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On Our Radar: Today's Feminist News Roundup

Bitch HQ post by Andi Zeisler on May 24, 2013 - 7:56am; tagged cancer, Jerry Lewis, secularism, women in comedy, women in movies.

Happy Memorial Day weekend! If your plans include reading, here are some links to get you started.

• Yet another teenage girl has committed suicide after months of school bullying—this time, the victim was 12-year-old Gabrielle Molina of Queens, New York. [New York Daily News]

• Amy Pascal, the chief of Sony studios, gave a fantastic interview to Forbes's Dorothy Pomerantz. Indiewire's Women in Hollywood blog has some of the most trenchant excerpts, including this one, on female characters in film: "They can be villains, they can be protagonists, I don't care but their movements, their actions what they do in the plot has to actually matter." [Women in Hollywood]

• The Center for Inquiry's CEO, Ron Lindsay, delivered the opening statements at last week's Women in Secularism conference. Unfortunately, he took the moment as an opportunity to lecture the women in attendence about how they're doing feminism wrong. [Skepchick]

• In not-all-profanity-is-profane news: Three women were kicked out of Pennsylvania's King of Prussia Mall when security took issue with their "Fuck Cancer" hats, which they were earing to honor their recently deceased mother. [Clutch]

• Stand-up comic Christina Walkinshaw did a set at an upstate New York casino and was heckled throughout by a table full of men shouting for her to show various body parts to them. When she complained to the club's (female) owner, she was told, "I thought you liked it." Then she was cut from the lineup of a future show. [xoJane]

• And speaking of female comics, 87-year-old Jerry Lewis recently doubled down on his low opinion of ladies being funny. When asked if he had changed his mind since his famously dumb statements in 1998, Lewis said "I am a bigot with no imagination whatsoever, so no." (Actually, what he said was, "I cannot sit and watch a lady diminish her qualities to the lowest common denominator," but same diff.) [AP]

• At The Rumpus, porn director Sam Benjamin discusses his youthful idealism about the "spectacular, feminist, clever, ornate" films he hoped to make, and what he's learned from working in the sex industry. [The Rumpus]

• Kathryn Joyce's book The Child Catchers—reviewed in the new issue of Bitch—is a fascinating, if disturbing, exposé of how international adoption has been impacted by evangelical Christianity and corruption. Joyce discusses these subjects and more in this great interview. [RH Reality Check]

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Sassy Grandmas and Angry Old Ladies: Comparing the Comedy Comebacks of Betty White and Joan Rivers

Women Aren't Funny post by Gabrielle Moss on May 23, 2013 - 2:44pm; tagged aging, Betty White, Comedy, Saturday Night Live, women in comedy.

Betty White sitting on a pile of chairs

Everyone loves a comeback, the more unexpected the better--and no recent comeback was more unexpected than Betty White’s.

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Race & Body Issues in Nalo Hopkinson's "The Chaos"

Girls of Color in Dystopia post by Victoria Law on May 23, 2013 - 12:21pm; tagged apocalypse, body image, dystopian, Nalo Hopkinson, Race, sexuality, Toronto, YA fiction.

The Chaos book cover

When I first picked up Nalo Hopkinson's The Chaos last summer, I thought, "Finally! A book with a young woman of color as the protagonist!" Of course, I've since learned that there are other dystopic novels with girls of color, but this hasn't ended my love forThe Chaos even after a second (and third) reading.

The Chaos isn't actually set in a dystopia. It's more of a post-apocalyptic world in which Toronto transforms from its usual racist, misogynist, able-ist normalcy to utter chaos, complete with hoodie-wearing sasquatches, escalators that ask questions about quantum physics, and Baba Yaga and her flying house.

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On Our Radar: Today's Feminist News Roundup

News post by Sarah Mirk on May 23, 2013 - 8:50am; tagged Boy Scouts.

Here's all the feminist news I'm reading today:

• Prime-time TV is more gender-balanced than current films—according to a massive analysis, 39 percent of prime-time TV characters are women, while we make up only 28 percent of film characters. [Sociologial Images]

• Two articles about college graduation, since it's the season: Pictuing the enrollment gap between white students and students of color in college and Obama gives a graduation speech that veers into the territory of finger-wagging. [Racialicious, Colorlines]

• West Virginia has a new law banning sexting between teens, but it could wind up hurting the victims it aims to protect. [RH Reality Check]

• Are you following what's going on with #FBRape? The campaign launched earlier this week to get companies to stop running ads next to Facebook content that promotes violence against women has had a couple companies respond and no word from several others. [Women, Action, and Media]

• The Boy Scouts of America are meeting today to decide whether to life their ban on queer scouts—but keep in place their LGBT adults. [Advocate]

• Bronx environmental activist Majora Carter has fought blight in her community for decades and now says a recent New York Timesprofile of criticisms of her work is off-base and sexist. [The Slant]

• A WalMart security guard called the police on an interracial family because he thought the father must have kidnapped his daughters. [Alternet]

• If you haven't already seen Hyperbole and a Half's moving personal comic about depression, go read it now. That's an order! [Hyperbole and a Half]

What's on your radar? Add links I missed to the comments!

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Fighting for the Right to Go Topless

Politics post by Jordannah Elizabeth on May 22, 2013 - 5:08pm; tagged body image, criminal justice.

Holly Van Voast, shirtless in New York

This past week, the news broke that New York City began to instruct its police officers this winter that to make sure they act accordingly to legality of women going topless in public. It’s easy to dismiss this law with a punch line, but the truth is that instructing all of New York’s police force to leave topless women alone is groundbreaking and part of a long running movement lead by women who have fought for topless equality.

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Star Trek Into Feminism: Three Ways the Sci-Fi Series Needs to Change

TV post by zach on May 22, 2013 - 3:02pm; tagged LGBT, Race, Sci-Fi, Star Trek.

Uhura wearing a tiny red dress

Star Trek has a reputation.

For almost fifty years, the disempowered and the marginalized and the outcasts have held up Star Trek as a show that said, “This is what we can aspire to: a humanity that has evolved beyond inequality and oppression”. The show presents a vision of Earth that has moved beyond racism and classism, beyond ableism and sexism and homophobia. As a life-long Trekkie, it is tempting to agree with this reputation. Me and Star Trek, hand in hand, running through fields of wildflowers on a soft-focus sunny day while I gaze upon them longingly. Oh Star Trek! So progressive! So feminist!

But this reputation is not reality.

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