- Where’s Rey? | Sweatpants & Coffee (January 19): “Would your son want to play with an action figure of Rey, the central figure in the latest Star Wars film? Would your daughter? It’s too bad they don’t have the choice; Hasbro, among other toymakers, left out the one key female figure in their The Force Awakens game sets. Hasbro says it was to preserve plot secrets, but an industry insider said the choice was deliberate. The insider, who spoke to Sweatpants & Coffee on condition of anonymity, said the decision to exclude Rey was based on marketing assumptions and not for plot reasons.”
- How The Media Continues To Sell Out Victims Of Abuse | The Establishment (February 17): “[Zoe Quinn’s work] isn’t “profiting”—it’s making the best out of a disaster, eating the locusts that have devoured your crops and telling yourself you can get used to the taste. And whose fault is it? Well, it’s the fault of an angry ex who understands the Internet well and admits to carefully engineering his words to make his screed about what a terrible person his former girlfriend was go viral among people who hate her. But it’s also our fault. My fault. The fault of people like me who make a living writing about things and drawing attention to them and acting like that, in and of itself, makes a difference.”
- 10 Movies You Should See That Pass The ”DuVernay Test” | Refinery29 (February 3): “Named for Selma director Ava Duvernay, it’s a test to see if a movie presents substantive depictions of people of color. While the Bechdel test has certain boxes that need to be checked off, the DuVernay test is broader. Dargis explained that, in films which pass the test, “African-Americans and other minorities have fully realized lives rather than serve as scenery in white stories.””
- 2016 Dancecard & On Semi-Recent Events | Samantha Marshall: “Being a marginalized person in tech and a regular conference speaker is really rough. It requires a lot of energy to get on the level of everyone else around you that fits into the stereotypical “middle-class white dude” tech speaker. People don’t take you seriously and will drastically underestimate what you know or can offer that could be useful to them. It requires more energy to arrive at the same place, then you also need energy to face the harassment and exclusionary behavior that will inevitably manifest at events.”
- Women in STEM and Steven Universe | /r/stevenuniverse (February 18): “It’s good to see a show promoting women going into these fields without portraying them as shy bookish types in high school. These are individuals who are confident in their abilities and display a level of professionalism expected of them without any sort of bias based on gender.”
- Long Live Zoë Quinn, The Nerd Hero We Deserve | Autostraddle (February 13): “What’s so frustrating—and perhaps why Quinn’s harassment is so resonant with so many women I speak to—is that G-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named is nothing new. It’s simply a new way of doing an old thing, of harassing women. The idea of the “good victim” that Quinn suggests has been around for ages as a way of discrediting those that report abuse.”
- In Conversation With bell hooks and Emma Watson | Paper (February 18): “Emma Watson’s stirring speech at the United Nations. Emma’s moving words and her work promoting gender equality through the UN’s HeForShe movement provided the first real introduction to the concept for many young women (and men). For her part, the actress says she’s identified as a feminist since she was a kid, but she also credits writer, artist, intellectual, and feminist icon bell hooks, author of Feminism is for Everybody among many other key texts, with inspiring her and helping shape her understanding and beliefs through her essays, books, and videos. And as for bell she says she is equally as inspired by Emma.”
- How Shari Steele aims to take the Tor Project mainstream | The Daily Dot (February 16): “Steele’s job is to transform Tor’s image in the public eye, build its organization, and convince the world that strong privacy—not the weak kind you get through tweaking your Facebook settings—is a necessity in the 21st century.”
- The Opposite of Rape Culture is Nurturance Culture | Dating Tips for the Feminist Man: : Attachment theory, neuroscience, etc. “In Ursula K. Leguin’s book Gifts, an entire culture lives by the rule of what they call ‘gifts’ – powers to do harm – possessed by certain of its members. … By the book’s end, the child at its centre has struggled, against all signs in his culture, to realize something profound and fundamental. … He finally asks his sister and closest confident: what if we are using our gifts backwards? To harm instead of to help? What if they were meant to be used the other way around?”
- 70 years ago, six Philly women became the world’s first digital computer programmers | PhillyVoice (February 11): “Without any real training, they learned what it took to make ENIAC work – and made it a humming success. Their contributions were overlooked for decades.”
- 14 graphic novels and comics every woman should read | Cosmopolitan (January 26): Webcomics, illustrated, by/for/about women.
- Overrated Men | Inside Higher Ed (February 12): Study finds bias in how male students view female STEM students.
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Geek Feminism Blog 
Linkspam suggestion, the Medium post “Fighting Rockstars and Ninjas instead of Sexism”: https://medium.com/@reagankm/fighting-rockstars-and-ninjas-instead-of-sexism-82d83c33672a#.wpefggsxg
Book: Women in Power: Myths & Truths. Topic: Feminism
Feminism
My earliest memory of feminism is from the late 70’s when I was a teenager being raised by a single mother since the age of 2. I remember my mother being optimistic about the discussion of feminism and the concept of equal pay for equal work, which was taking place.
But, then I remember how it was then suddenly perverted by stay home moms and conservative men.
Suddenly, the discussion became about how a stay home mother’s job in raising kids was equal to the man’s work in providing for their families. I sensed my mother’s disappointment.
Now, as a single mother myself, I laugh at the suggestion that work done by a stay home mother is equivalent to work that pays the bills. Any woman who has had a job that could pay for the mortgage, bills and children, must agree.
For wealthy stay home moms, or as I call them – the Ladies of Privilege – their work income would have to be substantial to pay for their nice homes, car, shopping allowances, etc.
In other words, in the 70’s the discussion of feminism was perverted by those of privilege. Suddenly, a feminist morphed from a woman who wanted equal pay for equal work into an ugly, manly, lesbian man-hater.
Now, 40 year later, women are still not yet one-fifth of the governing body that’s meant to represent their views and interests, even as they account for more than 50 percent of the population.
40 years later, women still have not made significant progress. I propose that this is because we primarily elevate women based upon who the men in their lives are, rather than for their individual accomplishments.