birth control

Goodmorning everyone! Here's a sample of the news we've been reading at the Bitch HQ.

• Were you told in school that if you took birth control, your mother probably hates you? Well the high schoolers at George Washington High were, and this one rad student spoke out. [Think Progress]
• The new Dove ad: some love it, some hate it. It's certainly not without its problems, and this feminist blogger explains why. [Jazzy Little Drops]
• If you're thinking of moving to another city or want to appreciate the one you are already in, here’s a list of the top 10 best-paying cities (in the US) for women. [USA Today]
• To add insult to injury, this one trans woman in Georgia that was incarcerated for allegedly exposing her breasts in public was placed and harassed in the men’s ward. Unfortunately this story happens all the time, but it’s still one worth reading.  [Advocate]
• If you're in New Jersey today and tomorrow, you’re in luck! Why? Because there’s a conference happening at Rutgers University on Trans Politics and Strategies for Social Change. [Institute for Research on Women] 

Have strong feelings about an article posted? Share them in the comments!

 

 

This week, we’re all hoping that the Supreme Court will rule on the side of all that is fair and good and affirm the rights of gay and lesbian people to be married.

But while we’ve got our thumbs on champagne corks, anxiously waiting to celebrate, let’s just take a breath for a minute and recognize that while marriage equality is just major step forward toward equality for same-sex couples, it’s just a step toward equality for all in America. We’ve got to look beyond marriage to the other ways gender, sexuality, and love will still be regulated by the government, even if gays can finally tie the knot.

 

The blogs will never stop!

• Feministe points us to a New York Times piece on the 7 billion-person milestone and the importance of birth control...
• ...and the Crunk Feminist Collective reminds us that the majority of consumption is done by the western world, not by "brown people" in population-dense countries.
• The XX factor looks at a NY Times article about the "decline" of Southern manners that completely glosses over the whole aspect of race.
• Racialicious tackles the problematic subject matter in Craig Thompson's new graphic novel Habibi.
• Check out Muslimah Media Watch's new home at the Patheos blogs.
• Transgriot looks at Barack Obama's admirable work on transgender issues—and celebrates 3 million hits!
• Choices takes some time to look at how the Mississippi personhood would affect everyone if voted in next Tuesday.

Let us know what you think or what you've been reading in the comments down below!

In the political and media realm, this "pregnancy as disease" model is one thing that pro- and anti-choicers agree upon, although they use it for different ends.

It's a little embarrassing to call out Fox News on the Douchebag Decree, because that channel is basically a love letter to this column: "Dear Douchebag Decree, I will always be here for you. You will never be lonely as long as I'm around. Love always, Fox News." But it's also embarrassing to let the outrageously offensive commentary go without reminding the Internet that we DON'T just shake our heads and sigh every time Bill O' Reilly et al. run their fool mouths. We get mad as hell, and we tell people about it. On the Douche slab this week are Dana Perino and the rest of the commentators on "The Five," for their responses to the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) requirement that insurance cover the cost of birth control.

SXSW Interactive had an overwhelming amount of panels, conversations, and sessions that covered more tech talk you could shake a joystick at. Here's a quick round-up of three panels I saw, including Internet drama from a feminist perspective, the brainstorming behind Bedsider.org, and how female entrepreneurs fare in the tech world.

MTV’s been having a good summer. In part, that’s because the second season of its reality series Teen Mom has been generating huge ratings for the network—it is this summer’s third-most-watched original cable series in the coveted 12-34 demographic. The show, which documents the lives of four young women after they gave birth to children as teenagers, along with its sister show and predecessor 16 and Pregnant, has already generated a fair amount of cultural chatter on the question of whether the show is a valuable educational tool or just, as most seem to have concluded, regular old exploitation of the young women in question. There’s something to this argument, of course. MTV’s ratings success makes for a strange contrast with the fact that Teen Mom’s stars have been occupying the front pages of celebrity weeklies like US complaining that they are dead broke, doesn’t it?

I’m of two minds about the argument. On the one hand I certainly don’t have much faith in MTV’s dedication to social messaging, at least not enough to believe it extends much further than what advertisers are comfortable with. I’m not the first, for example, to point out that abortion, as an option, is not something that’s seriously discussed in the context of the show. You can spin that fact as having something to do with showrunners needing to have a more extended narrative arc than, "Now I’m pregnant, now I’m not." But Teen Mom does follow one young couple, Catelynn and Tyler, after they’ve given their child up for adoption, so sponsor queasiness seems a more likely explanation.