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Infected Worldmind

Politics and Culture. A Tonic.

Who am I?

I'm general counsel for a medium-sized tax-exempt organization that helps court-involved and other at-risk populations clear barriers to success in the community.

I'm also a development/fundraising professional and provide legal advice and guidance to start-up entertainment firms.

I'm a contributor to Funnybook Babylon and my ever-expanding bookshelf is here. I infrequently write about food and take pictures.

I'm also the happiest newlywed in the world.

That's everything.

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Posts tagged "gender issues"

[F]ew people could blame T.I. for his anger and protective instincts. That’s his daughter — “mines,” he said.

He’s also the same guy who once rapped, “Ay T.I.P. been bangin’ thick dames since he was 15/the click came ran trains if her shit clean.”

This woman, real or imagined for musical purposes, is someone’s daughter. Maybe girlfriend. Possibly mother. Someone else’s “mines.”

-Blackink12 explores casual misogyny and male responsibility through the lens of TI’s response to a guy who harassed his daughter online.

Here’s what I love about the post: TI’s hypocrisy (mc with frequently misogynistic lyrics catches feelings when his daughter becomes a target of those who came up in the culture he helped perpetuate) is just the starting point.

It’ll be interesting to see if T.I.’s experience leads him (or other similarly situated artists like Nas) to develop some empathy for the women who aren’t his daughters.

Blackink’s story reminds me of a story that a friend told me about being the lone female in one of the group sex scenarios that T.I. bragged about in What’s Your Name (and that Big Punisher rapped about all throughout Capital Punishment). I can’t share the story, but let’s say this: although she technically consented, it was a pretty ugly situation.

When it came to exaggerated sexual exploits in hip-hop, I always preferred the bacchanalian narratives (loose men and loose women having fun) over the harder aged ones that belittled women or were focused on the sex industry, but if I’m being honest, I never took much offense. Bitches Ain’t Shit wasn’t on repeat, but I didn’t exactly skip over the track when it came up in the rotation.

But after hearing the story, it was hard to ignore how ugly it all was beneath the playful euphemisms. When you hear about ‘running trains’, you don’t automatically think of the scared woman in a room with a group of unruly guys. Maybe we should.

kateordie:

Erika Moen
Queer

Erika for President.

We let Willow cut her hair. When you have a little girl, it’s like how can you teach her that you’re in control of her body? If I teach her that I’m in charge of whether or not she can touch her hair, she’s going to replace me with some other man when she goes out in the world. She can’t cut my hair but that’s her hair. She has got to have command of her body. So when she goes out into the world, she’s going out with a command that it is hers. She is used to making those decisions herself. We try to keep giving them those decisions until they can hold the full weight of their lives.

(On why he let Willow cut all of her hair off)

(via librariesandlemonade)

Goddamn, I love Will Smith.

(via whydoihaveablog)

Some fatherly wisdom from Will Smith.

(via whydoihaveablog)

They’re harder to find. It’s definitely not because women ain’t funny, because I’m finding the opposite. It’s because there’s fewer of them. The statistical probability of picking up a shitty script, it’s compounded for women. There’s the same percentage of genius happening in both genders, but there’s less women writing scripts and out there looking for the job. So you dig a little extra-hard, and you end up with a staff that took a few extra meetings and a few extra shitty scripts to read. Now you have a staff that is just as good as the staff you would have had, but happens to be half women… And the male writers across the board, from top to bottom, in their most private moments drinking with me, when they’re fully licensed to be as misogynist, reactive, old-boy-network as they want, all they can say is, ‘This turned out to be a great thing.’ The energy is different [in the room]. It doesn’t keep anybody polite. We’re not doffing our caps or standing up when they enter the room. They do more dick jokes than anybody, because they’ve had to survive, they have to prove, coming in the door, that they’re not dainty. That’s not fair, but women writers, they acquire the muscle of going blue fast because they have to counter the stigma… I think women are different, and I think having them in the room is crucial to a family comedy, ensemble comedy, television comedy, where half the eyeballs on your show are women. As it turns out, I think Megan’s the only female writer who’s staying this year, so now, even though Bromstad’s gone, now I’m carrying this legacy, going, ‘Eh, guys, we really need a half-female writing staff.’ I would teach it. I think we have to stop thinking of it as a quota thing and think of it as a common-sense thing.

Dan Harmon (co-creator and showrunner of NBC’s Community), on recruiting women for the writer’s room. Harmon was originally ordered to have a writer’s staff that was 50% female by former NBC programming head Angela Bromstad, but has since become enthusiastic about the “legacy”.

A really interesting conversation about medical ethics, the ambiguity of history, and the story of J. Marion Sims, the ‘doctor’ who found a cure for vesicovaginal fistula in the 19th century by experimenting on African-American slave women. For those unfamiliar with the condition, it is a connection between the urinary tract and the vagina caused by trauma (like prolonged childbirth or violent rape) that causes involuntary urine discharge into the vaginal vault. For more, click here, but I’m sure you could imagine the consequences - irritation, increased frequency of urinary tract infections, etc.

Dr. Sims developed a technique to repair these injuries (insisting on clean working conditions and using special silver sutures), but his test subjects were slaves. He claimed that the women agreed to serve as his test subjects, but it’s difficult to imagine that their ‘consent’ was not manufactured or coerced. Even if one disregards the troubling fact that they were slaves, and lacked the ability to refuse his request, there’s nothing that indicates that he told them that he would operate on them multiple times. Or operate on them without anesthesia in his own backyard with an appreciative audience of friends and neighbors.

On the other hand, should we expect more from a man in that era, a world where slaves were considered less than human, and being a doctor was a profession for people who didn’t have the money to run a store and weren’t smart enough for law school?

Ms. Epstein is the author of “Get Me Out: A History of Childbirth from the Garden of Eden to the Sperm Bank”. Click here to watch the rest of the Bloggingheads session. She did a really good interview with Fresh Air, which can be listened to here.

4thletter:

Lamya Cammon was sitting in her first grade class playing with her hair. The sound apparently annoyed her teacher and so she was instructed to stop. When the girl continued to play with her hair, she was called to the front of the class with an offer of candy. When she arrived at the front, her hair was cut in front of her fellow students. Lamya walked back to desk where she sat down and cried. (via Womanist Musings)

This is just horrifying.

gender issues

The rate has declined slightly in recent years, but, according to the Guttmacher Institute, thirty-five per cent of all women of reproductive age in America today will have had an abortion by the time they are forty-five. It might be assumed that such a common procedure would be included in a nation’s plan to protect the health of its citizens. In fact, the story of abortion during the past decade has been its separation from other medical services available to women. Abortion, as the academics like to say, is being marginalized.

Jeffrey Toobin Read the rest of the article for a great perspective on the abortion debate that’s taking place in the context of health care reform. I agree with almost every single word, especially the notion that abortion is just a medical procedure. He also points out one of the main failings of the ‘post-partisan Democrats’, that we’re a little too quick to concede ground on fundamental issues. Is abortion ‘undeniably difficult’? Not really. The decision is between a woman and her doctor. See? That’s not so hard.

retropolitics:

Illustration of men trying to subdue militant suffragette w. whip who is disrupting speech by Chancellor of Exchequer Lloyd George to the Women’s Liberal Federation, w. legend “The woman with the whip: the miltant suffragettes’ new weapon in use at the Albert Hall.” Location: London, United Kingdom. Date: 1908 (via)

The secret message of Cosmo. h/t Jezebel

Horrifying. A Channel 4 news clip on the epidemic of rape in South Africa, particularly ‘corrective rape’ targeted at gay and bisexual women. h/t Shadow and Act