Hello, Jheri Curls! How are you feeling today? I’m feeling like TAKING LIFE BY THE HORNS. But first, the stories we missed this week.
The Myth of Beyonce’s Imperfections
The newly released Shriver Report features writing from a ton of amazing women – Beyoncé among them – focused on the economic impacts of gender inequality. Queen Bey’s essay slammed “the myth of gender equality.”
Humanity requires both men and women, and we are equally important and need one another. So why are we viewed as less than equal? These old attitudes are drilled into us from the very beginning. We have to teach our boys the rules of equality and respect, so that as they grow up, gender equality becomes a natural way of life. And we have to teach our girls that they can reach as high as humanly possible.
We have a lot of work to do, but we can get there if we work together.
Bow down, bitches.
F*ck The Man
+ Trans 16-year-old Jewelyes Gutierrez is facing criminal charges after defending herself from bullies.
+ Marissa Alexander will remain free on bond – but with tightened restrictions.
+ CeCe McDonald got free and jammed out to Queen Bey. With Laverne Cox. NBD.
On @Beyonce‘s new album not full on rachet but #CoutureRatchet. @Free_CeCe said post that. #posted. Jamming to the visual album with CeCe
— Laverne Cox (@Lavernecox) January 13, 2014
You Should Give
+ Easy Abby wants to do it with you. Erm, they want to do it together. This thing. This crazy thing called a webseries! ONLY THEY WANNA PUT IT ON THE TEEVEE!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=32UH5b4-iS8
+ THE FOXY MERKINS. Sounds sexy.
The Good, The Bad, The Downright Depressing
+ Who Decides? According to NARAL, if you’re in America, it’s definitely not you.
The anti-choice War on Women did not slow down in 2013. You can be sure it will only ramp up further in 2014 as the mid-term elections approach. As opponents of a woman’s right to choose continue to chip away at our freedoms piece by piece, we’ll be there to fight them every step of the way and reveal the shadowy organizations supporting them. But we’ll work just as hard to expand our freedoms, so that every woman has not just the right, but the opportunity to make whatever choice is right for her.
+ Gay activists may not get their rainbow flags and fly them, too, in the Little Saigon Tet parade.
+ Liz Cheney is no longer running for office in Wyoming, which is nice on account of she was the absolute worst.
+ There are so many abominable things about gay marriage that Utah can’t seem to remember all of them at once.
+ Whoops! Turns out Obamacare is awesome and saves the government money. Put that on your “broken website” and enroll in it, GOP.
+ Chris Christie vetoed a bill that simplified the process for trans* folks of obtaining amended birth certificates. I am guessing he vetoed it because it wasn’t about bridges, or because it does nothing to fix his really fucking unimaginative name. Really? Why has this never come up.
A Man Could Go To Jail for Doing A Bad Thing
A Toronto man named Gregory Alan Elliott was arrested and charged two years ago with criminal harassment for threatening messages he allegedly sent to women via Twitter. His case finally began in a Toronto court yesterday. If convicted, he could face jail time.
It’s a heartening development for women whose professional and personal lives are heavily taxed by the specter of online abuse. Traditional law enforcement channels (not always on the cutting edge of new social media technology) often don’t take internet-based harassment seriously, because it seems to exist only in an intangible playground and because our culture’s “boys will be boys”/”don’t feed the trolls” apologia is so aggressive. The line where online attacks cross over into real-life danger is muddy and ill-defined for most people—even, quite often, victims themselves. Is this real? Am I being oversensitive? Am I installing an alarm system in my house because some 13-year-old boy in Ohio is bored?
That’s What She Said
Media Matters
+ So, what exactly does MSNBC plan to do about the Sochi Olympics?
+ Jared Leto got a Golden Globe for his shitty movie, and then he gave a shitty speech. Shit.
+ “Chozen” doesn’t do shit for anyone, you big fuck-ups.
+ 2014’s gonna be a big year. It might be the year black women take over Hollywood.
+ Catching Fire is the first film since 1973’s The Exorcist to be the top-grossing film of its year. Katniss Everdeen, you have won the Hunger Games.
Catching Fire, the second installment of The Hunger Games saga is not actually an experimental art house film about a family arguing over a pizza order as they play an epic game of Monopoly, crossed the $400-million mark at the domestic box office this week. With a domestic haul of $409.4 million, the Jennifer Lawrence archery expo has passed Iron Man 3 as the highest-grossing domestic movie of 2013, which would be a notable achievement all on its own if it were not augmented by another trivia-worthy fact: Catching Fire is the first movie with a solo female lead since 1973’s The Exorcist to become the top-grossing film of the year.
Transgender Dysphoria Blues
NPR is streaming the new Against Me! album and there’s only one takeaway: LAURA JANE GRACE IS PERFECT.
I want to start off by saying I love Beyoncé and I think her essay is amazing and she puts forth many great points but I do have a small beef. Queen B still refers to women as “mothers, sisters, and daughters”… This is still a huge issue. Women are so often defined by their relationship to others (mainly in their relationship to men). For me that little sentence totally destroyed the point and meaning of the essay. It just further shows that even the people trying to be aware of women’s subordination are not fully aware of how deep these things are rooted in us. Yes, I am a daughter and I am a sister and I may very well be a mother in the future but NONE of those things defines me as a women.
Really excited about Transgender Dysphoria Blues!
You lost me at “Humanity requires both men a and women…” What about everyone else? And I was especially done after “mothers,sisters and daughters” Lord knows I’m sick of being valued by my connection to men or anyone else really. Don’t feel bad about me being hurt, oppressed,etc. because I’m someone’s daughter, do so because I’m a person that doesn’t deserve shitty things to happen to me.
I already don’t care for you particularly, dont give me any reason to roll my eyes.
You lost me at “Humanity requires both men and women…” What about everyone else? And I was especially done after “mothers,sisters and daughters” attitude (as stated above) Lord knows I’m sick of being valued by my connection to men or anyone else really. Don’t feel bad about me being hurt, oppressed,etc. because I’m someone’s daughter, do so because I’m a person that doesn’t deserve shitty things to happen to me.
I already don’t care for you particularly, dont give me any reason to roll my eyes.
Well, this is novel: ‘But, drawing on Supreme Court decisions endorsing the value of diversity in deciding who may attend public universities, the state now said it was pursuing “gender diversity” in marriages. “Society has long recognized that diversity in education brings a host of benefits to students,” the brief said. “If that is true in education, why not in parenting?”’
The straws they grasp at just keep getting weirder and weirder.
I know, right? Different types of marriages is bad diversity, but reinforcing harmful gender roles within marriage is good diversity? What the fuck?
The new Against Me is truly smashing.
NEW AGAINST ME IS SO PERFECT
OMG YOUGAIZ AGAINST ME! WAS JUST IN CLEVELAND AND I TOTALLY WENT AND LAURA JANE GRACE WAS PERFECT AND AMAZING AND SO SO HAPPY AND EVERYONE SANG “TRUE TRANS SOUL REBEL” AT THE TOP OF THEIR LUNGS. THAT HAPPENED. AND I WANT IT TO HAPPEN TO ALL OF YOU.
I lived in Wyoming for nearly a decade (not all at once. I had to take a couple of breaks, because fuck that place) and I’m sorry to say that Liz Cheney dropping out of the race means nothing. Being the worst is basically a prerequisite for public office in Wyoming. The fact that Cathy Connolly (aka my academic adviser when I was at UWyo, aka AN AWESOME HUMAN BEING) actually got elected to the state legislature terrified me for the better part of a week, because I was convinced I’d somehow slipped into a parallel universe and I didn’t know how to get back.
Also, unpopular opinion time: I can’t stand Beyonce’s music. She’s a lovely person who does great things (although the people up thread are totally right about the flaws in that essay), but I HATE her music. It’s all those vocal runs. Runs, everywhere! Just pick a fucking note and go with it!