Also.Also.Also: Bill O’Reilly Should Eat Some Sriracha and Shut Up And Other Stories We Missed This Week

Hello, turtles! (You’ll never know if I mean the animal or the chocolate, and if you’re wise, you’ll never care.) This week I got nostalgic and had subsequent panics about the future! So here’s all the stories we missed while I cried softly to the series finale of Fraiser on Netflix.

I cried a sea of tears to this last night and I'm not ashamed

I cried a sea of tears to this last night and I’m not ashamed

Goodbye, Sweet Sriracha

We tried so hard and got so far, but in the end, it didn’t even matter. The Sriracha plant is closing, at least partially. The only thing that could possibly be next is the apocalypse and/or a new world order, really.

Views Of Shoppers And Products During A Wal-Mart Store Grand Opening

Period Pride

You know you got it.

Forgot about “your time of the month,” “the Curse,” and all the delicate and discreet euphemisms for menstruation. Recently, there has been a spate of viral music videos and art from a rising group of female artists who are determined to sing, rap and depict menstruation with (graphic) candor.

From rapping about cunnilingus on their period to putting a full-bush, bleeding vagina on a T-shirt, these musical and visual expressions of menstruation may seem initially jarring and even over-the-top. But they represent a bracing backlash against the blue-liquid marketing culture. Now, a generation of women who began their periods in an age of euphemistic “Mother Nature” ads are embracing menstruation in all of its bloody glory as their way of reclaiming their un-sanitized womanhood.

WATCH: TransMilitary

A new documentary reminds us that DADT wasn’t the only anti-queer policy inhibiting full participation and fulfillment for queermos in the military. For trans* folks, their preferred genders remain a complicated battle line.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1sH3nKv9miA

F*ck Bill O’Reilly

Out actor Alex Newell from Glee has no patience for Bill O’Reilly patronizing “dopey kids” by trying to protect them from trans* characters on screen. (He regrettably forgot to mention that Bill O’Reilly called Glee an “undeniably…good program,” which is a lie.)

Shortly after Newell’s character, Wade “Unique” Adams, was introduced on Glee, O’Reilly criticized the popular musical series for its inclusion of a trans teen and claimed, “If you make it glamorous in a program likeGlee, which is undeniably a good program … a lot of these dopey kids are confused about who they are.”

In a new interview with Fusion, Newell fired back with a few comments of his own about O’Reilly’s harsh words. “It’s wrong to call people dopey,” he told Fusion‘s Alicia Menendez Thursday. “When it’s something this poignant and such a big part of the society, you can’t call kids dopey, because this is something that they’re actually going through, this is what they feel on the inside, there’s nothing dopey about it.”

Big ____ on Campus

College campuses may be the nexus for a movement toward preferred pronouns.

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Where Have All The Lesbos Gone

Not to the TV set, that’s for sure.

Speaking at “Lesbophobia in the Media”, a debate held jointly by Women in Journalism and lesbian magazine Diva last week, Carr called for more realistic depictions of gay women on TV. She highlighted how unlikely it is for disability to be a characteristic of an on-screen lesbian. “I’m not seen as being capable of having any kind of sex as a disabled woman,” she said. “I’m asexual. Disabled women are very much desexed.”

Writer Iman Qureshi said lesbianism is never “incidental to a character” in TV and film. “You don’t wake up in the morning, have breakfast and think – I’m having breakfast as a lesbian,” she said. “Why can’t lesbians just be people?” Jane Czyzselska, the editor of Diva magazine, agreed that lesbians are either portrayed as heavily sexualised, wacky or asexual. “I don’t see any butch dykes on television. I don’t see any archetypes or role models and we definitely need more to move things on.”

MHP’s Black Feminist Syllabus

Well this is fantastic. READ IT.

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Last week, whilst schooling Michelle Cottle on her insipid “Michelle Obama is a feminist nightmare” article, Melissa Harris-Perry quipped, “You might want to read up a little bit on black women and our feminism. I’m happy to send you a syllabus.” To which the Internet responded, “Um, yes, please do.”

Very happily, that quip has now become reality: here is MHP’s suggested reading list on black feminism. It’s an amazing, inspiring, hugely necessary resource, and it covers a wide breadth of theory and history. Take a look, educate yourself, share it, use it to augment your holiday wishlist, bookmark it for future use, print it out and turn it into a vision board, etc etc.

Gay Marriage Chronicles

+ A majority of Croations do not have positive emotions related to same-sex marriage, so their government is going to push ahead with gay civil unions instead.

+ How the f*ck do Mormons feel about gay marriage, anyway?

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You Should Give / Go

+  “Out of This” will transport you from Art Basel Miami into some sort of artsy, queer fantasyland. All you gotta do is RSVP.

Chaperones needs your help!

Chaperones is about Alex Bell, a math teacher, and Ramona Hernandez, an English teacher, who are new to Lakeview High School. Because Lakeview is notorious for having a disastrous prom every year, the new teachers are required to attend as chaperones, as nobody else will do it. Alex and Ramona take prom as an opportunity to get to know each other better, but every time they manage to connect, a rowdy student or the callous Principal Jensen get in their way. The story follows their efforts to get together throughout prom night despite the challenges being presented to them.

+ You can’t always go home again. But you could always go HOMO FOR THE HOLIDAYS AMIRITE.

Homo For The Holidays is a seasonal spectacle guaranteed to make even the most stubborn yuletides gay! An unforgettable all-star cast of burlesque, cabaret, dance, drag, and musical local luminaries come together in a display of glittering grandeur that’s been called “F*CKING GREAT….F*CKING HILARIOUS!” by Dan Savage of The Stranger.

Jinkx Monsoon will be performing in Homo for the Holidays December 12th-14th and December 23rd-24thScott Shoemaker will be performing December 18th-22nd.)

Homo2013_JiJiLee

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Carmen

Carmen spent six years at Autostraddle, ultimately serving as Straddleverse Director, Feminism Editor and Social Media Co-Director. She is now the Consulting Digital Editor at Ms. and writes regularly for DAME, the Women’s Media Center, the National Women’s History Museum and other prominent feminist platforms; her work has also been published in print and online by outlets like BuzzFeed, Bitch, Bust, CityLab, ElixHER, Feministing, Feminist Formations, GirlBoss, GrokNation, MEL, Mic and SIGNS, and she is a co-founder of Argot Magazine. You can find Carmen on Twitter, Instagram and Tumblr or in the drive-thru line at the nearest In-N-Out.

Carmen has written 919 articles for us.

12 Comments

  1. The Linkin Park reference w/r/t the Sriracha factory might be the most beautiful thing about this post

  2. Sometimes I wish everyone could collectively agree to react to Bill O’Reilly by laughing heartily in his face and then go back to whatever we were doing as if he didn’t exist. I feel like refusing to take him or the things he says seriously would drive him bugfuck crazy, which would be glorious.

  3. I’m still unsure of whether to buy ALL the sriracha now or wait till it all goes on sale…Well, I guess I’ll just read MPH’s perf syllabus while I figure it out.

    • Same! I just bought a new bottle and made a variation of the peanut butter noodles that were posted here a whole back; now I’m worried I’ll run out soon :(

      and MHP is everything.

    • I like the concept of period pride, but I often find the ‘positive’ talk around it alienating. It tends to boil down to two things:
      1. “Without periods there wouldn’t be babies!” Yes, well, not all of us want to have babies!
      2. “It’s a woman’s rite of passage!” Lies. Not all women have periods, not all humans who have periods are women.

      Am I ashamed of my period? Nope. Do I think it’s a blessing? I have yet to learn of a useful thing it does for me, so no. Except that experiencing intense pain every once in a while is a reminder of my good fortune in not feeling pain the rest of the time? That’s the best I’ve been able to come up with so far. If anyone knows of actual perks to menstruation, I would love to hear them.

      • My attitude is more like “Probably about 40% of the world has to deal with this on a regular basis, those who know what it’s like can relate to what I’m talking about, and those who don’t have no room to complain because they don’t have to put up with it firsthand, so I’ll be damned if I’m going to walk on eggshells when talking about a basic bodily function I have to endure every month.”

  4. It’s really sad about Croatia.

    You think things are turning out for the best everywhere, but then every now and then there come Russia, Croatia just kicking you in the ovaries for a reality check…

  5. All the things I would do to be able to see Jinkx Monsoon Live….I’m not always the biggest Dan Savage fan, but Homo for the Holidays sounds like the best holigay spectacle ever!

  6. Oh man 4 for you Alex Newell *slow claps it out* Keep this up and I will have a tremendous crush on you as well as Unique anyone who shuts Bill O’ Reilly the fuck down deserves a high five.

Comments are closed.