Also.

unrelated, but I just got this text message:
"There is a piss-drunk man in line at the port authority falling everywhere and knocking over queue lines eventually to sprawl out on the ground...Next year!"

Diseases, it turns out, are not discriminatory

John Prescott, GB's former deputy PM, has admitted to suffering from an eating disorder. I'm so thankful that, as a a high profile male, Prescott is willing to put his face on disordered eating and potentially augment the dangerous and totally ungrounded assumption that only women have eating disorders (and, more specifically, only women have eating disorders, and only to be thinner. In actuality, 10% of people with EDs are men, and the oft repeated mantra is true: eating disorders aren't about food. Period. End of story). So why do I, the epitome of the stereotypical eating disorder demographic, give a fuck? Because I think that if people recognize that eating disorders are not gender/age/race specific, that legitimizes them more, and maybe can help society on a greater level finally get that these are not diets or bad habits or lifestyles but serious debilitating fatal psychological diseases.
Whew, that said, I agree with Feministing's response to the BBC article:

While Prescott is brave, The BBC article is actually pretty stupid. Even after establishing that his disease stemmed from his inability to manage stress, it ends with a focus on his weight. For the last frickin' time people, eating disorders are psychological, not physical diseases. If an inability to manage his emotions caused the disease, why not report on how he learned to do that, not his 15 stones?

Happy Earth Day!

Okay so, I totally understand that paying too much attention to the craziest, weakest, most radical challenges to justice does not a well-rounded activist make. But in honor of Earth Day, I cannot help sharing Feminism is bad for the environment.

"Equal pay for equal work also means equal commutes...Homeschooling moms further ease the strain on the ecosystem by keeping their kids off the road"

So, guys, you might have thought that "going green" was a mantra of the same progressive leftists that once brought you women's lib. But in fact, the greenest thing you can do is assume a traditional caregiver/childbearing role at home.

Troubles Brew in the Ivy League

I almost don't want to address this because it makes me so angry and frustrated but since it's pretty much already saturated the internets and it is a news story straight from my great home I suppose it merits some conversation. So this Yale student allegedly artificially inseminated herself over and over again for 9 months while repeatedly taking herbal abortifacients to induce "miscarriages," which she videotaped and the blood from which she preserved and surprise! She's turning the whole thing into an art installment! In which she projects the footage of herself bleeding into her bathtub onto a suspended cube she's lined with her blood.
At first when I read this I got so angry, because it seemed like this was going to become another freak incident that totally plays into ugly stereotypes about pro-choice women/women who have abortions AND trivializes the issue and reduces the whole topic of abortion to, basically, something completely absurd AND plays into anti-choice talking points.
And then I thought, wait a second, there is no way this could actually have happened. You can't artificially inseminate yourself (she was doing it at home with, I presume, some kind of turkey baster?) and get pregnant that many times in 9 months. Maybe she was never really pregnant and just took the abortifacients and cramped and bled into her bathtub for 3/4 of a year and called it art.
Not that that really matters, in the scheme of things, because either way she chose to present it the way she did.
But then this showed up, and now I don't even know what to think because we have the student standing behind her claim that she artificially inseminated/"aborted" for nine months but saying she doesn't know if she was ever pregnant and the whole point was to call attention to the ambiguity surrounding women's bodies etc etc. But Yale says the whole thing is "creative fiction," and claims that she admitted to them that she staged the whole thing but would deny that admission if they publicized it.

So we have so many issues here. If she did do what she claims, it's within her legal right to do so, but as strongly as I will stand behind the mantra of our bodies our choice, this still makes me furious. Because regardless of what she did, regardless of whether she was ever really pregnant or if the whole thing was phony, she presented it in a way that can and will be manipulated by anti-choicers. In the abortion debate, time and time again incidents of "extremes" have dominated conversation-- partial birth abortion, for example. This might be a really naive stupid undergrad art student, but it's an ugly message. I believe in free speech but I believe in self-censorship.
And on top of all the reproductive rights issues, there's also this problem of the university's claims contradicting her own. And personally, I don't know what to think, because I find it very believable that she faked the whole thing, but at the same time I know that university's are so much about PR and branding and image.

ahroeuhrareK!

lul

"I slept with a woman...and afterwards I was thinking, 'Am I gaaaay? Am I straaaaight?' And then I realized: I'm just slutty. Where's my parade?"
-Margaret Cho

I hate advertising

On my way to work this morning, I walked through what I assume was a commercial set, and it was really great: they blocked off the whole block of bond st between broadway and lafayette and filled it with cabs, and there was this beautiful enormous blown out model jumping from hood to hood. The most ridiculous part was that you just know it's a commercial for, like, mascara or something.

charming...

Nick Eriksen got dropped as the London Assembly candidate for the British National Party because he made this statement on his personal blog:

"Rape is simply sex (I am talking about 'husband-rape' here)... Women enjoy sex, so rape cannot be such a terrible physical ordeal…To suggest that rape, when conducted without violence, is a serious crime is like suggesting force-feeding a woman chocolate cake is a heinous offence.”

I confess to having little knowledge about the goings-on of British politics, but it's staggering to me that a man so audacious, with misogyny so deeply rooted that he shares it publically on the internet could have gotten so far in politics. Certainly the British are not mindlessly supporting bigotry-- So if one blog post can bring this man down, can we assume that until this point said bigotry was not public? And if so, how many other politicians are harboring like-minded philosophies on women's health, and how far will they get in the political system before we realize them? Am I missing something here?
Londonist

blunk drogging

Kudos to Planned Parenthood of Georgia!!! The 2008 legislation has officially ended and for the first time in 3 years no blatantly woman-hating legislation passed! AND the Georgia Medical Privacy Act, a proactive law, was passed!

However, here are some actual quotes from this year's session:

"Women shouldn't be allowed to have abortions just because they wake up on the wrong side of the bed."

Yep, that is a serious concern-- women aborting because they're cranky!

"If I hear about women's health one more time..."

Sorry if we constitute half the population and demand legislation that recognizes that!

Well, all that aside, hooray for PPGeorgia! And let's hope NY can pass the RHPPA!

I got into a conversation the other day about the western value placed upon female virginity and today I found this interesting if not well-written article, "The Hymenization of Virginity: Examination of Sociolinguistics, Historical Roots and Consequences"

Some moral indignation to kick off the weekend

"US Funded Health Search Engine Blocks 'Abortion'

The manager of the database, Johns Hopkins' Debbie Dickson...replied in an April 1st e-mail that the university had recently begun blocking the search term because the database received federal funding.

And so we have yet another incident of the Bush administration's reproductive health policy stretching its long evil tentacles into various different arenas that affect far more than just the life of an unborn fetus. Only in this case, we are hearing not only that abortion is wrong, but that it is not even a medical procedure. This government is so insulting and woman-hating I don't even know what to do with myself sometimes.

I have nothing to even say

Women serving in the U.S. military are more likely to be raped by a fellow soldier than killed by enemy fire in Iraq.