Must Reads

Here are some awesome posts from the past few weeks from elsewhere in the blogosphere. I hope you’ll take the time to check them out!

Liss Says Stuff #3: Devil’s Advocate by Melissa McEwan

Devil’s Advocacy seeks to turn the intimate aspects of one’s life into an abstract discussion.

This Is Why I Talk About This Stuff by BRACE

If you think that ableism ends at the top of a ramp, you have gotten lost somewhere.

Why Our Notions of “Sex-Positive” Feminism Are in Need of an Overhaul by Kelly Rose Pflug-Back (Content Note: Descriptions of Self-Injury) 

Each body comes with baggage–and if this baggage prevents us for the time being from fully loving and accepting ourselves, from pleasuring ourselves, or from giving and accepting pleasure from others, this does not mean that we are wrong or bad or broken. We are simply doing what we have to in order to survive in a world where the odds are stacked against us, regardless of whether our ways of coping look “healthy” to others, regardless of whether we are called bad feminists or bad women because of them.

How To Keep Malala From Being Appropriated by Omid Safi

It is easier for us to focus on the evil of the Taliban than to confront the evil of “our” own policies.   We have to speak against the evil of the Taliban, and we have to recognize that we too—as in the United States of America—are responsible for a great evil over there.

this here quote on Tumblr by Andrea Smith 

This colonial practice, structured by sexual violence, is often perpetuated by white feminists in their efforts to heal from the wounds of patriarchal violence. Sadly, they do not consider how such practices may hinder Native women from healing as well.

No, I Will Not Celebrate “Bartolomé Day” by Patricia Valoy 

And although we can argue that Bartolomé de las Casas was in many ways less of a genocidal megalomaniac compared to Christopher Columbus (among many other conquistadores),  I refuse to celebrate “Bartolomé Day” in lieu of “Christopher Columbus” day.

I will not dedicate a holiday to a man that embodies imperialism and colonialism.

We don’t make our children kiss relatives or tickle them after “Stop.” We talk a lot about being gentle with our hands and heeding other people’s ”No.” We talk about respecting privacy, honoring boundaries, and not touching people without their permission. Love is more than words or feelings; it encompasses what we do with our bodies–and how we refrain.

When I wrote that article, was I trying to hurt blind people?  No, I wasn’t thinking of them at all.  And that’s exactly where my sin lay…I had never bothered to find out what constitutes ableism and how our collective linguistic habit of using blindness as a synonym for ignorance and moral failing hits them.  This is exactly what I had done: I had failed to bother to love people who are blind.