I don’t know how this got so long, but I hope you love it as much as I love you and mango LaCroix. Happy weekend reading!
You Should Go or Do or Give
+ Support Always In Season: A Documentary Film!
+ Support Invisibility Blues: Exploring Race in Video Games!
+ Help fund the next season of Button and Bly’s Travel Show!
Queer as in F*ck You
+ A Quiet Triumph for Gay Workers.
+ Sexual Fluidity: Queer, Straight, and Anything Else You’re Feeling.
+ Aisha Moodie-Mills: Victory Through Visibility.
+ Italy Violates Human Rights of Same-Sex Couples, Court Rules.
+ How Strangers Harass Lesbians On The Street with art from our very own, very dear Yao Xiao!
+ People Are Furious After Toronto Pride Tried To Trademark “Dyke March” And “Trans* Pride”. Lol Canada, lol.
+ It’s First Person time again!
+ Father-Daughter Dance: On Coming Out and Going Home by Amy Deneson.
+ In Indiana, Employers Can Fire Workers for Being Gay or Trans—and They Do, All the Time.
+ Do you want to hate-read something today?
+ Civil Rights 2.0: What the Equality Act of 2015 means for LGBT Americans.
+ Beth Maiden on why she uses the word ‘queer’.
Doll Parts
+ Well you’ll love this very much! My Wedding Was Perfect — And I Was Fat As Hell The Whole Time by your girl Lindy West.
+ There’s Now a Trans-Only Modeling Agency.
+ Murder of Trans Woman K.C. Haggard of Fresno Caught on Video.
+ What We Talk About When We Talk About Sex Workers in Silicon Valley.
+ Disney Princesses With Their Periods.
+ Five Black Women Share Their Experiences With the Police.
+ Lilly Ledbetter’s Fight for Equal Pay is Coming to the Big Screen.
+ Meet Margaret Hamilton, the badass ’60s programmer who saved the moon landing.
+ Five Times Nicki Minaj Spoke the Fierce, Feminist Truth.
+ Taylor Swift Is Not Your Friend by Dayna Evans.
This last excerpt shows exactly the part of Taylor’s persona that doesn’t get talked about enough: she is a ruthless, publicly capitalist pop star. To think of her as womanhood incarnate is to trick oneself into forgetting about “Bad Blood” and “Better Than Revenge.” Swift isn’t here to help women—she’s here to make bank. Seeing her on stage cavorting with World Cup winners and supermodels was not a win for feminism, but a win for Taylor Swift. Her plan—to be as famous and as rich as she can possibly be—is working, and by using other women as tools of her self-promotion, she is distilling feminism for her own benefit.
::teeth-gnashing maniacal laughter::
+ Nine Inspiring Women Leaders in Tech Share Career Advice Everyone Needs to Hear.
+ This is Why The Women’s World Cup Winners Got Paid So Much Less.
+ Patricia Navidad Calls Out Menstrual Shaming.
+ An Interview with #BlackLivesMatter Co-Founder, Patrisse Cullors.
+ Nobody at Google Was Talking About Pay Inequality Until a Woman Made This Spreadsheet.
+ Life advice via Laverne Cox.
+ Be a Great Ally to Fat Folks by Getting Neutral About Food by Queer Fat Femme.
+ Diary of a Teenage Girl Gets NC-17 Rating, So Teenage Girls Can’t Watch It. Patriarchy.
+ But Do We Need an App for That? The New Trend of Consent Technology.
Saw This, Thought of You
+ No, It’s Not Your Opinion. You’re Just Wrong.
+ What The Supreme Court Has to Say About Sandra Bland’s Arrest.
+ Two Things to Know About America’s Mass Shooting Epidemic, complete with handy, horrific map.
+ NASA Finds “Earth’s Bigger, Older Cousin”. Her name is Tammy and she already knows about french kissing and wine coolers.
+ I don’t know I heard you guys like this show? ‘The X-Files’ Is Bringing Back the Lone Gunmen.
+ Shitty Beer is the Best Beer, and Miller Highlife is Best of All. So.
+ See Laura Jane Grace and Transgender-Fronted Band Spook School Meet.
+ “Currently making me want to die.” —Stef re: Old Hipsters Reviewed by New Hipsters.
+ Talking to the Director of the New Amy Winehouse Documentary.
+ New Exhibit Explores the History of Cats on the Internet. This is all I want.
+ “I Arrived at the Revolution Via Poetry”: An Interview with the Mongrel Coalition Against Gringpo.
+ Putting Spiders on Treadmills. Ugh that would be such a good song title, especially on my debut album, Remember When We Were Pirates?
+ Human + A.I. = Your Digital Future oooooooooh.
+ You’ll find yourself crying about this and you won’t really know why, and that’s ok. How Naming Confers Dignity Upon Life and Gives Meaning to Existence by the damn lovely Maria Popova forever.
+ In a Small Town in Washington State, Pride and Shame Over Atomic Legacy.
The workers inside Hanford’s nuclear reactors in the early 1940s knew their jobs were important, even if many of them didn’t know why. They worked hard, and for that they were paid well. They tucked their children into bed at night in handsome homes with green lawns on streets named for brilliant engineers —Goethals Drive, Jadwin Avenue.
The secrecy around Hanford, a part of the Manhattan Project, came to light on Aug. 9, 1945, when U.S. forces dropped a thick-bellied, 10,000-pound plutonium-filled bomb called Fat Man on Nagasaki, Japan — vaporizing some 60,000 to 80,000 people in an instant and leading to the end of World War II. All along at Hanford, they had been contributing to the war effort, producing plutonium that would make up the core of Fat Man.
+ Sarah Smith, Founder of The Dyrt: Helping People Find and Review Campgrounds.
+ The Evolution of TV’s “Very Special Episode”.
And Finally
What to do with your body hair.
Hahahaha! “whatever it is, it must be done out of spite”
FAVE LINE.
These links! I now have 10 additional tabs open
Me too!
That hipster article hurt my brain. So. Damn. Shallow.
So many great links today!
Lots of great things here!
Whoa, so many great things here. Still in the process of going through my multiple tabs of it.
I started off with the hate-read one today because I am incurably curious and just couldn’t help myself. And oh. my. fuck. Brb, gotta go punch a wall from all that self-righteous identity policing. That friend of hers would be so much better off without the author hanging around. I mean, fuck, who is this person to judge her friend’s identifier of choice, level and direction of desire, personal presentation, situational safety, best interest, and disclosure of sexual history? I get so mad at the self appointed arbiters of who is a “GOOD queer/lesbian/bisexual/literally-everything-else”.
IKR
I am right there with you, friend, ten tabs open and full of wrath and everything.
The author’s “counter-argument” to biphobia in the queer community is something I’ve heard regularly and it’s still infuriating and illogical: “Come out to a community that doesn’t want you (or even hates you), be involved and super-supportive of their needs, and then maybe they won’t be such huge jerks.” When people tell queers to do that in hetero/cis-normative communities, everyone points out how that is not physically, mentally, or emotionally safe. And while I appreciate that folks think bisexuals are super-human and don’t need to worry about our safety on any level, we’re actually not. We’re just regular humans and want to be treated that way.
Ahhh thank you for your rage-summary; now I know which AWFUL article was today’s hate-read. I had the joy of coming across it on Facebook already, blurgh.
The comment section at least was validating.
That fluid sexuality piece: A+.
If I see one more thinkpiece on Taylor Swift, I think I might actually lose my mind.
see i was thinking that, too, but then this one was just so fun.
Laneia, I trust your judgment, buuut I just can’t handle another one. But I’m happy it made you happy!
preach
The XO Jane hate-read piece is just face-palm on so many levels. Since their comments section is now closed, let’s take a moment shall we?
1. “In my eighth-grade baby gay days, while I was handing out Day of Silence buttons, this girl told me that she didn’t want to take even an “ally” button because she was afraid she would get bullied.”
Oh my god, she was scared to be queer-identifying when she was thirteen? Guess what — so was I. So were a lot of people.
2. “In the nearly ten years I have known this woman, she has never pursued, or dated anyone but self-identified cisgender men.”
A) How do you know?
B) I only dated cis men in my twenties, too. Not because that’s who I wanted to be dating, but because that was who asked me out, and I was wayyy too insecure to ask anyone out myself — especially queer women, from whom I felt very alienated because I was so deeply closeted.
I didn’t date men because it gave me straight privilege. I dated men because the alternative scared me to death.
3. “If I thought my friend was in any danger coming out in any of these settings, I would cut her some slack. But I think she’s just fearful of having hard or complex conversations with folks….What a shitty, lazy excuse not to be brave.”
How fucking dare you. You are not the judge of what feels dangerous to her.
You have apparently been out since you were thirteen, so let me tell you what it’s like to be 30 and paralyzed by the big rainbow elephant in the room.
You know all of those people who tell us we’re wrong, we’re perverts, we’ll be judged? A big part of me believed them.
You know all of those after school special type movies and news stories in the nineties where gay people got beat up and hate-crimed and left to die in corn fields? I took that shit to heart. The first time I went to a bowling alley with a girlfriend, I honestly thought we might get beat up. The first time I went to my town’s LGBT center, I honestly thought it would be like Planned Parenthood — enter through the back door, get buzzed in by the security guard.
I live in California in a liberal town and my family is liberal and I still am not out to certain members of it.
I was born in the eighties and came of age in the era of Buffy and I am safe and my family loves me and I still wasn’t ready to face my demons until recently. And you know what? That’s none of your damn business.
If your friend feels safe expressing her queer side in what she perceives to be safe spaces, like your lib-arts college and when she’s hanging out with her queer friends, then fuck you for denying her that safe space. Fuck you for judging her. Fuck you for assuming that because you’re also queer, you know anything about her life or her struggle.
*
HAHA omg ok I’m done! And don’t worry everyone I’m doing great! I totally kiss girls on crowded sidewalks downtown now and everything.
Bonus: I just read XOJane’s call for content, where they say
“xoJane is not snarky, but inclusive and uplifting, while remaining nothing but honest at all times.”
Yes to all of this, people like this writer are why I am afraid to talk to girls at parties.
Also I think suggesting one volunteer at a soup kitchen purely in order to meet women is pretty callous.
“You have apparently been out since you were thirteen, so let me tell you what it’s like to be 30 and paralyzed by the big rainbow elephant in the room.”
this is when i shouted AMEN and read the rest like a sermon.
Omg thank you! This was some serious Dan Savage-level shit. It’s bisexual peoples’ fault biphobia exists!!!!! Volunteer if you want to get laid!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! You are obligated to come out!!!!!1111!!!!!!
“I can rattle off three or four dudes she’s hooked up with in the course of our friendship, and if there’s a non-dude in the mix, she’s never mentioned it to me.” No shit, Sherlock. Maybe she doesn’t want to confide in you because you’re a judgmental asshole who runs around slapping “THIS IS A BAD QUEER” stickers on everyone’s backs.
There is so much good stuff here and my favorite is the existence of donotlink.com. (Not really, but it’s great.)
I just realized Anthony Michael Hall makes an ADORABLE lesbian
i am having the worst week, nay month, EVER. i mean just the worst ever in the history of fucking ever. but there is so much here to love and relate to and i am so grateful for this AAA reprieve because i am *this close* to faceplanting right into the carpet a la george michael and never getting back up. i am going to start by reading that article about taylor swift (is there a place where we can send TS some important and necessary readings on intersectionality? idk isnt that what tumblr is for? i dont know these things) and then work my way out from there and i cant wait for the distraction.
also there is seriously nothing i love more than flavored sparkling water. i have so many sparkling water feelings and as such, may i humbly recommend polar seltzer in the vanilla flavor? because one minute you think you are just a jaded player in the sparkling water game and then BAM vanilla polar seltzer happens to you and life is never the same.
ok a) i am so fucking sorry about your shit month! that is fucking terrible. i’m going to send a bunch of bright electric energy out to your general area. maybe you will find a cool mushroom while you’re on a walk or a thing you really want will be on actual clearance at target (not the fake clearance where they lower the price by 60 cents like we’re a bunch of fucking idiots who can’t read numbers).
b) i’m making it my life’s mission to find polar seltzer in arizona. #LIFEMISSION
they have a TROPICAL MAI TAI flavor for summer. i am just saying. I AM JUST SAYING, LANEIA. #LIFEMISSION (full disclosure: i have to buy mine online because i live in the middle of nowhere. did you lose a little respect for me just now? when you learned that i buy bulk, wholesale packages of sparking water over the internet? it’s ok if you did i totally understand)
also thank you so much for the bright electric energyyyy. not for nothing, but just now i found a lost honey smoked bbq kind bar that i thought i had eaten but apparently it has just been getting squished over and over in a nonsensical pocket of my shoulder bag for weeks but i am currently enjoying it despite all the abuse it has suffered so i mean coincidence? i really think not. metaphor for my life? um maybe.
Or this – http://www.polarbev.com/contact/findus/tabid/129/default.aspx
Cause I love our state but sometimes specific foodstuffs are hard to find.
Try the usual trifecta – Sprouts, AJs, Whole Foods.
Polar seltzer is some A+ deliciousness! I’m partial to the dry grapefruit flavour myself.
well everything about this entire thread has really changed my life for the better.
Margaret Hamilton, Badass Programmer: my heroine of the week.
Thank you for the shout! <3
Laneia, meet me and Tammy behind the middle school after your parents go to bed.
wait, am i bringing brass knuckles and bartles & jaymes, or are you?
I object to being called both “bigger” and “older,” but I do like wine coolers.
I will never consider a woman making bank they she wants to anything but awesome. This is why I don’t identify as a feminist. Modern feminism is far too limited. It’s not enough to equal and independent, you must be a saint.
Feminism can look however you think it should for you, as long as it’s about believing in the equality of the sexes :-)
o_O How does one be an active commenting member of Autostraddle and walk away thinking that feminism is too limiting? The cognitive dissonance is too much to comprehend.
So much to read! Thanks
Here is an excellent takedown of that xoJane article
Putting spiders on a treadmill = Ensuring I will never workout ever ever ever
shrimp on a treadmill however
SHRIMP! SHRIMP.SHRIMP.SHRIMP! SHRIMP. SHRIMP. SHRIIIIIIIIIIIIMP!
That XOJane piece made me want to remove my eyeballs and never read anything ever again.
The article about sexual fluidity was really good, though (this: “we once understood ourselves one way, and now we understand ourselves differently”).
And yeah, Italy sucks. Come and save us, please.
“Choose your rituals, but make them yours. If you want to look like a flower market ate fat Betty Draper and then barfed her up in the middle of a haunted forest (YEEEESSS!), great choice. If you want to get married to a burrito while wearing a barrel with suspenders, I’m cool with it. If you think the very concept of marriage is hot garbage, that’s legit. But regardless, remember that you absolutely do not have to “fix” your body, chase after “flattering”, be somebody’s dark secret, or beg for permission to be happy.”
Paragraph wins all the things.
I love Lindy so much! This piece made my life and made my eyes all dewey. Ditto to the Brain Pickings piece… I really want to read that book now. Kimmerer puts into words so beautifully and simply what I feel about nature, tbh.
Omg, that “It’s not your opinion. You’re just wrong” article gives me LIFE and hits on one of my all time greatest pet peeves.
I grew up in a red county in California and in a place near a giant mega-church so I got the whole shitty/wrong opinions thing A LOT. My most hated phrase of all time is “well I respect your opinion, but…” after anyone would say anything at all that they just pulled out of their ass as though just because a person thought a thing, that somehow made it sacred and untouchable. I never understood why no one else wanted to shout “I DO NOT RESPECT YOUR OPINION AT ALL BECAUSE IT IS A SHITTY OPINION AND YOU ARE SO STUPID I COULD HURL.”
So yes, that article was extremely validating for me.
My brain is stuck on Lindy’s perfect, perfect, perfect dress and how incredible it looks on her. That may objectively be the most beautiful dress imaginable… worn perfectly.
Thanks for putting all this together Laneia!
The Lindy West article was a really great read, as was the article by Queer Fat Femme.
Here’s some words:
Trans modeling agencies – or really, agency divisions – were only a matter of time, but I’m glad it is now that time. Taylor Swift is really not my friend, or even my friend’s friend. I am bored with people talking about their relationships to food in such unoriginal ways – food ally?? I own that Misshapes book, Stef! I have complicated feelings about that (yes, ridiculous) xoJane story.
xo Jane was a ripper hate read thanks Laneia.
I’m almost at the point where I can no longer read about gun violence in America. I despair. So many lives needlessly wasted.
I really wish there had been actual pictures of said spiders on their little treadmills
I *loved* the Lindy West piece, I saw it pop up in my fb feed a few times, and hadn’t read it, so thank you!
Also. I find nuclear-related mutant stories terrifying. Terrifying. Even the Simpsons three-eyed fish makes me feel really creeped-out and uncomfortable.