As many of you know, I don’t believe we should exclude one cause to promote another. That’s why I’ve been getting increasingly frustrated with the vegan/animal rights/animal welfare communities (I had to throw animal welfare in there because I’m going to be talking about PETA who is definitely not either a vegan or animal rights organization regardless of what they say). Not that the feminist movement does much or even really cares about animal rights as a rule. Most feminists are omnis who I’ve found don’t like to hear that veganism and animal rights is a feminist issue. However, since the feminist movement doesn’t directly counter the animal rights movement strictly to further their own cause, I won’t be saying anymore about that side of things.

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A Perfect Storm of Misogyny, All on One Dudebelly - There’s nothing more that I can say about this heinous tattoo that Melissa doesn’t say 10 times better. The best line ever - “a truly magnificent image, so perfect in its encapsulation of myriad expressions of the hatred and objectification of women that it is as compelling as it is appalling”

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First we have Oklahoma representative Sally Kern bashing homosexuals and actually saying they are more a threat to this country than terrorism. Not that I think terrorism is a huge threat to our country, I think it’s mostly fear mongering. But people like rep Kern do believe that terrorism is a major threat so this statement is a bold one coming from her.

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Defining the terms: I think it’s important to start by defining the terms I will be using in the article. This helps to avoid confusion, especially for many people who are confused as to what term they should use if they wouldn’t have an abortion themselves but also don’t feel they should place their personal views on others.

Pro-Choice - You are against government regulation of abortions regardless of whether you would have one yourself or not. If you don’t think abortion should be illegal you are pro-choice.

Anti-Choice (aka Pro-Life) - If you are pro-government regulation and believe that roe v/s wade should be overturned you probably refer to yourself as pro-life. However, I personally find the term pro-life to be very loaded, meaning to imply that anyone who is pro-choice is also anti-life, which is usually the farthest thing from the truth. I much prefer the term anti-choice and find it much less loaded since it’s a term used to denote a person who literally wants to take away a woman’s right to choose.

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I wrote the following as a response to Jethra Black’s blog post Let’s Talk Torture. BRAIN STORM TIME!!!!. She’s doing a documentary on the way horror films have changed in post-9/11 American culture and asked for feedback on the torture porn trend. However, my comment ended up being too long for the reply form and I also thought it would make a great article to post here.

First I should say that before reading this post, I hadn’t made a connection between the torture porn trend and 9/11 at all. As a feminist who has been following those trends for years, I just took the appearance of torture porn as another sign that the way society views women is on the downfall. Along with the torture porn trend over the past few years, there’s also been a huge trend of rape apologists, the invention of the term “gray rape”, access to safe abortion and birth control has increasingly become scarce and abstinence only education has stripped many young girls of any chance of having a healthy sexual relationship. So my views here on torture porn will be more related to feminism than 9/11.

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Another in the “Original Women” series called “Silence is Deadly”. Far too often women have so much to contribute but hold back because they’ve been taught that “polite girls” don’t speak up. The silence is killing us, we all need to learn to use our voices in any way we can. Blogs, zines, art, poetry, music… it doesn’t matter the medium, just make your voices heard!!!

I wanted to expand a bit on some thoughts I was just posting while replying to Diane Casetamorphoses’ post She Ain’t Giving Up Yet on Hillary Clinton’s fight to stay in the race.

I don’t get seriously involved in presidential races. Since I’m usually left voting for the lesser of two evils anyway (99% of American politicians are way too far center leaning for my socialist views). To quote Bob Torres, I watch politics the way many people watch sports. It’s very entertaining and almost everyone involved is just in it for their own personal gain anyway.

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Someone pointed me in the direction of this link yesterday and I just had to re-post it as well. Joss Whedon is one of my favorite feminist men, second only to my beloved husband The Angry Hippie. I love his work and Buffy has been my favorite television show of all time since the first episode I saw of it back in ‘98. I’ll now let the man speak for himself.

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I don’t know how many people reading this have played any of the Harvest Moon games but basically they are sim games where you run a farm.  You grow crops, raise cows for milk, sheep for wool, and chickens for eggs.  Now, here’s the thing about the game.  You never kill your animals and the nicer you are to them the more milk/eggs/wool they produce.  And if you don’t take care of them they will stop producing milk/eggs/wool.

I was reading a help guide for one today and read something that both pissed me off a bit and made me roll my eyes at the same time.  The person said that they loved this game because it was so educational, and that they had no idea how farms worked before playing.  I was really blown away at their comment since I thought that pretty much everyone knew that there was no such thing as the “friendly family farm”.

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The following is a post Reverence Lily wrote for her blog and decided not to use. She offered it to me and I thought it was too good not to see the light of day. So without further ado…

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