butch

Vietnamese Mail Order Bride: $8,000. WTF International Diner's Club? Via Racewire. • New tapes reveal Nixon was warmonger, racist, and anti-Semitic. Why am I not surprised? At all? Not in the least? Not one---okay that's probably enough. • Hilarious new Infomania segment "That's Gay." • Joss Whedon gives his final answer to the question "Why do you always write such strong women characters?" The answer will warm your heart! • Kate Harding and Marianne Kirby write on the depiction of fat women in romance novels (there is usually a box of doughnuts involved, ugh). • The Washington Post turns an economic story on Jimmy Choo into a sexist stereotype of women going rabid over expensive shoes. • DIY health and beauty on Wiretap!• All I'm saying is Jenny Shimizu never looked like that on Make Me a Supermodel! Top 100 Hottest Butches of 2009 (author disclaimer included). • Amelie Gilette major burns Jennifer Love Hewitt's new relationship book. • Utne Reader reports on Pepperdine University finding correlation between promoting women and business success.

Lately I've been thinking about the process of coming out and identities/shifting, and how for so many of us it's an ongoing/lifetime process. In part because we as individuals change, and/or in part because our environment changes, and/or in part because our identities can't be read on the outside, and/or because some of us feel the most comfortable in those in-between spaces yet sometimes feel compelled to "pick a side" (so to speak/referencing here the dualism so prevalent in mainstream Western culture), because the struggle to have our identities validated (or even finding language to define ourselves and our experiences) simply becomes too much work. But then when we "pick that side," we might eventually feel the weight of that boxed-in identity start to hurt, so we begin the process of coming out again... Or geez, to put it most simply, because things just change...