Astute readers may have noticed that I’ve missed a few installments of Picks from Planet Venus over the past few weeks, things being what they are. So to make it up to you, here is something epic in scope and length.

Jazz saxophonist Matana Roberts has started a video blog to address some ideas about feminism and creativity that have been buzzing around in her head (and cropping up in interviews) for a while. Like a written blog, she meanders casually and candidly around and through topics like distinctions between black and white feminism, the definition of gender, and the development of her own voice. It’s like she’s giving you the interview of a lifetime and you don’t even have to ask her any questions.

Roberts is involved in a veritable panoply of amazing endeavours, like teaching at the School for Improvisational Music, and working on Coin Coin, an ongoing musical project based around her ancestor Marie Thérèse Coin Coin, a Louisiana woman who, after being freed from slavery, became a businesswoman and founder of one of the earliest communities of freed black people in the United States. She’s also an incredibly engaging storyteller, and has hung out with Alice Coltrane!

Learn more about her continuous investigations of the links between her history and her art at her blog, Shadows of a People.

Watch parts 2, 3, and 4 of her musings on gender and creativity after the cut.

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Sexual harassment okay as it ensures humans breed, Russian judge rules

“The unnamed executive, a 22-year-old from St Petersburg, had been hoping to become only the third woman in Russia’s history to bring a successful sexual harassment action against a male employer.

She alleged she had been locked out of her office after she refused to have intimate relations with her 47-year-old boss.

“He always demanded that female workers signalled to him with their eyes that they desperately wanted to be laid on the boardroom table as soon as he gave the word,” she earlier told the court. “I didn’t realise at first that he wasn’t speaking metaphorically.”

The judge said he threw out the case not through lack of evidence but because the employer had acted gallantly rather than criminally.

“If we had no sexual harassment we would have no children,” the judge ruled.

…

According to a recent survey, 100 per cent of female professionals said they had been subjected to sexual harassment by their bosses, 32 per cent said they had had intercourse with them at least once and another seven per cent claimed to have been raped.”

~from Telegraph.co.uk and Foreign Policy blog

I love stories where people successfully defend the freedom to read. Via Quillblog comes this amazing response to a patron’s request to remove a children’s picture book about a gay wedding, Uncle Bobby’s Wedding by Sarah S. Brannen, from the Colorado library. Here’s an excerpt:

You feel that a book about gay marriage is inappropriate for young children. But another book in our collection, “Daddy’s Roommate,” was requested by a mother whose husband left her, and their young son, for another man. She was looking for a way to begin talking about this with son. Another book, “Alfie’s Home,” was purchased at the request of another mother looking for a way to talk about the suspected homosexuality of her young son from a Christian perspective. There are gay parents in Douglas County, right now, who also pay taxes, and also look for materials to support their views. We don’t have very many books on this topic, but we do have a handful.

…In short, most of the books we have are designed not to interfere with parents’ notions of how to raise their children, but to support them. But not every parent is looking for the same thing.

…What harm has this book done to anyone? Your seven year old told you, “Boys are not supposed to marry.” In other words, you have taught her your values, and those values have taken hold. That’s what parents are supposed to do, and clearly, exposure to this book, or several, doesn’t just overthrow that parental influence. It does, of course, provide evidence that not everybody agrees with each other; but that’s true, isn’t it?

…I fully appreciate that you, and some of your friends, strongly disagree with its viewpoint. But if the library is doing its job, there are lots of books in our collection that people won’t agree with; there are certainly many that I object to. Library collections don’t imply endorsement; they imply access to the many different ideas of our culture, which is precisely our purpose in public life.

I fully suggest you read the letter in its entirety.

Adage reports that “Researchers Find Thin Models Make Viewers Like Brands More, but Themselves Less:”

A study by business professors at Villanova University and the College of New Jersey, inspired by Dove’s “Campaign for Real Beauty,” shows that ads featuring thin models made women feel worse about themselves but better about the brands featured…

“They have higher evaluation of the brands. With the more regular-size models, they don’t feel bad. Their body image doesn’t change. But in terms of evaluations of the brands, those are actually lower.”

(Also, the women studied wouldn’t eat the cookies after they saw the skinny models, so this tactic simply doesn’t work for baked goods.)

None of this is really news, but the study is worth gander:

…the findings create something of a quandary for marketers, who might have a positive effect on young women’s self-esteem by showing more typical women in ads, but suffer in the marketplace as a result.

Um, doesn’t seem like much of a “quandary” to me?

Fresh off of watching Helvetica (and then watching it again — big thanks to Lex), I enjoyed this recent post at Logo Design Love (once again via Google Reader rec).

“It’s becoming more and more difficult to execute original logo designs. No matter how clever your idea, the chances are someone has created a very similar logo. Why is that? We’re all surrounded by the same influences, exposed to the same shapes, forms and patterns. With the importance of branding in the marketplace, and thousands of designers working on similar projects, it’s obvious ideas will, from time-to-time, look almost identical.”

You can see what they mean (I knew Columbia Sportswear reminded me of something):

Wayback Machine and Google Blogoscoped

Sun Microsystems and Columbia Sportswear

Many more logos and logo-a-likes here.

And now some bonus material. Including: a breast massaging robot, a face-stealing robot, and mad Mac speculationing.

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Via Torontoist we’re alerted to a viral video that SummerWorks (Toronto’s indie theatre and arts festival) has created to promote this year’s events. Torontoist writer Johnnie Walker breaks it down:

In the video, playwrights Hannah Moscovitch, Tara Beagan, Claudia Dey, Rose Laborde, and Linda Griffiths discuss the travails of being “hot playwrights.” The video, which culminates in a pillow fight, has already sparked a comments war on the fest’s blog about its feminist implications.

You can view it yourself:

I completely get the absurdity of having five of Canada’s most talented, intelligent, award-winning female playwrights act completely ditzy and diva-ish while repeatedly saying “like” and pillowfighting in barely-there sundresses, but my concern is whether the genral public is capable of taking female artistic talent seriously and not falling back on the “hot female artist” publicity crutch. I’m not alone in my concern; as Johnnie Walker points out, the comments on the SummerWorks blog reveal that there is discussion around what this kind of imagery does to the plight of female writers being taken seriously in an often male-dominated industry. Some theatre-goers are seriously offended, and question why these women chose to participate in something that, in their opinion, perpetuates a harmful stereotype.

In the comments section of the blog post, Moscovitch states:

I distinguish between being objectified or subjected to unwanted sexual attention, which is humiliating because it leads to feelings of shame, and making a video with friends in which you joke about the fact that there are still artistic directors and critics out there who think that women writing plays is about as cute as girls having a pillow fight.

What do readers think? Harmless fun or epic fail?

There’s been a lot of talk about teenage pregnancy in the news and in films, lately. But what’s often left out is how marginalized teenage mothers are, and how institutions often discriminate against these women, rather than support them.

Katherine Arnoldi’s graphic novel, The Amazing True Story of a Teenage Single Mom, beautifully tells the story of her struggle as a young mother. Arnoldi got pregnant at 17, and with little support from her family, she worked long hours at a factory, waitressed, and generally busted her ass at low paying jobs to provide her daughter and herself with their basic needs.

Arnoldi talks about the conflict that comes from being being a mom, who loves her daughter and wants the best for her, and a teenager, who wants the opportunity to travel and get an education. She feels her whole life is ahead of her, while constantly being told that she’s given up any chance at a future.

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For the past few weeks I’ve been working with Diaspora Dialogues and a group of great young creative writers over at the Malvern Public Library in Scarborough. These fantastic young people have been doing six weeks of graphic novel, fiction and poetry writing that will all come together in an open house at the library on Thursday, August 7 at 5:30 pm. Congratulations to these talented young writers! The press release is below.

Malvern’s Young Creatives
Young writing talent nurtured at Malvern Branch

In July, Diaspora Dialogues and Toronto Public Library – Malvern Branch partnered to present a free series of creative writing workshops for neighbourhood youth. Six weeks of amazing creative work will culminate in a celebratory “wrap” party and reading on August 7 at 5:30 pm!

(more inside…)

In the US, the House Armed Services personnel subcommittee hearing on “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” unfolded into a ridiculous circus of homophobic sentiment, revealing the incredibly unabashed anti-gay doctrine that can come from high up in military administration. The hearing has also revealed that most troops could care less about the sexual orientation and preferences of their fellow soldiers, as long as they are competent and prepared. Given that the military has taken to lowering prerequisite test scores, raising age limits, and even recruiting alcoholics and felons before letting the gays in, it would seem that there’s a disconnect between what’s best for the troops and what’s actually going on.

For those of you who don’t know about “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” it is a US Military Policy, implemented by Bill Clinton, that prohibits homosexuals or bisexuals from disclosing their sexual orientation, or from speaking about any homosexual relationships, including marriages or other familial attributes, while serving in the United States armed forces. HuffPo gives us a rundown of the recent hearing on the (archaic) policy:

Last week, some in the Democratic Party with a good sense of historic timing held a committee hearing on the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy of excluding gay people from the military. It’s the first such hearing in 15 years. Democrats invited three witnesses, including a retired Navy Captain and a retired Marine Staff Sergeant, both of whom are gay (and one of whom lost a leg in Iraq). A black retired Army Major General also spoke about how the current policy resembled segregation in the military. The Republicans invited retired Army Sergeant Major Brian Jones, and a woman, Elaine Donnelly…

To behold the hysterical anti-gay sentiment from Elaine Donnelly is truly mindblowing. From CBS News:

Elaine Donnelly, president of the Center for Military Readiness and anti-gay activist, seems to have exiled her brain to a cave on Mars for the last 20 or so years. Among her many reasons for not permitting gays and lesbians in the military was the prevalence of “inappropriate passive/aggressive actions common in the homosexual community.” She claims that “Don’t ask, don’t tell” contributes to the spread of AIDS. She mentioned a case of “black lesbian” gang rapists who prey on new recruits.