Passing this along for your consideration.  “Another liberal arts college is in the news this week after a handful of Muslim students claimed offense at an on-campus art exhibition by Iranian-American feminist artist Taravat Talepasand. The exhibition, which stands in support of the Women Life Freedom movement in Iran — a movement spurred by Iranian feminists in direct opposition to mandatory hijab laws and the morality police — explicitly defends the rights of women and challenges misogynist cultural and religious demands. A biographical statement about the artist and her exhibit states: “As an Iranian American woman, Talepasand explores the cultural taboos that reflect on gender and political authority.” Some students were apparently shocked, hurt, and offended that an exhibition promising to challenge cultural taboos around gender and political authority indeed challenged cultural taboos around gender and political authority.“ ... “...the Macalester students who want this work censored don’t use the language of religious fundamentalism or blasphemy — although that is what they are, and that is what they are objecting to — but rather the language of social justice, therapy, and DEI initiatives. “ ... “... liberals and progressives do no one — ourselves included — any favors when we ignore the fundamentalists, misogynists, and censors who use the language of social justice to make all of our worlds smaller. “

Take the claim that “life begins at conception,” which is routinely broadened out by the anti-abortion movement to mean that a fertilized egg should be given legal personhood status. Even if pro-choicers don’t believe that a fertilized egg is a person, reporters, politicians, and others routinely say that many abortion opponents do genuinely believe that a fertilized egg is the moral equivalent of you or I, and should be treated as such under the law.

But here’s the thing: They don’t really believe that a fertilized egg is the moral equivalent of a three-year-old, and it’s appallingly obvious that virtually no one believes that. People may say that’s their belief, but all of the evidence suggests otherwise.

Exhibit A: the fact that as many has half of fertilized eggs do not implant in the uterus, never form a pregnancy, and are flushed out of a woman’s body, but the pro-life movement has done nothing — zero, zilch, nada — to save these lives. If you really, truly believe that a fertilized egg is the moral equivalent of an infant, you’re probably going to care even a little tiny bit about all of those fertilized eggs that die. And sure, these eggs are perishing naturally, but last I checked the US spends many billions of dollars researching and attempting to prevent, treat, and cure the great many ways that children and other human beings might die natural deaths. The entire human condition is a protracted fight between Mother Nature, who doles out all kinds of natural manners of death, from cancer to communicable diseases to good old-fashioned just getting old, and humans, who battle valiantly to live through all of these life-threatening travails. And yet “pro-life” folks want us to believe that they believe a fertilized egg is a person, even though they have not lifted a finger or spent a dollar trying to keep the majority of those persons alive?

It beggars belief. This claim of zygote personhood is simply made up; it’s invented; even the people who claim it don’t believe it. And yet we’re collectively required to go on pretending like this is some sincerely-held belief that may legitimately influence law and policy.

Jill Filipovic, The Years of Magical Thinking

Sex may be the most popular recreational activity in the United States.

Politically, though, we treat sex like it’s a vice instead of a normal part of human behavior - a sinful defect but also a consumer product. The bulk of that dysfunction falls on women, who are tasked with being the safeguards of appropriate and moral sexual activity but whose nearly naked bodies also serve as stand-ins for sex itself, to the point where we all understand the cliched observation “sex sells” really means “women’s bodies sell things.” It’s women whose decisions about sexual reproduction face state interference and moral hand-wringing. It’s women who are legally punished for sexual and reproductive choices that deviate from some often-shifting and unreasonably high bar for what a “good” woman does. It’s women against whom sex is used as a weapon, and whose pleasure is left almost entirely out of the way we understand, teach, and talk about sex.

- Jill Filipovic, The H-Spot: The Feminist Pursuit of Happiness

Worrying about whether your partner thinks you’re sexy can be a real impediment to being wholly present during sex and being able to wholly enjoy it. It can also make pleasure contingent not just on pleasing another but on being a conventionally sexy, aesthetically pleasing object.

- Jill Filipovic, The H-Spot

A year into Putin’s war, it’s clear that he is willing to sacrifice untold lives to cement his power and Russia’s imperial interests. Americans have a choice, both at home and abroad: Do we stand with autocrats and their small, hateful view of the world? Or do we stand for freedom and democracy – including the obligation to live among those whose views you don’t agree with and whose choices you wouldn’t make yourself?   The decision, and the stakes, couldn't be clearer.

Jill Filipovic at CNN.

Putin basically declared war on liberal democracy. That’s why anti-democratic forces in the West sympathize with Putin. He shares their goals, they all hate freedom and democracy. We need to oppose such people at home and abroad.

(link)

Act about this , who in their art work will find a interactive way to promote the universal humain right charter ( unesco) .

Do you have solutions?

Your peace ambassadrice , who as teach in prevention

In vain , it fell .

Sofee

Opinion: Be careful when you laugh at Burning Man | CNN

The Florida GOP is on a truly stunning tear of misogyny, ignorance, homophobia and censorship, culminating in a bill that just passed the Florida House that would bar young girls from discussing menstruation, including their own menstrual periods, in school. Fifty three years since Judy Blume wrote “Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret,” some Republican legislators still seem less comfortable with puberty and sexuality than pre-teen girls (maybe they should go see the movie when it hits theaters next month).

The Florida bill states that education around sex, reproduction and sexuality cannot begin until 6th grade.

NEXT I GUESS YOU WANT THEM TO LOSE THEIR ABOVE THE LAW STATUS?, STOP LYING, GOVERN FOR ALL AMERICA ?

AND GASP!..........BE HELD ACCOUNTABLE FOR WHAT THEY SAY AND DO?

It’s hard to think of something more devastating than being forced to carry a pregnancy to term against your will. There is nothing in life — nothing — as fundamentally life-altering and undoable as having a child. There is nothing an average person does to their bodies that is as extreme and physically onerous; there is nothing an average person does in their lives that is as permanent. Most other major decisions can be walked back: you can get divorced, declare bankruptcy, sell a house, rehome a pet. Having a child is forever, for you and the new person you’ve brought into the world. There are no backsies or do-overs. That anyone would force another person to go through with a life-altering decision of that magnitude is frankly just sick. But it’s also predictable that forcing women to risk their health and in the best-case scenario fundamentally alter their lives, change their bodies forever, and bring a new person into the world who they will be connected to and responsible for forever has ruinous mental health effects. Having a child should be, and often is, a joyous life event. But like so many other of life’s best moments, the joy gets pretty well sucked out when the moment is forced. A wedding can be a spectacularly happy day when the couple is in love and dedicating their lives to each other; it can be pretty damn depressing and scary when the marriage is a forced one. A slice of chocolate cake is nice, but I don’t think any of us wants to have dessert shoved down our throats. For many people, sex is among life’s greatest pleasures; rape, on the other hand, is a horrific crime not just because it’s violent, but because it takes something that can be incredibly fun and gratifying and connective when entered into enthusiastically and turns it into something sadistic, painful, and cruel. This is all true for having a child as well: Just as a rapist takes something pleasurable and turns it into an act of sadistic abuse, abortion bans — and those who use their power to ban abortion — take one of the most extraordinary things human beings can do and turn it into an act of misogynist cruelty. Add on top of that cruelty the fact that the thing being forced — pregnancy — radically changes your hormone levels and reshapes your body and brain in all kinds of novel ways. Many women with badly-wanted pregnancies find themselves surprisingly depressed, anxious, or even struggling with psychosis or suicidal ideation. Of course women whose pregnancies are forced are going to struggle with these same physical and psychological changes, plus the profound stress of being forced into something that is going to change your life dramatically — and often, end life as you knew it. For women who can choose to continue pregnancies, those changes are often welcomed, or at least understood as trade-offs. For women who want to end their pregnancies but can’t, we know that many of their fears do in fact come true: Compared to women who were able to end unwanted pregnancies, women who are forced to carry to term against their will are more likely to stay poor or fall into poverty; they are more likely to be trapped in abusive relationships; their existing kids wind up worse off; they are more likely to struggle with depression and anxiety; they are more likely to die of pregnancy-related causes. And they are more likely to die by suicide.

Jill Filipovic

Oh look, a "politics" "writer" gets basic facts about our government and legal system wrong, must be a day ending in Y.

If you want to be an issue advocate, be an issue advocate, but stop presenting yourself as an objective synthesizer of fact while being an activist because you look really stupid when you attempt to evoke pathos and miss basic realities about the country we live in.

This is referencing Jill Filipovic on the southern border and her apparent lack of awareness that economic migrants are not always asylum seekers and can't be admitted as such to the United States. Her exact phrasing is "Many of the people attempting to cross the southern border are looking for financial security that their homelands cannot provide" and that, by definition, is economic migration and NOT asylum seeking!

"False appeals to pathos" is my least favorite method of argumentation like I think it's fundamentally and definitionally illogical and everybody online LOVES it because that means they don't have to work in concrete facts.

Reading List, Heatwave edition.

"This is the true joy in life, the being used for a purpose recognised by yourself as a mighty one; the being a force of nature instead of a feverish, selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy. ... I want to be thoroughly used up when I die, for the harder I work the more I live. I rejoice in life for its own sake. Life is no 'brief candle' for me. It is a sort of splendid torch which I have got hold of for the moment, and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible." [George Bernard Shaw]

[Image: Robert Herman (1980) via 90sanxiety]

*

"Some philosophers claim that the emotions artworks evoke are really 'pseudo emotions'; we feel them at one degree of remove. I can think of no better support for this thesis than the experience of listening to Paula Cole in CVS. The hopes of young love, the disappointments of middle age, the curdling resentment that ensues: I feel some inkling of it all. But mostly I’m just tapping my foot as I wait to pick up my prescription." This is incredible. [Mitch Therieau, The Paris Review]

Empire of dust: what the tiniest specks reveal about the world [Jay Owens, The Guardian]

#GraveTok [Jessica Lucas, The New York Times]

Semesters for adults [Allie Volpe, Vox]

Your movers have opinions about your relationship [Gina Cherelus, The New York Times]

How to Take a Photo of Your Girlfriend [Kate Lindsay, GQ]

"Collective effervescence is the way we feel connected when we’re in a crowd of other people, even if we don’t know them. When we’re all focused on a concert or a play or a movie, we feel a sense of social connection and it makes us feel really good." After the pandemic, people forgot how to behave in public [Alex Abad-Santos, Vox]

"If we want to replace our culture of trauma with a culture of resilience, we’ll have to relearn how to support one another—something we’ve lost as our society has moved toward viewing “wellness” as an individual pursuit, a state of mind accessed via self-work. Retreating inward, and tying our identities to all of the ways in which we’ve been hurt, may actually make our inner worlds harder places to inhabit." I Was Wrong About Trigger Warnings - Jill Filipovic, The Atlantic

Is Tradwife Content Dangerous, or Just Stupid? [Kathryn Jezer-Morton, The Cut]

Why Barbie Must Be Punished [Leslie Jamison, The New Yorker]

"When you get a woman in her 40s or 50s who has progressed in her career and is probably more willing to speak her mind, I think it's intimidating to the insecure men in our workforce. They would rather diminish that woman, not promote her, keep her in her place. It's not that they don't want her in the workplace — they just want her in a role that's going to support the men in the workplace and not compete with them. And certainly not give them a contrary opinion." Women Face Age Discrimination at Every Age, According to a New Study [Kelli Maria Korducki, Insider]

"Algorithms do the work for cheap, but when they reflect our taste back at us, it feels misshapen and insulting, a crude and unfair representation. When everything is available, all knowledge, all information, all entertainment ….nothing is perceived as valuable. Not the labor that creates the thing, not the person behind it, not the thing itself. The only valuable thing is our time, and if we spend it on something that isn’t amazing, isn’t exquisitely for us, we understand it as time wasted, instead of time gloriously wandering." The Sterile World of Infinite Choice [Anne Helen Petersen]

"We are living in a streaming paradox. As both an entertainment business model and a consumer experience, streaming has become a victim of its own success. It is a paradigm shift that is beloved for giving us more choice than ever before, while also making it harder than ever to actually enjoy that abundance." Streaming Has Reached Its Sad, Predictable Fate [Charlie Warzel, The Atlantic]

Every “chronically online” conversation is the same [Rebecca Jennings, Vox]

The Wild History of Not Eating Meat - on Alicia Kennedy's new book, "No Meat Required: The cultural history and culinary future of plant-based eating" [Diana Hubbell, Gastro Obscura]

My first boss busted me for skiving off work. I still don't regret it. [Anna Codrea- Rado]

"That myth of a restful vacation becomes something of a self-fulfilling prophecy. I’ll tell myself that I need to get away in order to relax, but then I’ll get more stressed as I prepare for the trip. I’ll cram too much into the days beforehand, from finishing up work tasks to finding time for a pedicure. By the day before departure, I’m a wreck. And yet, rather than question this approach, I’ll see it as evidence of how much I needed that holiday in the first place. But do I actually need a holiday or do I just need more breaks in my regular life? Would I be so desperate for a holiday if I had a little more breathing room in my day-to-day?" The myth of the restful vacation [Anna Codrea- Rado]

Who's Defending Hamline?

By now, you've probably heard of the flare-up at Hamline University in Minnesota, where an adjunct professor of art history was dismissed following student complaints after she showed a historic painting that depicted the prophet Muhammad. Every account I've seen suggests that the professor presented the painting (which was created in Persia by a Muslim artist in the 14th century) in a respectful and sensitive fashion, including notifying students that it would be depicted in her syllabus and again before the start of the relevant class (and told students they were free to opt out of attending that session). Nonetheless, the college not only declined to renew her contract, they expressly accused her of "Islamophobia" and indicated that "academic freedom" should not have protected her ability to "harm" her student.

The decision to terminate the professor has been met with a firestorm of criticism (e.g.: FIRE, PEN America, the Muslim Public Affairs Council, Academic Freedom Alliance). I personally found this post by Jill Filipovic to be especially thoughtful. So far, though, the college has been emphatic in defending its decision.

On that note, however, one thing I've yet to see is any prominent figure defending Hamline. The closest I've seen is a local CAIR official who (at a university-sponsored forum) said that the lesson had "absolutely no benefit" and compared alternative Muslim perspectives on portraying Muhammad as akin to the existence of people who think "Hitler was good." I've also heard hearsay that some academic professional organizations have privately declined to speak out because many officers and/or members feel uncomfortable. But as far as public discourse goes, I've seen essentially nothing but wall-to-wall condemnation.

Indeed, the universality of the "Hamline got it wrong" position in some ways renders it impressive the degree to which the Hamline administration is sticking to its guns here. It is one thing to abandon principles of academic freedom under intense external pressure demanding censorship; it's another thing to abandon principles of academic in the face of intense external pressure to abide by them. It does make me wonder if there are any unknown cross-currents of pressure that the college is responding to. It's not out of character for a university to make terrible, craven decisions, of course -- but it's a little out of character for a university to make terrible, brave decisions, which makes me think that there must be some point of leverage on the administration that they are succumbing to. Again, the prospect that these cross-currents exist doesn't at all excuse the college's actions here. If, for example, the decision to terminate the professor was widely popular amongst Hamline students (or groups that Hamline hopes to recruit students from), it would still be the case that the college had an obligation to stand up for the right principles. But at least that would be a normal, explicable failing.

But maybe I'm overthinking it. Maybe the Hamline administrators are that ideologically committed to being thoughtlessly censorial. Or maybe there's a line of Hamline defenders I haven't seen. But as far as I can tell, virtually everyone (left right and center) is onboard with the view that Hamline fouled up. The last people to agree, it turns out, are the Hamline administrators.

via The Debate Link https://ift.tt/OReugIK

Are Stay-at-Home Mothers Really Miserable?

@JillFilipovic thinks so. But @lymanstoneky just ran the data. Here’s what he found @FamStudies:

https://ifstudies.org/blog/are-stay-at-home-mothers-really-miserable

…

“In a recent New York Times piece, @MattBruenig suggested that any child care program should also have an at-home-care allowance provided to ensure that families not using center-based care are not penalized. In response, @JillFilipovic tarred his proposal as sexist.”

“the problem with a home-care benefit, she says, is that it encourages women to stay home with their kids, and being stay-at-home mothers makes women miserable. If this claim is true, it would be an important issue to consider. Nobody wants to make moms miserable!” ~@lymanstoneky

Contra @JillFilipovic: “Survey evidence from two large, long-running survey programs shows that stay-at-home mothers are in fact just as happy as other mothers.” https://ifstudies.org/blog/are-stay-at-home-mothers-really-miserable… @lymanstoneky @FamStudies

…

Who are the least happy parents? Unemployed dads. New from @lymanstoneky @FamStudies

Married mothers’ happiness, by work status, per @lymanstoneky https://ifstudies.org/blog/are-stay-at-home-mothers-really-miserable