via AlterNet

Sigh. Pat Boone. What are we gonna do with you?

All manner of parasites, vermin, roaches, rats, worms and termites find their way into the building. Long before they’re detected, they infiltrate the walls, the floors, the roofs – and then chew their way into the structure, the supporting beams and the very foundation of the house itself. Silently, surreptitiously, whole communities of invaders make places for themselves, hidden but thriving, totally unknown by the homeowner.

Then, in time, tell-tale signs are seen. Little droppings, discolored trails, proliferating piles of residue appear in corners, on tabletops, little hanging sacs from ceilings – alarming evidence that the grand old dwelling has been invaded. Decidedly unwelcome creatures have made this place their home, and by their very existence will eventually destroy the house and bring it to ruin. [...]

Our White House is being eaten away from within. We urgently need to throw a “tent” of public remonstration and outcry over that hallowed abode, to cause them to quake and hunker down inside. And then treat the invaders, the alien rodents, to massive voter gas – the most lethal antidote to would-be tyrants and usurpers.We must clean house – starting with our own White House.

Not that I’m exactly an Obama fan, because I’m sooooo not, but this is ridiculous.  For one, Obama isn’t a “usurper;” he won the election fair and square (unlike the ass who came before him).

Pat Boone’s obnoxiousness has been on my radar ever since I watched a documentary called FUCK, which is about people’s thoughts toward the word:

Yeah, well…Boone you, dude.

Stop Screaming at the Op-Ed Page and Start Writing It.

Submit an entry for the 2010 Love Your Body poster contest (postmark deadline: December 1).

Head over to Her Life with Boobs and fill out their questionnaire.

Ask President Obama to give the turkeys a real pardon this Thanksgiving (pardoned turkeys are usually sent to Disney World or Disneyland).

Full time students: apply for a paid internship to cover the legislative process in Albany.

Participate in NPR Monitor Mix’s Build A Body With Bands illustration contest (deadline November 20).

HollabackUK needs street team volunteers.

High school seniors: apply to be an ACLU Youth Activist Scholar (deadline November 30).

Sign the petition for an international ban of plastic shopping bags.

Help an amazing WOC writer/activist secure funding so she can attend a writer’s retreat.

Anna: The Female Blogger Deficit: Are We Too Nice, Or Not Nice Enough?

Tami: Dispatches from Nappyville: Hair hatred needn’t be a black girl’s right of passage

Telegraph: The secret behind Mona Lisa’s enigmatic smile

Mary Ann: Education Week: Immigrant Children Not on Obama Admin Agenda

Vulture: Nona Willis Aronowitz on Writing About Feminism, Her Mother Ellen Willis, and Catcalling

Kate: Will Anti-Fat Hate Crimes Make People Take Sizeism Seriously?

Nezua: THE CRIME: Sleeping While Chinese

Violet: Exciting new growth sector in feminism: bashing women

Joe: Is Insistence on English and Punishing Spanish About Maintaining Racial Power?

Prof Susurro: Black Face is Never OK – Memo to “Miss Tyra”

Naked Feminist: I Put My Ring on My Left Hand

Pilgrim Soul: On Polanski and Other Gods and Monsters

Amanda: ABC News Story on Showing Boobs Won’t Show Boobs

Vegan MoFo Headquarters: Soup, Stew, and Chili Roundup for 10/30

Julian: What do you call twenty men and boys gathered around a young woman being raped? [trigger warning]

Anushay: Climate Change Hits Women Harder, So Where Are the Feminist Voices?

SociologicalMe: Allies Asking Questions

What happens to birds when they eat plastic:

[Trigger warning]

That’s one of the top search engine phrases that’s been bringing people to this blog. That’s one of the questions I’ve not let pass through comment moderation.

What race was the Richmond rape victim? Really, people.  Does it matter?

Do you feel a little more at ease at the thought of a poverty-stricken 15-year-old Latina getting gang raped by a bunch of Latino boys/men?  Is that the kind of thing that’s a fact of life for those types of Latina girls?

Is it easier for you to cope with the situation at the thought of a 15-year-old black girl getting gang banged by boys at her school?  Is that how all this would make more sense to you, the thought of a sexualized black teenager drinking and hanging out with older boys in the dark?

Do you feel like forking out more cash at the thought of a pretty, 15-year-old white girl getting ravaged by a gang of brown boys, some older than 18?  Will donating to her recovery fund be your good deed for the month?

Because seriously, people. What does it matter what race she is?

Why do you want to know so badly?  How will this piece of information influence your thoughts on the matter?  What stereotypes are you bringing to the table when you ask this question?

A little girl was brutally assaulted.  A little girl had her world turned upside down.  A little girl has a long road to recovery ahead of her.  It could have been your sister, your mother, your favorite cousin, your best friend.  It could’ve been you.

The media has published reports about what kind of girl she is, what her interests are, what she’s like at school.  I’m sure everyone at her school knows who she is.  People in her community know who she is.  Eventually, she’ll have to face these people who know all about The Bad Thing that happened to her.

Jesus Christ, what race is she?  I hope I never find out.

via Feminist Peace Network

A rape survivor holds Senator David Vitter’s feet to the fire for voting against the Franken Amendment:

WOMAN: It meant everything to me that I was able to put the person who attacked me [behind bars]. And what allowed me to do that was our judicial process. I showed up in court every day to make sure that happen

VITTER: And I’m absolutely supportive of any case like that being prosecuted criminally to the full extent of the law.

WOMAN: But there are rape victims who are being kept silent.

WOMAN: But how can you support [a law] that tells a rape victim that she does not have the right to defend herself?

VITTER: Ma’am The language in question did not say that in any way shape or form.

WOMAN: But it is unconstitutional to have a law that says a woman does not have a right to defend herself.

VITTER: You realize Mr. Obama was against that amendment that his administration was against that amendment

WOMAN: But I’m not asking Obama. I’m asking you.

VITTER: Do you think he’s in favor in rape?

WOMAN: I’m asking you Senator. What if it was your daughter who was raped? Would you tell her to be quiet and take it? Would you tell your daughter to be silent?

Paste Magazine released it’s list of the Top 50 albums of the decade.  Unsurprisingly, the list is a total sausage fest, with the exceptions of the obligatory M.I.A., Björk, and Amy Winehouse (plus a couple of other women).  Yup.  The O Brother, Where Art Thou? soundtrack beat out PJ Harvey.

But here’s a startling revelation: women could’ve made up more than 10% of that list.  Shocking, I know.  My album recommendations:

PJ Harvey (Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea)

Yeah Yeah Yeahs (Fevel to Tell)

Neko Case (Middle Cyclone)

Sleater-Kinney (The Woods)

Any women/female-fronted bands you think we should know about? Leave suggestions in the comments!

Happy Dia de los Muertos, to those who celebrate it.

I never felt compelled to celebrate it until today, but no, I don’t have a shrine or anything. That’s mostly because I didn’t even know it was today until this morning (I know, yet another thing to put in my “I’m a bad Mexican” files).  My immediate family has never celebrated it, and I’m an atheist (though my family is Catholic), so it’s never been a tradition for me.

But it is something I’d like to start doing in the future as I renegotiate my Latina identity.  Perhaps it’s because, as of this year, all of my grandparents are now dead.  I liked hearing my paternal grandparents tell me stories about their lives growing up, and I do have 20+ pages of my grandmother’s oral history recorded.  I never knew my maternal grandfather because he died before my first birthday.  I could never truly communicate with my maternal grandmother because she only spoke Spanish, and my Spanish is fragmented.  I could understand a lot of what she was saying, but I couldn’t speak back to her.  When she descended into dementia as she got older, a lot of her history was lost.

Only now am I truly starting to regret not having learned all I could learn about them and their experiences.

(Photographer unknown (Felipe Tofani, maybe?).  You can see more of these gorgeous photos at Pristina.org.)

Yeahhhhh…I seem to add a new blog to my reader every other day, so my Weekend Link Loves are getting hella long.  I’m gonna start doing this twice a week, m’kay?  So tune in Wednesday for the second half.

herlifewithboobs: Thinking about “toplessness”

qmccall3: Is there a “feminist responsibility” to support women’s sports?

Lisa: Disney Princesses, Deconstructed

Kjerstin: Adventures in Feministory: Lois Jenson and sexual harassment

Lissa: An Eating Disorder—10 Years Later

Shamus: Obama’s Dirty War on Immigrants

Becky: Who You Calling A Slut?

Feminist Peace Network: Susan G. S. McGee: Why Does She Stay Is The Wrong Question

Briar: Grandmothers of electronic music, Part 1: Delia Derbyshire

stuff white people do: point out they’ve never owned slaves

Femonade: Sorry, Men and Fun-Fems: All Porn Is Rape, All the Time (Or, If You Are Watching Porn, You Are Watching Rape)

Jemima: Feminism: Explained for Ladybrains

Lauren: If Harry Potter Was Made in the 1980s, and Starred David Bowie

Melissa: New Research: Women Fare Better in the Indie World

MattBastard: Won’t Somebody Puhlease Think About The “Good White People”?!

flip flopping joy: opting out of masculinity through rape

Sex With Ducks, “a response to when Pat Robertson said, ‘You’ve got somebody who is really weird and his sexual orientation is he likes to have sex with ducks. Is he protected under hate crimes?’ when talking about evil gays having rights”. via Avivapress:

5 years ago, I was a sexy cop for Halloween.¹ And I liked it.

The usual me wears jeans and t-shirts and flip flops pretty much every day (unless it’s cold, in which case the uniform becomes a sweatshirt, jeans, and sneakers).  I do a pretty half-ass job on my hair about 75% of the time.  I never bother with makeup.  I like dressing up occasionally, but most of the time, I’m just plain ol’ me.

So our last year before graduating from undergrad, my roommates and I got gussied up and hit 6th Street in Austin, and I went as a sexy cop.  Granted, I unsluttied it up a bit by wearing at tank top underneath (there is no way in hell I’d be caught showing that much skin).  The basic rules of fashion are to feature one area, meaning don’t go overboard on showing the rest, ya know?  So I was covered on top, and the knee-high boots I was wearing weren’t stilettos but thick black heels, but half of my little ass was hanging out.  There’s no denying that one.

But you know what? I liked it.  I liked doing something completely not me for one night, and I liked that I was able to get completely over my body image hangups for once and rock the hell out of the look.

You know what I didn’t like?

I didn’t like the asshole on the crowded street who felt he had the right to grab my ass not once, but twice.  And twice, I turned around in fury, more than willing to grab and squash the shit out of his testicles.  Sadly, it was too crowded for me to ascertain who did it, so no ball squashing for me that night.

I also didn’t like people telling me I asked for it.  Funny how all of the thousands of other men in the crowd were able to keep their hands to themselves that night except for that one asshole, even though I was “asking for it.”

I’m not going to debate the merits (or non-merits) of sexy Halloween costumes.  I’ve done my own version of it and still consider myself a card-carrying feminist, but I can understand why people freak.  A lot of the “sexy” costumes one can find nowadays are jacked, and there’s no doubt that costumes of sexualized children’s characters (and stuff like the sexy Girl Scout) are a big fucking problem.  And I know that “sexy” is an image mass-marketed to society that can be defined as “skinny-yet-curvy female: the more naked, the better.”  Which is also a big fucking problem.

But you know what else is a problem? Slut-shaming. Especially when done by other self-identified feminists.

¹I don’t know who those people are.  They’re total strangers who wanted to take a picture with me, so I blurred their faces out just in case.

Video and artist info via Paste

To celebrate, here’s the music video for “Do They Know It’s Hallowe’en?” by the North American Hallowe’en Prevention Initiative, aka:

• Win Butler & Régine Chassagne (Arcade Fire)
• Beck
• Feist
• Devendra Banhart
• Thurston Moore (Sonic Youth)
• Roky Erickson
• Peaches
• Dntel
• Syd Butler (Les Savy Fav)
• David Cross
• Elvira, Mistress of the Dark
• Karen O of Yeah Yeah Yeahs
• Jenny Lewis & Blake Sennett (Rilo Kiley)
• Dan Boeckner & Spencer Krug (Wolf Parade)
• Steve Jocz of Sum 41
• Nick Diamonds and J’aime Tambeur (Islands)

But for those of you with more subtle, mellow musical tastes, here are:

• The Mountain Goats – Mike Myers Resplendent
• Rufus Wainwright – Evil Angel

And if you missed it, here’s my Halloween mix for this year.  Be safe tonight!