Better late than punctual, here’s this week’s open thread for discussion and our regular round-up of some of the articles and blogs we’ve noticed but not had time to post about over the last week or so.
If you have a link or comment that doesn’t fit anywhere else and would like to share it, feel free to drop it in the comments here.
- New feminist pop culture site (Bad Reputation)
- Diary of a Domestic Extremist: Why I hate activism (Ceasefire Magazine)
- More black people jailed in England and Wales proportionally than in US (The Guardian)
- Renewable Girls Calendar Aims to Make Solar Sexy. Ugh. (TreeHugger)
- Establishing Personhood: Female Versus Woman (Clutch Magazine)
- Unveiling Misconceptions: A Muslim Woman Documents Lives of American Women (KickStarter)
- “Who gave you the right?”: Indian sex workers talk back to filmmakers (Bitch Magazine)
- Peter Hitchens: Not A Feminist (No Sleep ‘Til Brooklands)
- Cheerleading: Why do boys want to wave pop-poms? (BBC News Magazine)
- Sex workers and relationships: a picture is worth a thousand words (Feminisnt – possibly Not Suitable For Work, if only for the writer’s biopic)
- Lip Service (BBC Three) “Sex, lies and true love in modern Scotland, BBC Three’s new seductive relationship drama Lip Service follows the lives of a group of twenty-something lesbians.”
- What Virago means to our readers (Virago Books)
- Think iPhone apps are just for geeky blokes? Read our Girls’ Guide to making the most of your mobile (Daily Mail)
- Lose Weight, Make Money (Slate: XX factor)
- You Don’t Have to Be Pretty (A Dress A Day)
- Jam City Rollergirls (Gamespot – video requires Flash Player 10)
- Feminist Porn Studies: Reader call for papers (Feminist Porn Studies)
- Women of the Year Awards Winners (Women of the Year)
- Lads’ mags: the great cover-up (The Guardian)
- The Best Place to Be a Woman (Ms. Magazine blog)
- Theory is Yours: A Brief Archaeology of Trans Feminist Awesome (Questioning Transphobia)
- Analysis: Is it safe to come out? (Inside Housing)
- Cheerleader Required to Cheer for Man Who Assaulted Her (Ms. Magazine blog)
- Gaza’s surfer girls (The Atlantic)
- Charity offers UK drug addicts £200 to be sterilised (BBC News)
- The right kind of feminism (Yale Daily News)
- Exeter RTN cancelled as local police withdraw support (Musings of the Anti Chris)
I can’t let this post go by without mentioning that The F-Word has been listed in Master’s Degree website’s 50 Best Blogs for Following Women’s Rights Issues
And finally, continuing my break with tradition, I’ll finish this round-up with a music video. This pulls together a couple of thoughts I’ve had reading Sian Norris’ review of Click: Young Women On The Moments They Knew They Were Feminists and Cazz Blase’s latest instalment in her Women In Punk series.
To be contrary: I don’t know if I’ve ever had a single click moment around feminism; it’s more of an ongoing process for me – and not just for my feminist awakening, for want of a better term, but in many areas of my life. For example, punk pretty much passed me by first time round, although I did have something of a click moment with reggae music, which I doubt I’d have had if not for punk. Hearing The Clash’s cover of Police And Thieves on their first album opened up a whole world of amazing music to me – and I must admit I’m kind of hoping that Cazz writes a further article examining the impact of reggae on punk (anyone remember The Selecter?). So while I go for a wander down memory lane, here’s the original 1976 version of Police And Thieves, sung by Junior Murvin and produced by the musical genius Lee “Scratch” Perry: