Until then, I give you a collection of the cool stuff I've found online in the last while, for your perusing pleasure.
Sex, Gender, GLBTQ, Sexism
The following reasons do not make it okay to call someone a slut
The opinion pages of the New York Times has this article entitled The Disposable Woman about the media, and societies, reaction to Charlie Sheen and his long history of abuse and violence against women.
"I've been really shocked and distressed to find out that 8- and 9-year-old girls are getting all their pubic hairs waxed off by their mothers. I think if I have any purpose at all, it’s to stand up there and say, ‘Oh, no, no, no, no, girls. You totally have a choice. You can wax it, you can shave it, you can grow it out, and this really is up to you.’ That’s the way that I feel about everything, that you just need to know there’s a choice out there."-Amanda Palmer Gives Pubic Hair a Shout Out! | Good Vibrations Magazine
"Women's breasts, originally intended to nourish babies, are greatly fetishized by men. In a patriarchal culture, this makes them sacrosanct, so they must be covered up as something dirty. Dirty = arousing to men. (Men’s chests might be similarly arousing to women, but in a patriarchal culture, what is arousing to women is regarded as being of no real importance unless it suits male fantasy.)
Of course, as fetishized objects, boobs must also be made into ornaments (just like cars, also fetishized by men). So, they are primped and prodded, alternately bound and pumped up, displayed like prize ponies. Even if you don’t want to. (Have you tried to buy a non-wire bra recently that didn’t look like a Playtex Cross-your-heart? Good luck with that.)
When I first wrote the Subversive Scholastic essay, I got a lot of reactions from males who said, basically: You wanna take off your shirt? Hey alriiiight! Do it, babeeeeeee!
No, no and no.
If I should take off my shirt, I want you to be as lackadaisical about that as if your best male friend took off his shirt. Are you saying Hey alriiiight! to your best male friend and encouraging him to take off his shirt? Then I don’t want that either. Optimally, it would be nice if you didn’t even NOTICE.
Hey, says authoritative male voice, you can’t expect guys not to even notice, okay?
Question: Do women act like asses when men shed their tops? You know, we might be as excited about that as you are, has that ever occurred to you? But we have learned to behave ourselves. I am utterly confident that men could learn the same, if expected to." -Women should have a right to be shirtless
"So many liberal dudes consider themselves political revolutionaries but then ignore or devalue gender politics as less important than other causes. Or they talk a good game about gender politics but then do the complete opposite in their personal lives. […] You think subcultures are going to have better more equal power dynamics, but then they usually reproduce the same fucked up power dynamics of mainstream institutions. It happened in the civil rights movement. It happened with hippies. It happens in indie and punk. It happens in everything when men are the only ones in recognized leadership positions. I wish that it never happened, but it does. Rather than bury our heads in the sand we must choose to engage with it, to figure out why it happens and how we can work on it." -Molly Lambert, In Which Your Ballroom Days are Over Baby
Unschooling, Education, Anti-School, Youth Rights
"It's not that I feel that school is a good idea gone wrong, but a wrong idea from the word go. It’s a nutty notion that we can have a place where nothing but learning happens, cut off from the rest of life." -John Holt
I'm in the process of writing an unschooling zine (tentatively entitled Free The Children!), and would love your input on the ideas I have so far.
"Usually when adults say teens need to be responsible or complain that they’re not responsible enough, what they’re actually talking about is being submissive. A teen is called ‘responsible’ when they shut up and do as they’re told without complaining or questioning what the point of what they’re being asked to do is.” -Elisha
This article from Jeff Sabo is worth a read. He talks about how teaching can definitely be a part of unschooling. Unschooling is about freedom of choice, not about learning everything all by yourself!
This page is from a terrific book entitled ABC's of Anarchy, which you can see the entirety of here.
A new unschooling website called Why Unschool? has been launched by two grown unschooled siblings.
A post about why being friends with older people is a good thing is up at Un-Schooled.
The similarity between prisons and schools:
And finally for this section, a list of the 50 Best Blogs in the Unschooling Movement is worth checking out, though note that not all of the blogs and sites listed actually focus on, or even mention, unschooling. Some are simply about homeschooling or school reform.
Anarchy, Politics, Revolution, Freedom
"We should be in the business of living, not making a living.” -Lucien Bourjeily
An environmentalist is on trial for "eco-terrorism" for disrupting a land auction.
"(Many of) the greatest crimes in the world are not committed by people breaking the rules, but by people following the rules. It’s people who follow orders that drop bombs and massacre villages." -Banksy
"The first step — especially for young people with energy and drive and talent, but not money — the first step to controlling your world is to control your culture. To model and demonstrate the kind of world you demand to live in. To write the books. Make the music. Shoot the films. Paint the art." -Chuck Palahniuk
"Think of anarchism as an individual orientation to yourself and others, as a personal approach to life. That’s not impossible to imagine. Conceived in these terms, what would anarchism be? It would be a decision to think for yourself rather than following blindly. It would be a rejection of hierarchy, a refusal to accept the “god given” authority of any nation, law, or other force as being more significant than your own authority over yourself. It would be an instinctive distrust of those who claim to have some sort of rank or status above the others around them, and an unwillingness to claim such status over others for yourself. Most of all, it would be a refusal to place responsibility for yourself in the hands of others: it would be the demand that each of us not only be able to choose our own destiny, but also do so." -from Days Of War, Nights of Love: CrimethInc for Beginners
From XKCD:
Random Cool Shit
Have any particularly cool stuff you've found online lately? Have you put together your own link roundup recently? Please do share in the comments!!
