During Women’s History Month, help make women’s voices heard.

WVWV is honoring those women that have utilized the internet to amplify their voices. Nominate your favorite blogger by March 21, then check back to vote for your favorite among our top 10 women bloggers.

Remember to visit WVWV.org later in the month to vote for your favorite in the first round.

Maybe this whole “diamonds prove your love for a woman” trend is finally over? Perhaps the industry has shifted gears?

(Thanks Daisy)

No one is ever allowed to accuse me of “pampering” the dog again. Gratuitous photo of the would-be recipient of diamonds in my household, after the jump. (more inside…)

I know I’ve mentioned this film before but now I’ve actually seen it! Yesterday I joined about 100 high school students, their teachers and a small number of other adults at the Revue for a screening of A Winter’s Tale followed by a Q + A with two of the film’s actors.

I had expected this film to be a poorly made but very well-intentioned piece of social commentary. What I actually experienced was an amazing piece of film-making. From the opening note of pounding, perfectly chosen music to the flawless acting, excellent script, powerful story and tight conclusion this film is a truly awesome piece of cinema. The Q + A session echoed some of the issues in the film; gender stereotypes, racial profiling, community responsibility, masculinity, drug dealing and more.

Filmed in Toronto’s Parkdale community A Winter’s Tale tells a simple story.

Shots ring out one winter night and a bullet meant for a local street dealer kills a ten-year-old boy.

In the downtown Toronto community of Parkdale, grief and suspicion hang heavily in the air, while the nightly patrons at Miss G’s Caribbean TakeAway resume their ritual of beer and banter.

But one of them, Gene Wright, cannot go on. He begs his friends for help. In a most unusual development, six Black men make a pact to form a support group in hopes of salvaging their broken spirits and redeeming their besieged community.

I highly encourage everyone to go see this film. To find out about showtimes and to see a trailer check out A Winters Tale.

We’ve already had a fantastic response to our call for submissions to the Shameless anthology! Just wanted to remind you all that we’re still looking for essays and will be until April 18th!

Click the image for more information.

While boots might still be made for walking, we’ve branched out to establish that “lips are for losing weight“, and the newest retasked body part — hair that “tells your story”.

While at university, working on my smrts, I took a course in the History of Advertising. Where I was lucky enough to be exposed to Jean Kilbourne. Specifically Jean Kilbourne on advertising. And her expletively excellent book Deadly Persuasion (also released as Can’t Buy My Love). Get it, get it now. I’ll lend you my copy.

Published in 1999, Jean reprints and analyzes ads as a backdrop to broader discussions about the techniques and messages ads use on/for women. Deadly Persuasion is now almost 10 years old, and sadly I’d say it’s just as spot-on now. Same soul-sucking techniques, sometimes more overt, sometimes honed to be more insidious.

Here’s an example from Deadly Persuasion/Can’t Buy My Love, about an ad for nail polish depicting a woman pulling against a net:

The product that promises to free this girl from the net that imprisons her? Black nail polish.

Nail polish. Such a trivial solution to such an enormous dilemma. But such triviality and superficiality is common in advertising. How could it be otherwise? The solution to any problem always has to be a product. Change, transformation, is thus inevitably shallow and moronic, rather than meaningful and transcendent. These days, self-improvement seems to have more to do with calories than with character, with abdomens than with absolutes, with nail polish than with ethics.” (153)

(more inside…)

Click here and say yes in a poll regarding Dr. Henry Morgentaler being awarded the Order of Canada.

From the Globe and Mail:

A group of pro-choice activists has decided that, protocol be damned, they are going public in a last-ditch attempt to have Dr. Henry Morgentaler invested into the Order of Canada.

Morgentaler has been nominated twice already, and passed over both times. He has recently suffered a stroke and his health is failing. The Order of Canada cannot be awarded posthumously.

“It’s blasphemy that this hasn’t happened, a national embarrassment,” said Cathie Colombo, the long-time assistant to Dr. Morgentaler who is leading the charge… “Even if you don’t agree with his views, you can’t deny the impact he’s had on Canadian society.”

Please repost.

The other day I noticed that Shameless’ “Geek Chic” category is sadly underrepresented. Tech is important to me. I <3 tech. Poor little tech, not getting the love.

Sometimes the line is blurry between the personal interests of one young feminist (<-me), and what might be interesting to young feminists everywhere.

But when you get a great lead on some new (or overlooked) tech hawtness, one of the first things you do is share it with all your geeky buddies. So that's what I'm going to start doing here, extended circle of geeky buddies: expect some more regular excited blathering from me about videogames, operating systems, gizmos, hacks, all the things a growing tech-savvy girl needs.

Playing catch-up, here are few bits and pieces I owe you, Shameless ladies:

Nokia’s Morph nanotechnology concept ad

PicLens

PicLens is a swishy new picture viewing plug-in for Windows or Mac (and for just about any browser, though you’re all using Firefox right?)

Check out the preview. Shiny.

(more inside…)

I haven’t seen this story anywhere in the mainstream media…Any ideas as to why that is? From Pajamas Media:

Iranian Shoppers Riot Against Modesty Police

It happens every day on the streets of Tehran: a police squad grabbed a young woman for dressing immodestly. But this time, the young woman fought back, and a crowd defended her and attacked the police.

At approximately 7 pm on Saturday, February 23, the Ershad patrol, modesty police assigned to enforce clothing regulations, accosted and attempted to arrest a young woman at Goldis Shopping Mall…the woman fought back. A young man - it is unclear whether he was accompanying her - came to her defense and joined her in fighting the police. In an attempt to subdue - and humiliate him - the police grabbed the young man and threw him into the garbage can nearby.

That was when the large crowd, predominately made up of young people, rose up against the police and attempted to liberate the young woman themselves. Faced with a full-blown riot - complete with angry crowds with garbage cans being set on fire - the frightened police jumped into the van and fled the scene…

In a report on the event that appeared the Iran Press Service web site, student web sites are quoted as saying “to disperse the angry mob, heavy police and anti-riot units that arrived fired into the air but were met with a crowd of more than 300 people, now changing slogans against the regime and its leaders, mostly Ayatollah Ali Khameni and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, chanting “We don’t want dictatorship,” “We don’t want emergency and martial law.”…

Read the whole story by Ardeshir Arian here.

The Ryerson Student Lecture Series is bringing masked feminist avengers The Guerrilla Girls to Toronto on March 6!

The Guerrilla Girls are a group of anonymous women who assume the names of dead female artists, don gorilla masks, and use humour, graphics and clever campaigns to take on sexism, racism, and corruption in art, film, and culture. This will be the Girls’ first performance at a Toronto university.

Thursday, March 6
7 p.m., John Bassett Theatre at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre
FREE (ticket info here).