Tuesday Teasers: Stuff I’ve Been Reading #11

brought to you by one crashed kitten

Last week in the midst of Boston’s first heat wave of 2012, Hanna and I adopted a kitten. For the kitten-lovers among you, there are photos and web videos available here and here.

In addition to kitten wrangling, here’s some of the web-based reading I’ve been doing since the last Tuesday Teaser.

Amanda Marcotte @ Pandagon | Why empowering girls isn’t working:

I’m sick of putting women in a situation where we’re expected to defeat sexism by giving up on other important goals, such as finding love and partnership, or enjoying sexual game-playing, or having families, though that’s not my thing. I just don’t really see a way out of this dilemma, except by putting more pressure on men to relinquish privilege.

s.e. smith @ this ain’t livin | “She can’t be poor, she has a cell phone!“:

People seem to be under the impression that owning a cell phone makes it impossible to be poor, despite the fact that they are ubiquitous in US society; in fact, it can be cheaper to own a cell phone than to carry a land line. And for poor folks, that level of connection can be critically important. A cell phone is needed to find work and network with people, to interact with social services, and, yes, to socialise and build community with friends and people who may work in solidarity together to address specific problems in a given community.

Issa @ Live Love Grow | What You Say About Children in Public:

The truth is that children are messy sometimes. And loud sometimes. And they run around sometimes. And they bang on things and drop things. And they and their parents should still be welcome in public spaces. To attempt to eradicate the noise and the mess and the motion is actually an attempt to eradicate the presence of parents and children from public life. If that’s what you mean to do, then you’re an asshole, and I’m not really talking to you. If that’s not what you mean to do, give your words a second thought the next time you’re talking about children in public. Are your words welcoming? Or are your words the ones that send us to hide in the bathroom and push us out in the cold?

Elyse @ Skeptick | Psychology Today Blogger Marty Klein: Your Facts Are Irrelevant, Woman:

 How about this: grownups learn that there is a time and a place for sexual propositions. Much like there is a time and a place to ask people if they love Jesus, and a time and a place to tell someone you’re concerned about their health. Rather than making it the responsibility of everyone who doesn’t want attention to list the kind of attention we may or may not want, why don’t we just put into place some social rules about how we approach certain topics and then live by the assumption that decent people understand those rules and that there are consequences for breaking them. So, let’s say you throw your come-fuck-us card at a stranger, you understand that the stranger very well might think you’re a giant asshole who she would not want to fuck. And if you do this within the context of an ongoing discussion within a community already fed up with it’s women leaders being sexualized, it may come up as part of the conversation.

Charlie Glickman | Sexual Harassment, Unwanted Sexual Attention, Cruising, Flirting:

The fact that women at conferences have been dealing with sexual harassment and being tokenized, dismissed, or ignored because they’re women, the fact that their speaking out has resulted in all of the usual derailing and attacks, and that this fits within a larger pattern of cultural sexual intrusion that women face on a daily basis all intertwine to make this kind of interaction especially likely to be button-pushing. Within that background, I think it’s easy to see how this couple’s actions landed in the way they did, even though I think it’s unlikely that they had that intention.

cjpascoe @ Social (In)Queery | How Not to Study Families:

If there’s one thing we can learn about Regnerus’s study, it’s this: studying same-sex families quantitatively is very, very difficult. Family and sexuality are both fluid, dynamic features of our everyday lives, but capturing them in a demographic snapshot is complicated even further by a lack of federal support for research. Population-wide datasets like the U.S. Census have failed to adapt to family change by including a broader range of options for marital status and living arrangements, and most still refuse to include a single question about sexual orientation. It’s not as though family scholars are unaware of the methodological weaknesses that Regnerus complains about in his lit review – many of us have had to rely on convenience samples and snowballing just to get a sample size of same-sex families high enough to test statistical significance. As a result, much of what we know about gay and lesbian families is based on the most visible among them – white, class-privileged, two-parent families.

E. J. Graff @ The American Prospect | Why Does The Atlantic Hate Women?:

Slaughter strikes me as having a limited idea of what feminism is. The feminists I knew in the late 1970s and early 1980s wanted to restructure work and family life. Few of those structural reforms got enacted. One key change did come: Women were able to to crack into high-end careers—but that was as far as they could go. They couldn’t also, in that generation, push for structural reforms that changed the workplace for everyone. Then came the backlash, from Phyllis Schlafly (whose high-powered career was saying that women don’t want high-powered careers) to Caitlin Flanagan (ditto). No movement, no generation has an infinite amount of energy or power to accomplish all the changes needed. Now it’s time for the next generation to reshape education and work in ways that enable all of us to have balanced human lives—lives where we can care for our young, our sick, our old, and ourselves without losing either our minds or our jobs.

Susie Bright @ Susie Bright’s Journal | Teenagers Can’t Seem to Have ANYTHING At All – The Big Lie Behind the Mommy Wars: 

Young people deserve bold chances— all our children deserve that support. Our “work,” ultimately, is toward the betterment of the world for our children, and for their children. That’s what’s upside-down in our world right now— the vanity of the short-sighted, the hubris of elders who destroy the future for youth. You want a movement for “having it all?” Start by giving it back, in spades.

Sarah @ Feminists For Choice | The Multiple Abortion Question:

I never understood the conflict. Shouldn’t being pro-choice mean supporting a woman’s right to make a choice, period? After all, I had no idea what the circumstances were that made a woman choose one abortion, much less a second or third. And it wasn’t my place to know these circumstances, because these women had agency over their own bodies. If they felt that abortion was the best choice for them, who was I to say otherwise? And in fact, wasn’t judging a woman for her personal choice getting pretty close to the anti-choice mentality, anyway?

Ashley Baggett @ Nursing Clio | Finding Satisfaction: A Review of “Hysteria”:

Having researched and delivered conference papers on the topic, the medical historian in me danced a little jig when I heard Sony Pictures Classics was releasing a movie called “Hysteria.”  I did, however, enter the theater with some reservations.  Motion picture portrayals are notorious for being historically inaccurate, and if films are true to history, those not in the field tend to find it a little, well, boring.  (That is unless Werner Herzog is narrating it with his dry but inadvertently humorous observations.)  Thankfully, the $7.50 spent on a matinee wasn’t a waste at all.

A. Lynn @ Nerdy Feminist | Were You in Need of Your Daily Dose of Fat Shame?:

I am so, so divided about this. Part of me totally understands the intimidation of the gym. As a large person, who is there for any number of reasons, you do get glances and looks which feel very off putting, to say the least. On the other hand, I feel a gym like this would unnecessarily divide people by an extremely arbitrary standard. It reinforces the stigmatization of fat bodies and the idea that weight loss is of paramount importance. Basically what I’m saying is why do I need a special gym? Why can’t people in the traditional gym setting just not be assholes? Novel thought!