Some of my recent click recommendations

If you don’t follow me on twitter (and I get pretty inane on there so god knows I understand), or you missed some of my links then these are some of the best from the last little while.

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This fantastic piece by a straight, white male explaining privilege to other straight, white men at Whatever. (It’s also the link referenced in the picture above by the very amusing An Idle Dad).

Dudes. Imagine life here in the US — or indeed, pretty much anywhere in the Western world — is a massive role playing game, like World of Warcraft except appallingly mundane, where most quests involve the acquisition of money, cell phones and donuts, although not always at the same time. Let’s call it The Real World. You have installed The Real World on your computer and are about to start playing, but first you go to the settings tab to bind your keys, fiddle with your defaults, and choose the difficulty setting for the game. Got it?

Okay: In the role playing game known as The Real World, “Straight White Male” is the lowest difficulty setting there is.

Let’s talk about sex and race and The Game of Thrones at Racialicious.

To add insult to injury, we see women’s bodies constantly on display for the male gaze, but what about the female gaze? NEWSFLASH: We like seeing cute guys with nice bodies. Yeah, we got one to two episodes where there was one scene with Theon and Gendry showing their well-built bodies off. We saw Theon topless in episode one—but then again, we also got a whole lot of naked wench in the bed with him… But what about Jon Snow, Robb Stark, and Tyrion Lannister? Hell, even the Kingslayer at this point. I’d even take Littlefinger. We are watching too, and we are legion.

In praise of single mothers at The Atlantic.

This Mother’s Day I confess that I am very proud to be from what some would call a broken home. Not because it was easy watching a young woman struggle to be a mother on her own after ending a violent marriage, but precisely because it was so very hard. And “hard” seems to be a word we now avoid, disparage, and devalue in our insta-everything culture.

In other words, the very values that Senator Santorum and so many others say these solo moms undermine are just the values I learned from mine — and the community of women like her I grew up with outside Washington, D.C. What did we learn from these women who worked one or more miserably paid jobs while battling domestic turbulence, hunting for child support, hustling to pay rent, and forcing us to do our homework all on their own?

Everything.

When the conservatives started calling feminists sluts they accidentally undid one of their greatest slurs at The Washington Post.

The image of the feminist as a mirthless, hirsute, sex-averse succubus is a friendly-fire casualty of the Republican “war on women.” It’s a grave loss to conservatives, who have used this faithful foot soldier as a comfortably grotesque stand-in for the real people whose liberties they have sought to conscribe: women.

Henry Rollins with sex advice.

The friction is perfect. She’s doing everything she can to have an orgasm and he’s doing everything he can not to. I can remember times when a woman’s nails have been digging into my skin and I was urgently multiplying numbers, thinking of what to get at the grocery store – you name it.

The cost of mothering to mothers at work in The Guardian.

Women with children earn about 22% less than their male colleagues, according to a new report that explores the “devastating” impact of motherhood on earnings.

“Before becoming parents, men and women are equally likely to be employed, but childbirth marks the start of a great divide, which continues even after children have left home and does lasting damage to women’s careers,” the report finds.

Dictators and their relationships with their mothers at Foreign Policy.

The Austrian neurologist Sigmund Freud, who was very close with his mother, once remarked that “people who know that they are preferred or favored by their mother give evidence in their lives of a peculiar self-reliance and an unshakeable optimism which often seem like heroic attributes and bring actual success to their possessors.”

Pixar, are you brave enough to let Brave be about a girl? at Peggy Orenstein’s blog.

Pixar is all but putting up signs saying,  ”EVEN THOUGH BRAVE IS ABOUT A GIRL BOYS AND MEN WILL LIKE IT!  WE’VE GOT DICK AND BUTT AND FART AND VAGUELY HOMOPHOBIC JOKES! SEE?NO COOTIES HERE, GUYS, NO SIRREE! YOU CAN SEE THIS AND STILL BE A MAN!”

What a bunch of cowards.

This new trailer is clearly pandering to a male audience that may have qualms about a “princess” movie.

Trayvon Martin’s mother has been given extended bereavement leave by donation from workers, the story is at Huffington Post.

Thanks to a massive donation from fellow Miami-Dade County employees, Trayvon Martin‘s mother will be able to take about 8 months of paid leave from her job.

The rising importance of single women as voters in the USA elections at The Washington Post.

If this trend continues, singles (including unmarried people who are cohabiting) will make up the majority of Americans in less than 15 years.

And in this nation of swinging singles, women are dominant. Because women live longer than men, there are about 10 million more single women than single men, and their ranks are growing. While the number of voting-eligible married women grew by 7 percent between 2000 and 2010, the number of voting-eligible single women increased by 19 percent. This election year, unmarried voting-eligible women are estimated to number 55 million, more than 25 percent of the voting-eligible population.

The impact of sexual abuse as a child on a man’s sex life at The Good Men Project.

Getting molested did not stunt my sex drive at all. Between the usual urges that accompany puberty and being a bookworm who read a lot about sex even before the Internet made it easy, I had no shortage of sexual desire. What it did stunt was my willingness and ability to make a move. Deep down, I was so afraid of violating a girl’s space by making an unwanted advance, that I refrained from making moves even at times when any “normal” guy would be seeing nothing but green light.

The more sexual or physical the move, the harder it was to make, but the really insidious thing about this fear was that it was inhibiting even at the point where potential sex gets started, like flirting or asking a girl on a date. I was not incapable of interacting with girls, but I’d always be so “nice” and asexual that I was one of those guys who ended up with plenty of platonic girl friends who infuriatingly told me time and again how lucky some girl would be to have me.

Your guide to social activism as a young feminist with some excellent mentors and it’s free.

French guerilla feminism at The Guardian.

Media-savvy from the start, La Barbe has thus cajoled the media into reporting on male supremacy.

How we’ve entered the age of uninformed political debate at The Drum.

It really sets you back in your chair. From a contemporary perspective this seems an extraordinary act of political courage, of reckless honesty. A politician on talkback radio telling someone with no real knowledge of the issue beyond a gut feel that it rankles their deepest prejudices, that they are not entitled, under those terms, to enter the discussion.

You just know that today, the caller would be indulged; their opinion flattered with undue attention. So it is that today we see a political discussion that rather than excluding or marginalising the voices of the uninformed, angry and blindly polemical, is in fact conditioned, directed and dominated by them.

Does Chris Uhlmann disrespect Australia’s female Prime Minister? by Paul Keating at Unleashed.

His technique is to have the pap set question to hand.  And as the interviewee responds, he speaks over the top of them to demonstrate an aggressive credential.  This is broadly to conceal the fact that he is unable to follow an answer in a discursive way – to grow the conversation in a manner that is both informative and elucidatory.

The whole tone is invariably accusatory – a tabloid device for putting the interviewee on the back foot; notwithstanding the worth or conscientiousness of their responses.

Uhlmann had all those wares on show Wednesday night.

He was interviewing the Prime Minister, but by his manner it could have been a junior state minister.  There was no respect for the Prime Minister’s position in our national life.  His repeated interruptions of her were as impertinent as they were off point.

A nuanced discussion of when motherhood never happens at Jezebel.

If you really really want something, you go for it. That much we know. But if you don’t? If you’re unsure? If there are extenuating circumstances? What if the money, time, physical/mental health and partner aren’t there? How does one press on? What keeps childless women from staring out of a window day in, day out, weeping at the confusing injustice and senselessness of it all? In a perfect world, it wouldn’t even be an issue, it would be like, hey, you do you, I do me, everything’s cool, la la la. Whatever. But this world is baffling: You’re meant to make something of yourself, work hard, contribute to society in a meaningful way. And once you fight tooth and nail to establish yourself with not just a job but a career, you’re chastised: What, no kids?

This little awareness campaign packs a surprising punch.

Why feminism is good for men at Tres Sugar.

Provides a model for consciously changing gender roles. Women have changed what it means to be a woman. Even women who don’t call themselves feminists have had their ideas of themselves shaped by feminism. Women who imagine themselves pursuing a career, or even imagine themselves having choices of whether and when to become a wife or a mother, owe their freedom to choose to feminist thought. As men, we have had our lives changed just as helplessly as the women have. We have the same power, as men, to consciously shape what we think a man should be, and how to live up to the standards we create. Feminism taught us it can happen.

Dealing with procrastination and burn-out as a writer at Musings of an Inappropriate Woman.

Which is why I liked this post. At first I thought it was going to give me advice about stamping out procrastination. Then I realised the real point was that you can never escape procrastination entirely.

Are Australians racist? at Canberra Times.

By international standards among major immigrant-receiving nations, Australians are pretty tolerant. About one in eight is avowedly racist. This compares with one in three in western Europe and one in five in the US.

Many of us with concerns usually express them in terms of national identity, cultural groups who don’t or won’t ”fit in”. But racist attitudes are uneven. In cities such as Sydney or Melbourne, many older people, especially in areas of major contact, are very tolerant. Yet some better-educated people in Sydney’s north and north-west are less so.

In our major cities, outer suburbanites are less tolerant, yet have little contact.

In rural Australia, there is generally less acceptance compared with the major cities, but tolerance is nonetheless high. This matters for policies aiming to introduce more immigrants into these areas. So, yes, Australians are racist, but much less so than elsewhere.

Blogs for Mums by Beth Taylor at ABC Open. (Recommends my blog – thanks!)

It’s heart is in the right place but this piece from the Huffington Post is riddled with classism and ableism and illustrated with some racism for extra points.

Same-sex marriage used to happen in Christianity.

Contrary to myth, Christianity’s concept of marriage has not been set in stone since the days of Christ, but has constantly evolved as a concept and ritual. Prof. John Boswell, the late Chairman of Yale University’s history department, discovered that in addition to heterosexual marriage ceremonies in ancient Christian church liturgical documents, there were also ceremonies called the “Office of Same-Sex Union” (10th and 11th century), and the “Order for Uniting Two Men” (11th and 12th century).

A pretty thorough discussion of all that goes on to hold women back in the corporate sector at The Wall Street Journal.

Barriers to women “are deeply intertwined, making them even harder to eliminate than we had thought,” McKinsey says, based on detailed data from more than 50 companies that opened up their records for a deep look at the pipeline. Women lack sponsors to advocate for them, and leaders often assume they won’t want tough assignments. About half the women surveyed by McKinsey are both primary breadwinners and primary caregivers to their families, and many tend to avoid jobs that bring greater pressure.

Womanist Musings being interviewed on radio talking about motherhood and feminism.

Photographs of some of your favourite feminist writers as babies with their mamas at GOOD.

I have a certain affection for the TIME breastfeeding meme.

Fact checking Abbott’s Budget Reply at Market Economics.

The truth about pet ownership at Tiny Cat Pants.

That’s the thing they don’t tell you about pet ownership. You see the cute end only when it’s trying to lick you, bite you, or wake you up. If you’re lucky, you can spend some time looking at their backs. But mostly, it’s just you, staring at their butts.

Having trouble downloading Diablo? at really, really, really trying.

Lovely street photography in Belgium at artureranosian.com

Incredible illustrations from Edgar Allan Poe’s stories.

Understanding all the maths in Alice in Wonderland.

Help save Sisters Inside, a counselling service for Queensland women in prison that has lost its funding under the new conservative government.

Criminalised women have the highest rate of sexual and physical abuse perpetrated against them in our community. Due to this horrendous abuse women turn to self medication with illegal drugs and/or alcohol. Sisters Inside reduces crime in our communities, breaking the cycle of imprisonment which saves the State Government and tax payers money and keeps families together.