Links round-up

Posted by Lashings of Ginger Beer Time


There's nothing so over-rated as heterosexuality: one cis "queer-ish" woman's account of the trying to conceive, and the oddities of intercourse.

Brian Stuart at Shakesville neatly explains how Dan Savage Continues To Make Sure It Doesn't Get Better for Fat People.

[CN: Rape threats, threats of violence, misogyny] Cristy Cardinal gives a run-down on Daniel Tosh's inciting male members of his audience to rape a female audience member: receives rape threats herself in turn. Ah, the lovely mainstream comedy industry.

Adele Haze at Heresy Corner contextualises Fifty Shades of Grey Grr:

Here’s something you may not know about kinky people: we are hungry for mentions of our lifestyle and its expressions in the mainstream media. When a book, film, article or a documentary focuses specifically on kinky people, there is usually a lot of buzz on the message boards and around dinner tables. Having lived through several BDSM-centric cultural events - large-scale, like the film “Secretary”, or minor, like episodes of police procedurals featuring a BDSM club here, a professional dominant there - I can say that on the whole, we don’t expect to see anything positive...

London Pride 2012

Posted by Cleopatra

So I went to World Pride in London on Saturday. Pride, to my mind, is one of those things that come round once a year, like your birthday or Christmas. You wander into Soho, you watch the parade, you go check out the rally and booths in Trafalgar Square, meet as many of your queer friends as you have the energy to find in all the crowds. (Then depending on said energy levels, stay out and drink for a bit or go home.) I’ve gone every year I’ve been in London since I started identifying as queer.

Links round-up

Posted by Lashings of Ginger Beer Time

Asaf Einy for Israel's FOD magazine creates a photoshoot featuring men with femme-coded hairstyles. It's gorgeous.

[image description: a young, thin white man sits on a stool wearing a pair of white trunk-style undershorts 

and a grey hooded sweatshirt.  His dark hair is backcombed into a 1960s-style beehive with a flowing fringe]

Busty Girl Comics! Artist Rampaige discusses the joys and nusiances associated with being in possession of breasts that occasionally get in the owner's way. She also explicitly states that her comics are for everyone, whether they identify as busty, as girls, or otherwise.

Over in fandom, lightgetsin has written an essay entitled Do I Do It For You? Service Kink & Disability - a thoughtful discussion about how to negotiate the intimacy and power of service relationships, regardless of whether they're romantic, and how these relationships often appear to casual observors.

[CN: Misogyny, harassment, violence] The latest re: Anita Sarkeesian: one particular harasser has now made an online game where people can virtually punch Sarkeesian in the face. An in-depth discussion with extracts from the misogynist twerp game-creator's Twitter feed is here.

And all of us here have been here all the time: Historicism, non-normativity, and People Like Me

Posted by Galatea



This is prompted by an epic debate thread that, at the time of writing, seems to be just kicking off over at Shakesville (ETA: The discussion thread has now closed). In the midst of a rather interesting post about stereotyping of Scottish people in the upcoming Disney/Pixar film Brave (link contains spoilers!) several commenters have also begun a discussion about the representation of non-white people in medieval-themed fantasy writing. As the link isn't good for anyone who wants to stay spoiler-free for the film (*shakes fist in the direction of movie Powers That Be who have proclaimed that UK viewers shall not be allowed to see it until August*), I've excerpted a couple of comments below:

(discussion below the cut does NOT include spoilers for Brave: please do not post any in the comments!).

The Artist's Way

Posted by Annalytica


A couple of years ago someone recommended I should read "The Artist's Way" by Julia Cameron, a book about unblocking creativity. It sounded interesting, so I borrowed it - and then it sat on my shelf unread for an embarrassingly long time.

Then, a few months ago, I found out about a course running in Oxford. Course participants work through the exercises in "The Artist's Way" and meet weekly to discuss their progress. In theory, this was something I could arrange to do without paying for a course - except by this point I had had the book for two years and done nothing, and I thought the structure of weekly classes might be what I needed to motivate myself.

I had several reasons for thinking that unblocking creativity was something I should work on. For one thing, when we started this blog I was overflowing with ideas for posts and seriously considering professional freelance writing. Recently it seems to be getting harder and harder to come up with ideas, which is why you haven't seen much of me on here lately. When rehearsing Lashings acts, I often freeze up, feeling self-conscious and unsure what to do with my body, and needing quite precise directions from other Lashers. Sometimes this direction helps, and other times trying to perform movements recommended by someone else only feels even more awkward. If I were more in touch with myself and my own feelings, and less concerned with consciously thinking all my movements through, perhaps I could express myself and my characters in a more spontaneous and natural way.

Links round-up

Posted by Lashings of Ginger Beer Time


Alternative Sex Education - an e-Petition to the Department for Education to include domestic violence, rape and sexual assault, and safe-sex for same-sex couples in sex education.

What looks set to be an epic discussion kicks off at Shakesville: Melissa McEwan on nationalism and stereotyping in the new Disney/Pixar film Brave (link contains spoilers). [TW: discussion of rape]

The blogosphere gets a-rumbling with numerous discussions of sexism and geek culture: Foz Meadows writes eloquently on gaming's rape culture and the misogynist attacks on FemFreq's Anita Sarkeesian, shortly before the issue reignites with several responses to the new Tomb Raider trailer. The thoughtful responses from Cara Ellison and Susan Arendt are very different and both worth reading, as is this [potentially highly triggering] article from an anonymous male survivor of rape: this story has also hit the Guardian twice, via Mary Hamilton and Charlie Brooker. Meanwhile, The Vicious Pixie and Ellen Lundgren take on a self-congratulatory meme about 'geek culture' beating 'pop culture' for female role models.

Merritt Kopas creates an amusing in-browser game that satirises TERFs (trans exclusionary radical feminists) and predicts their becoming 'utterly irrelevant'.

Femfresh, purveyors of the sort of 'feminine hygiene' that encourages shame, faced a hilarious social media backlash on their Facebook page - it's been deleted now, but check out some archived quotations and the parody poster made by Adventures in Menstruating!

 Virginia Howes laments the count-down to Independent Midwifery becoming illegal, decreasing the freedom women will have to make choices about how and where they birth their babies. More info about the institutionalisation of birth and therefore the restriction of the rights of mothers and midwives in the short film Freedom for Birth.

 A testament to the power of online activism - 9-year-old schoolgirl Martha Payne's blog documenting her poor-quality school lunches leads to improved meals within weeks, a global media storm, and over £100,000 raised for a charity feeding impoverished children.

Last week's Cutlery Drawer fundraiser, which featured a double set from Lashings, raised £244 for The Harry Harris LGBT+ Library!

A collection of poetry dealing with gender, sexuality and identity is reviewed by Tor, including particular mention of "Hair" by the awesome Hel Gurney.

Snow White and the Huntsman

Posted by Cleopatra



So I went to see Snow White and the Huntsman this week and I have a lot of feelings about it, so I thought what better place to put them than the Lashings blog.

(I’m going to talk in some detail about various choices the film made in their re-telling of the Snow White fairytale so spoilers for stuff like that. However, if you are familiar with the fairytale, there are not really going to be a ton of surprises here, except for interpretation/artistic choices/that sort of thing.)