date rape

Here's some news to help you over the hump that is Wednesday!

• Think you're living a sexism-free life?  Think again.  Andrea Grimes reveals the implications of the everyday choices feminists make and defends them. [Hay Ladies!]
• An open letter to Michelle Williams on dressing up as and equating Native Americans with Munchkins. [The Nation]
• Colorlines covers the heartbreaking death of 16-year-old Kimani Gray who was shot by the NYPD this past weekend after allegedly attempting to adjust his belt. [Colorlines]
• Defense attorneys of the recent Steubenville case will be pleading that date rape does not exist. [The Atlantic Wire]
• The new stats on gender disparity in publishing were released last week by VIDA.  Here's what the editors at the least sexist publications had to say on their practices. [Flavorwire]
• Monica Roberts of TransGriot is the first transwoman keynote speaker at the 2nd Annual Black Transmen Conference which starts today, March 13, and goes through March 17.  [TransGriot]
• Tell your stories of identity and gender to The Bandit Zine by March 15 for consideration in their upcoming issue. [Autostraddle]
• With all the awkwardness and realness Girls is servin' up, it leaves some wondering what's up with the lack of condom talk on the show.  [Slate]
• Sure, things are mostly casual on Grindr, but that doesn't mean people shouldn't take it seriously.  The app is actually changing the way people connect in more ways than you might think. [The New York Times]

So that's what we've been reading up on.  Did we miss any links?  Send 'em our way and let us know in the comments.

In college, I lived in a co-op – on-campus, owned by the university and so-called because rather than rely on the custodial service that cleaned the other campus buildings, we divvied cleaning tasks among ourselves. It was cheaper to live there than in the dorms or off-campus. There were several on our campus, and I lived in no fewer than three. There were not the hippie havens they sound like, though the one I lived in for two years in a row had a hackey sack circle going out front pretty much 24/7. That house – the only coed house in Oregon State's co-op system – was far more like a coed fraternity.

None of us would have admitted that at the time, of course. All of considered ourselves a little too cool, a little too lefty and a little too mellow to participate in the, pshhhh, Greek system.

In the frenzy of cable news chatter that followed Tuesday's State of the Union address, one pundit stood out in the crowd, a beacon on a douchebag hill. The Wall Street Journal's Stephen Moore out-douched the considerable competition by employing the age-old tactic of saying stuff is like rape when it is not even kind of like rape.

On their latest album A Very She & Him Christmas, Zooey Deschanel and M. Ward cover the creepy (yet catchy—creetchy?) classic with a twist: Deschanel is the "wolf" to M. Ward's "mouse." Does this make the song any less of a problem?

Once, twice, three times a douchebag for Johns Hopkins University's student newspaper The News-Letter, who hit the student body with a double-whammy of sexist, rape-apologetic articles in the last two weeks.

A look back at Degrassi: The Next Generation's season two episode "Shout," and how Paige Michalchuk uses rock music to work through the trauma of date rape.