kill sickness soup

works everytime. changes slightly everytime.

you need:
veggie oil
3-6 cloves garlic
ginger, sliced, big enough not to eat
onion
veggies like: carrots, bell pepper, cabbage, mushrooms, radish, kale, spinach, jalapenos, broccoli, squash, or whater you have that’s high in vitamins
can of diced tomatoes
herbs/seasonings:
cinnamin
black pepper
cayenne pepper
cumin seed (ground tastes better)
bay leaf
cilantro (really good for your stomac and digestion)
honey (unless you don’t eat it, remember also to get local!)
turmeric
curry powder
basil
sage
rosemary
oragoneo
and whatever else you like! adjust seasonings as needed.

use a medium soup pot (or adjust to how many to feed, how long you’ll be drining only soup). mince or chop the garlic and onion then throw in the oil. heat it on high and let it get warm and the onion turn yellowish, but don’t burn the garlic!

add the ginger. stir a bit. then add more oil and fil the pot half-wayish with water (or soup broth). start adding some herbs. i recomend starting with a bay leaf and some honey (say a teaspoon). then the cayenne, slowly and anything else to add color. then chop up and throw in some veggies. whatever you want to be the mushiest or whatever cooks longer start with. per example, carrots and potatoes are hard and thicker, throw them in first.

stir everything around and try a little sip of it. think about what it needs, then bring it to boil. let it do that for a sec, then turn down the heat and simmer it. a lot of veggies lose their vitamins when cooked too high, so watch it.

add the rest of your veggies (greens in last). stir somemore. add a little more honey and black pepper. taste it. if it needs to be thicker, add more oil and honey. if it needs to be spicerer add more everything, especailly cayenne. if it needs to be sweeter add more honey or some paprika if you have it. if it just needs more taste in general add basil and curry powder. now add the tomatoes!! this gives it more flavor and it seems to make it feel nicer on your throat. maybe the acid burns the germs?

stir this for a couple more minutes and you’ve got something that will kill the sickness inside of you! it’s been better than a flu shot for me and everyone i’ve made it for loves it. take out things you don’t like add things you do. good with tofu or black beans. leave the honey out if you don’t eat it.

now, take some vitamin C, and sit down to your soup with a large glass of water. you’ll be better soon.

strip to end animal suffering

only “feminazis” don’t like it!

the Casa Diablo Club

if sex appeal is used all over our society, why isn’t it okay for us to use it to sell veganism and vegatarianism?

what’s next American Apparel

so, this is another old issue, but lately it seems like i am getting a daily reminder of how fucked uo this company seems to be… i really liked their clothes and the early ads i saw! at this point, however, every ad i see looks more and more like fucking kiddie porn and their clothes are over-priced over-hip badly made
And this in 2007????????

to their credit, apperently this was actually done by the magazine i-D and not AA themselves, but they didn’t check it first? more than that i have only seen one AA ad with an African-American woman in (well, 16 year most likely), besides this one. in general the fashion world only uses African models to exotify them and this seems no fucking different. i read a few responses to this saying it was celibrating “Black Beauty” and “OMG this is so high fashion”, but the responses seemed to be from white people. i read other respsonses that it was art, and i agree that it’s artisticly done with amazing use of color/contrast, but ART is not immune to rascism and an ADVERTISEMENTS/EDITORIALS barely qualify as art. And the “Sweeter than candy, better than cake.”?! that in the end is what sets me overboard. i mean, i could see this as reclaiming or confronting our aunt jemmima stereotypes, but that proves it is about the fetish of it. the fact remains AA is a company owned by a white man and i-D a magazine owned/edited by white people. a women responded on AA’s website: “but we’re not dessert, we are not a statement, we are people, plain and simple, intricate and complicated-just like everyone else.”

i can’t help and feel like even though it wasn’t an offical AA ad, that soon we will see their ads with black women in chains in their “native Africa”. i think we are beginning to see what the fashion world is capable of.

what does american apparel have to say? not much, but read the comments from their daily update. what does i-D magazine have to say? no response i found.

it’s worth noting that i can’t find info or pictures of this model anywhere else and there is an arguement as to whether or not she’s really black, or if she truely is wearing blackface.

also, worth mentioning that AA is NOT offically sweat shop free brand clothing. made in america means made by immagrints making minimum wage.

mostly, i think fashion magazines, clothing companies and ad firms need to be put in check: exploiting race and objecting women isn’t fucking provakative or edgey, it’s fucked up. will things ever change, not as long as they profit from it, not as long as we buy it.

blogging

so, i just read a couple blog entries from some of the thing that says “most read posts” or something. they were both stupid. not in a sense of the writer wasn’t intelligent, but in the sense of being redunant and full of conspiracy theories.

do people really have nothing better to do than read blogs and blog all day and attak policans they don’t really know with accusations that would be true of any/all politicans? i mean, i’m sure they could have at least washed their fucking dishes, instead!!! (oh, i forgot, that’s a women’s job anyway). more than that, are people really that angry? white men with money and access to the internet and obviously a lot of free time? they’re THAT angry?

i’m not posting any links because this garbage doesn’t deserve to be read, i’m sure if you’ve read random blogs you’ve run into the same problem: annoying, reactionary, chatterboxes who talk through their asses. and people who read it. FUCKING SHIT.

so, how do we make sure this isn’t us? well, i think being happy is one way! hahahaha. when you spend all your time being angry and yelling about shit people stop listening and you stop caring. you end up being miserable and, frankly, you catch more flies with honey. also, if your blogs/zines/articles are annoying and reactionary people who have intelligent criticism won’t think you’re worth talking to, you’ll only hear from assholes who think you’re onto something and use your comment box to say some other racist, fucked up stupid shit.

getting off the internet is another way. stand on a real soap box, not a virtual one! or just read, shop local, make dinner with your friends, go on walks, masterbate, go to workshops, accept that you have things to work on, do art, talk to kids, plant a garden, talk to your neighbors, vote for who you actaully want to be president, volunteer, call people out on their shit, call yourself out on your shit, pick up trash, have a party, start a band, go to a protest, organize your own protest, write on bathroom walls, loan people books, share your knowledge, listen to others, interview people at the bus stop with you, &tc.

i find that people who do these things are much happier than people who blog about policains and drugs all day and how angry they are about it. don’t be that angry white man who no one listens to!!! we don’t need another Lyndon LaRouche, we need people who act on their convictions!

having said this, i’m going to get off the internet to clean and make myslef healthy food! (and read more about lyndon larouche).

MONSTERS OF THE ID

what?

A Message to “Anarchist” Men by Molly Tov

this really hit home for me: “The men who vocalize their aggression against rapists, but when THEIR lovers say no, coercion is simplke, and its not rape, because he’s ANTI-SEXIST. There are men who use anti-sexist talk to pick up wimmin. The men who challenge others to call them on their shit and when someone does, on goes the defense mode and he’s appalled that someone could say HE was fucking up, instead of actually thinking about the situation and to start working on it.“

broader than just the issue of sexism in “radical” men, is the issue of isms in all of us and our inibility to confront it or handle criticism. this is understandable: it sucks to feel like you’re being called out for behaivor it seems like everyone’s displaying, it sucks to be judged, it sucks to have a friend tell you that you’re fucked up and it’s super scary to look inside ourselves at the ugliest forms of sexism/racism/aggression/&tcism.

we have this idea “the racist” is some monster KKK member who is less than human, so if we ourselves are racist we must be the same. just like we have this idea that “the rapist” is a monster who hides in the bushes waiting to attack the most vulnerable, so Jonny Nextdoor who gets girls tootoo drunk can’t be a rapist because he’s no monster, he’s just looking to have fun.

these ideas keep up from confronting ourselves. instead we talk about others as “inhuman” “scum” “disgusting” and we distance ourselves from them to make it clear that THEY are sexist/mysogonistic/racist/greedy/evil and WE aren’t. so when someone says “i think what you said is really racist” we hear that we are the same as that KKK member (who we’ve decided is less than human), we know we’re not that monster so we deny and become defensive instead of wondering why that person felt we were being racist. this means the inner racist inside us goes on, as does the racism in the world around us.

the “common sense” thought pattern many of us have is that a select group of less than human people comitt all rapes and murders, say all the sexist things, go to KKK meetings and torture people. 90% of the world is incapable of doing these things, and is “human”. i’d like to point out there is little to no DNA evidence that murders are any less human than marketing reps or students or the people they murder. but, in thinking this way, they prove to themselves that they are not the monster. and people tell them that we all have to change our attitudes in order to prevent these things from happening or that rape is a product of society, they preach the “common sense” that’s it’s the “bad seeds” and not a problem that will be fixed by anything. none of us can be the monster, we can’t be that. never mind that this world doesn’t actually use common sense. because that isn’t one of us! ———–>

several years ago my best friend was raped while i slept in the next bed. the perp in this situation was another friend of mine, and the man in our friend group who everyone trusted the most. when i sat in his living room telling him what he did wrong there was no monster before me, there was a fucked up kid. he didn’t hide in the bushes, he didn’t plan on raping someone, he didn’t do any other form of violence. he wasn’t a less than human monster, he was our best friend (very past tense). when we asked him why he did it he said he didn’t know. when we asked him if he thought it had something to do with power he said no, then he told us of 2 sexual situations where he had felt powerless and of a shit load of situations other situations where he felt powerless over his life. he used the word “powerless”. this kid was so fucked up but he couldn’t confront himself, he couldn’t challenge his mysogony his homophobia or the abuse he had suffered. he was so fucked up he choose to empower himself by fucking up someone else.

this doesn’t make him a monster, this makes him the same as the 8 year old who lived next door to me when i was 6, and the boyfriend i had when i was 14 and many many others who couldn’t hear the word “NO”, thought silence was “YES” or felt like it was ok because it happened to them. a product of a society where they felt marginalized so they marginalized others and got away with it. similar to thousands and thousands of others who when called on their shit become defensive and make up excuses for themselves.

instead of giving up our privilege or using it for good use, we see people challenging society as a threat to it. because (as cliche as it sounds), the inherintly racist/classist/sexist/homophobic society still favors the white, able bodied young man and he(we) doesn’t want to admitt it. and being confronted, having to purge it out for real, means we have to admitt it benefits us in at least some small way. and if change the whole social construct of it, we’ll lose that privilege. and then we have to sit andwonder if we are any different from the rapist clansmen we made so much fun of?

my answer? if you read this whole thing and thought “fuck, i did really violate someone’s boundaries and it’s my responsibility to apoligize and fight sexual assault in my community” or “wow, maybe i did say and do things that were racist and it insulted one of my friends, i should accept my white privilege and learn to fight racism”, then yes, you are different from him.

and until we all think that way, until we accept that EVER LAST ONE OF US has issues with sexism, racism, able-bodism, classism, speciesm, agism, culturism &tc, until we confront those issues head on and look at how they play out in our lives, until we accept that if there is monster in our community it is because there is a monster in all of us, then we’ll never fucking get anywhere as a society/movement/community/revolution.

more than the internet

there’s a lot of stuff i’ve been thinking about that i would like to see happen. specifically a Ladyfest or CLIT fest in austin or a free school in austin. both, really. but i was thinking maybe a fest would be more achivable in the short term, and i guess there was a ladyfest here in 2004. i think a lot of my early empowerment as a women and my knowledge of self healthcare begain at the first CLIT fest in Minneapolis 2004. in fact, there were a couple older punk women i met there who (even though i only hung out with them a couple times) impacted my life in a tremindous way.

a free school, also, i feel like could be a great asset to the austin community (and all communities), i know the bat annex, the belfry and the jack pine were all pretty awesome influences in the twin cities. i also think that as an anarchist helping people learn how to read, write, plant gardens, cook, make their own clothing &tc should be a goal of mine. when we get together to learn how to be self sufficent and teach others how to be self sufficent we create community. i’m sure that there are lots of people in austin that are interested in the same thing/have tried the same thing. AND the rhizome collective has had free classes in the past and free education surrounding sustainability is part of their object/mission statement.
another thing that’s been happening is meeting about starting a food coop in south austin!! i’m pretty excited about this, but have yet to go to a meeting. i found their blog, though, so we can all keep up to date: South Austin Food Coop

And speaking of the rhizome collective AND getting off the internet the Radical Urband Sustainability Training is in a week! it’s kind of expensive, but i think i’m going to try to go.

female domination!!!! 2.0

“whenever i say something they find hard to hear, they chalk it up to my anger and never to their own fear.” -ani d

so, someone tells you that there are feminists who went too far, practice “reverse sexism” and female domination and want a matriarchy instead of a patriarchy. in our case this is a friend. this isn’t some politican or actor or religious leader or Rolling Stone magazine journalist or anyone else i would have expected something that semi-uneducated and very unthought out from. it’s someone i know on a personal level, interact with weekly or more, someone i hired on to his job!!! it’s not this big political deal, it’s the small, deeply personal phrasing of words that has a great weight and bagage behind it.

but how could he know about that baggage? it’s not his sex/gender coming from thousands of years of oppression, a marriage contract stating he was some one’s property, a 1/3 chance of being sexually assaulted. the first law ever written didn’t say “if a man speaks out against his woman his mouth shall be smothered by hot brick”. so, there is little chance he could understand the true oppression of sexism.

i, however, came with that baggage, from that place. and because of this and the many articles/books/lyrics/poems i have read and the people who called me out on my fucked up behavior know that it’s silly to use words like “reverse sexism” (if it’s sexism reversed, wouldn’t that not be sexism?), or to even say that feminism itself is untouchable because of “a few rare people who took it too far”. what movement/government/community HASN’T had a rare few who took things “too far”? we live in a society of extreme music, sports, sex, reality tv, and violence. of every population there are extremists, how would a population of feminists be any different? and why would this be evidence that feminism is to blame?

at a panel on gender based violence at an Amnesty International conference i went to in 2004 i found out that gender based violence accounts for more deaths/disabilities than cancer, malaria, traffic accidents and war PUT TOGETHER in women ages 15-44. on top of that, in societies that are more masculinized (ie. men is bread winner, macho is the in thing) sexual violence occurs more often. according to RAINN’s website men make up only 10% of sexual assault survivors (currently). in my domestic violence class in high school we learned that over 99% or rapists in prison were men. talk about women’s equality and female domination!

if there are women who have goal of female domination or “reverse sexism” or female separatism, or who are going too far it is in direct reaction to a society that has gone too far in her own oppression. it is a reaction to her friends being raped, her boyfriend pushing her to the side, a political system where she has only 22% representation when she makes up 52% of the world’s population, a lack of equal pay for equal work, violence against her being a norm in music and movies and an impossible standard of beauty.

whether or not it’s justified or ok for women to “dominate men” or “reverse the issues”, again: it is a direct reaction to a society that went too far in it’s oppression of all people (including men). if we are reversing the roles of our gender it might be because men should know what it’s like to be in our shoes (and we theirs). men have tried to dominate women for around 5,000 years, and for some women to take advantage of sexual power or physical ableness to dominate them is a perfectly valid response to her own oppression (whether or not it’s the best response). because hers is inherited from her mother and her mother and her mother and back, while his is an oppression of the minute or hour he is made to feel our discomfort.

“oh, i’m sorry, did I ruin 3 hours of your life? Did I ruin your good time? well, I am a woman every single day I deal with this shit every single day So I’m sorry if you felt uncomfortable for a single day But good – maybe you’ll know what it’s like What it’s like to be me Maybe you’ll know what it’s like What it’s like to be she” -Garmonbozia

i’m not saying these things to to make any man feel guilty, or to make us women into victims, i’m saying them to give a better understanding of what it means to be a women in this day and age. or, what it has meant to be one over the last couple thousand years.

so many people treat modern day feminism as a joke. we have sexual harassment laws, the right to vote and you pay for our dinner, what more could we want? oh, i don’t know, to be a person and not a prize! is this taking it too far? is that reverse sexism?

contary to the opinions of many i don’t want to have my cake forever and eat it, too. i don’t want or need you to hold the door open for me, buy my dinner, drive me to the movie or take me shopping. that means nothing if you’re not my equal/friend/partner/brother. i don’t want to wage war on men or the community around me. but i do feel like there is a war against me and my body. i don’t want to be an object or a goddess. i don’t WANT to dominate you (well, maybe sometimes i do in bed…), i want you to recognize me as your sister and not your enemy. i want to walk home at night without fear of rape. i want to invite you to my house without you assuming it’s for sex. i want my opinion to be respected. i want an end to rape as a tool of war (and war, too). i want equal pay for equal work. i want you to look at my face and not my chest when i speak. i want to wear a skirt without being honked out. i want to breast feed in public. i want my choice to be my choice. i want you to listen when i speak. i want you too aid me in revolution. i want you to take issues of sexual harrassment seriously.

is this reverse sexism, female domination, or anti-male? is this too much to ask? well, if it is, forgive me for saying it, but i can only image a better world built on the ashes of this one. you can call that whatever you want.

she’s considered armed and fuckin nuts

a review of Serial Mom.

I have a fascination with female serial killers. tottally morbid right? well, whateves, apparently John Waters does, too! so i’m in good company. i was super stoked when my roommate (Comrade’s dad) brought home this movie and we watched it.

it’s about a loving, sweet, church going housewife in the subburbs named Beverly Sutphin (sounds more like Suck-fin). the beginning of the film has the family discussing capitol punishment: “He killed people, mom”. “We all have our bad days”. when she’s not being s demon in the kitchen or the bedroom i guess she’s just a demon!

one of the great things about this film is that Beverly Sutphin is the perfect example of the female gender roles, as i said; loving, sweet, church going, motherly, cooks, cleans, fashionable (no white shoes after labor day!), enjoys sex with her husband. but at the same time she completely subverts her gender by being sadistic, violent, powerful, cunning and ruthless. she sees what she wants, she takes what she wants.

and with Kathleen Turnner in the lead, Sam Waterson and Rikki Lake, girl you can not lose!! not too mention camoes by Joan Rivers, Traci Lords, Patty “Tania” Hearst and fucking L7, among a few! you’ll laugh your heart out and feel like carving up your own good time. it’s well worth the trip to the video rent depot or adding to your netflix.

i give it 2 bitches up.

the real enemy, the real enemy

in light of the recent comments made by Gerraldine Ferraro, the ever underlying presence of racism and the backlash against feminism i think it’s time we talk about the issues within our movements. we absolutly-fucking-positively have to confront our own racism, sexism, homophobia, classism, ablebody-ism, transphobia, sizism &tc. WHITE PATRIARCHY AND THE POWER SYSTEM are the enemies, but when we actively participate in that WE ARE OUR ENEMIES.

we live in a society where are constanly exposed to these things, and talking about them once or going to an anti-racist training once doesn’t solve the problem. we can’t magicaly unlearn a life time’s worth of oppresssion & privilege. we have to get to the root of it.
so, how do we do this? well, let’s start by educating ourselves. white privilege workshops, anti-racist trainings, women only discussion groups, talking to your dyke best friend (who might soon be your trans best friend), writing down your experiences, domestic violence workshops, documentaries, reading Angela Davis, bell hooks, Valerie Solonas, Emma Goldman, Anne Schaef, Arundhati Roy and that zine you picked up at the radical book fair are a start (so is My Gender Workbook by Kate Bornstein), asking questions and a number of other things. check the primary souces on you high school or college history book!

now, let’s empower ourselves. how? create art, zines, blogs, articles about how we confronted our internalized oppression. volunteer at a domestic voilence center, for the Black Panther party, at a homeless shelter, for the campaign of a third party canidate (like Cynthia McKinney), provide day care for groups let by women of color, or where ever you know you will learn more and feel rewarded. go to Take Back the Night or Dyke March or start your own Take Back the Night. start a girl gang. help out your friends.

then, educate others and let them educate you! whether you spread yourzine around, start conversations at the bus stop, tell people how you actually feel, call people out when they use words like “gay”, “nigger”, “cunt”, “pussy” or call women ugly because they don’t fit into society’s white & skinny standard of beauty. talk to other women about their experiences and yours. lead a white privilege, internalized sexism or domestic voilence workshop. write on the bathroom wall.

live it. take everything you’re learned and shared and live it. don’t contribute to gentrafication, hold meetings in places that are excessable by bus, write letters to politicains, newspapers, magazines… don’t support companies who have fucked up practices, support local music, and yourself and your friends. stand up for yourself and others. subvert capitolizm by buying fair trade, homemade or not buying at all.

and then get back to educating yourself, again!

this is only a beginning. it’s time to stand up to the stereotype of the racist white feminist. it’s time to confront ourselves, each other and find out who our real enemies are.

no comment

“http://www.theonion.com/content/node/28801“
“By the end of the week, she had lost its shoes, its dress was in tatters, and she’d given it a Mohawk haircut.”

Obama on Race

Open Thread: Geraldine Ferraro

1984? Geraldine Ferraro?

Who is she?

Emotions do the Talking

“http://www.theonion.com/content/node/28906″>

“http://www.theonion.com/content/node/27651“>
“Actually, I guess it doesn’t matter. They’re both kinda like that.”

privilege & me 2.0

a personal side of my privilege.

my parents never really had money. i don’t remember ever not being in debt. 3 kids, pets, and a car or 2 (that were always at least 10 years old) and my mom’s student loan payments were always draining our income. they owned a house and of course had to pay bills, etc. even though my mom was an occupational theoropist at a hospital owned by Healtheast she didn’t have healthcare, and from 8-16 neither did i. i don’t remember ever going to the denist and after we moved to Minnesota all our doctor’s visits were based on how much money they had. and they were all at the sliding scale neighbourhood clinic where you weighted about half an hour. we rarely had money to fix plumbing/heating/electricity problems in our hundred year old house and most winters i couldn’t sleep in my room because it was so cold. the neighbourhood we lived in had one of the highest crime rates in our city and the year i moved back to austin (when i was 19) the highest homocide rate (4 alone in the month of january).

like i said before, i have feel i was very privileged. no matter what money problems we had, or how little i actually got to spend time with my parents or how often our cars worked or whatever, i always got a lot of love. from them and my sister and brother. i had most likely the most emotionaly supportive family of anyone i knew.

my siblings were a lot older than me and wrote me letters after they went to college. my sister made me a little book out of pink construction paper about my life: from peeing on the floor and blaming it on the dog to my future of traveling and charming everyone i met. my brother sent me specail stationary to write him letters, when i went vegan (at 11) my sister sent me her old cookzines. they called me often and told me how much they loved/missed me.

my parents weren’t consistant in their attention and could be kind of self invovled and neglectful. but they were supportive of my choices and were intelligent, loving and very liberal. my earliest memories are of my dad putting me in one of his shirts to wear to bed, putting on an old blues or Velvet Underground record and letting me dance around our living room until they put me to bed.

most of my life i spent watching PBS, hearing/reading articles about science, politics, music and literature. my mom had worked for Planned Parenthood and talked to me about sex education and the importance of abortion and birth control. my father studied history and talked to me about labor movements, the civil rights movements and the impact that music had. they both talked to me about who they might vote for (although there were many times my dad didn’t vote because he had to work all day and was too tired to go vote on his breaks) and why. my mom was on the board of PFLAG and led the transgendered support group. both of my parents had been councelers at different points in their lives.

they taught me about art history, greek history and music history. my dad still calls me when he hears a radio show or sees something on PBS he thinks i would want to hear about (usually something about women in music or anceint cultures or silent films). we watching foreign films, 60’s art films, silent movies, 50’s scifi flicks and documentaries.

when i was 15 (and none of us had health insurance) my mother had surgery to remove a tumor in her brain, the first time. we had over $90,000 in medical bills. later in high school my parent filed for bankrupcy, for the second time. even with all the medical problems both my parents have had, even when i lent them them money, even when my dad worked 60 hours a week and my mom worked 30 and we still barely had enough money for food, even when i made all the meals and sometimes even bought the meals, even when i was afraid to walk down the street in my neighbourhood, even now when me& my siblings pay for my parents to visit, even now when i work my ass of, even now when i fight sexism daily and save almost all my money for school, i will never deny my privilege. what i wanna know is how come other people can’t claim their privilege?

while having a loving, supportive, intelligent family is a right a child has, not every child gets it. not every adult gets it! just like being paid the same for the same amount of work is right we have, but don’t get. so, while all these things we talk about as “rights” are indeed rights that doesn’t mean everyone has them. growing up in a supportive household where you can be out to your parents and you are raised to be critically minded and watch/read intelligent things is more than many of my friends who grow up in more stable households with more money got.

so, on this very personaly level, i feel like i had all the privilege in the world…

rape and film

there are a lot of observations i have made about rape scenes and rape in film, but the one i want to really touch on right now is how often the women make noise similar to that of orgasms and DON’T FIGHT BACK. and by often, i mean in every rape scene i have witnessed.
while often women (and men) are paralized by fear when being attacked, they fight back most of the time. not say “oh, oh, oh”, put a fucking “baby” in there and it’s a sex scene for shits sake. i think every woman i have talked to about has told me they would rather be murdered on the street than raped on the street (myself included). i would say based on that, most of them would try to RUN AWAY and not just say “oh, oh, oh” and LET THEMSELVES be raped.

more than that, in most movies the man isn’t home when the woman is raped or is killed, and suddenly without a man to defend her she is HELPLESS and DEFENSLESS, until a another man comes back to save her and/or help the cause of justice by punishing those other men.

where are the rape scenes of men? where is the rape/torture pornography of men? what’s up with the prevailing number of women helpless, being raped on television and in movies?

furthermore, considering how triggering rape scenes are for women (and men) who have been assaulted (myself included) why the fuck even include them? you can imply rape without showing everything from her screaming to men riping her clothes off to the rape itself. i don’t know anyone who thinks rape scenes add ANYTHING to movies. all they add is some nightmares and body memories where we relive what happened to us, and remind us of our place in society: the bottom.

she’ll make a believer out of you

a review of “The Eyes of Tammy Faye”

“the Eyes of Tammy Faye” documents the life and rise and fall of Tammy Faye and her televangalist career from start to 2000, with chapters announce by sock puppets and narration by RuPaul. she grew up in Minnesota and bought her first make up kit at the flee market (always a shopper!). there was a ton of information about the late Tammy that i hadn’t known. like on her show in the 80’s she had a gay man with AIDs on and talked about how horrible it was that people calling themselves christians would be afraid to get close to him, she cried and told him she loved him.

after watching the whole documentary i have to say that a)Tammy wasn’t as dumb as i thought; b) she was super inspirational and c)she might have been one of the few people who truely loved everyone she met. and how amazingly strong you must be, to truely love and forgive everyone who ever wronged you. i have to say that while i still don’t understand her faith, sock puppets or make up, i have a lot more respect for her after seeing this. she was tottally sweet and charismatic, almost everyone who met her fell in love (especally gay men). i highly recomend seeing it!!!! you’ll cry the whole time (in true Tammy Faye style)!!!

since the making of the film, Tammy Faye Messner died of colon cancer that spread to her lung in 2007.
seriously, dog, love your enemy and see it.

female domination?

so, i find myself having a huge weakness for young, slightly awkward, highly intelligent, heavey drinkers who like to talk about music, politics and literature.

and i’m a little hopelessly attracted to this kid, a film student and nerd (in the hip way). we joke around quite a bit and always have fascinating, ridiculous conversations. today i was blown out of the water when i put in this mixtape of riot grrrl bands and he recignized the bands and songs. we talked about riot grrrl, girl gangs (i even showed him my tattoo from my girl gang), feminism, girl music and zines! how excited was i? i can’t even say…
then i said something about boys who call themselves feminists, but don’t change themselves, just talk shit about “typical guys”. he said something about how common that is. and he wasn’t for sure a feminist, but he knew it was important and he did believe in equality. and it was becuase he believed in equailty that he wasn’t a feminist, because there were a rare few who took it to the point of reversing the issue (issue=sexism? reverse sexism?!) and dominated men…

…what?

i responded by saying that sometimes that’s valid. we were then interupted and didn’t get to finish the conversation. so, does this guy i thought of as an ally and a cutie believe in “reverse sexism”. not just the act of women oppressing men, but that phrase?!

he might not even have meant it that way… we didn’t get to finish talking about it!!! i know later he quoted le tigre and i’m positive i turned fucking red in the face and forgot his strange, incomplete sentence that was so, um, anti-feminist. not just that, but he almost uttered a phrase that carries this vast amount of baggage and guilt.

so, what do we do when the “radical” men in our lives aren’t so “radical”?

my friend Ruth Less volunteered to write female domination 2 & 3, where we’ll explore reverse sexism, oppression, and uh, talking about it with your coworkers/people you’re sexually attracted to… right?

…right!

target yourself

so, i think this is sort of an old issue, but i only recently found out, and no one i knew, had any idea, either.

that is, that Target, the great dispenser of cheap, awesome goods decided that it was a-ok for their pharmacists to deny women birth control based on their “moral” objection to it. WTF, Target?

you were suppose to pretend to be on our side!!!

now, if someone on the street had told me this about Target i’d be like “you just don’t want me to save money and look good doing it!” or think they got Target and Wal-Mart confused, but alas, i read this in an old issue of BUST magazine. a quick google search lead me to this lengthy article in Prevention magazine, this on hipmama.com and this blog about it. tottally heartbreaking, right? the thing is, all these articles are from 2005 (well, the BUST one i read was 2007, i think), anyone have 2008 information?

until further notice i most definately encourage anyone who enjoys girlcotts, to girlcott them. the Target corporation doesn’t need your money anyway and you can find cheaper things at thrift stores… i know i’m avoiding the department store.

other corporations that you should look into girlcotting: coca-cola , nestle, suicide girls (i recomend shooting your own porn if you want something really woman owned/operated!), look at oneangrygirl’s girlcott list here and please tell me of other companies we should know about for consideration…