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 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.”

Remember that IAT test we talked about last week?  You know, researchers found that people still associate the word “feminist” with negative descriptors faster than they can associate the word “feminist” with positive attributes when asked to?  And the author thought this was just some more evidence of what a bunch of a-holes feminists are since the “obnoxious” ones are so much more prominent than the “normal” ones or something like that?

I have yet to meet a bra-burning, hairy monster in the feminist movement. In fact, I know many feminists who defy the stereotype, including people who are religiously observant, sorority girls, and male feminists to name a few. However, the media and entertainment industry continue to show feminists as mean girls/women who will never provide a rational voice in society. Through this negative portrayal of feminism, audiences become accustomed to feminism as something they could never relate to.

From the mouths (fingertips?) of young feminist babes.  Word. [keep rockin', FBomb]

I love Felicia Day.  I loved her as Vi during season seven of Buffy.  I loved her as Penny in Dr. Horrible.  I loved her as Mag during the postapocolyptic Epitaph episodes of Dollhouse.  And I love her as the star and creator of The Guild.

The Guild is an awesome internet series focusing on the in-game and real-life exploits of the members of The Knights of Good, a guild in an online RPG only referred to as The Game (it’s essentially World of Warcraft).  The series focuses on Day’s character, Cyd Sherman aka Codex.  The series pokes fun at stereotypes regarding online gamers, but is filled with enough in-jokes that gamers are the core audience and not just the butt of the joke (ahem, not that I’d know).

However, that’s not to say that it’s perfect (after all, nothing regarding MMORPGs is).  So allow me to express one (of many) of my concerns:

Read the rest of this entry »

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.

Crafts in general, particularly knitting, sewing, and needlepoint, have a reputation for being “women’s work” or “women’s hobbies.”  Not always true.  In fact, at my college there were multiple male members in the kitting club, of which I was VP for a year.  A few months ago we took a look at crafting truckers.  Today, I bring you artist Nathan Vincent.

His artist statement reads:

“My work explores gender permissions and the challenges that arise from straying from the prescribed norms. It questions the qualities of gender by considering what constitutes masculine and feminine. It critiques stereotypical gender mediums by creating “masculine objects” using “feminine processes” such as crochet, sewing, and applique.”

Vincent’s work was recently featured on one of my favorite blogs, Sociological Images.  Here are a few of my favorite examples of his work:

In these three pieces a pair of boxing gloves, a collection of handguns, and a urinal have been constructed with yarn through crochet – traditionally a “feminine” medium, and yet all of the objects are considered “masculine.”  The gloves and guns are masculine symbols of aggression, and the urinal is masculine because, well, you know…  In two more examples a push lawn mower and beer-can graveyard have also been crafted:

Masculine or feminine or (!!!) simply objects, the creativity and uniqueness of this sculptural collection rocks my world.  Maybe it’s time for me to move up a notch from scarves and mittens…

The following is a cross post from Electric Emily over at Jukebox Heroines – be sure to check out all the other great music-based info she’s got at her blog!  If you are interested in cross posting or guest posting at feministhemes.com, please send your ideas to ms.wizzle@feministhemes.com.

Lady Gaga was on Larry King on June 1st, 2010. I just watched it, and once again, female artists have to defend themselves for their art, presentation, and politics.

Larry King asked if Gaga was a feminist, she said:

“Yes. Yes I am. I am a feminist. Does this settle the ongoing debate once and for all?”

Why is it so hard for people to believe that Gaga is a feminist? I have a few thoughts on the matter.

Is it because she is a pop-star, and somehow we have obscured pop music/stardom with instant sell-out status, misogyny, and manufactured faux empowerment?

That isn’t to say that there is some of that in music, and that pop music, like every other music genre has issues with gender, race, class, looks, etc, but presuming this of pop music limits one from experiencing some amazing talent. Just because you can dance to is, and it is accessible to the majority of people don’t make it lesser than. Pop music has a long-standing tradition of being seen as feminine, and as “of the body,” which is seen as less artistically sound and worthy than the masculine, “of the mind” rock or indie music scenes.

Is it because Lady Gaga is an attractive woman and hence, could never be a feminist, because you know, feminists are ugly, fat, hairy, bra-burners!

Ha, you know that one. All the myths associated with feminism, I’ve heard them all before! They never seem to go away. Let’s run them down: feminists are only women, they are not attractive (ugly), hate men (perhaps because their ugliness denies them a suitable mate), hate children, are lesbians, angry, don’t wear make-up, witches, choose career over family, cock-blockers, want to rule over men….did I get them all?  These myths serve in separating women from each other, and deter women from joining a movement that is about social, political and economic equality for not just women, but all.There is nothing wrong with that, except that it challenges a system of inequality in our culture that continues to keep women in a second class status. Challenging that is dangerous. Therefore these myths exist to maintain the status quo and silence any opposition.  And why would a beautiful woman want to get involved with any of that? She apparently has everything right? Oh, how wrong that assumption is, and Lady Gaga isn’t fooled by those myths. She smashes them with a sequined, flame-engulfed hammer.

You could say Gaga even makes fun of the whole bra-burner myth via her fabulous spark-bra. Read the rest of this entry »

Today our links go out to all the self proclaimed geeks, nerds, and dorks among us.  Be it sci-fi, comics, science, or some combination, peruse the following links and embrace your inner geek.

Representations of Women in (Mostly Superhero) Comics [Threat Quality] via [jezebel]

This is a thing that comes up periodically: what happens is, someone says, “Jesus $&^#, could there be one comic in which all the women don’t have their tits sticking out all the #$^@#%* time?” Inevitably, at least one person responds to these criticisms with the following argument (and occasionally a few supplemental ones):

“Comics have always been an exaggerated ideal, just like in movies and other forms of media, and besides, they exaggerate men and women equally, so it’s not sexist.”

For example:
Disney’s Princesses Reimagined As Comic Book Heroines [io9]

To celebrate this news, check out another take on the Disney princesses, drawn up comic-book style by J. Scott Campbell. In keeping with the “comic book art” style [Note the quotes], they can barely keep their seashells on — oh no wait she’s not wearing any seashells. At least Maleficent looks bad-ass, as usual.

Thinkgeek’s nerdlady tees: Ada Lovelace and Marie Curie [wonderland] via [io9]

Thinkgeek have a new Heroine series, in which they’ve made up two teeshirts celebrating two wonderful ladies: Marie Curie (discovered radioactivity) and Ada Lovelace (invented computer programming).  They’re not only very lovely teeshirts, but the sale of each also donates a dollar to The Girl Effect, an organisation dedicated to helping girls out of the cycle of abuse, poverty and second-class citizenship.

An email was forwarding about the internet not long ago regarding Barbie’s 50th birthday.  Maybe you got it.  Maybe you didn’t.  And by “it” I mean the email, because the humor part is kind of lost on me.

You see, after 50 years Barbie has let herself go.  She now eats Chinese food in bed with empty soda cans and a cat on her bed with her laptop on her expanding thighs.  She lazily surfs the internet, probably looking for a replacement for Ken, who certainly wouldn’t be interested in her anymore thanks to her expanding calves, tummy, arms, and multiple chins.  Ha ha ha, that Barbie – “it’s about time this happened to her.”

It’s really easy to hate Barbie and her perfect body.  You know, the perfect hair, perfect nose, perfect waist (just ask Heidi Montag)…  This is the unrealistic, impossible “standard” that has been set for women.

But this isn’t really fair either.  Because wishing fat on beautiful women (heh heh, she deserved it) is yet another way of pitting woman against woman, world against woman, and woman against herself.  It says “this is what normal slobs look like, and beautiful women deserve it.”  “It” in this case being stereotypes about the overweight and obese as lazy slobs.

I’m not usually a fan of Sarah Silverman, but she does have this going for her:

“I don’t really care for like fat jokes about women, specifically.  Because I feel that we live in a society where fat men deserve love, and fat women do not deserve love — at least in white America. And so I feel like that’s an ugly thing, and it doesn’t make me laugh.”

Or is this just another example of feminists lacking a sense of humor?