Misc links

Mostly from my blogroll I think (which would be on Dreamwidth if we had filters yet :/).

New Alice in Wonderland. Looks cool though I hope it doesn't end up creating a good vs evil dichotomy, that lack is one of the charms of the book.

A libertarian argues for an amnesty for undocumented migrants Libertarianism is so totally far from my own cynical pinko tendencies(*) that I find it incomprehensible, so it's really surreal to find it used to argue against racist views I find incomprehensible, you end up with (to me) bizarre statements like It’s true that when you combine something basically moral (free immigration) with something completely immoral (government subsidies for education and medicine) you may get bad results from the combination.

My Life In a G-String: A Round Up of Stripper Memoirs This is EXACTLY what bugged me about "Candy Girl" by Diablo Cody.

Equal pay for equal work (unless you’re creative, in which case “pride” is enough) Not that the Australian Government has a history of ironically doing the exact opposite of what it's preaching while it's preaching it *cough*

Also: I keep meaning to write a post about the Iranian protests but don't feel like I have anything informed to add to the conversation (and assume you all know it's happening so generic "awareness raising" won't make much difference. If not you could do worse than searching for "Iran" on my blogroll). I did set my twitter timezone to Tehran.

(*)I was brought up around rigid socialists, and as a result am both left wing and anti-dogma, so I'm not a big fan of right wing idealistic dogma.

Thinking about the "centre" of feminism

I had a bit of an epiphany last night. I've seen a lot of complaints from WOC, disabled people etc about being treated as "add ons" to feminism, which has as a default the needs and experiences of white middle class western women. I'm sympathetic to these claims but always felt I was missing something.
( And then I got it. At least a bit )

The Revolutionary Potential of Het fanfic

Having written Why I like Gen and Why do we femslash? I felt I should finish off the "Fanfic which is not slash" tryptych :) (I do like slash too, but I think there's enough meta on it out there already)

So: Het has a bad rep. It's all soppy and romanic and sexist and cliched and boring. Except it's not.

Since I think we can all agree that "Stories containing heterosexual relationships" have the potential to be good (that description covering most of all fiction ever), I've tried to give a bunch of examples to show that het fanfic is (sometimes) awesome or at least interesting in practice. (Though of course Sturgeon's Law applies)

Note that I'm not saying that not-het isn't awesome too. If you prefer not-het but think het is all fine and well for what it is, that's fair enough. It's the "All het is crap" argument which bugs me.

EDIT: Written in 2009, slightly updated in 2013.
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