- A Few Things To Stop Doing When You Find a Feminist Blog | Fugitivus: “Here is the thing, okay? Coming into a feminist conversation with, “Have you considered that sometimes women acquire free drinks at bars?” is like walking into graduate school during Philosophy finals and saying, “Have you considered that the color blue that I see may not be the color blue that you see?” […] Imagine now [the student’s] feelings when you go to the head of the classroom with a smirk on your face and demand the professor give you an A for effort. Imagine now that they think you are a douchebag asshole, because they do, and because you are.”
- Banish the trolls but web debate needs anonymity | The Guardian: “So the proprietor of the Huffington Post has decided to ban anonymous commenting from the site, starting in mid-September. […] That seems like common sense. Whether it is supported by evidence is, however, uncertain because at the moment there isn’t much research. […] there is a halfway house: pseudonymity‚ ie a system in which commenters are allowed to choose their own user names, but have to associate them with a valid email address. […] And the moral of the story? Think twice, Arianna Huffington, before insisting on real names.”
- [Warning: quoted examples of ableist speech] How to be an Ally to Sick People | Autistic Hoya: “An Ally recognizes that Sick people are human and sometimes get overwhelmed by their situation. An Ally recognizes that at times a Sick person may want to vent among other people who understand first-hand what it’s like. An Ally also recognizes that we all make mistakes or poor choices and that is a part of being human. Even if an illness is connected to a poor choice, it still doesn’t mean the Sick person deserves the illness.”
- The Unbearable Whiteness of Breaking Things | Medium: “By teaching primarily young white men to unreflectively “break things” and reward them when they do, Stanford and other Silicon Valley institutions like YCombinator are incubators not for any kind of social change or “disruption” but for the assignment of privilege to the people who are most likely to already have it.”
- She’s got it: responses to Tony Abbott’s ‘sex appeal’ comments | The Conversation: “But intention is not the key issue. These kinds of comments have serious consequences for both the individual woman involved and for women in public life more generally. Pervasive gender stereotypes mean that women are already fighting a battle to be seen as potential leaders, and comments about traditionally feminine attributes, such as sex appeal, reduce the perceived competence and suitability of women for public office.”
- Architecturally Isolating “Feminine” Emotional Displays | Inequality by (Interior) Design: “The story that I’ve always heard about [a roofwalk / widow’s walk / widow’s perch / widow’s watch] is that it was designed for the wives of sailors to watch and wait for their husbands to return. Women whose husbands died at sea–so I was told–would sit in these rooms, pining for their long-lost lovers. As it happens, there’s not a great deal of evidence that this was, in fact, the original purpose of the room, nor that this is how these rooms were actually used. […] Rooms dedicated to socially “inappropriate” emotional displays from men are absent in Victorian architecture, perhaps because “real men” were presumed not to ever have need of them. It’s an interesting case in which architecture plays a critical role in our interactions, either segregating or suppressing certain displays.”
- [Warning: discussions of sexual harassment and assault] Conference anti-harassment campaigns do work: Three existence proofs from SF&F, atheism/skepticism, and open source | The Ada Initiative: “We decided to chronicle the history of conference anti-harassment policies in three communities: science fiction and fantasy, skepticism and atheism, and free and open source software. The goal is to create a standard reference model of how conference anti-harassment campaigns usually work so that we can refer to it when the going gets tough. […] This history only covers the high-profile, publicly-documented events of conference anti-harassment campaigns, but like any social justice movement, much of the credit should go to the many people quietly working behind the scenes to organize and implement the change.”
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