Oprah Winfrey

Hey everyone, take it easy with some of these fine links, hand-picked from all over the web.

• Caitlin Boston gives us some pretty concrete pointers on how to hit on not harass an Asian girl.
• Feministe dances a jig over Nepal's landmark gender legislation.
• Attention students and academics! Of Another Fashion, a Tumblr started by Threadbared's Minh-ha Pham to archive the overlooked fashion of American women of color, is now available on the academic search engine WorldCat. 
• Gamepro doesn't buy the "but no one was supposed to read that" defense after a slur slips into a popular game's code.
• The Huffington Post's fair Canadian branch calls out a supposedly "ethical" pro-oil ad campaign on Oprah's TV network.
• Fbomb reminds us that this whole Dominique Strauss-Kahn ordeal is still bad news.
• The Pursuit of Harpyness decided that her boss is so awesome she deserves her own tribute.
• The XX Factor slap their forehead after reading a psychological study that thinks sex hormones influence your fetus' future career.

Tell us your thoughts in the comments below!

How did you celebrate the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday—sleeping in, cruising sales at the mall or maybe even working because you didn’t have the day off? Of course, you may have actually spent the day attending a Martin Luther King Day parade or engaging in civil rights activism—for which you deserve to be commended because so few people observe the holiday by recognizing King and his work. I, for one, spent MLK Day watching the Oprah Winfrey Show to check out her roundup of programs she’s done on race over the past 25 years. So, what were Oprah’s most memorable shows on the subject?

PETA is in some hot water (again) for using first lady Michelle Obama's image in one of their ads without her permission. PETA pres Ingrid Newkirk says they didn't get Obama's permission because, well, they knew she would have said no. Since this is the same rationale I used when I "borrowed" my mom's car before I had a driver's license, I happen to know firsthand that the I-didn't-ask-because-you'd-say-no excuse doesn't work too well. Here's the ad:

By now you've probably heard that Oprah has announced her daytime talk show, which has been on the air for a staggering 23 years, will end in September 2011, and already there's clamor over how the daytime talk show void could possibly be filled.

Today, Oprah will be airing an interview with Mackenzie Phillips.  Who is that, you say?  She is a former child actress who also, coincidentally, happens to be one of the many children of the late John Phillips of The Mamas and Papas.  Like most former child actresses, her personal life has been a slow-moving disaster of epic proportions - just last year, at 48, she was busted for cocaine possession.  At an airport.  This being more or less par for the course in former child actress terms, one might wonder why she is getting the entire hour of Oprah to herself.  Wonder no more; E!Online is reporting that Phillips will reveal that she was raped by her father at 19.  Phillips also calls the relationship "consensual" at some point, which Anna North at Jezebel neatly deconstructs here.

I'm not so much interested in the horrific details of what happened to Phillips, personally - I wish her excellent therapy and hopefully some peace since justice for these things isjust a word and not a realistically attainable goal.  But I am filled with seething anger that these traumatic events are being turned into yet another ratings/YouTube bonanza for Oprah.  Oprah thrives on this stuff, of course, even though nowadays her show lies somewhere in a no-woman's land between 20/20 and infomercials.  It's the big confessional interviews, though, that are her particular specialty.  She just got done with that huge Whitney Houston bonanza, and is currently "interested in" Jaycee Dugard (cringe).  She gets them because she's Oprah and she milks them because she's Oprah and good goddamn it annoys me.

Several years ago, I read the novel Push written by performance poet, Sapphire.  I remember climbing into bed one night to read it and finishing it at about 5 AM.  Several times I had to put the book down for a few minutes, just to get myself together, to breathe.   Once I put the book down for the final time, I still couldn't sleep: I was emotionally wrung out and deeply disturbed.  It's hard to recover from a book that opens with: "I was left back when I was twelve because I had a baby for my fahver..."

Quick update: Sundance winner Push: Based on the Novel by Sapphire has landed a distributor! News broke yesterday that Lionsgate has acquired North American rights to the film. What's more, both Oprah Winfrey and Tyler Perry are also backing Push, which means that director Lee Daniels may actually be able to get this film in front of commercial audiences after all. Whew!

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