A page from Amy’s Diary (The Amy Diary)
Amy Barbara of Vancouver recently posted her junior high diaries on her new blog the amy diary. A testament to the power of a grade-school diaries, the amy diary is a sweet little snapshot into the language and life of a young woman.
Hey ladies! Didn’t you know that you didn’t need a rugged, “manly” man? And that Feminism with a capital “F” has trained your brain to not only think for itself (!!) but to long for not-too-rugged jaw lines? Well, don’t fret because the New Male Beauty is here!
Ed Westwick’s GQ photoshoot remixed (Jezebel)
Straight from Jezebel, it seems that Irina Aleksander at the New York Observer has scoured the television for images of this new man. Her argument? They all look the same: girlie, non-threatening, and their faces are completely symmetrical.
Now, if you’re on the hunt trying to distinguish one of these beautiful boys from our popular culture here’s a list of traits to look for: “heavy upper eyelash and eyebrows, not super-strong cheekbones and very soft jaw lines”. According to a prominent scholar, nowadays women are interested in men who look like babies not those handsome, rugged manly men of the yesteryear like George Clooney and Brad Pitt!
(more inside…)
I am procrastinating from the home stretch of my thesis and singing along to this karaoke version of Sister Suffragette from Mary Poppins! What a great way to send a thesis about feminism into the future!
I am in the thick of submitting the second draft of my thesis. Over the past few weeks I’ve updated essays I wrote over a year ago, saying “yes” to every edit my thesis-supervisor has suggested, and incorporating newer material because my research just kind of stopped at 2007. One of the articles I’ve come across in my search for newish material, “What is Third Wave Feminism? A New Directions Essay,” by R. Claire Snyder, sums up the major arguments/actions of the third wave.
She also stakes a claim:
“third-wavers do not feel the need to spend a lot of time constructing ambitious theoretical analyses or justifying on what grounds they are acting; they just do it.”
And I wanted to pose a question to the greater Shameless community (if you identify as third-wave or not):
When you act politically or feministy do you know the theoretical argument behind what you’re doing? Or do you just do it?
For me, it’s a mix of both. I like engaging with feminism and being an activist/feminist in my community without thinking about the theories and reasons behind it. Feminism is inside me, this is who I am, what action I take is a direct reflection of this gut-feminism. But, I also love to wrestle with theories about why I participate the way I do and contribute the way I do (hence this crazy thesis about the third wave). I’m always surprised by is how easy it is to put the third wave (and younger feminists) into that non-theory category: as if we’re unable to talk our way out of the box we’re in.
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Often, hearing about my favourite band from Grade 7 going on tour makes me feel old, but this one makes me feel like a teenager again. And from this day forward I commit to cramming my summer full of being outside, wearing mis-matched clothes that claim my independence from the pseudo-corporate “casual business attire” world, and dying my hair from bubble gum pink to a platinum blonde.
Similar Space Girls much? (www.dinosaursandrobots.com)
To date no official comment has been released on either of Hart’s websites, but an incredible amount of data is being batted back and forth online. Without going into too much detail (you can find blogging here, here, here, and here) it saddens me that this kind of widespread artistic infringement happens in the indie craft world. I mean, Urban Outfitters has been accused of similar in the past, repeatedly, but you kinda hope that last time is really the last time.
To add fuel to the fire, Urban Threads has provided a rebuttal for the entire online craft world to dissect and discount as well as a letter from the big cheese meant for Jenny but published on the Urban Threads website for the whole world to see.
Newspaper Pots (Little House in the Suburbs)
Often gardeners here start their seed a few months in advance, inside, under the pale light of fake sun. Gardening helpers, like these Newspaper Seedling Pots or Newspaper Seedling Packs from Little House in the Suburbs are a handy and waste-reducing way to get your garden a-growin’ before the ice has even left your flower beds. Even if you just want to plant some basil in your windowsill to dress up some summer pastas, these might be a cheap (and environmental) alternative to those kits at the grocery store. All you’ll have to do is thicken up the newspaper and make sure you put it on a plate or on a yoghurt lid and in some sunshine.
Chili Can Candelarias (Crafty Chica)
The Mentalists are an all girl dance-rock band from London who were featured on Make Zine for covering Kids by MGMT on their iPhones. While the rendition isn’t the best, the inspiring possibilities are endless. It has been argued that computers and technologies are solitary activities and the getting-back-to-the-internet by young feminists and activists holes ourselves away, geeking out, and not building community.
What I love about what The Mentalists are doing here is that they’re using free applications (on expensive hardware mind you) as tools to recreate a piece of popular culture, giving it their own spin (free performance, all-girl band, not perfect in execution). They’re building relationships with each other, performing in public (and on YouTube), and providing us with a conversation piece concerning media-ownership, the ability of young women to master an application, and the one and only girl band. Happy IWD!
Let me preemptively say that I am PRO paying taxes. In fact, I did my taxes just yesterday and on both me and my partner’s meager income we only have to pay $377.86 in taxes for 2008. And we’ve used that and more in social services. I mean, I took the bus quite a few times and we’re both CBC fans, I even went to emergency for something minor because our city’s walk-in clinic is only open after 4pm.
But, I get wary when the Canadian Revenue Agency is out to get the “little people”. Those of us who barter services rather than exchange cash (ie. volunteering an hour a week for a gym pass), or work for cash like mowing lawns, doing someone’s taxes by donation, or receiving an honorarium for giving a presentation at a local high school. To the CRA this is the “underground” economy and it’s DESTROYING our communities. In this fancy YouTube video above their rationale is that the non-taxed economy destroys communities because communities rely on services provided by taxes. Not a variety of self-sustaining and community embracing economies like bartering or the gift economy.
The way I see it, though, is that if the government can justify paying me a wage at the social service agency I work for that keeps me so low on the tax bracket that I have to do work on the side in exchange for services then that’s what I have to do.
I think my friend put it succinctly when she came up with her own idea for the video above:
I want to submit a video to them with [new baby’s name] asking for the boob and me saying “wait a minute, let me get a receipt, revenue canada deserves a share of my labour.”
The attack on the “underground economy” brings up a lot of questions: Does this mean that a person’s parenting/home work is also now taxable? And what about that $50 I get from my grandparents every Christmas? Does that count too? And what happens when I report I made an extra $300 building websites for a poor student to get their work off the ground? Do you think they’ll actually put those tax dollars into my community in a better way than that $300 went to buying local honey or paying my roller derby dues?
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