ismnotwasm
ismnotwasm's JournalHeavy Metal Feminism
My anger as a Black woman fronting an aggressive, politically charged hardcore/metal band with DIY punk ethics is somehow too much for [some listeners]. White punks screaming about the same politics, the same fucked-up shit, and even about racial issues and injustices they dont even particularly face, are wholeheartedly accepted, never questioned, never told to tone down, and never told to relax. No matter how justified I am, or how down for the cause they are, theyre put off by my very valid rage. Why is that? What is it about a Black girl doing the same shit white men do that makes them feel like its too much? How am I the only one being labeled too aggressive in a genre that is all about aggression?
Despite the global appeal and presence of heavy metal culture, widespread online distribution, and increasing awareness among a diverse audience, there remains great resistance to discuss ongoing sexism, racism, and other issues that can potentially dissuade fans from actively participating in the subculture. I dont know why it is so hard for people to understand that not everyone is just like them, Phillips told me. And Phillips isnt alone; other artists and journalists are questioning the pervasiveness of discriminatory practices and beliefs within a musical culture that, ironically, not only boasts of its inclusive community (in which membership is predicated on fandom and not gender, ethnicity, or sexual orientation), but also, because of its underground status, places an emphasis on fan participation and economic support in order to create and distribute music that will never, and doesnt want to, receive true mainstream commercial attention.
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Despite both carrying reputations for rejecting societal norms, more often than not, using heavy metal and feminism in the same sentence is bound to raise some eyebrows. For anyone who remembers the 1980s hair metal craze and the ensuing complaints about the representations of women in Motley Crue and Poison videos, or the impossibly high number of women KISS bassist Gene Simmons allegedly had sex with during the bands heyday, it makes total sense that the genre and the ideology mix as well as oil and water. And metals tense relationship with female representation is hardly confined to the past: The fact that, in the 21st century, a national music magazine publishes an annual issue and sponsors a national tour dedicated to physically attractive female metal musicians, doesnt bode well for the argument that heavy metal can be a liberating and empowering culture for women.
http://penguinrandomhouse.ca/hazlitt/blog/heavy-metal-feminism?curator=MediaREDEF
Hillary Clinton to sit down with Ellen DeGeneres
"These 3 women are changing the world," @TheEllenShow tweeted Monday. "They're also on my premiere week, starting September 8th."
The tweet included a photo of Clinton, along with photos of Caitlyn Jenner, the athlete formerly known as Bruce Jenner, and Malala Yousafzai, the youngest ever Nobel Prize laureate for her work as an activist for female education.
Representatives for the show did not immediately respond to questions about when Clinton's interview will air.
Clinton's first national television interview as a candidate was with CNN's Brianna Keilar in July. Clinton also spoke with Maria Elena Salinas of Univision earlier this month.
Bill Clinton is the most recent member of the Clinton family to sit down with DeGeneres. The former president talked with host in November 2014 -- before Hillary Clinton had declared her 2016 candidacy -- and chatted about the prospect of his wife running.
http://www.cnn.com/2015/08/17/politics/hillary-clinton-ellen-degeneres-show/index.html
Marissa Johnson: a generation of activists who believe in disruption
Its one we may be having for a while. The screaming disruption, shocking as it was, reflects the Black Lives Matter movement that Johnson jumped into after Ferguson when Missouri prosecutors declined to indict a white officer who killed an unarmed black man.
The movement is comprised of a new generation of activists, with a decidedly different style and mindset than those of generations past. They are either wonderfully bold or appallingly disrespectful, depending on your point of view. Whichever, they embrace confrontation be that with an aging white politician or veteran black leaders they see as not doing enough.
The cause, they believe, is urgent, explained K.L. Shannon, a Seattle labor organizer who at 45 serves as a mentor to some in the local Black Lives Matter movement. Every day, some black man is getting killed.
http://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/marissa-johnson-a-generation-of-activists-who-believe-in-disruption/
(Front Page of the Seattle Times)
Where is Bernie Sanders on Gender Justice?
Legitimate question of a potential POTUS
But I have to ask. Why does Bernie struggle so much to talk about gender? Why is it like pulling teeth for him to talk about my identity as a woman in addition to my identity as a worker?
I took a look through his platform recently, and I didnt exactly see women represented there. For one, most of the policies that would disproportionately benefit women (equal pay, paid family leave, paid vacation, and paid sick days) are housed within the Real Family Values section, a classification that implicitly characterizes womens rights as valuable only insofar as they benefit a larger family unit.
And while the platform mentions abortion briefly, it fails to offer any recommendations about how to preserve and expand access. Due to the Hyde Amendment, federal funds cannot be used for abortion except in limited circumstances. This restriction means that, as a result of economic deprivation, poor women, who are disproportionately Black and Brown, can be forced to carry unwanted pregnancies to term. To reduce these barriers to women accessing basic health care services, Bernie should throw his support behind the EACH Woman Act, a recently introduced piece of legislation that, according to RH Reality Check, would ensure that anyone who has health care or health insurance through the federal government also has coverage of abortion care.
http://feministing.com/2015/08/14/where-is-bernie-sanders-on-gender-justice/
Rose McGowan Is Starting A Revolution
After 20 years of acting and finally realizing she hates it Rose McGowan has become Hollywoods feminist whistleblower. To the industry, she says, Fuck your rules.After tweeting it, she simply went to bed, not thinking much of it. When she awoke, the tweet had gone viral and was starting to be picked up by the media it was, after all, about a high-profile project, Adam Sandlers new Netflix movie The Do Over. I was like, oh dear if you think thats bad, she remembered thinking. I was mostly flummoxed by everybody thinking that was so horrible; its just par for the course. It was more a stupidity offense bad manners offend me. And then I was thinking, How many peoples hands did that pass through before that was just sent out to every woman coming in?
McGowan then said in a deadpan tone: The role, by the way, is for a supermodel whos obsessed with Adam Sandler. She fell silent, looked at me pointedly, and started to laugh.
McGowan at Paris Fashion Week Haute early this year. Getty Images
One week after her tweet about the Sandler audition, McGowan screened her short film Dawn her directing debut, which had premiered at Sundance in 2014 for the Film Society of Lincoln Center in New York City. Which is one of the highlights of my career so far. It was a huge honor, McGowan said. As she left the stage after the Q&A, she checked her phone and saw an email from Innovative Artists, her agency dropping her. Like, We no longer want to work with you, she said. She felt a wave of semi-panic my ankles shook a little.
http://www.buzzfeed.com/kateaurthur/rose-mcgowan-is-starting-a-revolution#.moZwG6R51
The Story of Women in the 1950s (book review)
Sounds interesting
Virginia Nicholson
Viking/Penguin 526pp £16.99
Exactly who were the perfect wives of the 1950s? Were they the drably dressed women still queuing for food up to a decade after the Second World War had ended? Or were they sprightly looking females in frilly pinnies, manically waving a feather duster and serving up delicious meals to their husbands?
Following her probes into the lives of women after the First World War and their roles in the Second, Virginia Nicholson moves forward into a decade that has only recently begun to receive the attention it deserves. Sandwiched between the privations and sacrifices of the 1940s and the affluent excesses of the swinging sixties, the fifties have long been regarded as a dull decade, when Britain was struggling to rebuild a devastated and shabby country and face the future, in the words of the Labour Partys 1945 election slogan. For many women they were years of frustration at wartime gains lost, whereas others nursed a profound desire to return to the certainties of their pre-war lives. But for both the future was to prove circumscribed.
Women might have had the vote on the same terms as men since 1929, but for most that was pretty well the limit of their equality: working women were paid much less than men and despite the responsibilities and sheer hard graft many had endured in wartime, were still regarded as submissive and inferior beings. Educational opportunities were limited. The 1944 Education Act was supposed to give everyone parity of esteem, but that is not how it worked out. Many teachers and parents had narrow expectations for girls whose destiny was to be marriage, a home and a family, with work just an interim measure between leaving school and walking down the aisle, rather than a career. Just 1.2 per cent of women went to university in the 1950s.
In many cases, a womans lot seems to have hardly improved by marriage. Imagining wives to be fulfilled by having an easy-to-clean Formica worktop and a twin-tub washing machine, husbands could be harsh taskmasters, most regarding running the home and parenting solely as a womans responsibility, expecting meals ready when they returned from work, making all the household decisions of consequence and largely continuing to inhabit a separate sphere of pubs and football.
- See more at: http://www.historytoday.com/reviews/story-women-1950s#sthash.Se3Odv4Z.dpuf
Oh, There is something wrong all right
(Thank you 1StrongBlackMan)
#BLM is now under the bus--as far as I've seen anything tossed.
I'll tell you what, Sanders had one rally--wasn't even his rally he was just there --interrupted. He then went on to speak to thousands of adoring fans. I don't know the racial composition, but probably the same as usual. All hell breaks loose because a grassroots organization for African American people, started because they are being shot dead on the street DARED to confront a white liberal--who happens to be very popular. If people are really paying attention, this isn't the first time, or the second, or the 100th time white liberals have been critizised by PoC--far from it.
It's much like white feminism. As a white feminist, I HAVE to acknowledge we have failed women of color. Not all of us and not all the time, but consistently and it's only fairly recently that strong voices of these women (those who are not poets and authors) are speaking out to the point they're being heard, to the point white women make the effort to cross the divide. I think it was Bravenek who said "you have to come to us, we aren't going to you" and that's how it should be given all the history that's gone before.
All the history that's gone before--an important point I think
Bravenak tried, as hard as I've seen anyone try, to reach across racial divides and get folks to listen. I saw her comments, read her OP's tried to learn, as much as I could -as another white person--from what she was trying to say. (No Hillary fan, she) And she was shut down.
Something wrong? It's probably an understatement.
To the Republican Candidates, From an 18-Year-Old Woman
Dear Dr. Carson,
Per your remark about "fighting for our children and the next generation," I just want to say, as a member of this generation that you claiming to be fighting on behalf of -- these aren't the fights I wish you'd fight (but it's a noble way to frame your self-serving agenda).
Dear Mr. Trump,
It would be cool if you stopped capitalizing on your privilege as a wealthy white male.
I know you enjoy being the farce of the party. But if we don't have time for political correctness, as you say (a weak excuse in response to accusations of your absurd misogyny, to be quite frank), then we definitely don't have time for someone like you to be taking up space in a political debate. (Side note: what do you mean we don't have time? There are still months before the primaries start!)
Dear Senator Rubio,
YOU WERE SO CLOSE! You could have taken one step in the right direction if you'd admitted that you supported exceptions to your pro-life stance in the case of rape or incest. You blew it, my friend.
Dear Governor Walker,
Thanks for your input that the life of an unborn baby is more important than that of its living mother. The ultimate empowering statement to the approximately 51 percent of America that is female.
To all the candidates:
Thanks, you 10 men, for sharing your opinions on whether a woman should have control over her own body. In the future, please keep them to yourself.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/carly-steyer/to-the-republican-candidates-from-an-18-year-old-woman-_b_7957370.html
GOP debate: Marco Rubio claims it’s in the Constitution that abortion should be illegal....
This man should be nowhere near politics. What a creep and an asshole.
If you believe that life begins at conception, as you say you do, she asked, how do you justify ending a life just because it begins violently through no fault of the baby.
I dont think thats an accurate accounting of my view, Rubio replied.
You dont favor a rape and incest exception? Kelly asked.
I have never said that, Rubio replied. Ive never advocated that. Ive advocated passing a law that says that all human life, at every stage of its development, is worthy of protection in fact, I believe that law already exists.
Its called the Constitution of the United States.
http://www.salon.com/2015/08/07/gop_debate_marco_rubio_claims_its_in_the_constitution_that_abortion_should_be_illegal_even_in_cases_of_rape_and_incest/
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