I stumbled across this lovely website yesterday:

To be fair, there are also husband, pet, and (my favorite) kid varieties to choose from.  But this one really made my day:

Make your own damn sandwich, bucko, and while you’re at it why don’t you kick your shoes off and try conceiving a child.

The kid and pet photos are fairly hilarious in their exasperation.  The husband and wife ones are just stereotypical, aggressive, and depressing.

The other day I was poking around foxnews.com out of some masochistic form of curiosity.  It was kind of like perusing a tabloid, but more people believe that it’s true.  Sad.  Anyway, I came across an article that asked whether or not Sarah Palin should be referred to as a feminist.  I learned a lot from the comments.  I laughed, I cried, I wondered what the world is coming to.  Enjoy!

I felt like this one should be read in a Shatneresque poetic way.  With black clothes and finger snaps.

Bill589 has more wisdom and artistry to share:

Snappy little catch phrase, eh?  Here’s another perspective on why Sarah Palin is a feminist:

If producing a daughter who gets engaged to start a reality show isn’t feminist enough for you, I think the chopper hunting should put her over the edge.  Feminism is about flaunting assets, after all, not “conventional self growth areas” like *education,* right?  Not everyone agrees, though.  Here’s an argument for why Sarah Palin is not a feminist:

HA!  Feminists are crazy miserable lesbians!  Duh!  Thank you Slick Willie |||||||||||||||||||||Democrat elder statesman |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||!

Here are some SHOUTY tips on how Sarah Palin COULD become a REAL PATRIOTIC feminist:

I hope you’re paying attention.  CLASSY LADIES don’t do drugs.  Or show bare-feet.  Outside of the kitchen anyway.  And finally, a warning about the dangers of the feminist movement from someone who USED TO BE LEFTIST!!!

OMG won’t someone save us from the horrors of people freely admitting a desire to transform society!!?  I mean, equal rights for women was taking it pretty far already.  Damn modern feminists… (Does anyone else ever get confused when someone says something that you think is great like it’s terroristic or something?  Is that just me?)  But hey, what does Ms. Palin herself have to say about all of this?

Mmhmm… Well then.  There that is.

“I am not ultra-ultra-conservative on every issue. I actually support gay marriage. I think the gay marriage thing would definitely surprise people. I mean, for some people, it will surprise them to the point that they won’t want to hear it. ‘No, that can’t be, I really want to have this sort of idea of her in my head,’ so I sort of rain on their parade there. I am a person that does believe that life begins at conception, but I also don’t believe that the government should tell women what to do with their bodies. So I’m torn there in terms of supporting laws [for or against abortion].”

-  Elisabeth Hasselbeck

Um… yeah. Huh?  From fancast via jezebel.

Kristen Schaal always makes me laugh.  Usually by making me feel really uncomfortable/awkward first.  I think she also has this effect on Jon Stewart.

In related news, Jon Stewart’s new goatee also makes me feel really uncomfortable/awkward.

I love short hair.  I love it.  The longest my hair ever grew was halfway to my elbows in the 8th grade.  Then I chopped it all off Sarah McLachlan style and never looked back.  (Unnecessarily self-disclosure: I am currently rocking the faux-hawk/pompadour and loving it.)

But where are all the other short haired ladies?  I just finished watching Roswell (old school adolescent-based dramas available on Netflix instant make my life… lazier) and was seriously bummed when Maria’s funky short do turned into the perfect long golden curls of tv-land.  Ana on The O.C. had the cute little pixie thing goin’, but then she got the axe because Summer was just that much “cuter” or something.  And I can’t even think of any other examples from current tv shows in which a short haired lady isn’t somebody’s soccer mom.  Hell, even the soccer moms have long hair.

Emma Watson says no.  And I say rock on.

Yes, our dear Hermione Granger has gone pixie on us, and she looks gorgeous.  Here’s what she has to say:

“I’ve wanted to do this since I was about 16, so as soon as I had the chance I was like, ‘Right. This is it.’ Oh my God, it was the most liberating thing! The stylist just grabbed the back of my hair and took a whole ponytail of hair out. It felt amazing. I love it.”

My first super-short haircut was amazing.  But I didn’t feel like that at the time.  I wanted short hair, I got short hair, I proceeded to wear a bandanna Bret Michael’s style all summer long until I came to terms with the haircut that made thin, flat-chested me “look like a boy.”  Except I didn’t look like a boy, I still looked like me.  Who ever decided that short hair was “masculine” anyway?  It’s hair.  I still have moments when I worry that short hair makes me look “old” or “mannish” or whatever tropes the beauty industry tells me I need to cower in fear of.  But most of the time I feel cool, I’m happy that I spend less than 5 minutes on my hair out of the shower, and I look hot.

Angelina Jolie and her little rockstar Shiloh know where it’s at, too:

“I have a very strong-willed four-year-old girl who tells me what she wants to wear and I let her be who she is. I think people think kids should be a certain way, but I feel they should wear what they feel like wearing and they should express themselves. Shiloh cried one night and said, ‘Please cut my hair off. I don’t want to have long hair.’ I’m not going to leave it long just because somebody thinks I should.”

Megan Fox is pretty controversial among feminist blogs.  Sometimes she says (and does) really stupid, stereotyped, sexpot things, and to say the least that is often perceived as taking the easy way out.  I mean, I’m sure that it’s really hard to fight the good fight in Hollywood, and Megan is gorgeous – she usually seems to be taking the course of least resistance in posing provocatively for lad-mags, taking non-progressive roles in non-progressive films, and saying bimbo stuff that women are apparently supposed to say for/in these roles.

But then she turns around and does some really cool stuff.  Like Jennifer’s Body – like it or not, Jennifer’s Body was a really different type of horror/comedy film.  Not to mention how awesome working with Diablo Cody must have been (haters gonna hate).  Well, now she’s done it again.  Which is to say, she’s done something really icky and paired it up with something really cool.

Megan Fox is starring (alongside LOST’s Charlie) in Eminem’s new music video.  The one with the song featuring Rihanna.  The one about an abusive relationship.  Yeah, that’s uncomfortable.  She plays Charlie’s lover (good one Charlie, guess Drive Shaft is making a comeback), then they fight, then they do it again – or so I’ve heard.  Anyway, the song sounds like a desperate attempt at stirring up more controversy and leaking misogyny into the mainstream in some sort of “ironic” way or something, what with the incorporation of Rihanna and all (tasteful, right?).  And Eminem has a history of that sort of thing.

So how in the world could Megan Fox miraculously turn anything in this situation into something remotely admirable?  She donated the money that she made from appearing in the video to Sojourn, a L.A. shelter for battered women and their families.

Wait… What?

So, appear in a video about a dysfunctional relationship for a song about an abusive relationship with an out-and-proud misogynist capitalizing on the public’s awareness of the violence perpetrated against a young star… And give the money to an organization aimed at fighting all of the above.  It’s kind of like pouring gasoline on a fire, then donating your paycheck from the gas station to the fire department.  Hmm…  So what do you think: is this something to applaud and be excited about, or not nearly a big enough move to cancel out every other factor in the situation?

From E! via Jezebel.

“The American Psychological Association is gratified that the court agreed that there is no justification for denying marriage equality to same-sex couples. The  research shows that same-sex couples are similar to heterosexual couples in essential ways and that they are as likely as opposite-sex couples to raise mentally healthy, well-adjusted children. Thus, there is no scientific justification for denying marriage equality, when research indicates that marriage provides many important benefits.”

- American Psychological Association
President Carol D. Goodheart, EdD

I am proud to be going into a profession that acknowledges and supports the rights of all people, and uses its resources to make sure that those rights aren’t taken away.

California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has recently appointed actress Geena Davis to a state commission aiming to promote women’s equality.  Sweet!

According to Wikipedia:

In 2004, while watching children’s television programs and videos with her daughter, Davis noticed what she thought was an imbalance in the ratio of male to female characters. From that starting point, Davis went on to sponsor the largest research project ever undertaken on gender in children’s entertainment (resulting in 4 discrete studies, including one on children’s television) at the Annenberg School for Communication of University of Southern California. The study, directed by Dr. Stacy Smith, shows that there are nearly 3 males to every 1 female character in the nearly 400 G, PG, PG-13, and R-Rated movies the undergraduate team of Annenberg students coded.

In 2005, Davis teamed up with the non-profit group Dads and Daughters to launch a venture dedicated to balancing the number of male and female characters in children’s TV and movie programming.

It’s nice to see someone with power, and with a background in the entertainment/film industry no less, acknowledging that this is a problem worthy of attention and taking steps towards change.  Let’s hope that Geena is able to really get the ball rolling and that change starts to happen!

(Check out Alethea Joy’s post on research inspired by Ms. Davis.)

A week or so ago Amanda Hess over at The Sexist posted (and critiqued) a recent finding from Scientific American.  The study in question examined college students’ implicit (underlying or subconscious) attitudes towards feminism.  And look what they found:

So guess what happened in Jenen’s IAT study when college-aged men and women were asked to match the category “feminist” with either positive or negative words? The most pertinent findings were that the participants were significantly slower to associate positive words (“happy,” “joy,” “peace,” “wonderful”) with the feminist than they were negative words (“awful,” “evil,” “nasty,” “terrible”).

OMG are you, like, so totally surprised?

Um… Probably not.  First of all, Jesse Bering, the author of the original story over at Scientific American, frames the article like this:

If you’ve ever wondered why some feminists have earned themselves such a bad name, and are at all curious about how some intriguing new experimental research demonstrates that this negative view of feminism is more than just my personal opinion and in fact runs very deep in the modern psyche, then read on.

Anyone else sensing some explicit bias from our dear Jesse Bering?  The fantastic Amanda Hess seems to:

Bering takes these results to mean that the feminist movement has been hijacked by “the most obnoxious, peevish and humorless feminists,” turning it into “a term loaded with negative stereotypes of the kind exemplified by [the] sour and overly vigilant, accusatory, men-are-brutes outlook on life.” …does the poor view of the feminist movement instead reflect the work of people like Bering, who are invested in framing feminism exclusively in negative terms?

More likely, in my opinion (which, for the record, is the opinion of a fourth year graduate student in psychology who spent a significant amount of time last semester studying the IAT) these findings represent the stereotypes of feminism that continue to be perpetuated by media, such as film, music, television, and even pseudo-scientific opinions masquerading as fact.  Bering, I’m looking at you.

These findings don’t mean that feminists are “obnoxious, peevish and humorless.”  They mean that those are the only caricatures of feminism that most people are exposed to without looking deeper.  Which is a shame.

This is a cross post from a good friend of mine.  It originally appeared at team berlin.  If you are interested in guest or cross posting at feministhemes.com, send a line with your idea to ms.wizzle@feministhemes.com.

In response to Vatican says women priests a ‘crime against faith’ [telegraph]:

Yep.  It’s definitely one of those times when I remember why so many people hate the Catholic faith.  Mostly because they’re full of dicks, both literally with all their penii flying all over the place and metaphorically in the sense that they’re quite mean.

REALLY?!  Worse than pedophilia?  REALLY?!  Honestly?  Who came up with an idea like that?  Only the Catholics could come up with a concept that is so obviously opposed to the teachings of Christ, and yet have such “reverence” for the Virgin Mary.  Yes, they have their insane reverence for a character in the Bible that hardly does anything at all, except for what they view as her womanly duty of giving birth.  Yet, they never look at the fact that there were female judges that led the Jewish people through battles and back into moral integrity.

What terrible hypocrisy.  How can we possibly allow such hate and sinfulness from a church?  I don’t care what we want to say as far as equality goes.  I don’t care when we want to say as far as women being ordained as priests.  If the Cathies just said, “No.  Not our style,” that would be okay.  That’s their thing, they’re sexist, and they like it.  I’ve long since accepted that.  But I cannot stand by when somebody who identifies as Christian is saying that ordaining women as priests is WORSE than pedophilia!

It isn’t as if the Catholic church has belittled pedophilia enough already.  No, they seem to do plenty of that.  No really, Catholic church, take as long as you need to prosecute or punish the pedophilic priests.  We’re not in a rush to get any sort of justice or closure on these.  8 years?  No, go ahead and take longer.

Read the rest of this entry »