feminish

Courtesy of Ginger over at Diary of a Freak Magnet, we are brought the latest Carnival of Feminists - humour, satire and smiles a plenty with this one.

If you giggle at this picture, (courtesy of Ginger) you’re sure to love it. Schmoozy on over there and check it out!

Yesterday, someone came to this blog having typed “HOW TO RAPE SOMEONE” into Google.

(Hello, whoever you were in Falmouth, Maine, USA, using Firefox 2.0 on Microsoft Windows XP. It was 11.15pm for you and your IP was: 72.224.132.# (ROADRUNNER-NYC). I’m sorry you only stayed on here for 0.0 seconds and didn’t have a chance to read the part of my post about not raping women.

If I was a Christian, I’d be praying for you. I’m a meditator, so I’ll be breathing for you instead, doing my best to understand that this kind of Google search can only really come from somebody who is already suffering themselves.)

As you can probably guess, this troubles me. It troubles me that someone is interested in finding out (though granted it could just be research for a fiction book). And it troubles me that we’ve created this thing called the Internet where interested folks can find out. It’s not exactly something they’d ask down the pub, in the Classifieds or over the water cooler at work.

I ran the same Google search myself, to see how they’d got to me. I have a porn filter on my search preferences, I was using google.com, and I was mildly relieved at the results. The first is “How to Prevent Rape”, the second a little more dodgy (I didn’t click through), then there’s “Reduce the Risk of Becoming a Victim of Drug Induced Rape”, “Punishments for rape”, a social welfare article about rape victims, “Can someone rape and not know it”, and then my very own “Flesh, cloth and rape” post, from which Google picks out the phrase: “If you break into a house and find a woman there, don’t rape her. If your friend thinks it’s okay to rape someone, tell him it’s not”.

I felt a small wave of gratitude for Google come over me, and wondered if there was greater censorship than my (self-chosen) porn filter. I was then surprised to find that the term “how to rape” figures on Google’s search trend radar - there’s a fairly vague graph you can examine here, which tells you little more than that there was a marked decrease in searches for ‘how to rape’ in January and February 2006, whatever that might mean.

I’m still troubled by what drives a human being to want to search for those things; and I’m still troubled that we humans have created this beast of the internet that can (in principle) help people find out. After all, “HOW TO RAPE SOMEONE” is a different question from the much more reasonable “WHAT IS RAPE”, and presumably it comes with the corollary “HOW TO RAPE SOMEONE WITHOUT GETTING NICKED” .

I immediately recalled the hoo-haa a few months ago after AOL inadvertently released search data which included which user (a numeric ID) had searched for what (the data was swiftly removed but had already been mirrored here). I can deconstruct my visitor in Falmouth, Maine, and reflect on the bizarre ways in which their unhappy world briefly collided with mine… but it’s altogether more telling when you can pull together a user’s search history over, say, several months. The 3-month AOL database of search terms is startling, revealing as it does users’ deepest (and darkest) queries. CNET News.com pulled together a few user profiles, assembling their queries chronologically:

Based on the number of local searches, AOL user 1515830 appears to be a resident of Ohio’s Mahoning County. On March 1, user 1515830 was trying to find the amount of calories in chai tea and bananas. But on March 9, the searches took a darker turn:

Read the rest of this entry »

I can’t work out which diary to take refuge in at the moment - moleskine or blog.

I want to write about the way the laundry froze solid on the line this morning (it was minus 4), and about how happy I am that it’s winter again. Sure, my nose has recommenced it’s fairly charming sniffle, and yes, my toes feel a little damp. But Winter’s good for me - or, to be more precise, it’s good for me now. I like the smell of fires, the shrouding of dark evenings and the warm glow of candlelight. I like feeling the need to wrap up, bed down, put-my-head-down, slow down. I feel free to just get on with things, quietly and determinedly; the world is no longer overtaking me with its oppressively enthusiastic early dawns.

I’m grateful for the earth’s tilt that gives us Winter, and for the asteroid (or whatever) that once knocked off-kilter This Planet We Call Home.

But for the moment I’m going to turn to the moleskine, spend a weekend at the Immanent Grove, and leave you with a little link-fest of great feminist posts I’ve enjoyed elsewhere this week:

The inimitable Twisty Faster on economics professor Todd D Kendall’s paper on “Pornography, Rape, and the Internet.”

The *generally-great* Diary of Barbie’s Worst Enemy, on Barbies in general and Job Centre ads for Exotic Dancers in particular.

Charliegrrl getting WHSmith in trouble for their Playboy stationery paraphernalia for 7-year-olds.

And the F-word for a powerful juxtaposition of recent posts:
»Top Businesswomen earning 20% less than male counterparts- £60,000 to male director’s average £74,028
»The first US conviction of a man for female genital mutilation
»Womankind Worldwide’s report on the situation of women in Afghanistan (Not Good)

… the last two put the 14 grand shortfall for a minority of British women into perspective. Here in the White West we get to talk about the icing on the cake, yet in most of the world women still don’t even have the recipe.

The latest Carnival of Feminists is now up over at A Blog Without a Bicycle. Elizabeth’s done a great job. I bet you never saw a carnival with a Contents List before! Go read…

The Carnival of Feminists is a year old! Please shimmy over to Philobiblon where Natalie, the Carnival’s founder, has pulled together a fantastic assortment of the best posts from feminist blogs over the past fortnight. Inspiring stuff, these carnivals; they make it all worth it.

Enjoy: 25th Feminist Carnival…

I’m not sure how this one crept up on me silently, but -

Today is the British Library’s “One day in History” Day.

They’re calling for as many Brits as possible to write about their day today and submit their account online, creating “a mass blog for the national record”. The British Library have already started publishing people’s entries here, and have committed themselves to preserving everything they receive for ever and ever. I suppose the only question is whether humans will expire before their hard copies do?

So, email your friends and get on the phone to your Mum and Dad and see if you can persuade them to write a few words and post them up. After all, if you’re reading this you must think blogs are even just a teeny weeny bit worthwhile.

But if it doesn’t tickle your fancy, you can always shimmer over to Clioweb which is hosting the latesd all-singing all-dancing History Carnival. The Aztecs, the Athenians and the Australians all get a look in - and it’s all the more fascinating for its lively crop of women’s history (including one or two numbers by Yours Truly).

Ever idly wondered what a woman might have been writing in her diary on this day in, say - 1920?

I just found Harvard’s Open Collections website, where they publish primary-source documents from their collections - 7,500 pages of manuscripts, 3,500 books and pamphlets and 1,200 photographs. If you go to the diaries page you can see women’s journals opened at today’s date (updated daily).

I read what was written on this day by a farmer in 1887 ( “…rained quite a shower after dinner”), a schoolteacher in 1906 ( “…took a bath. Mended.”), a secretary in 1914 ( “…stayed in bed and fooled until 8.30″) and an actress in 1920 ( “…we saw Cohan’s opening - “meanest man in the world”).

Vicarious and addictive.

Technorati tags: women’s history, historical documents, women, diaries, history

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.]

Reasons why the feminist blogosphere is great, No.1:

A wave of ladeez have recently opened themselves up for any questions about the whys, wherefores, what-have-yous and whatjamacallits of feminism.

It all began with Molly Saves the Day, and quickly spread to Pandagon and Feministe (Jill’s just begun responding). Even the Happy Feminist has promised to play the game too.

Woo hoo!

In my accidental absence these past few weeks there have been two remarkable, impressive and fascinating Carnivals of Feminists, showcasing the best recent writing in the feminist blogosphere.

Check out the Carnival of Feminists XXI at Being Amber Rhea, which includes posts on Women & Technology, the Role of Male Allies in Feminism and bloggers describing their own particular Brand of Feminism.

The Carnival of Feminists XXII is up at Redemption Blues, centering on two big themes: Feminism & Fat and Feminism & Faith.

Happy reading.