schmevil

I'm doing some reassessing and research. Below is an excerpt from a piece I'm reading, and may be of interest to some of you:

Anti-Oppression 101: Alliance building, and tips for a liberatory organization

Working for Social Justice in Everything We Do

Confronting privilege or ways you’ve been duped because of a group you belong to is a complicated, lifelong process, but there are things you to can do to confront these issues head on. There is no comprehensive guide for how to be an ally, but here are some things we can all work toward:

Become an ally to yourself. If you can’t stand up for yourself, how are you going to stand up for anyone else?

Work with the perspective that social, economic and environmental issues are interconnected and interdependent. People currently have unequal access to clean and healthy food, air, water, homes and land. These are historic inequalities, and they continue to be largely based on race, class, gender and sexuality.

Understand and learn about systems of oppression and challenging the power structures which support those systems and create injustices.

Understand that we all have multiple and fluid identities. There are no pure cultures or identities. One’s gender, race, class or other identifier may change over time, or one person may embody multiple races, genders, cultures and ethnicities simultaneously. Don’t box people in. It’s suffocating. ( Read more... )

Matt, King and I got to talking about this on Twitter, and I promised I'd open up a venue for more in depth conversation. The issue at hand:

Are the Amazons the only group to self-identify as feminist? It's been a year since my last read through, so I can't remember if another character uses the term.

The Amazons being violent extremists, what implications does that have? And what about the obvious feminist themes, characters, and premise? How does this all fit together?

TeeJay Szabo is hosting National Punch A Slut In the Face Week.

If you have an account on Facebook, please report this event as a violation of FB's terms of service ("a direct call to violence"). It advocates violence against women and slut shaming - for lulz.

Catching up on email and comment notifications. Some of you can expect to be spammed.

Reading some things:

brihana25 writes about sexual misconduct at cons (the still ongoing imbroglio is in Supernatural, but the post is worth reading for everyone in fandom - context), and reminds us that victim-blaming is never acceptable.

Fandom, and the internet in general, is about as close to anarchy as you can get, and believe me when I say that's not a bad thing. No one knows who you are or where you live, and the opinions you hold and the things you do there don't follow you home. There are very few consequences for things done or said in fandom, and those consequences that do exist aren't really tangible.

Fandom sets your fantasies free and gives you a place and a peer group that you can talk freely about them without feeling the shame that the real world would bring down on you for them. Sex is celebrated, and the more the merrier. And in fandom, almost everybody's in to it. Those who aren't can just scroll on by.

But conventions aren't fandom proper. They are a hybrid of fandom and real life, and when those two things collide, they have a tendency to explode rather spectacularly.

If you go to a convention and you decide to bring your fandom fantasies to life, that is your own business. If you decide to seek out like-minded people to play your fantasy out with you, that's fine, too.

But if people who don't want to be there, who don't want to be part of that, get drawn into it on accident, they can't scroll past you. They can't hit the back button.

If their way out is blocked, even temporarily, even if it's not by you but by someone else you brought there? Then we have a problem.

Read More.


Also, Ableist Word Profile on disabledfeminists.com is a great 101 resource.

I have followed tammylee's lead and ordered the first four issues of Filament Magazine - porn for women. From their FAQ:

Why does the world need a magazine like Filament?

Women are 10 times more likely than men to undergo cosmetic surgery and 43 times more likely than men to suffer an eating disorder. Is this because women are ‘naturally’ life-threateningly obsessed with their appearance, or is this in some way influenced by women’s media? Many men’s magazines don’t discuss men’s appearance, but nearly all women’s magazines discuss women’s appearance.

We thought, hey, wouldn't it be cool if there was a women's magazine that was all about smart stuff instead of what we look like, with gorgeous men in states of undress in it, instead of women. And it might just do some good in the world too.

Women aren't visual. Everyone knows that.

This is a popular adage that seems to have arisen from early, unsophisticated research. Once upon a time, researchers looking at these kinds of questions would ask women and men to look at erotic images and say whether they were turned on. Men generally answered yes, and the women answered no. Such methods are highly subject to the participants giving socially desirable answers. Recent research has used more advanced technology to circumvent the problem of subjects potentially giving socially desirable answers, and found that women and men are equally aroused by erotic images. Here is one such study.

Link is obviously NSFW.