SUNDAY LINKS

February 7, 2016
from the bb desk

DARLINGS

For a long time, my sole skin care routine was Pond’s cold cream and like the occasional scrub with a shit ton of moistened baking soda when I was feeling particularly crusty. This week, however, has heralded the onset of my commitment to two exciting things: chemical peels and oil cleansing. First you use the peel and your dead skin comes just sloughing off and then you put a bunch of almond oil on a cotton ball and swipe it around your face like a luscious zamboni. This week on twitter dot com was a nightmare, but this new skin care regimen helped me make it through. Let’s begin.

Bey.

Many cis men behaved reasonably and as I would expect them to behave in their capacity as politicians this week as a noted misogynist and his tragic minions endeavoured to organize hate crimes in cities across the country. The cool-mayor thread jostling of all of them retweeting each other is the most precious political race I’ve ever witnessed. If you are a cis dude reading this, I hope you engaged meaningfully with the idea of gathering in some form to resist the pro-rape discourse of which so many of your brethren are so fond. If you didn’t, sit in a corner and read this over and over again until you’re ready to do so. Also, now is a great time to revisit this piece about social security and MRA garbage.

I absolutely walked around this week with my eyes covered by my giant fluffy mittens in an effort to avoid seeing headlines that present the events leading to this week’s major legal proceedings as anything other than one man’s reprehensible and wholly predictable actions. I encourage you to curate your own reality to the best of your abilities too! It’s the best.

Here’s a list of 14 Indigenous women authors to add to your reading list ASAP.

It’s Black History Month! Read #cdnBHM, divest yourself of the notion that there was never any slavery in Canada, read about some incredible Black women, and keep your anti-racist feminism anti-colonial too (not something that first vid does tbh).

A real frikkin’ excellent anti-racist critique of the respectability politics at play in the way we talk about veganism.

El Jones on Bell’s Let’s Talk and the company’s relationship with profiting off incarceration.

There’s literally no reason for your hairdresser to know your gender.

Laurie Penny, sharp as ever:

A Barbie doll with a slightly reduced waist to hip ratio is not the feminist cultural revolution it’s being sold as—sold being the operative word, the millimetres of plastic flesh measured precisely in pounds and dollars. This is because a feminist cultural revolution would involve, at minimum, a massive restructuring of what society believes women are, what they do and what they deserve. Let me give you a hint: it’s more than the right to stand very still, smiling and looking pretty, with thighs that happen to meet in the middle.

A UN Committee ruled abortion a human right this week, which is incredible in the face of the misogyny characterizing a number of countries’ response to the Zika virus. Heads up: both those articles are super cis-supremacist.

A great response to the Fuck-Off Fund piece from a week or two ago.

Reparations: very real, very needed.

Are you not into the challenge of watching movies and TV with no cis men on the cover? Try the DuVernay Test and refuse to watch movies where only white people talk to each other!

Naomi Sayers on the unfolding inquiry process into missing and murdered Indigenous women, girls, and two-spirit folks:

We can agree that when it comes to missing and murdered Indigenous women that we need to examine policing practices, and many other facets of society, but we also need to look at the impact of criminal laws, especially for Indigenous women in the sex trade.

Why do we love period pieces?

…it really ties in with a nostalgia for an era in which systems of oppression and dominance were much simpler. And obviously, white viewers get a lot out of this because you don’t really have to engage directly with race. And wasn’t it nice when white people could just be in charge? And non-disabled people don’t have to deal with the discomfort of seeing disabled bodies on the screen. And cis people don’t have to see transgender people or to have their notions of gender challenged. And middle and upper class viewers don’t really have to deal with poverty. They can push it off into the corner… what people usually mean by that is that in those days, people who looked like them and enjoyed their social status got to be in charge.

This is the most important video of the week other than Bey’s, and this is the most important photo series.

A big WELCOME HOME shout out to anyone who has been travelling in the past little bit—a couple of our editrixes were, and I missed them terribly <3

xoxo

Image

Screencap from MTV Decoded’s Black History Month episode.

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