August 30th, 2015
from Nat
- It’s incredibly disappointing that the Conservatives and the NDP have refused to participate in a debate on women’s issues. These are election issues!
- “Our national dessert: A confection of Canada’s famously shitty butter and the sugar we owe to people Europeans evicted. Butter tarts are strangely modest in their excess, a two-dollar decadence. They don’t have frescoes of icing, or decorative cherries, or a macaron’s need to be fussed over and indulged. They wouldn’t want to make a spectacle of themselves. Like that Canadian myth of innocent blandness, a butter tart’s surface hides something much more complex.” This, by Chris Randle in Hazlitt, is a must read: on butter tarts, Canadian identity, and much more.
- Who knew that Anne Carson and Carly Rae Jepsen were the perfect combination we all needed? Jia Tolentino did.
- On the suffragettes of Saudi Arabia, who will soon be able to vote for the first time.
- “The Canadian government wasn’t listening — especially in Alberta. They were so foolhardy: ‘We’re going to be an energy superpower.’ Now they’ve had to eat their words because they put all their eggs in one basket.” A great interview with Melina Laboucan-Massimo on tar sands, environmental racism, and sexism.
- You’ve probably already read Claudia Rankine on the meaning of Serena Williams, but if not, you should do it now!
- “My most aching and enduring losses have not been with boyfriends but instead the fading, fizzling, or harsh breaks with women. But only recently did I confront the paucity of vocabulary available to someone who mourns a broken friendship.” On loving and losing female friendships
- More on the ‘kids are alright’ beat: 13-year-old ‘Girl Meets World’ star Rowen Blanchard lays down a great definition of intersectional feminism on Instagram. It’s 2015!
- “Colin and I lost our virginities to each other. Colin said if I got pregnant, he would make me have the baby. He didn’t believe in abortion. Colin said if I got pregnant, he would make me have a C-section. Colin said that if I didn’t have a C-section, my vagina would be too loose for him to ever enjoy having sex with me again.” Another painfully familiar story from i believe you, it’s not your fault
- Jessica Hopper asked marginalized people to talk about the first time they were shown they didn’t ‘count’ within the music industry, and the stories are awful.
- The Paris Review interview with Elena Ferrante (whose new book comes out in September!)
- “The things these girls go through when they go missing, or in their last moment of their lives — I mean, it’s nothing near the little blisters on my feet that I can one day get over, right?” she said. Incredible Manitoba teen Tracie Leost runs 115 km for missing and murdered Indigenous women.
- There’s a lot of great writing about the implications of the Rentboy.com raid in the States. This piece, by Morgan M. Page, lays out how the rhetoric of sex workers as ‘victims’ changes dramatically when the workers are male.
- For the literary side of what we’ve missed, check out the new links roundup from the CWILA!
Image: Serena Williams via flickr
