Feminist Monday, October 8

So, last week sucked ass. The US Republican Party has ceased to function as an element of democracy and has switched into full-on Fascism mode. That makes November's election more important than ever before. There is so much on the line this election. And after the latest report on climate change everything feels dire. Because dictators don't care about the environment. Trump certainly doesn't. Neither does the Republican party. This, my friends, is a deadly combination on multiple levels. So, don't listen when the trolls tell you that you'll only make it worse by speaking out. You can't make it worse. It is worse. Relenting and giving the big bad what it wants just makes it easier for them to do whatever they want. Fight back.

Speaking of, lately I've been thinking hard about my practice of retweeting articles and opinions from BlackTwitter. The reason I was doing so was to promote POC voices. However, this had an unfortunate side effect. Trolls saw these RTs and abused POC Twitter-Users. I recently saw a complaint about white tweeters who RT POC tweeters not coming to the aid of the POC tweeters they've RTed. That is a valid complaint. I've giving some thought to my personal response. Anyway, I think, in the future if I see a POC being attacked, I will stop and ask if they need assistance. (Automatically doing so risks the whole White Savior thing.) If you have other ideas, I'd love to hear them.

In other news, today is Indigenous People's Day in the US. And I think it's Thanksgiving for Canada. Regardless of whether or not you're celebrating either holiday, I hope you have a happy Monday. Now for those links...

Literary/Entertainment: Five Indigenous Speculative Fiction Authors You Should Be Reading. And here are Five must-read books by Indigenous authors. And here are 108 Indigenous writers to read, as recommended by you. And then there's Uplifting Indigenous Literature. Now read about THE STORY BEHIND THE MEDUSA STATUE THAT HAS BECOME THE PERFECT AVATAR FOR WOMEN’S RAGE. So, both my editor and an Irish fan brought this film to my attention. I'm going to give it a watch soon. It sounds heartbreaking. So, I need to be in a strong place to watch. (I'm just not there yet.) A Derry mother's impossible choice focus of new film. And now a podcast about American Culture--in particular the film American Beauty. it's called I Hate It But I Love It. 

​General: Sorry. I don't have a lot of links today because...well...I stayed off of the internet for most of the week for personal reasons combined with the Kavanaugh nomination. So...I've only got two. Tulsa mayor reopens investigation into possible mass graves from 1921 race massacre. This next link is appropriate because Halloween is filled with wall to wall misogyny in the guise of green-skinned witches. Witches whose bodies are crushed against walls or the ground. Witches only represented by disembodied legs in striped tights. Witches being viewed as evil crones or over-sexed demonic nymphets. [sigh] THE woman known as the mother of modern witchcraft was also a Bletchley Park codebreaker and a friend of the Queen Mother, a new book claims. 

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[1] Okay, this next link is to a critique of American Beauty. I'm just going to say that when the film came out, I couldn't bring myself to watch it. So, I haven't. And frankly, the more I've heard about it, the less I've wanted to watch it. The blatant misogyny, the creepiness of Kevin Spacey's character and his son who both stalk teenaged girls--it all just made me nauseous, but not as nauseous as all the glowing talk about Spacey's character. For the record, I feel the same damned way about Lolita. I want to believe that Nabokov wasn't condoning Humbert Humbert's pedophilia. However, American culture more often than not seems to embrace his abuse of a child because that child happens to be a girl and is "asking for it." No one I've ever spoken to on the subject has once mentioned that the girl probably doesn't know what she's doing--even if she's actually doing it. No one has asked questions about an environment that produces a child that behaves this way. No one seems to ask that even though it's clear Humbert is an unreliable narrator that maybe his perspective on Lolita isn't the truth. Anyway, it's a novel I'll never read. It's too triggering. That said, here's a more recent discussion about American Beauty as viewed through the eyes of women who've witnessed #metoo.