jezebel

Oh Gawker. Lindy West's Jezebel post on Hipster Racism is blowing up certain parts of the Internet today. In it, West goes over four main points of "hipster racism"—where folks justify racism by poorly hiding behind irony (Sarah Silverman—we see you!). On Racialicious, Carmen Van Kerckhove dubbed hipster racism one of 2006's top race and pop culture trends, which means that hipster or "ironic" racism has been a topic of conversation by writers of color and others in the social justice sphere for literally years. You won't find any links or acknowledgments of these earlier discussions in West's Jezebel post, but hey, at least a whole new audience of people will be that much closer to knowing how to talk about stuff like Lesley Arfin's insensitive, "ironic" tweet last week.

One dude definitely didn't read the post though.

There's a lot of fun/interesting stuff happening in the blogosphere today! A sampling:

• A great interview from The Guardian with Gabby Sidibe. Be prepared to get irritated when she talks about how everyone conflates her with the character of Precious.

• Interesting piece at The New York Times on expectations of motherhood in Germany

• Latoya Peterson's insightful take on the ten most bizarre sex ed videos. Boys beware! (Women's periods and gay men in cars are dangerous!)

• Veronica Arreola on why she supports women-focused relief organizations. The first comment is someone calling her a sexist, of course.

• Jessica Valenti responds to Nina Power's claim that she is a "consumer/self help" feminist.

• Judith Warner on Elizabeth Edwards' public image in the light of Game Change

Any other links you'd like to add? Put them in the comments section!

We're exhausted here at Bitch headquarters today by all of the weirdness that's happening on Double X, the new online women's magazine that is a version of the eponymous Slate blog. Apparently, the folks over at Double X don't want to identify as being feminist, but they sure love talking about how feminism is dead. And out to get us. ZOMBIE FEMINISM!



Since Double X launched yesterday, it's been chocked full of infuriating, Backlash-y articles like "Whine, Womyn, and Thongs: How feminism has failed", and "How I Got Bored With Feminism".

We don't know about you, but we're disappointed. (And we also need to figure out the best way to fight off this new undead feminism before it eats our brains.)

image from George Romero's Night of the Living Dead (1968)

OK, I know everyone doesn't like Jezebel.  Sometimes I don't, but mostly I do - it can be informative and amusing much of the time.  Now that my disclaimer is out of the way, they've got a funny April Fool's joke going on right now and are writing the site as though it has been purchased by CondeNast.  From the "new" editor's letter:  "For starters, there will be less focus on issues that dominate the six o'clock news (isn't there a limit to how much upsetting news a