TED Talk: Cindy Gallop: Make love, not porn [NSFW]

Cindy Gallop: Make love, not porn is a TED talk by entrepreneur Cindy Gallop on the detrimental effects of hard core porn on heterosexual interpersonal relationships. In it, she launches her site, Make Love Not Porn, a site that redefines normal.

The commentary on the Ted talk includes a lot of annoyingly mis-informed and un-enlightened internet trolling, but don't let that detract from the experience: skip it altogether. Enjoy!


(From yesterday's TOTI)

Reality Check

Reality Check is an allegedly user-generated ad for tampon/pads/liners. It mocks the soft-focus, spinning-women-frolicking-on-the-beach current motif that is used to hawk feminine hygiene products. Quite artfully executed too, I must say. Good work.

TMI: But can it make me switch from plastics to my least-favorite cotton-based variety brand? Only time will tell. Enjoy!

(From Buzzfeed)

Welcome to Cancerland: A Mammogram Leads to a Cult of Pink Kitsch

In honor of today's Facebook flurry of bra-color status updates and the ongoing controversy, here is an article from the perspective of a patient:

Welcome to Cancerland: A Mammogram Leads to a Cult of Pink Kitsch is an article by Barbara Ehrenreich about the commercialization of breast cancer.

"What sustained me through the "treatments" is a purifying rage, a resolve, framed in the sleepless nights of chemotherapy, to see the last polluter, along with, say, the last smug health insurance operative, strangled with the last pink ribbon. Cancer or no cancer, I will not live that long of course. But I know this much right now for sure: I will not go into that last good night with a teddy bear tucked under my arm."

Love,
The Rememberance Bear

(From TJ's friend Laura, picture from abc news)

Memoir of a former abortion addict

Memoir of a former abortion addict is an LA Times news story about Irene Vilar, now a mother of two, who wrote a memoir of about led her to have 15 pregnancies ended.

Exerpt:

"She describes her abortions as part of a misguided quest to free herself from the burdens of a complicated and tragic family, then as part of an immensely dysfunctional dynamic with her first husband, a professor of Latin American literature whom she met at Syracuse University when she was 16 and he was 50.

'We could be a couple as long as I relinquished my desire for children,' she said of her husband, 'a disturbingly handsome man" who taught her that 'families are nests of suffering" and informed her that he preferred young women because they are "unformed . . . unfinished, with not too many wounds.' Children, he told her, were incompatible with freedom. (Her ex-husband, Pedro Cuperman, did not respond to an e-mailed request for comment.)

Again and again during their 11-year relationship, she rebelled: 'Forgetting' her birth control pills, she would get pregnant, feel the thrill of self-determination, then panic that she would lose her husband, seek an abortion and collapse in relief and despair.
...'I can completely understand the discomfort that some feminists feel,' said feminist author Robin Morgan, who wrote the book's foreword. 'There is a perfectly human tendency to say we can't afford ambiguity, we can't afford nuance. I am afraid it comes from years of being pummeled by the extreme, anti-choice right. The truth is that it's a complicated issue.' "

Pretty crazy.

(From Buzzfeed)

The Drugging And Gang Rape Of A KBR Employee! Senator Al Franken

The Drugging And Gang Rape Of A KBR Employee! Senator Al Franken is a poorly titled youtube video (from C-SPAN2!) showing Al Franken presenting his amendment. This is dry but important!

Boing Boing explains,

"Al Franken successfully introduced legislation that denies federal contracts to companies that have policies -- anywhere in the world -- that punish employees for complaining about rape or discrimination on the job. This is in response to a KBR/Halliburton employee in Iraq who was drugged and gang-raped by co-workers and denied justice or even medical treatment, then locked in a storage container for 24 hours and told that she'd lose her job if she left the country to get medical help. She was also prohibited from suing or seeking criminal justice because her Halliburton contract forbade seeking any justice apart from private arbitration.

Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL) tried to block the amendment, saying that it was a 'a political attack directed at Halliburton.' Franken replied, 'This amendment does not single out a single contractor. This amendment would defund any contractor that refuses to give a victim of rape their day in court.' "

Yes. Violence against women makes me ANGRY. GAAAAAAAH!!!!111!

(From Boing Boing)

I Am The Anonymous Model

I Am The Anonymous Model is an essay by Jezebel's TatianaTheAnonymousModel, who quit modeling, took up writing, and finally reveled her identity.

Reading the essay, I figured out that I had no idea non-supermodel-models were scraping by this hard. I know, I know, bohoo, I *have* to wear dresses that are worth more than people's houses... But still, if you think about it, the bottom line is being poor kind of sucks. Being constantly poor, itenerant, and hungry triple sucks. Enjoy random quotes:

"They were all 16 and 20 and 23, and most were amenable to staying up late and talking about Lech Walesa and the problems of teaching post-WWII history in a country where 15 years ago neighbors turned each other in to the secret police for having an extra chicken. Or they would trash talk creepy clients while drinking white wine out of 7UP bottles in the street because none of us had the money for a bar tab and the apartment was too hot. That was good, too.
...
I spent three nights in a models' apartment near Wilshire and La Brea with no electricity; my three roommates and I removed our eye makeup by candlelight.
...
When we were talking about mutual acquaintances, my Madonna lookalike friend told me a story about a fellow model, a teenaged scenester I'd been hanging out with in Los Angeles and New York earlier that year. The girl rolled with a musician boyfriend who was fucking my friend when she was 16, and she had a momager who lived off her earnings, which included at that time $25,000 for a major global campaign. And, said my friend, the teenager had actually just entered rehab in Arizona because the whole time I had known her, she was shooting heroin. The story -- with the stage mother, the influence of one of the many dudes who fuck 16-year-olds, the money jobs, the intravenous drug use -- all seemed at the time like a giant neon sign flashing Get Out Of This Industry Now. I still can't believe I didn't even realize she was strung out. Perhaps that contains a depressing message about the kinds of connections this business fosters between people. Or about how I coarsened as a person during my time wandering this earth selling the rights to my image for a living. Or both. I don't know.

...
My last job -- "Oh, if only we could be shooting film," exclaimed the photographer, as he put in his memory card -- was for a bridal magazine, and I wore, among other things, a dress that cost $29,000 and was largely constructed of ostrich feathers. Before the job, the photographer had found an old personal blog I used to write, under the name I'll now be writing with for Jezebel. He wanted to know why I'd given up on that blog; I was good and kind of funny, he said. I told him I'd gotten bored, which was more or less true.

At the very end of the shoot, as the assistants were striking the set, undoing everything they'd jerry-rigged so convincingly the day before, as the stylists were packing up the couture gowns and the art director was looking at potential layouts with her boss, and as I was putting on my jacket and heading for the door, the photographer called out to me, "Jenna! Please just keep writing."

My name is Jenna Sauers.

I smiled, and told him that I would."

Jenna states, "the problems of the modeling industry are not in fact personal, but structural." Nice. I hope she gets to eat as many (veggie) burgers as she wants now.

(From HuffPo and Racked)

Isabel Allende: Tales of passion

Isabel Allende: Tales of passion is a TED talk by Isabel Allende.  I had never seen her talk prior to this, and she is very funny.  I did not expect this.   Isabel reminds me of my Aunt Godmother. 

Between funny stories about flag-bearing, the Olympics, and Sophia Loren, Isabel tells tales of extraordinary strength and makes a very strong case for feminism today. She introduces herself as such: 

"I was born in ancient times, at the end of the world, in a patriarchal, Catholic, and conservative family.  No wonder that by age 5 I was a raging feminist. Although, the term had not reached Chile yet -- so nobody knew what the heck was wrong with me. I would soon find out that there was a high price to pay for my freedom and for questioning the patriarchy, but I was happy to pay it because for every blow that I received I was able to deliver two."

Isabel's daughter Paula insisted once that feminism is dated.  They had a fight. Isabel rebutted that feminism is dated for privileged women like her daughter, but not for most of our sisters in the rest of the world:

"Who are still forced into early marriage, into prostitution, into forced labor.  They have children that they don't want or that they cannot feed.  They have no control over their bodies or their lives.  They have no education and no freedom. They are raped, beaten up, and sometimes killed with impunity.  For most western young women of today, being called a feminist is an insult. Feminism has never been sexy. But let me assure you, it never stopped me from flirting. And I have seldom suffered from lack of men. 

...

Feminism is not dead, by no means. It has evolved. If you don't like the term, change it... the name doesn't matter, as long as we understand what it is about, and we support it.

...

Although women do 2/3 of the world's labor, they own less than 1% of the world's assets. They are paid less than men for the same work, if they are paid at all, and they remain vulnerable because they have no economic independence and they are constantly threatened by exploitation, violence, and abuse. It is a fact that giving women education; work; the ability to control their own income, inherit, and own property benefits the society.  If a woman is empowered, her children and her family will be better off.  If the family prospers, the village prospers, and eventually so does the whole country.

The poorest and most backwards societies are always those that put women down. Yet this obvious truth is ignored by governments and also by philanthropy. For every dollar given to women's programs, $20 are given to men's programs.

...

In this case, the trickle down effect which does not work in economics, works perfectly. Abuse trickles down from the top of the ladder to the bottom. Women and children, especially the poor, are at the bottom. Even the most destitute of men have someone they can abuse: a woman, or a child.  

I'm fed up with the power that a few exert over the many through  gender, income, race, or class... We need a critical number of women in positions of power, and we need to nurture the feminine energy in men. I'm talking about men with young minds, of course. Old guys are hopeless, we have to wait for them to die off."

Those are the weighty, hefty bits with statistics and fighting words. Isabel sprinkles those amongst human stories which are much more interesting, but which I'll leave up to the video. This is one of my new favorite talks. 

(From my iPod)