surely the business model needs reinventing"
PhD education and mental health: A follow-up
Live-tweeting at academic conferences: 10 rules of thumb
£1bn-a-year 'black hole' in university funding revealed
My top 10 postdoc pick-me-ups

Trans* and academia
Trans? Disabled? In need of surgery? Best to avoid Warwick Medical School
Discrimination? You bet! What you might expect from Warwick Medical School?
On *the* Institution of Transgender Discrimination Within Healthcare
“Just Check ‘Female’”: Trans Women and Smith College Admissions

Politics
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Hillsborough:
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Language
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Nature
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Food
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History
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Interesting stuff
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Stories and fic
Ursula Vernon: Elegant and fine - Susan, Narnia
A Study in Squawking - Sherlock AU
Amy J Williams (.png) - small snippet of a life. Amy, DW
calapine: Outside In - Eleven, Oswin, DW
lizbee: Detectives, Adventurers and Girls Who Don't Wait Around: The Paradox of Amelia J. Williams Amy, DW

Tumblrs etc
http://what-if.xkcd.com/
http://istwitterwrong.tumblr.com
http://stfu-moffat.tumblr.com/
http://wheninacademia.tumblr.com/
http://whatshouldwecalllinguistics.tumblr.com/
http://researchinprogress.tumblr.com/
http://penandink.tumblr.com/
http://100worstpeopleontwitter.tumblr.com/

Interesting in light of Robin Hobbes' comments on mental illness: EM Forster's work tailed off once he finally had sex. Better that than a life of despair:

It rings through the ages, this idea: the old connection between art and torment. It's a poisonous creed. It's also bullshit. It may be true, but it's adolescent bullshit all the same. And yet its grip holds. The miserablists have Milton, Goya, Rimbaud, Van Gogh, Hart Crane, Fitzgerald, Pollock, Bishop, Woolf, Plath and on, ad infinitum. The happyists have PG Wodehouse and VS Pritchett. Case, apparently, closed.

But how much of an egomaniac must you be to choose distinction over happiness, fame over love, making your own monument over doing right here?

[...]

Nobody should have to write, or paint, or sing from the depths of despair, no matter how exhilarating the results. I'm sorry we never got to read Forster's unwritten novels, but I'm much happier he got laid.

It seems to perform a curious balancing act between trying to take down the assumption that unhappiness creates art but appearing to subscribe to it by arguing that yes, it is a choice between happiness and art and that only fools choose art over happiness. oursin takes a codfish to it, noting that "[p]eople remember the angst-ridden creative artists because, memorable draaaaammmmmaaaaa, whereas someone who just turns out excellent works against a background of stability is not a story in themselves".

Article about what it's really like to be small. I declare some personal interest in this; I'm short, had delayed bone growth as a child and was thoroughly investigated by a paediatric endocrine unit from the ages of four to around fourteen or fifteen. They tried to work out whether I had a growth hormone deficiency but as my stress levels (and therefore, hormones in my blood) go haywire at the merest suggestion of needles, the tests were inconclusive. In many ways I'm quite lucky - I have proportionate short statue, I haven't had surgery or hormone therapy and I don't have pain or lack of mobility resulting from my restricted growth.
However, I didn't feel the article addressed stuff I care about though. How do you live in a world that's designed for people considerably taller? Supermarket shelves, bar counters, clothes, bikes, cars, so-called "ergonomic" seats that do not in any way fit your body and want your spine to curve in the wrong places...it goes on. How do you demand respect where height is so closely and messily and casually associated with authority and maturity and intelligence? How do you work with children when they're taller than you and delight in pointing this out? My favourite tactic is to evoke comparisons to Yoda, which also gives me cool points, but I'm aware that I need to know the kids to be able to say this and it won't work with all of them. How do you think about your body - how does it feel when you don't feel any different from people of normal height, then you're abruptly and often rudely reminded that you're not?*
I'm especially interested in how shortness works with gendered identities. What are the assumptions about petite women - why is petiteness seen as feminine? How do you perform a male or androgynous identity when your body won't let you pass as an adult if you perform those identities? What takes precedence? How does it make you feel about your body? Where do small transmen get clothes?

Basically, I have Questions.

*in the past month: one guy when I was on holiday saying "I know this is a personal question, but how tall are you?" To which I replied, "yes, you're right, that is rather personal".
One great-aunt and a different great-aunt's daughter, both of whom I last "met" when I was a baby or very young child, both (completely separately and independently) introducing themselves with "Hello. Gosh, you've not grown much have you?" My smaller-than-me aunt and I bitched quietly about people who feel compelled to inform you of this as if perhaps you haven't noticed you're not seven feet tall.

I have recently been drunkenly wandering around various counties (i.e. Hampshire and Surrey), somehow managing to help win a pub quiz (I KNEW my ability to recognise Tilda Swinton's face would come in useful one day), stumble upon a dogging site, be privy to a mild spat over the aesthetics of Guildford's cathedral and help cook an epic meal for seven.

I have thus far failed to do any work on my scarily imminent presentation (donotthinkaboutthat, donotthinkaboutthat) but have mixed up my very first batch of straights rat food - i.e. from scratch, mainly grains, legumes, dried vegetables and herbs, dried shrimp and some fortified human cereals. It looks so much nicer than any commercial mix I've bought for them and hopefully they'll eat it all, so will cut down on waste.

Anyway, links!

Signal Boost: Don't support Clitoraid or Betty Dodson

In the abstract, reversing FGM sounds like a fine idea. In the concrete, though, this campaign avoids some important questions, such as what is the effect on the lives of African women within their communities? What do women who have experienced FGM want, specifically, from their genitalia and their partners? What actions are African communities already taking on this matter? How do African women feel about having their body parts advertised for adoption? Why, in short, are you doing to African women and for African women but not with African women?

Size six: The Western women's harem

Yes, I thought as I wandered off, I have finally found the answer to my harem enigma. Unlike the Muslim man, who uses space to establish male domination by excluding women from the public arena, the Western man manipulates time and light. He declares that in order to be beautiful, a woman must look 14 years old. If she dares to look 50 or, worse, 60, she is beyond the pale. By putting the spotlight on the female child and framing her as the ideal of beauty, he condemns the mature woman to invisibility. In fact, the modern Western man enforces one of Immanuel Kant’s 19th-century theories: To be beautiful, women have to appear childish and brainless. When a women looks mature and self-assertive, or allows her hips to expand, she is condemned as ugly. Thus, the walls of the European harem separate youthful beauty from ugly maturity.

Western attitudes, I thought, are even more dangerous and cunning than the Muslim ones because the weapon used against women is time. Time is less visible and more fluid than space. The Western man uses images and spotlights to freeze female beauty within an idealised childhood, and forces women to perceive aging – the normal unfolding of the years – as a shameful devaluation.

Really interesting essay on beauty, space, time, and power, and clear-eyed about the implications. I've often wondered just how much energy women devote, or are supposed to devote, to looking acceptable slim and youthful and beautiful, and what this energy and time might otherwise be used for. But I think the implications here go further and are more disturbing.

Manic Pixie Songwriting Dream Girls, A History in Youtube and Published Slur

[T]he continuing emphasis on female musicians’ musical or personal weirdness — often overemphasized, or just blatantly made up in the mind of music journalists — serves to give said music journalists good cover for not talking about any of those girls’ actual, technical accomplishments, and for implying that basically all girl musicians birth albums directly out of their vaginas without giving it a second thought.

Dorothy L Sayers wrote about Lord Peter Wimsey meeting Sherlock Holmes and it's kind of adorable really.