Links round up

Posted by Lashings of Ginger Beer





A Game of Thrones might be problematic in all sorts of ways, but this is rather awesome... actor Peter Dinklage speaks out against abuse of people with dwarfism at the Golden Globe Awards.

Under Duress: Agency, Power and Consent: an excellent and very finely-nuanced post on the uses and problems of understanding consent as a binary:

I’d like to ask the reader to do a brief mental exercise. (If you’d rather not, just skip to the next paragraph.) I’d like you to remember the last time you found it difficult to give an explicit “no” to somebody in a non-sexual context. Maybe they asked you to do them a favour, or to join them for a drink. Did you speak up and say, outright, “No”? Did you apologise for your “no”? Did you qualify it and say, “Oh, I’m sorry, I can’t make it today“? If you gave an outright “no”, what privileged positions do you occupy in society, and how does your answer differ from the answers of people occupying more marginalised positions?

ETA: You can also now read Part 2 of the post at A Radical TransFeminist's site.

From the Hairpin: Alice Duer Miller, Are Women People? -- suffragist poetry from 1915.  An example:

Our Idea of Nothing at All 

("I am opposed to woman suffrage, but I am not opposed to woman."—Anti-suffrage speech of Mr. Webb of North Carolina.)

O women, have you heard the news
Of charity and grace?
Look, look, how joy and gratitude
Are beaming in my face!
For Mr. Webb is not opposed
To woman in her place! 

O Mr. Webb, how kind you are
To let us live at all,
To let us light the kitchen range
And tidy up the hall;
To tolerate the female sex
In spite of Adam's fall. 

O girls, suppose that Mr. Webb
Should alter his decree!
Suppose he were opposed to us—
Opposed to you and me.
What would be left for us to do—
Except to cease to be?

Miller would so have been a Lasher.