September 7, 2014
- The Daily Dot tackles a question that is likely not on your cultural radar, but probably should be: Why has Hole’s Live Through This, arguably one of the most influential albums of the 90s, suffered years of near obscurity? “What was once a candidate for album of the decade is now a oft-forgotten treasure, something you fall in love with almost by accident.” Can we chalk it up to the public’s disdain for Courtney Love or is something else going on here?
- This week The New Inquiry compiled a list of reviews, essays, blog posts and more about the ongoing misogynist harassment of female and feminist game producers. “Because of the particular concentration and visibility of this current misogynist campaign, we wanted to highlight, in solidarity with feminist critics and thinkers everywhere, some of the wonderful, complicated and powerful work that has been done against, outside and in spite of gaming’s heteropatriarchal structures.”
- The New Yorker profiles Cambridge scholar Mary Beard, focusing on both her academic work and her response to the “Twitter trolls and online commentators” who harassed her following an appearance on the BBC show Question Time.
- Many of you have probably read about a new type of nail polish that can test whether a beverage has been laced with a date rape drug. On Wednesday’s episode of The Current, Steph Guthrie (a feminist advocate) and Emma Teitel (Maclean’s columnist) debated the merits of the product. Does the nail polish simply place the “onus on women to protect themselves” rather than challenge “attitudes that permit rape culture to flourish”?
- “Discuss Rules Beforehand” is Chris Kraus’s ode to Kathy Acker, the “high priestess of punk” who died in 1997. We love the list that precedes the article (a feature of all The Believer articles) outlining the main topics to be covered: “Disjunctive Narrative Style, Butch/Femmeness, The German, Het Shit, Miss X, An Awkward Niche, Brigantine Pirate Girls, Rats without Working Maps, The Fistfucking Closet, Vanilla Sex, Untweezed Brows, Susan Sontag.”
- While CAFE (a thinly veiled men’s rights group) was recently granted charitable status, Vice reports that the the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives (CCPA) risks losing its funding from the government. CCPA is being audited and could lose its charitable status because, according to the Canadian Revenue Agency, charities are forbidden from spending more than 10 percent of their resources on political activity. Remind us again, how is CAFE a “neutral, unbiased” organization?
- There has been a plethora of responses (some good, some bad) to the stolen nude photos of Jennifer Lawrence that were leaked on the internet by a hacker last Sunday. While the hack has been described as a form of sexual assault, and many critics have exhorted the public to refrain from looking at the photographs (Lena Dunham has been particularly vocal about this, saying that viewing the photographs serves to reproduce the original act of violence), others have defended their right to look at the naked images. After all, “the exploitation of women is nothing new.”
- Whether or not you are a fan of Joan Rivers, you can’t can deny that she was an outlier, advancing in an industry at time when women were more likely to be the target of a joke than than the ones making the joke. The New Republic, Take Part, and Ravishly reflect on whether Rivers deserves to be called a feminist icon.
- Simpsons fans will enjoy this short piece on how Marge and Lisa embody the ideals of second and third wave feminism.
