Going green doesn’t have to be snooty – let the Guide Girls prove it to you. (Where can I get one of those flying nun hats?)
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A6SpiHs2ls0[/youtube]
[tags]Earth Day, Guide Girls[/tags]
They’re making a television movie about Irene Sendler, the woman who saved twice as many Jews as Schindler.
As a social worker in Poland, Sendler smuggled 2,500 Jewish children out of the Warsaw ghetto, and although she was tortured for three months – with Gestapo officers crushing her legs in a vice and smashing her bones with hammers – she refused to divulge their whereabouts. Having buried their names in jars, after the war Sendler used the information to help the children track down surviving relatives.
She was relatively unknown until three kids from Kansas researched her as part of a history project in 1999. Not to diss Schindler in any way, but why, until then, was he a chapter heading and she a footnote?
Anyway, Anna Paquin is going to play Sendler in the movie. I hope it’s historically accurate, though part of me is secretly hoping to see her go full-tilt Rogue on some Nazis.
“If I have chosen the female form in particular, it is because beauty has been debased and exploited in our sensual twentieth century. We seem to have a need to turn innocent nature into evil ugliness by the twist of the mind. Woman has been the target of much that is sordid and cheap, especially in photography. To raise, to elevate, to endorse with timeless reverence the image of woman, has been my mission – the reason for my work which you see here.”
- Ruth Bernhard (October 14, 1905 – December 18, 2006)
Whatever you give a woman, she will make greater. If you give her sperm, she’ll give you a baby. If you give her a house, she’ll give you a home. If you give her groceries, she’ll give you a meal. If you give her a smile, she’ll give you her heart. She multiplies and enlarges what is given to her.
So, if you give her any crap, be ready to receive a ton of shit.
If anyone knows who said this, please comment. She is my hero today.
Samantha Bee is my hero.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h-6A1sH9p_Y[/youtube]
From Trendhunter Magazine:
Supermodel and Victoria’s Secret Angel, Karolina Kurkova has been blasted for an appearance at the Cia Maritima show in Sao Paulo Fashion Week. The Brazilian media is criticizing Kurkova for modeling a tiny bikini while having “back fat, love handles and cellulite.”
God forbid she look even remotely like the average thin woman. See for yourself…
I know I had to get out my hanky just reading about it.
Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon made history – again – at 5:07 p.m. Monday when they were declared “spouses for life.”
At that moment, standing next to each other in the mayor’s office in San Francisco City Hall in front of cheering friends and relatives, the couple of 55 years became the first same-sex newlyweds in San Francisco and among the first in California under a new right bestowed by the state Supreme Court.
In a now-famous speech from 1995, Hillary Clinton said “Women’s rights are human rights.” Verily, I say, gay rights are human rights, too, and few people alive have done more for both than Del and Phyllis.
I am so happy for these heroines that gay marriage has been legalized in their lifetimes.
[tags]gay marriage, human rights[/tags]
The title of this post is a nod to the only other “Hillary post” I’ve written: Senator Hillary Cleavage.
That post is my response to the bonehead at the Washington Post who wrote about the deep societal meaning behind Hillary’s tits. Today’s post is inspired by the no-longer-estimable Barbara Walters, who recently had to weigh in on the size and shape of Hillary’s ass.1
It seems we just can’t resist reducing all women to T & A in this country, no matter what the circumstance.
When the gals at Jezebel called Baba Wabba on her snark, the boys at Comedy Central replied that their attitude just proves they are “vaginas.”
I think Jezebel’s response to that sums up what so many people still think about woman in general, if Hillary’s campaign is any indication:
What. The. Fuck. So, like, we’re just a bunch of talking, writing, typing, drinking, ass-kicking vaginas? We’re not even the sum of our parts, we just get to be one?
Pick one. Tits, ass, or vagina. No fair being all three.
And while I’m on the subject of rants and Hillary, I’d like to raise a toast to a post: For the Record, by Melissa McEwan at Shakesville. It expresses my sentiments exactly about the wholly depressing misogyny that characterized so much of the reaction to Hillary’s presidential bid.
[Aside: As usual, there are a fair amount of misogynist comments on McEwan's post, but my fave is the guy who says he wants a female candidate who doesn't "embarrass her sex." Do people actually still think that way? People born after the Victorian era, I mean? Well, it's a good thing male politicians are not held to that same standard - i.e., assumed to represent their entire "sex" every time they act or speak. If they were, George "Nu-cu-lar weapons" Bush would have brought a whole new level of humiliation to the men in this world.]
While I’m talking politics, here’s my for-the-record:
I like Hillary. I like Obama. I can’t decide between the two. I like some things about Hill and other things not so much. Ditto for Obama.
If I did ultimately choose Hillary, it would NOT be because she is a woman.
It is sexist to choose a man because he’s a man, and it’s sexist to choose a woman because she’s a woman. End. Of. Story. Duh.
Well, unless you’re talking about sexual partners, but then I really hope you have additional criteria for that as well.
[tags]Hillary Clinton, Barbara Walters, misogyny[/tags]
After Reading Mickey in the Night Kitchen for the Third Time Before Bed
by Rita Dove
I’m in the milk and the milk’s in me… I’m Mickey!
My daughter spreads her legs
to find her vagina:
hairless, this mistaken
bit of nomenclature
is what a stranger cannot touch
without her yelling. She demands
to see mine and momentarily
we’re a lopsided star
among the spilled toys,
my prodigious scallops
exposed to her neat cameo.
And yet the same glazed
tunnel, layered sequences.
She is three; that makes this
innocent. We’re pink!
she shrieks, and bounds off.
Every month she wants
to know where it hurts
and what the wrinkled string means
between my legs. This is good blood
I say, but that’s wrong, too.
How to tell her that it’s what makes us–
black mother, cream child.
That we’re in the pink
and the pink’s in us.