This Week in Misogyny: Reading List

You didn’t think I was going to leave you with all the terrible news without giving you some lighter reading, did you? No worries, I found a ton of cool things for y’all to check out, though that’s not to say you might not have the occasional ragestroke. Come on in for a hefty dose of listicles, smart writing, hilarious satire, and PMag boyfriend Dulé Hill (you know that’s right). (As usual, trigger warnings for pretty much everything apply.)

I love the new White House PSA in which celebrities talk to men about ending sexual assault on college campuses. I do wish it didn’t fall into the annoying dude feminism trap of “What if it was your sister or daughter?” but mostly because I wish that wasn’t the only way that a lot of guys can relate to women’s issues.

Listicles!

• 23 ways feminists have made the world better for women, from PolicyMic.
• 7 lies we have to stop telling about African-American girls, from PolicyMic.
• 17 lies we need to stop teaching girls about sex, from PolicyMic.
• 8 most absurd lessons Americans teach kids about sex, from Salon
• 10 things not to say to a bisexual woman, from Cosmopolitan.
• 7 ways Bollywood is contributing to rape culture in India, from BuzzFeed.
• 13 snarky news headlines about women, improved, from BuzzFeed Community. (See more examples at The Vagenda Magazine on Twitter.)
• 18 books that changed how we felt about ourselves as women, from Huffington Post.

Recommended Reading

• Love, love, love the A.V. Club’s defense of the Bechdel Test and how it should actually be used. LOVE.
• Bustle looks at how we’re are affected by the barrage of images that chop up women’s bodies to depersonalize and sexualize them.
• Amanda Marcotte on the push to tell women that they’ll become mentally ill if they have an abortion.
• A new web app called Kitestring will let you set up an alert if you feel like you might be in a dangerous situation;  it’ll send a preset message to your emergency contacts if you don’t check in during a specified timeframe to confirm that you’re OK. It won’t necessarily stop anything bad from happening to you, but at least your friends will get an alert to check on you.
• Karin Gillespie on being a chick lit writer in an MFA program that only valued Serious Literature.
• Shannon Barber on being a Black Queer Author and how people are shitty if you dare to write about characters like yourself.
• Katie Heaney talks about the random messages men feel entitled to send her because she exists on the Internet. Having gotten a couple of these myself after I went on Jeopardy! and people tracked me down, I really identified with her frustration that there’s really no good way to respond to them or even talk about them without provoking an escalation.
• Lindsey Averill talks about getting death threats after releasing a trailer for her film Fattitude on Kickstarter.
• Zelda Fitzgerald wasn’t “crazy,” she was manipulated, gaslighted, and plagiarized by F. Scott Fitzgerald.
• Jessica Valenti explains yet again that feminists don’t hate all men, just misogynists.
• A new study has found that people who consider themselves to be attractive also tend to believe this puts them in a higher social class than less attractive people, and they’re less likely to care about issues of inequality. Though, ignore the dumb headline, and I’m not thrilled with this article’s conclusion that you should spend more time and money making yourself look good if you want to succeed; instead, let’s stop thinking that attractive people are inherently smarter and better. After all, it’s not vain to recognize the reality that society rewards people for looking good, it’s just shitty to think you actually deserve to be treated better for being attractive.
• A brief history of the “not all men” argument, complete with a hilarious comic.
• When men try to dismiss women by giving them infantilizing nicknames in debates.
• Jonathan McIntosh on male gamer privilege.
• TK at Pajiba rips on the “incompetent dad” trope in movies like Moms’ Night Out.
• So apparently The Other Woman really sucks. But at least it gave us this headline! “The Other Woman: A Shit Sandwich Wrapped In Shit, Lovingly Placed In A Bag Made Entirely of Shit.”
• The ridiculous language differences in how we talk about George Clooney’s and Jennifer Aniston’s engagements.
• Christianity Today actually acknowledged that women can have sexual desire! And then reminded them that masturbating is sinful and they shouldn’t do it. Sigh.

Just for Fun

• Reductress has some exercise moves to help us tone our flabby winter labia. (I pretty much lost it at “Queef-Burpees.”)
• The Onion pokes fun at Disney, who’s built up enough much good will with Frozen that they can totally go back to making misogynistic movies.
• More from The Onion: Teen Boys Losing Virginity Earlier And Earlier, Report Teen Boys. Snort.