The Good, the Bad, and the Curious (Links for the Week)

Here are the things I've been reading that have made me happy (The Good), sad (The Bad), and intrigued (The Curious).

The Good

This video from The Features:

The petition to cancel Shawty Lo's reality series All My Babies' Mamas worked. (I'm happy to see it go, but there is an interesting argument for keeping the show here).

Strawberry Mohawk has some great tips on how to hang art on your walls and make it look fantastic (complete with wonderful pictures). 

Check out these artistic representations of the "Missed Connections" section of Craigslist. 

Sporcle has a fun quiz on famous women. How many can you get right?

The Bad

These reports of how personhood amendments are being used to criminalize pregnant women send shivers down my spine. Women drug out of their house and forced to undergo c-sections? Women charged with murder when one of her twins died because she opted for a vaginal delivery? Shudder. 

Remember how Seventeen magazine was all about the body positive message and getting young girls to love the bodies they have? Well, partnering with The Biggest Loser and its new shaming of teenagers seems . . . not like that. 

What is it with lists that rank women's "hotness"? It should probably come as no surprise that a MRA website dedicated to showing that "masculinity is being increasingly punished" would produce a list of the 9 Ugliest Feminists, but shouldn't mainstream magazines like GQ and Esquire show sounder judgment. Since I don't want to send anymore traffic to those sites themselves, you should read these responses to the 9 Ugliest Feminists, GQ ranking women by race, and Esquire declaring Megan Fox's beauty a detriment because she's not ugly like Adele, Amy Adams, and Lady Gaga.  

The Feminist and the Cowboy is a book that made something of a splash when a former feminist said that meeting a "real man" changed her errant ways and taught her that her proper place was to submit. Perhaps finding out that while she was writing that book she was being sexually and physically abused by that real man should feel like some kind of vindication for feminism, but it really just feels very sad. 

Rush Limbaugh says that all abortions should happen "by gun." 

"The Barbie." 

On Gun Appreciation Day, there were multiple accidental shootings at gun shows across the country by the people who continue to tell us that guns--and unfettered access to them--make us safer.

The Curious

Dr. Freedhoff explains why using kids on The Biggest Loser is not an effective way to address childhood obesity:

The biggest losers each and every season aren't in fact the contestants, they're the viewers. By watchingThe Biggest Loser and basing their devoted adoration only on the proverbial "after" pictures, but not the "after-after" pictures, viewers are being taught non-sustainable approaches to weight management that in turn the medical literature suggests promote hatred of those who struggle with their weight, and potentially of themselves.

Do you sneak healthier foods into your child's meals? Mine's only two and I've been hiding carrots and zucchini in her spaghetti sauce for a while now, but this post from the Lunch Tray made me think about some of the implications of sneaking food.

Fit and Feminist talks about how seeing women's bodies that don't fit a narrow definition of beauty (like on Girls or in the locker room) can positively impact us:

There’s evidently plenty to criticize about “Girls,” but for all of the flaws her show may have, one of them is not Dunham’s willingness to get naked. Maybe if more of us knew what other women’s bodies actually looked like, instead of seeing nothing but the stagecraft and trickery of the mass media, maybe we’d all be less inclined to obsess over the “flaws” of our bodies because we’d understand that there is nothing freakish or wrong about us, that we are all lovely just the way we are.

This post from two to one about consent, sex, and religion is fascinating:

What angers me most about this entire debacle is the underlying, contrasting paradigms of sexual ethics. Reflecting on this now after several years have passed, I realized that we were literally speaking two different languages: theirs being of an insatiable drive to transgress boundaries due to sexual urges, and ours being of mutual respect and care for physical boundaries despite sexual urges.

I read this wonderful post about the importance of seeing other viewpoints from Halfway to Normal, and then I read this post about the stark differences in political world views as illustrated by two citizens of a small Ohio town. Together, they contribute to an interesting question on where we go from here.

This xoJane post about how hard it is to make new friends once you're outside of the situations that sort of forced you to make friends (like school) is interesting and generating some good conversation in the comments.   

So that's what I've been reading this week. What about you?