feminish

It’s that time of the month again…

There’s the first-ever Carnival of African Women on ‘Blogging and Identity’. And there’s the 24th Carnival of Feminists, with posts on feminism and pop culture, choice feminism, sex-pos feminism and ifeminism.

And, of course, a crop of links about the Veil Thing.

What veil thing? you might ask, if you spent most of this week sheltering under an umbrella from the overhead storms of cyber-media-discourse.

I write that and I immediately think of something I once heard from a very wise woman about a verandah in a monastery in China. It was known as the Listening to the Rain Verandah…. She had stood on that verandah once in a huge, warm thunderstorm. As she was enjoying the verandah she wished she could always have that verandah to go and be on in thunderstorms; to have a reassuringly dry place to take refuge in while the world happened noisily, at one remove, around her. The kind of verandah you can walk out onto and hear the rain and watch the rain and be in the rain and yet not wet. Sometimes I want to come back to that kind of nice, dry verandah in myself. You know the mood…. Those days when you don’t want to catch people’s eyes and wished you were wearing a hoodie so you could just pull it right over your brow and be protected from It All. The kind of day when you don’t want to talk. And the rest of the world can just deal with it.

There’s a lot to be said for hoodies. And umbrellas.

But I digress. Back to the Veil Thing. Well, there’s the Jack Straw Veil Thing, which is sizzling away here, here and here (there’s also a good point here).

And then there’s the feminist blogosphere Veil/burqa Thing (see also this and this) - an evolution of last month’s Boob Thing.

And the thing is (“what is the thing, Natasha?”), the thing is - these discussions are better than any I’ve ever had offline. Honest. Go read.

[UPDATE: I just improved the linking in this last paragraph re. Bitch|Lab’s fair comment below.]

It’s that time of the month again…

There’s the first-ever Carnival of African Women on ‘Blogging and Identity’. And there’s the 24th Carnival of Feminists, with posts on feminism and pop culture, choice feminism, sex-pos feminism and ifeminism.

And, of course, a crop of links about the Veil Thing.

What veil thing? you might ask, if you spent most of this week sheltering under an umbrella from the overhead storms of cyber-media-discourse.

I write that and I immediately think of something I once heard from a very wise woman about a verandah in a monastery in China. It was known as the Listening to the Rain Verandah…. She had stood on that verandah once in a huge, warm thunderstorm. As she was enjoying the verandah she wished she could always have that verandah to go and be on in thunderstorms; to have a reassuringly dry place to take refuge in while the world happened noisily, at one remove, around her. The kind of verandah you can walk out onto and hear the rain and watch the rain and be in the rain and yet not wet. Sometimes I want to come back to that kind of nice, dry verandah in myself. You know the mood…. Those days when you don’t want to catch people’s eyes and wished you were wearing a hoodie so you could just pull it right over your brow and be protected from It All. The kind of day when you don’t want to talk. And the rest of the world can just deal with it.

There’s a lot to be said for hoodies. And umbrellas.

But I digress. Back to the Veil Thing. Well, there’s the Jack Straw Veil Thing, which is sizzling away here, here and here (there’s also a good point here).

And then there’s the feminist blogosphere Veil/burqa Thing (see also this and this) - an evolution of last month’s Boob Thing.

And the thing is (“what is the thing, Natasha?”), the thing is - these discussions are better than any I’ve ever had offline. Honest. Go read.

[UPDATE: I just improved the linking in this last paragraph re. Bitch|Lab’s fair comment below.]