We live in interesting times

Some quick recommendations. 

Two posts worth highlighting from Echidne of the Snakes.

First, this ridiculously sexualised horse toy (with the best post title ever).

It’s as if someone wants to train girls as both hookers and consumers of makeup and clothes. Well, those girls who don’t suffocate on all the small pieces of jewelry at the age of four.

And then on a very different note, this very affecting prose by echidne for the fifth anniversary of the Iraq invasion, dedicated to all the children who have died in wars and acts of terrorism.

These are my children, the dead ones, the beloved: the ones covered in mud and dirt, the bloodied ones, the limbless ones, the ones who were scattered by bombs like crumbs thrown for the birds. These are my children: the burned ones, the raped ones, the starved ones, the buried ones. See how beautiful they all are, my beloved children.

I seek for them everywhere, I call for them and at nightfall I find them. I gather them to me and give them sleep. The night I turn into a silken shawl, the sky into a blue blanket. I weave cradles and nests out of my hair, and I find a place for each one of my children, however hurt and frightened.

True confessions of a feminist fraud! Feministing’s open thread for readers’ most unfeminist guilty pleasures could be worth a peek. My, my, we have a lot to confess too. Lots of feminists are disclosing a bit of porn-viewing (does feminist porn really exist? – Finally Feminism 101), but I’ll come clean and tell you that I’m keen to see the Sex in the City movie. There, I feel better.

third culture mama,  after being a feminist for almost as long as she can remember pinpoints her emerging feminist motherhood in this post here.

Watching my baby daughter sleep, I can’t believe that it took me until I was well into my college education to realize that motherhood was a feminist issue.

third culture mama is an American woman raising her baby in France. Having grown up for some time overseas, I enjoy reading about the lives of ex-pats.