[michellesiobhan]

Despite their radical views, [crisis pregnancy centres] are not fringe organizations; in many parts of Canada, they outnumber real abortion providers by a significant margin. The website Campaign Life Coalition lists seven CPCs in Saskatchewan, a province with zero abortion clinics and only four hospitals that provide abortion services. A woman in PEI who is faced with an unwanted pregnancy has no abortion access in-province, but can visit Birthright International, a religious organization with an anti-choice mandate and more than 300 chapters worldwide. CPCs

Buyer beware: A guide to anti-choice advertising

I wrote about fake clinics and their predatory advertising for Rabble.

[michellesiobhan]

Dudes who immediately decide you're perfect, who want to be in constant contact, who have "psychochick" types in their lives that just won't go away, who describe losing sexual interest in this or that woman (instead of describing, say, what kinds of conflicts or missed connections eroded their ability to communicate or listen or give to each other generously), who put love in magical, fated terms instead of ACTUALLY WANTING TO SPEND TIME WITH YOU, FACE TO FACE, AND SEE HOW THINGS DEVELOP? These dudes need to be avoided like the plague. They are looking for a fix. They will say whatever they need to say to get that fix.

Ask Polly: I Moved To A New City To Be With An Emotional Vampire (The Awl)

[cameronr-deactivated20160217]

Nobody knows what to do with a mayor who will not resign, even though he has ticked most of the boxes in the “You should resign immediately if…” section of the customary understanding between elected officials and their electorates. Such as: If you smoke crack. If you sometimes find yourself in the condition that Mayor Ford has now immortalized as “a drunken stupor.” If you let late-night visitors smoke pot in your City Hall office. If you consort with criminals. If people with whom you were recently photographed—in front of a suburban crack house, it should be noted—start turning up dead, or splayed on the ground beneath windows from which they have just mysteriously fallen. If you publicly malign the reputations of any politician, civil servant, or journalist who (correctly) raises the suspicion that the Mayor has a substance-abuse problem. If you are seen reeling through the streets of Toronto on several festive occasions while being, in the Mayor’s own vivid description, “hammered.” If (and it was this offense that seemed to really rattle many Torontonians) you urinate in public—or, to be fair, if you urinate in public enough to be captured on police surveillance cameras. Oh, and about those police surveillance cameras: you should probably resign as the mayor of Toronto if you are the subject of a costly police investigation—during the same period that you, as mayor, will preside over the upcoming police-budget debates at City Hall.

Toronto’s Rob Ford Problem : The New Yorker (via cameronr)

[michellesiobhan]

Listen, we all know that everyone's ancestors were invaded by the British and so you too can lay claim to historic oppression! And everyone has at one point or another been insulted for some intrinsic quality, and it made them feel bad. But someone calling you an "evil ginger" on the playground is not the same as living in a society that tramples your human rights and dignity. And even if you think your experience is equally bad -- or even worse! -- the fact is that this particular conversation is not about you.

I wrote a piece for Rabble on how you should not respond to indigenous people voicing their experiences of racism, and I am very pleased with it, if I do say so myself.

[michellesiobhan]

Digital cameras made things even worse, cameraphones worse still. "We do the rest," Kodak used to boast: but with digital photography there's no rest left to do, unless you count the addition of inane push-button filters to make it look as if you were eating your cronut during the Civil War.

The death of Kodak - Jason Farago for The Guardian.

[michellesiobhan]

Wearing a bikini...shut[s] down a man's ability to see her as a person. In order to preserve their personhood, Rey said, women should dress more modestly.

Former Power Ranger Jessica Rey is really worried about women dressing like sluts, negating their personhood, not buying her "modest" swimsuit line.

[michellesiobhan]

There’s a military museum in Brantford, but there’s no indication Ms. Wallin – an honorary Air Force colonel – held an event there. “If she did, she must have snuck in,” said Rick Shaver, chairman of the Canadian Military Heritage Museum in Brantford. The Brant Historical Society’s curator also couldn’t recall any visit by Ms. Wallin, though said it’d be difficult to know for sure.

Pretty sure the conspiracy here is not that Pamela Wallin is a deceitful, useless politician (yawn) but that she is actually the Kitty Pryde of the Senate, which explains why everyone is like "WELL WE DIDN'T SEE HER COME IN BUT THERE'S NO WAY TO KNOW WITH THAT ONE."

[michellesiobhan]

While every major scientific regulatory oversight body in the world, including the National Academies of Science and the Food and Drug Administration in the United States, has concluded that genetically modified foods pose no harm not also found in conventional or organic foods, the public remains deeply suspicious of them. A survey published in the same newspaper the day before Harmon’s piece ran found that 37 percent of those interviewed worried about GMOs, saying they feared that such foods cause cancer or allergies.

Getting a little necessarily tautological, Jon Entine for Slate points out that scientists are the best sources of scientific information, not, for instance, anecdotal stories in popular media.

[michellesiobhan]

Throwback narratives about stay-at-home motherhood tend to include lots of comforting quotes about how women are making this decision on their own, not under pressure from traditionalist partners. (Cut to Charlotte on Sex and the City screaming “I choose my choice!”) But when it comes to such complex arrangements as balancing a ballooning workload with the demands of parenting in an era with no clear rules, telling women it’s their choice is basically telling them the burden is on them to figure out the details. And live with the consequences. Most young men and women say they want to be in committed but autonomous relationships in which both partners have a happy balance of work and family life, according to sociologist Kathleen Gerson’s book The Unfinished Revolution. But if (or rather, when) they are unable to achieve that egalitarian ideal, a majority of those young men assume their wives will be the ones to “shift down” their careers.

Ann Friedman replies to the universal reaction to The Opt-Out Generation Wants Back In: Why did all these women marry selfish jerks? THE ANSWER IS DEPRESSING.

[michellesiobhan]

So much of it comes down to gender and this fear of femininity in our culture. Julia Serano talks about this so brilliantly, even in the history of feminist theory, femininity has been presented as something that's artificial and masculinity is something that's authentic, and even in a lot of feminist discourse until recently, femininity was seen as something that was artificial and fake. So there is this fear of feminine that we see in a lot of different aspects of culture that is punished. That's a part of patriarchy. In a lot of ways we can't talk about homophobia and transphobia, without talking about patriarchy.

Everyone on Orange is the New Black is great-- except Jason Biggs and maybe Taryn Manning-- but Laverne Cox as Sophia is especially great, and her incredibly eloquent thoughts on gender and identity and the patriarchy in this interview are spectacular. BOOM.

[michellesiobhan]

There is no question that, in their obsession with zygotes, embryos, and non-viable fetuses as part of their supposed pro-life stance, they are effectively murdering real, walking, talking women—mothers and daughters, grandmothers and sisters, all sacrificed on an altar of Pecksniffian hypocrisy and contemptible disregard by people who have the insurance, connections, and available health care to feel certain their politics won’t kill their loved ones.

Kurt Eichenwald writing about health care coverage and economic inequality in Vanity Fair. 

[michellesiobhan]

In 1981, when President Ronald Reagan declared that he was “running up a battle flag” in the War on Drugs, fewer than 2 percent of the American public viewed drugs as the most important issue facing the nation. That figure jumped to 64 percent in 1989, thanks largely to a sensational (and racist) media campaign. She also points out that the police could make numerous drug arrests by raiding the fraternities and sororities at colleges, but for the most part they don’t, because those students are not viewed as criminals: they’re just kids who use drugs.

Ross Gay in The Sun Magazine has some very eloquent and sobering thoughts on racism and law enforcement.

[michellesiobhan]

I would never tell anyone not to go to graduate school. It is a personal decision, and there are many reasons to go. But I would tell them not to go to graduate school believing that your performance in graduate school has anything to do with your ability to find a full-time academic job. Academia is closer to a Ponzi scheme than a meritocracy.

Cultural anthropologist/journalist Sarah Kendzior on grad school.

[michellesiobhan]

Let me be clear: there is nothing wrong with making your own food from scratch and designing your own clothes. But it's an individual solution to a greater systemic problem, nothing more or less. When we opt-out of the greater society, whatever our reasons, we lose the power to challenge it effectively, which is something any splinter group from the Amish to the Shakers can testify to.

Homeward bound: why leaning into the past is not what women need

Always good to remember when you are thinking of opting out of any flawed cultural system, whether it's the workforce or public schools or the electoral system, that carefree and chosen independence is a privilege, and as with all forms of privilege, there's no point applauding people who choose to revel in it.

[rematerializationchamber]

Besides the comments on proms and crushes and parents and school and #yolo, the most common theme on #followateen is people pointing out that #followateen is creepy. It’s a good point. Of course it’s creepy. It’s really creepy. If you haven’t yet noticed, Twitter is, itself, creepy. The language is creepy and the concept is creepy. The form is creepy and the content is creepy and the fact of all our relative habituation to it is very, very creepy.

All Our Little Lives – The New Inquiry (via towerofsleep)

[michellesiobhan]

The confusion of meanness with oppression is the root cause of why bigots feel that calling someone a “bigot” is as bad as calling someone a “tranny” or taking away their rights...Oppression is not about hurt feelings. It is about the rights and opportunities that are not afforded to you because you belong to a certain group of people. When you use a racist slur you imply that non-whiteness is a bad thing, and thus publicly reinforce a system that denies POC the rights and opportunities of white people.

The Revolution Will Not Be Polite: The Issue of Nice vs Good.

Important.

[michellesiobhan]

Comments like Byers' ("How did it become so difficult to call a woman good looking in public?") belie a strange belief: that commenting on the appearance of a woman in public should be both easy and deserving of a positive response.

Why Women Find Compliments Offensive - BuzzFeed