I'm an angry feminist, but I'm trying to dial back some of the actual anger

One of the ways that I define myself is as a feminist. I am someone who is deeply committed to the cause of equality, and all of the things that go along with that - equal pay for equal work; adequately representing the voices of women in all aspects of culture, from politics to the media to religion; promoting respect for women's bodily autonomy; not elevating one gender or set of gendered characteristics over another; not forcing people to conform to gender norms that may be stifling or constraining to them.
In some ways, the feminist movement, as it exists here in the US, is a deeply idealistic one, even though it can also be very cynical and pessimistic. Although that may sound contradictory, I think the two emotions go hand it hand. We're cynical and pessimistic because it seems like every day you hear about something really terrible happening because of the way that gender works in our society. A woman is brutally assaulted by her MMA fighter ex-boyfriend, but social media is flooded with people saying that she shouldn't be surprised because that's the kind of guy she went for, or somehow deserved it because she did porn. In Georgia, an ex-cop, who was convicted of raping a woman and even threatened to literally penetrate her with his gun, just got his gun rights back. In South Carolina, which has one of the highest rates of domestic violence in the country, only 18 counties out of 46 have shelters for women seeking to escape abusive relationships. In Texas, the governer is fighting measures that will make sure prisons are adequately staffed in order help end sexual assault there because he says it costs too much money.
The idealistic impulse in feminism manifests itself in the way that we talk about what has to be done about all of these things. Real change can't occur until there is a massive shift in the way that we think and talk about gender in our society; anything else just feels like a bandaid, a stopgap measure that is only designed to react to a problem, not actually fix it.
Yesterday my boyfriend sent me a link to an article that he was critical of: "Why is it easier to invent anti-rape nail polish than it is to stop rapists?" I will admit, the headline is a little misleading; of course it's easier to invent a thing that reacts to a chemical compound than it is to change the way an entire culture thinks about sex, consent, and rape. He felt like the author was far too critical of the guys who invented the nail polish, and that given that we live in a society where rape is a real possibility that women have to contend with, any tools that they can use to help prevent it should be applauded.

In a way, I guess I agree with that. There are certain things that I do, or have done, that make me feel safer. I used to carry pepper spray on a regular basis, and it's still kicking around in a drawer somewhere. In my post about street harassment, I mentioned that I may or may not react in a certain way to being catcalled because I don't know what the repercussions might be.
On the other hand, I understand what the author was trying to say. It's the idealism in play - what kind of world do we live in that women feel like they have to arm themselves with roofie detecting nail polish in order to feel safe? How is that different from the other "rape prevention" techniques and devices that have been recommended over the years? That's included everything from from a condom you can leave in that basically has built in vagina dentata (side note, the movie Teeth is actually pretty awesome and you should watch it), to pissing on yourself if someone is trying to rape you because then they'll be grossed out and stop, to not going out and drinking or "dressing like sluts." It's not that the nail polish or the impulse behind it are necessarily bad, but it feels like yet another burden that women have to take on to prevent bad things from happening to them.

Of course, the world that we live in is this one. Is it merely pragmatic to accept that, while the only person to blame for a rape is the rapist, the are certain things that women can do that might diminish their risk? It seems like that just leads back to victim blaming.
If we accept the statement that there are things that women can do to keep from being raped, the logical conclusion would seem to be that if you are raped, you must have done something wrong. The tendancy to do that in our society is already so strong. Rape cases don't make it to trial very often, and when they do, victims have to be prepared to answer questions about what they were wearing, if they were flirting with their assailant, and details about their sexual history. Defense lawyers wouldn't ask these kinds of questions if the answers, irrelevant though they are, didn't result in acquittals.

The best anti-rape campaign that I've ever seen.
I want to have discussions with people about the problems in our society. Rape is the one that's foremost on my mind right now because of this article and because of Slutwalk, but I will argue with people about birth control, abortion, domestic violence, racial discrimination, and inequality in all its forms. What I don't want to do is alienate the people that I'm having these discussions with, or shut the conversation down without hearing them out. The thing is, I'm absolutely convinced that I'm right about these things; I don't argue positions I don't believe in, unless I'm trying to play devil's advocate. Sometimes, that level of passion is an asset, and I feel like I've definitely brought people around, or at least worn them down, by finding different ways to explain things to them, coming up with different metaphors and analogies and questions to try and give them an "a-ha" moment.
Sometimes, though, people have told me that they feel like I'm shouting them down, and that I'm not listening to what they have to say. That's something that I do regard as a failing on my part. How can you expect people to listen to you and respect what you have to say if you don't give them the same courtesy? I want to help change the way that people see the world, not close their minds to what I have to say by bludgeoning them with rhetoric.
This isn't intended as a criticism of other feminists - there are so many terrible injustices in this world that should make me angry, and do. But there's definitely a time and a place for that anger, and I think every person has to decide for themselves when and where that is. For me, I'm just trying to bring things down a notch in my personal life, with the people that I love and respect. 

Links to love

1. Kudos To This Portrait Series For Not Erasing LGBTQ Identities While Proving They’re Just Like You
The Self Evident Truths Project is a massive photography project that aims to capture the portraits of 10,000 individuals on the LGBTQ spectrum. The photos manage to capture a little something of their queer identities while also making them human and relatable. There's also a stories section on their website, some of which are uplifting, some of which are heartbreaking. 


2. Why you should fight your judgemental side eye during shorts season
I stumbled across this article shortly after I wrote my post from yesterday, and I cannot agree with it more. Maybe you don't want to rock a pair of "janties," but demeaning other women who do serves no purpose other than to police and shame them. 


3. A tropical breeze dress
I am loving this homemade dress on my fellow vintage blogger Tasha from By Gum, By Golly. I've been dying over tropical prints lately (anyone want to buy me something pretty by Alfred Shaheen?), and this makes me want to learn how to sew my own clothes.


4. Oscar in the utility belt: 9 actors who won Academy Awards after playing comic-book characters
For a long time it felt like there was a bit of a genre ghetto in Hollywood. You could be a serious actor who did "real" movies, or you could be a B-level actor who did action/sci-fi/fantasy. With the explosion of comic book movies in the late 90s, the names started to get bigger. Bigger budget genre flicks = bigger names = bigger profits (usually). Right now, it seems like comic book movies, particularly in the Marvel Universe, are the best place to spot talented actors.


5. The Ryno prepares to charge
I think I want one.

Links to Love

1. Want to Know if Your Food is Genetically Modified?
To quote somewhat at length:

"Though opposition to GMOs has its roots in the liberal environmental movement, an increasing number of environmental writers and thinkers have begun to take the industry’s side in the debate, pointing to an overwhelming scientific consensus—based on hundreds of independent, non-industry-funded, peer-reviewed, long-range studies—that GMOs are safe. The scariest recent study, which claimed that GMOs caused tumors in rats, was the work of a rogue laboratory in France whose findings have been widely debunked. The National Academy of Sciences, the American Medical Association, the World Health Organization, the U.K.’s Royal Society, the European Commission, and the Center for Science in the Public Interest have all sought to weigh GMOs’ purported risks, and found that there is no evidence they are dangerous."

I've already made my feelings about GMOs pretty clear,  but I was really fascinated by this article from The Atlantic. It's a long read, but it's really worth the time.

2. A Taxonomy of Carbonated Waters
Summer's almost upon us, and L.V. Anderson from Slate tackles this most important of issues - what's the difference between various kinds of fizzy bubble water?

3. Women in Space (part 1)
This review of women in space based sci-fi added several new entries to my reading list. I've already read more fantasy than sci-fi, but lately I've really been drawn to science fiction. It tends to be such a male dominated genre, though, that it's nice to have a list of novels to check out that actually have women in them. 


4. The Hollow Cat Eye: A Customized Twist on a Classic Look
Much as I love a classic cat eye, sometimes you just have to switch things up a little bit. This xoVain tutorial gives a few different ideas for how to mix things up with your beauty routine.


5. Model Co Tan Mousse and Mitt
The reason why I'm featuring this link is less because of the product review, and more because of what the lovely Marianne has to say on the issue of skin tone. This is something that I've noticed myself - the vintage look seems to be a very white look, both demographically speaking (I know many more white people who've embraced the retro aesthetic than people of color) and aesthetically speaking (the beauty standard seems to be very pale skin). I think that there are a lot of reasons behind that, and they're way too complicated to get into in just a paragraph or two, but I have to echo her statement that "...all skin tones are beautiful and let's enjoy them, whatever we have, and paint them, or not paint them, whatever takes our fancy, as we see fit."

6. Silk Mystery Outfit
One of the joys of wearing and collecting vintage clothing is doing the research to try and pinpoint their era and origin. The Vintage Traveler recently purchased this lovely silk outfit, and was trying to place the time period it came from. I've spent plenty of time doing this myself, and it was great to read her working through the various clues that made her conclude that it was, in fact, a 1950s garment.

The one thing I really care about when it comes to organic food

I am an outlier when it comes to the organic food movement, in that I support it, but I think the anti-GMO dogma that characterizes it is wildly misplaced. For one thing, we've been genetically modifying food for thousands of years; those heirloom veggies you're paying top dollar for at the farmers market aren't any closer to their wild ancestors than the ones you'll find on the shelf at any grocery store. They also aren't bad for you. Study after study has confirmed that they are not poisoned, they will not give you cancer, they will not give you autism, they will not turn you purple. While I don't always trust the government, I sure as hell trust scientists over the kind of quacks that have people convinced that vaccines are bad for you, because they two groups seem to go hand in hand.

Not an accurate depiction of GMOs.
For the record, Monsanto is the worst. The things that they do to farmers who don't want to buy their products are atrocious, and it's criminal that they can get away with it. That's something that is wrong with them as a company, though, and needs to be dealt with through patent law reform, not anti-GMO activism. Monsanto is not the only company that creates GMOs, and lumping all of them together only stifles progress. When activists burn down fields of enriched wheat that's being developed by scientists in Australia, who have no affiliation with Monsanto and can help improve the nutrition of children in the developing world, it is immensely frustrating.
So, why do I care about organic food? Because there is something about factory farming that is really dangerous, and could potentially kill millions, if not billions.
Antibiotics.
The World Health Organization recently released a report that said, in a nutshell, that we really need to stop fucking around with antibiotics or they aren't going to work anymore. Play nicely with your lifesaving medicines or you'll break them and then you won't have them anymore.
Most people living today don't remember what the world was like before antibiotics. Syphilis, meningitis, pneumonia, gonorrhea, even minor flesh wounds could be deadly, and will be again if antibiotic resistant strains keep proliferating the way they have been in the past few decades.
Currently, most factory farmed livestock are regularly dosed with antibiotics, which help them to put on more weight than they would without them. The doses are sub-theraputic, so they don't actually keep them from getting sick from things, but they do create antibiotic resistance in the bacteria. This practice is banned in the EU and in Canada, but not here in the US. Given how strong the meat lobby is here, I don't know what the chances are of that happening any time soon.

Chipotle is one company that uses only antibiotic free meat.
I'm not always as conscientious about where I get my meat from as I should be, but making sure that it's antibiotic free, or skipping it entirely, is an important goal for me. Even if you don't care much for the "liberal agenda," not reverting to a pre-antibiotic society is a goal that everyone should be able to get behind.

Six Links to Love

1. Sterner Stuff: Why Sansa Stark is a Political Powerhouse. I'm not gonna lie - I've never been that into Sansa. I mean, when you've got fierce little Arya, Brienne of Tarth, Cersei Lannister, and, in the tv show, Olena and Margaery Tyrell to compare her to, it's hard to get that excited about her. However, this article raises a valid point. She's not stupid, she's not useless, she's just in the weakest position of any major female character in the series, and she uses the tools available to her to negotiate some harrowing circumstances. Her charm, decorum, and ability to hide her true feelings are what have kept her alive, if not unharmed. I have to wonder if Cersei wasn't wrong when she said she was a little bit like her when she was young.

Ok, but this is some epic durp face. 

2. Chronically Vintage: Miss L Fire Shoes I've been drawing so much inspiration from Jessica of Chronically Vintage lately. She has a real sense of elegance and great taste, and her website is a great source if you're looking for vintage shops or reproduction brands. I am dying for a pair of Miss L Fire shoes after she showcased these gems. The styles are fabulously vintage in style but with a modern sensibility. I think I might have to invest in this pair for the summer.

 
3. Mississippi Sex Ed Class Compares Women to Dirty Pieces of Chocolate I went to school in rural Colorado, and we also got abstinence only, sex-negative sex ed. Women who have sex are compared to toothbrushes, to gum, to pieces of chocolate, which have no value after they've been used. This is an incredibly damaging message to send to impressionable teenagers for a lot of reasons. Girls who have sex are considered worthless sluts, both by others and often by themselves, and boys become entrenched in the virgin/whore dichotomy. As Elizabeth Smart, who is quoted in the article, says, it can also make life even more difficult for girls who are raped, or undergo other traumatic sexual experiences.

4. The Color of His Presidency American politics grow ever more tense and divisive, and as much as I'd love to lay that all at the feet of the Republican party, liberals and Democrats haven't exactly been open to discourse either. Accusations of racism and totalitarianism fly from both sides of the aisle, and it's not getting us anywhere. Entrenched politicians are unwilling to act decisively for fear of losing an election, and their cowardice is a problem in its own right, but it doesn't help matters that every statement that actually says anything is going to be dissected in the most partisan way possible. Unless we start actually listening to and thinking about the ideas that the other side is putting forth, the days of America the Beautiful are over.


5.  Plasticland Killer Kraken Pillow I'm moving to a new apartment soon, and my boyfriend is in full agreement with me that a steampunk pad would be the bees knees. I'm thinking this kraken throw pillow might be a nice place to start.

6. The Kitchn: Minty Pea and Arugula Wonton Ravioli Doesn't this just scream spring? I'm determined to give it a shot this weekend, maybe with roasted chicken or tilapia.