We’re taking a short break tonight and throughout tomorrow to move the website over to the redesigned place. Hopefully by Thursday morning we’ll be up and running at the URL pandagon.net. If you’re using the Blogsome bookmarks, please switch back to pandagon.net. It will be directing to this website but switch over sometime tomorrow or Thursday. You can keep leaving comments here overnight.
For those who make the switch, the RSS feed and other important information will be there. I will post updates here in the meantime until everyone has made the switch over.
7PM tonight at MonkeyWrench Books , which is in one of my favorite parts of town, the North Loop area, which is like the hipster central shopping district. If you haven’t come out to a reading yet, try to make it to this one, because that might be the last for awhile.
If you haven’t seen it, here’s the highlight reel of my last reading at Book People.
Amanda Marcotte book reading from Marc Faletti on Vimeo.
It’s a good time! Luckily, for those in Austin who missed the experience the first time around, I’ll be reading at Book Woman tonight at 7PM. Show up and buy some books, yo. Feminist bookstores were the backbone of feminism for a long time, and we’re lucky to have one of the remaining ones in Austin, and they could use the support. I’m sure readers of this blog will find many tempting tomes at Book Woman. I won’t make it out alive with my hands empty, I’m sure. Much to the consternation of those who have to share my living space, because the piles of books around here on my “To Read” list is getting insane.
I’m hosting the Book Salon at Firedoglake today from 5-7PM EST. The book in question is Outright Barbarous: How the Violent Language of the Right Poisons American Democracy. The discussion will naturally be around framing, and particularly the right wing’s use of violent metaphors.
My own Firedoglake Book Salon for It’s a Jungle Out There: The Feminist Survival Guide to Politically Inhospitable Environments will be on June 7th. I’m also going to be joining the TPM Cafe round table the week of May 26th to discuss Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America.
Marc filmed my reading at Book People and reduced it to a 5 minute taster recap. Enjoy! And yes, that’s all hi-def and totally not YouTube.
The plan is for me to be on KVRX live in Austin tonight on “On The Fringe“. It’s right when 91.7 switches from KOOP to KVRX, so Austinites can hear me on-air on 91.7, but for those of you not in the Austin area, you can stream KVRX by pressing the “Listen Now” button on their homepage.
Okay, Austinites, you know where Book People is, I’m sure.
Random display at Book People.
Many cities in the U.S. are suffering under the onslaught of corporate bookstores, but we have an abundance of awesome independents in Austin, which is one reason I feel so lucky to live here. Book People, of course, is the behemoth of Austin independents, and that’s where I’ll be reading tonight at 7PM. There will also be readings at smaller independents with more explicit political missions. Austin also has one of the few remaining feminist bookstores in the country, called Book Woman, and I’ll be reading there in May. There’s also a reading at Monkey Wrench in May, another store I like to poke around in to find books of leftist importance that are harder to find anywhere else.
I’ll probably read a couple of short passages and then open the floor up to a Q&A, of which I encourage people to join. We had a lively one at Bluestockings, where all sorts of interesting points and tangents were raised.
Roger Gathman of the Austin-American Statesman interviewed me in preparation for this reading, and you can read that interview here. Ft. Worth Weekly also has a write-up.
I’m sorry. Plain and simple. I didn’t pick the offensive imagery in my book, but I should have caught it sooner than now. I didn’t and there’s no excuse. It was my first book, I was excited and happy, but I needed to have a more critical eye. I would do anything to remove racist images from the first printing of the book if I could, and I am relieved and happy to say that they will be removed from future printings. Seal Press has their note of apology up too, and they accept full responsibility for these mistakes. I really recommend reading it.
I can understand why anyone would choose to boycott a book with these images, and I respect that choice. Hopefully, once they are removed, people will reconsider supporting the book if they like the content. I, for one, will be ripping the pages out of my copy but keeping them as a reminder to be alert. Thank you to everyone who’s engaged in a conversation that’s been tough for me but productive nonetheless.
This is pretty much what I’ve got to say. I welcome your feedback below. I imagine things might get pretty intense, so I may not choose to say much more than this, but know that I’m reading and listening and respect your thoughts very much. Once again, I apologize for the images, my overlooking them, and any hurt this may have caused.
New York Pandagonians! Come out to the KGB Bar tonight for drinks and a reading from It’s a Jungle Out There: The Feminist Survival Guide to Politically Inhospitable Environments. If you can’t make it tonight, though, there’s a reading at Bluestockings on Thursday. Or, hell, come to both! I’ll be reading something different each time.
New Yorkers, I’m going to be in your city next week promoting the book, as well as just enjoying the city while my significant other attends/covers the NFL Draft. The week after, the book release party is scheduled in Austin.
KGB Bar
85 West 4th St
NY, NY 10003
Tuesday, April 22
7pm
Bluestockings
172 Allen Street
New York, NY 10002
Thursday, April 24
7 pm
Busy day today, and not that much time for blogging. I’m driving up to San Antonio for the ACLU conference, and after that, I’m hosting a book salon on This Common Secret at Firedoglake. Drop by the book salon this afternoon/evening if you have a chance.
In the meantime, I’m tickled that Margaret Cho is going to have a reality show on VH1. The long march of reality show subjects has mostly been a bunch of uber-sexist rock stars, either just being themselves or, in the case of Brett Michaels on “Rock of Love”, turning the sexism flame up to high by parading women in front of him like a dog and pony show to see who will win the chance to date him. Cho will be a breath of fresh air.
Word has it (from Lauren) that reviews of my book are beginning to trickle out. It comes out in April, y’all, and I’m currently putting together a schedule of book stores to do readings at. I will keep you updated on these.
In the meantime, here is the cover:
If you click the cover, you can see the Amazon page and pre-order it.
Okay, so I’m going to San Francisco tomorrow for the Sex Tech conference. I am looking for stuff to do Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday night. Suggestions? Ideas? Musts? I’ve never been to San Francisco. My family is trying to start a tradition of taking this specific silly hat with us when we travel to get photographs of us wearing the hat in front of iconic places. My cousin took it to Europe and had the hat in pictures of the Eiffel Tower, etc. What would be an easy place to get to from our hotel, which is downtown I do believe, where I could get pictures of myself in the hat in such a way that I’m unmistakeably in San Francisco?
For those interested in coming and perhaps meeting me (and telling me where to eat in person), I’m presenting on Wednesday afternoon. You can get the schedule from the website linked above. Just email and let me know, because I’m more fun when not surprised.
I’ve written a much longer piece inspired by the whole Jamie Lynn Spears thing. Check it out. I want to make it extremely clear that I don’t actually think there’s a damn thing wrong with 16-year-olds having sex with 19-year-olds, by any stretch of the imagination. What really bothered me about the whole thing, as you’ll see from the column, is the relentless emphasis on Spears “good” girl-ness, which is indistinguishable from basic immaturity. There’s a real sense that girls don’t grow up because they become mature, take ownership of their bodies and decisions, or anything like that. The dividing line is married/unmarried, not adult/child, which is what bothers me.
Jon Swift has asked me to think of my best post of the year. I can’t even begin to imagine what it might be, so like other bloggers who have been asked, I beg of you, dear readers, to nominate some favorites so I can narrow down the field.
I’m really happy with this week’s podcast. I’ve got a review of the Republican YouTube debate and the question of “How much time should she do?” and an interview with Harriette Wimms, who wrote a really great piece in the book Choice about the different treatment she got when she was getting infertility treatments as a woman perceived as straight (and married) and how she was treated when she came out and was applying for infertility treatments as a lesbian. There are a lot of great stories in that book, but Wimms’ story really blew my mind. The tone, the condescending treatment, all that was most like the pieces in the book that described pre-women’s liberation movement reproductive life, except that all this happened to her just a few years ago! It was a disturbing reminder of how far we haven’t come.
In the shadow of our alarmingly and charmingly pink capitol building, bloggers will be gathering in July for the annual Netroots Nation conference, right here in Austin, TX. Thanks especially to the fine folks at Democracy For Texas for putting together a proposal for why our city is perfect. One huge advantage we have over Chicago is that 95% of what you’d probably want to do if you’re in from out of town for after hours entertainment is in the downtown area; everything is quite walkable. (I can’t figure out from the website what hotels and convention centers they’re using, but if they’re using our actual convention center, it’s three blocks from the famous 6th St. area.) Wireless is abundant here, food is cheap, and so is beer.
PARTE THE FIRSTE
“I’ll tell you,” the OB/GYN said. “If you want to have children, I would start now. It’ll be difficult, and you’d probably better give yourself a good safety cushion. I wouldn’t be surprised if it takes you a year of trying.”
PARTE THE SECONDE
“I’ll tell you,” said the ER doc. “I doubt it’s anything serious, but let’s take an x-ray just to be sure.” 1.5 months later, Augustienne had been admitted to the ER with severe abdominal pain. She had taken a [negative] pregnancy test three days earlier, so we knew it couldn’t be that. After the x-ray, the ER doc came back in and said, “Well, we probably shouldn’t have done that x-ray, but it won’t hurt anything.” Hurt anything what, doc? “Well, you’re pregnant.” 1.5 months.
PARTE THE THIRDE
“I’ll tell you,” said the radiologist. “We definitely should have seen a heartbeat by now if this pregnancy were going to be viable. Let’s call your OB’s call partner, so that he can recommend that you go home, drink a glass of wine to calm your nerves, and wait 72 hours or so for nature to take care of the remains.” 72 hours later, nothing had happened. The radiologist and the OB had miscommunicated about the gestational age of the fetus and everything was, in fact, on schedule.
PARTE THE FORTH
“I’ll tell you,” said a different on-call OB, at about six months*, “this is early labor, and there’s no way the fetus would be viable. It’s also too early to take any extraordinary measures to avoid miscarriage. This is a foregone conclusion, sorry to say.” It was two hours before Augustienne’s regular OB found out what her call partner had been up to, rushed down to the hospital and started the magnesium drip, but the pregnancy was saved.
PARTE THE FIFTH
Repeat Parte the Forth, adding three weeks, changing a few minor details, and you have Parte the Fifth.
PARTE THE SIXTH
“I’ll tell you,” said the OB, two days after Augustlet was born. “That was the second largest head I’ve ever delivered.”
Seriously. It’s fricking gigantic. If they hadn’t done a c-section, Augustienne would still be laboring as I write this.
—————-
I’ll tell you, I have no idea if I’ve adequately captured the rollercoaster that was Augustlet’s gestation, but if it weren’t for the heroics of Augustienne, the heroics of the lone OB/GYN in that practice that knew what she was doing, and the heroics of me sitting around stressing about things, my life would be thinner today.
Update: I’ll also tell you what I probably should have realized I needed to tell you before: This post is a reflection on Augustlet’s sixth birthday. It being his first birthday as a kindergartner, it seemed momentous to me. AND THEREFORE IT SHOULD SEEM MOMENTOUS TO ALL OF YOU, I say in true parenting fashion.
On this week’s podcast, I have an interview with the researcher who did the study that revealed the amount of coerced pregnancy occurring in teenage girls in abusive relationships. Commenters asked to hear more about the research, so I went to the source, Dr. Elizabeth Miller, who did the study.
Also, a representative of the Family Violence Prevention Fund asked me to share this request with y’all:
Flushed pill packets. Holes poked in a condom. A boyfriend’s sneer that “Depo-Provera is for sluts.” Widespread but often unspoken, women’s experiences of birth control sabotage offer a prime example of how violence and abuse in intimate relationships are often linked with reproductive health and rights.
This September, a groundbreaking study by Dr. Elizabeth Miller of the Center for Reducing Health Disparities revealed just how common the problem really is. Miller found that a quarter of teenage girls with histories of abusive relationships living in poor neighborhoods in Boston reported that their abusive partners actively tried to get them pregnant by manipulating condom use, sabotaging birth control, and making explicit statements about wanting them to become pregnant.
Troubling stuff. And something that needs to be more openly discussed—both in the feminist community and in the wider national arena.
That’s where Pandagon readers like you enter the picture. The Family Violence Prevention Fund ( FVPF) is searching for women who are willing to share their personal experiences of birth control sabotage and other negative attempts–no matter how seemingly “minor”–to control their reproductive rights.
Have you ever had to hide your pill from your boyfriend or husband? Has your intimate partner been verbally or emotionally manipulative about your birth control choices? Have you ever been pressured into an abortion or an unwanted pregnancy? Sharing these and other stories with the FVPF will help us to launch an important new campaign to increase support for women’s reproductive health.
Your stories can be emailed to safewomenstories@gmail.com. If you’d like to share anonymously, let us know; if you’d prefer to take a more active role as a spokeswoman against birth control sabotage, tell us that, too. We’re eager to hear your thoughts, experiences, and ideas, and we think they’ll be a crucial part of this new initiative to put a widespread and serious problem on the public’s radar screen.
This project is a chance for you to speak out–recognizing that your voice is not alone and demanding that it be heard.
If you enjoy the great work that RH Reality Check does and want to help them do a better job, by the way, there’s a reader survey that you could fill out to help them out. It’s only a page from you, but would help them immensely in planning for the future.
Pandagon is nominated for Best Liberal Blog at the Weblog Awards. Vote early and often!
Update: Don’t forget the other categories. The Weblog Awards have a quality control issue, which is bunch of basement-dwelling wingnuts with no taste, no sense of humor, but plenty of time on their hands can vote often. Which results in tragedies that make the Disco Ball want to give up and shut off its lights like the fact that “Day By Day” is outgunning both “Penny Arcade” and “xkcd” in the Best Comic category.
I can take political stupidity, but that travesty to good taste makes me lose all faith in humanity.
I think I’m finally getting up to speed on the new job, and might actually write something of substance again sometime in the near future.
I usually don’t post earnest YouTube videos (preferring instead ironic, or kitschy, or what have you) but for whatever reason this particular song has been pretty much a constant companion during the recent upheaval, and it doesn’t get much more disgustingly earnest than this. So here it is:
| What Kind of Reader Are You? Your Result: Dedicated Reader
You are always trying to find the time to get back to your book. You are convinced that the world would be a much better place if only everyone read more. |
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| Obsessive-Compulsive Bookworm |
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| Book Snob |
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| Literate Good Citizen |
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| Non-Reader |
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| Fad Reader |
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| What Kind of Reader Are You? Create Your Own Quiz |
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First off, don’t forget to check out my newest podcast and column at RH Reality Check. This week seems like it’s mostly going to be a downer, politics-wise, with the S-CHIP crap and various other signs that we are a nation run by evil people. But the podcast is actually mostly good news—the Planned Parenthood victory, various pushbacks against anti-contraception forces. The column is about the standard issue arguments against universal health care. I wrote it before the argument for health care was, “But anyone who’s not sleeping on the street shouldn’t get health care!”, but I suspect we’ll be back to normal soon and the column is evergreen.
The other order of business is voting on a book club selection. Two books of the many I have queued up to read that strike me as likely to generate some interesting and varied discussion are Look Both Ways by Jennifer Baumgardner, a book on her experiences as a bisexual and some of the politicized meaning of that. The other is The Terror Dream by Susan Faludi. There’s other books I was considering, but I think that the advantage of these two is that they both have ideas in them that are controversial and should generate some lively discussion. So, which of the two would you rather book club?
New podcast is up, and I think this one is the best yet. I want to draw everyone’s attention to it because one of the segments I’ve done is, in my opinion, pretty important. I’m covering the protests of the Aurora, IL Planned Parenthood, and that’s been well-covered elsewhere, but I’ve brought in an angle I haven’t seen before, which is the history of why Planned Parenthood has started to use 3rd party companies to build their new facilities. Planned Parenthood says that they are doing it for safety reasons, so they can build the building in peace. Anti-choicers are playing the wide-eyed ingenues, with a, “Whatever do you mean? How could you possibly think that sweet little anti-choice nuts like us might use violence and intimidation to stop the building of these facilities, even though the very reason we’re angry you built them under the radar is that it prevented us from using violence and intimidation to stop you?”
And a lot of media is reporting the ridiculous claims that Planned Parenthood doesn’t have a right to protect itself, so I give some of the recent history from Austin, TX of exactly how the anti-choicers block the building of new facilities, why the concerns about violent intimidation are well-grounded, and why Planned Parenthood was wise to protect themselves from a well-established, violent, coercive attempt to stop them from building much-needed facilities. So please, check it out.
Thanks to Sanjayan for the copies of A Tragic Legacy by Glenn Greenwald and Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me) by Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson. I’m plowing through Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell right now for the book club, but I’ll probably hop right on these when I’m done.
While I have everyone’s attention, *cough*, new podcast. Better yet, subscribe on iTunes!
I’ll be in and out this weekend starting today. Because I’m going to the Austin City Limits Festival. The tickets were my birthday present from my punkass consort, and today’s going to probably be the biggest day for us. Here’s some You Tube videos of bands we plan to see:
Interesting new element: I paid a commercial radio voice actress to do my intro and outro. Constructive criticism and tips on good video and audio I can sample on the show always welcome. I have some really fun ones this time, including Larry Craig denying that he tried to have sex with congressional pages in 1982, though no one had accused him. Easter egg of the show: My intro music has a title relevant to the topic, if you know the song.
You can now subscribe on iTunes. I never really saw the brilliance of podcasting until I was shown how awesome it is to download them onto your iPod and listen to them in the car, while taking walks, etc.
The new Bitch magazine is out and I’m happy to announce that I have an article in it—it’s about Knocked Up, Waitress, and an upcoming book called Knock Yourself Up by Louise Sloan. The article is about looking beyond portrayals of pregnant women in less-than-traditional circumstances in the “will she or won’t she?” abortion lens and at how Hollywood gives into anti-single mother sentiments. More importantly, it’s why I think that Knocked Up really suffered because of it, since the “get them together at all costs” attitude that propelled the final 1/3 of the movie really betrayed the characterization up until that point.
I realize, rereading this article, that if you knew nothing about this movie but my article, you could walk away with the impression that the movie is about Allison’s dilemma more than Ben’s. I made that decision consciously, to reflect what I think was a real strength of Knocked Up, which is that it portrayed Judd Apatow’s strengths in making ensemble comedies more than 40-Year-Old Virgin did. His success is surely why he can move into the ensemble territory more, even though Hollywood clearly finds it harder to market ensemble pieces more than star vehicles. But he’s still in the middle ground, because while Knocked Up had the feel of an ensemble piece for the first 2/3 of the movie, it was marketed like a star vehicle and the last 1/3 of the movie had a hasty rewrite feel to reflect the marketing scheme. It wasn’t just that childbirth is not nearly as hilarious as Hollywood seems to think; it’s also that the movie basically dropped Allison and her family’s stories in favor of making it all about Ben in the end, and he wasn’t interesting enough to carry the movie by himself.
My first weekly column is up at RH Reality Check, and it’s about the bad messages in abstinence-only education. Check every Wednesday for it. Better yet, I recommend subscribing to their article feed—the level of commentary and news makes it a must-read site for anyone interested in these issues.
Don’t forget the Monday podcast either!
