Mademoiselle Satine

No really. Where are they? In RL I'm surrounded by people who insist on using male pronouns in their academic work because it "makes reading easier" (1).

A sociology docent who says that using more than two gender options in your empirical research isn't necessary as long as you don't do "special" research on transsexual people. (Apparently you will never meet any trans* people when you do research on non-sexuality related issues.)

A fellow student who claimed that the decline in births is the fault of feminism. (In Polish! He warned the female students that they would probably feel offended but knowing/expecting that didn't stop him from saying it. Thank God I wasn't the only one showing her offendedness.)



(1) "Im Folgenden wird, der einfacheren Lesart wegen, auf die Schreibweise mit großem „I“ für beide Geschlechter verzichtet und statt dessen nur die maskuline Form benutzt, solange es nicht ausdrücklich um Friseurinnen geht."

I always thought that it would be a cold day in hell if I voluntarily linked to pictures of a man with long hair but I will make an exception for someone like Beth Ditto who is kind of awesome.

I bet this photo campaign in POP (British fashion mag) was big news last year and I just missed but I'd had to share.

Beth Ditto is the singer of "The Gossip", a lesbian and in a relationship with a trans* man.

That's her:





I want that shawl. *g*

I tried to find as many of the photos as I could but I'm afraid I can't link to all of them without repeating. There is of course the site of Steven Klein, the photographer, but it's one of those annoying flashplayer-can't-link-or-navigate-without-going-crazy sites. Even loading takes forever. Oh, and it has background music which isn't half bad and fits the photos but still...

Take a look at the photos and ignore the knilch next to her.

( or follow the cut (8x, may be NSFW) )

I watched the first hour here. I agree wholeheartedly with this article on AfterEllen.

( Emmy Award Impressions - Sock it to me? )

Escapism: DailyMail article about three women who live in the 50s, 40s and 30s. I like to close the front door, pull off my gloves and know that I am in my own world.

Olympics: TheGuardian shows tattoos of Olympics' participants and asks you to compete in a literary quiz. I got 5 out of 10. :)

Edited to add:
Music: 'Salt, Peppa, and Spinderella' by Johnny Foreigner is a great song but the video might cause epileptic seizures (I'm not kidding here. I don't suffer from epilepsy and my eyes fucking hurt when I watched the vid).

Books: TheWashingtonPost believes that Young adult novel series "Twilight" has sunken its teeth into feminism and I call bullshit. Quote: "Yet on some level, it seems that children may know human nature better than grown-ups do. Consider: The fascination that romance holds for many girls is not a mere social construct; it derives from something deeper." O RLY?
Speeshul points for missing the point: "Three decades of adults pretending that gender doesn't matter haven't created a generation of feminists who don't need men; they have instead created a horde of girls who adore the traditional male and female roles and relationships in the "Twilight" saga."
And for the lulz: "Instead, a growing number of boys in this country spend much of their free time absorbed in the masculine mayhem of video games such as Grand Theft Auto and Halo or surfing the Internet for pornography." Surfing the internet for porn is a exclusive male thing to do? Bwahahahahahaha!

I just saw that the author of the Post article Leonard Sax has written "Boys Adrift: The Five Factors Driving the Growing Epidemic of Unmotivated Boys and Underachieving Young Men". I'm sure I saw this book being torn apart in some blog for the unfair representation of both genders but I can't find the link. (This is my last ETA. Promise!)