Favorites from this week

Happy Monday, y'all! On to my favorites from last week (this post a bit delayed due to internet problems...)!- Stephanie...Feminist group's brilliant Playboy hoax promotes 'consent culture' - Scott Kaufman at Raw Story"...Yesterday, the group “Upsetting Rape Culture” and affiliated conspirators redirected traffic from Playboy‘s “annual college party guide” to a convincingly similar one that featured pro-consent statements. The altered “party commandments” aggressively focused on promoting “consent culture,” beginning with the altered home page, which stated:

A good college party is all about everyone having a good time. Consent is all about everyone having a good time. Rape is only a good time if you’re a rapist. And f— those people.

The altered site was impressive enough in itself, but more significant is the network of college students who created mock sites to promote it. In addition to redirecting traffic to a fake Playboysite, the group created fake news coverage on the Huffington Post, Upworthy and Brobible. At its height, the sites were receiving upwards of 3,000 hits an hour.In an interview with Raw Story, Upsetting Rape Culture’s Rebecca Nagel said the point of the redirect and its associated promotions was to draw attention, first, to the fact that a robust consent culture “already exists at many colleges and universities.” More importantly, increasing the awareness of consent culture makes it “easier to have conservations about consent.”“It’s not a one-to-one correspondence,” Nagel said. “But much like in the ’80s and ’90s when condoms became part of that culture, we want ‘consent’ to be part of ours. As [Kelsey Yale] said at the University of Wisconsin [as part of this campaign], ‘consent is the first thing I do with my mouth.’ We want to make this the norm.”..."...Ugliest Beautiful Moment (Or, Fuck Ina May) - S. Lynn Alderman at Mutha Magazine"...But here is why I am mad. I also felt completely flimflammed. For all my preparing, I wasn’t prepared at all. And I felt ashamed about it. I felt that I let my daughter down by being scared. And afterward, I didn’t want to talk about the birth. I hid my books and avoided telling the story. I didn’t want to think about ever having a baby again. I didn’t forget the pain like they say. I felt like a failure as a mother and as a woman. It didn’t matter that I knew it didn’t make sense to feel that way, it wasn’t logical. In the months to follow, in the safety of our darkened bedroom, tiny girl on my chest, I’d whisper to Luke, “Can you tell me the story of what happened? What happened? Was it really crazy? It was so crazy.”It isn’t really Ina May’s fault. I think she is inspiring, really, and important, in many ways. But that dream of a peaceful, powerful birth felt shattered by the bloody reality of it all and I need someone to blame. So I pick Ina May. I bet she’d understand.The real solution, I guess, isn’t to denigrate what I decided Ina May stands for. Personally, I believe that peaceful labor means you have to be comfortable with vulnerability, with needing help, with uncertainty and, well, I’m working on those things. I also know that sexual trauma can often be re-experienced during labor and, well, I can check that box, too.But I think something has been lost to women everywhere these days between the ”Hook me up with the epidural before I feel a single thing!” camp and the “I shall silently channel my female ancestors and squat down over a pile of sacred leaves” team. I think we are lacking the active cultivation of support between women and a closeness with the reality of life’s ugliest beautiful moments. I now feel more kinship with my grandmother, whose voice lowers, then rises two octaves remembering birthing her five, four of them at home, when she says “Ohhhhh, that pain!” I wish I had held her experience closer instead of thinking that I was going to be above it, to chant it away. That would have been better for me, and more in keeping with how I want to be in life, really. I wish I’d invited my whole broken self into the room.So I’d like to offer an invitation to any woman who wants to join a new team to take into birthing rooms or forest glens or wherever. A team called “That shit is totally crazy and you don’t have to ‘handle it’ because the baby is coming no matter what and I’ll be there to hold your hand quietly or to let you scream and that’s okay. However you get through it is a victory and I am so proud of you, sister.” Maybe something shorter..."...Masks Off - A Challenge to Men - Jeremy Loveday...Cassidy Lynn Campbell, Transgender Teen, Named Homecoming Queen - Cavan Sieczkowski at The Huffington post"..."If I win it would mean that the school recognizes me as the gender I always felt I was," she told the L.A. Times earlier this month. "But with all the attention, I realized it's bigger than me. I'm doing this for the kids who can't be themselves."The teen's mother said it's "wonderful" her daughter won, telling KABC, "I never would have thought in my lifetime that I would see this."Despite the honor, Campbell was apparently upset by the end of the night. She uploaded a tearful video to her YouTube account saying that people were being "ignorant" and "stupid" about her crowning."After 16 years of struggling, I finally do it and I finally am myself -- thinking I'll be so happy," she said. "It's just sad that everyone has to be so judgmental about it, and so hateful, and so mean and so negative. I've never done anything to any of these people. And I don't know why they have to be this way, when I've done nothing to them. It just hurts so bad because I feel just as much of a girl as all of them do... Everyone is just so ignorant."Campbell is not the first transgender girl to be named homecoming queen of an educational institution. In 2009, Jessee Vasold received the title at William & Mary in Williamsburg, Va. She is, however, Orange County's first..."...Almost 13 Million Women of Reproductive Age Were Uninsured in 2012 - Susan A Cohen at RH Reality Check"...Almost 13 million women aged 15-44, accounting for one in five (20.8 percent) women of reproductive age, were uninsured in 2012, according to a Guttmacher analysis of new U.S. Census Bureau data. Moreover, in that same year, almost four out of every ten (39.1 percent) reproductive-age women living below the poverty line lacked insurance coverage. These bleak statistics not only underscore the urgent and ongoing need for safety-net programs such as the Title X national family planning program, they also demonstrate the significant potential gains to be made as the Affordable Care Act’s expansion of public and private insurance coverage gets underway on January 1, 2014..."...Javon Johnson - "cuz he's black" (NPS 2013) via Button Poetry...On Behalf of the Kids Whose Families Depend on Food Stamps - Phaedra Ellis-Lamkins at The Huffington Post"...The first time I knew that being poor made me different than everyone else was when my mom sent me into the grocery store to get food with food stamps. We had just picked up our free cheese at the food bank. I was running into the store to get pickles for the cheese and pickle sandwiches that I took to school everyday. A woman behind me smirked and made a comment about food stamps being used for snacks. She had a cart full of groceries and she was judging our family based on the jar of pickles and food stamps. I did not understand what I had done wrong. I knew I was supposed to be ashamed and I was.As I grew older I dreamed of finding my voice in that line. I dreamt of telling the woman that my mom had left a violent relationship -- that she was going back to school, was working as a waitress and had only been on assistance for a short time.My mom became a public administrator who would pay back the assistance that she had received 10 times over..."...Favorite photos this week: From the Facebook Page of One Million Vaginas

From the Facebook Page of Rock the Slut Vote