Hey check this out, Ron Leech, a politician in Alberta, Canada, has neatly defined the concept of privilege for us:

I think, as a Caucasian, I have an advantage. When different community leaders such as a Sikh leader or a Muslim leader speak, they really speak to their own people in many ways,” Leech is reported to have said by CTV.

As a Caucasian, I believe that I can speak to all the community.

Galling, really.

Natalie Rothschild, writing in Slate, about not just a new pronoun but Sweden’s status at the forefront of gender-equality. This caught my eye though:

Ironically, in the effort to free Swedish children from so-called normative behavior, gender-neutral proponents are also subjecting them to a whole set of new rules and new norms as certain forms of play become taboo, language becomes regulated, and children’s interactions and attitudes are closely observed by teachers. One Swedish school got rid of its toy cars because boys “gender-coded” them and ascribed the cars higher status than other toys. Another preschool removed “free playtime” from its schedule because, as a pedagogue at the school put it, when children play freely “stereotypical gender patterns are born and cemented. In free play there is hierarchy, exclusion, and the seed to bullying.” And so every detail of children’s interactions gets micromanaged by concerned adults, who end up problematizing minute aspects of children’s lives, from how they form friendships to what games they play and what songs they sing.

Goes to show how tricky and dangerous changing a culture is. It’s really hard to lose sight of the overall goal of equality: to build a society where everyone feels comfortable being themselves. (Society’s already a pretty comfy place for middle-class straight white cisgender men like myself.)

Another thing: questions of equality and justice are hard enough to reason about when dealing with adults. Can’t imagine how tough this is to do with children.

I mean, I knew the Augusta golf club, home of the Masters tournament and which famously excludes women from its membership, was run by a bunch of backwards, privileged assholes. But I didn’t think the New York Times was too. From the AP’s story:

“If it were left to me, which it seldom is in the power structure of writer versus editor, I’d probably not come cover this event again until there is a woman member,” [NYTimes golf writer] Karen Crouse told GOLF.com. “More and more, the lack of a woman member is just a blue elephant in the room.”

Contacted by The Associated Press, Times sports editor Joe Sexton said the comments were, “completely inappropriate and she has been spoken to.”

Christ on a crutch. Click through above for some more background and analysis from Digby.

Hilarious.

Daniella Cheslow writing for the AP about a new Israeli law that regulates the thinness of models in advertisements:

The new law requires models to produce a medical report no older than three months at every shoot for the Israeli market, stating that they are not malnourished by World Health Organization standards.

The U.N. agency relies on the body mass index, calculated by factors of weight and height. WHO says a body mass index below 18.5 indicates malnutrition. According to that standard, a woman 1.72 meters tall (5-feet-8) should weigh no less than 119 pounds (54 kilograms).

But be sure to read the whole article, it has a lot of background about just how damaging this is to young girls and young models.

Patrick Klepek at Giant Bomb has a transcript of a recent episode of Capcom and IGN’s webshow Cross Assault. The transcript is of an exchange between Jared Rea, community manager of the streaming video site TwitchTV, and Aris Bakhtanians, a competitive fighting gamer and head of Cross Assault’s Team Tekken.

Rea: Can I get my Street Fighter without sexual harassment?

Bakhtanians: You can’t. You can’t because they’re one and the same thing. This is a community that’s, you know, 15 or 20 years old, and the sexual harassment is part of a culture, and if you remove that from the fighting game community, it’s not the fighting game community—it’s StarCraft. There’s nothing wrong with StarCraft if you enjoy it, and there’s nothing wrong with anything about eSports, but why would you want just one flavor of ice cream, you know? There’s eSports for people who like eSports, and there’s fighting games for people who like spicy food and like to have fun. There’s no reason to turn them into the same thing, you know?

You can’t go to the NBA and say “hey, I like basketball, but I don’t want them to play with a basketball, I want them to play with a football.” It just doesn’t…it doesn’t make sense to have that attitude, you know? These things are established for years. That would be like someone from the fighting game community going over to StarCraft and trying to say “hey, StarCraft, you guys are too soft, let’s start making sexual harassment jokes to each other on StarCraft.” That’s not cool, people wouldn’t like that. StarCraft isn’t like that. People would get defensive, and that’s what you’re trying to do the fighting game community, and it’s not right. It’s ethically wrong.

You giant shitmonster.

1. Institutionalization of something terrible does not magically make said terrible thing not terrible. 100,000 people doing something terrible means that something terrible has been done 100,000 times.
2. If your community is so inexorably linked to something terrible that stopping that terrible thing will make it a different community, then have you considered that your community is actually just terrible (because it is).
3. Fuck.
4. I’m pretty sure the reason that people playing StarCraft wouldn’t like it if someone were to jump in and make sexual harassment jokes is because that’s a terrible thing to do, not because there’s some gentlemen’s agreement against it.
5. It boggles me how someone can conclude that “it’s ethically wrong” to tell people not to make sexual harassment jokes and not immediately recoil in horror at what they just said.
6. Seriously, I cannot get over that final sentence, “it’s ethically wrong.” What an abhorrent trainwreck of an argument.

Hines, an author of fantasy novels:

My sense is that most of these covers are supposed to convey strong, sexy heroines, but these are not poses that suggest strength. You can’t fight from these stances. I could barely even walk.

Don’t miss the photos.

Kelly Thompson’s list of “13 fantastic female creators in comics that you should be watching, reading, and supporting.” Some really great looking stuff on this list — warm up your credit cards, everybody.

(Via Bryan Gyg Jebavy.)

This is not only a fucking hilarious story, it makes an important point about feminism: “this is not a situation of the men holding us back - we are holding ourselves back because we don’t want to step forward if it is icky and muddy.”

(I wish there was some easy way to give attribution for the above, but this is yet another blog without a bio. Sad.)

Yes. 20% of US women will be raped or suffer attempted rape at some point in their life. Compare that with the similar statistic for men — 1.4% — and you may begin to see that there’s something to this whole feminism blah blah patriarchy blah blah rape culture buzzing noise that I keep making.