By Jess McCabe | 9 May 2008, 17:08

Dollymix blogger Natalie Lue did an interview with the Daily Mail’s ‘Femail’ section, only to be misrepresented, misquoted and stuffed into a piece about women taking revenge on their exes online - despite being assured otherwise.

As well as the insight into the ethics of the Mail’s hacks, here’s a little detail about the process you might be interested in:

A photographer came around the following day and told me that I couldn’t wear jeans because the Daily Mail likes it’s women to wear skirts or dresses! I felt like I was back at my convent school being chastised by the nuns!

Surprise, surprise, eh? You can check out Natalie’s actual blog about dating - not a revenge at all - here.

Still with the Daily Mail, this must surely be one of their worst articles in a long while. The headline? “Why women are to blame for killing off real men”.

The saddest thing about this story, is the writer Carol Sandler’s long description of all the work that women are expected/take on, in the pursuit of ‘reforming’ male partners:

And so we taught them the merits of changing their socks and soaping their armpits.

Perhaps we bought them style magazines, the odd designer label and a dab of face goo, too, that we might enjoy a kiss without our faces being rubbed raw.

We forced them to learn one end of a nappy from another so that they might bask in the admiration of friends when they demonstrated their dexterity with a safety pin.

We patted them on the back for donning a pinny and cooking a four-course evening meal.

Especially if they’d shopped for it, too.

We preached to them the importance of equality, within and without the workplace. We harangued them for their “sexism”, real or imagined.

We praised them beyond measure if they managed to shed a public tear.

We belittled the essence of masculinity. Even when, on the face of it, we meant no harm.

Clinton has been fucking up again, making comments that imply hard working Americans=white Americans - Ampersand has a round up of links covering the issue.

Time Magazine put out a list of top leaders. Suffice to say it was lacking in women (and included Vladimir Putin as fawned over by Madeleine Albreight. Ugh.) So Feminist Peace Network is compiling an alternative list, including Jennifer Drew, whose name you might recognise!

Meanwhile, our illustrious mayor is attending Pride this year, Pink News reports:

It will be the first Pride event that Boris Johnson has attended.

No shit.

Lesbian Dad has some thoughts on the process of re-interpretting children’s books from margin to centre:

The Philharmonic Gets Dressed is a current fave. Highly recommended, with the caveat that I keep having to ad lib a coupla mannish lesbians getting dressed in men’s duds (all 105 orchestra members are tracked from their showers to their dressing up to their subway rides to Philharmonic Hall; it’s pants for the mens, dresses for the womens, and the devil — that would be me and my cross-dressing kin — take the hindmost).

It’s a familiar routine, though. She’s quite well aware how un/underrepresented our family structure and her Baba’s gender are, in most of the media we consume. And she’s also learning first-hand how you re-write whatever it is you’re reading, so as to push yourself from margin to center.

Black Women in Europe links up some places where you can click banners to ‘end world hunger’ - i.e. corporate sponsors will make donations to charities that supply food to areas where there are shortages. Food is a feminist issue, Diary of an Anxious Black Woman points out (via Jender)

Quench zine considers the Body Image Project, set up to provide a place for women to tell their stories.

Black Looks notes that the 15th of May is blog for human rights day.

Over at pregnant drug dealing prostitutes, Davita Cuttita considers thin privilege at some length. The post is well worth reading in its own right, but she links to this great essay at Fresh Yarn, in which Kimberley Brittingham explains how she came up with the idea of a fake book jacket, in the style of those self-help manuals, called “Fat is Contagious, How Sitting Next to a Fat Person Makes YOU Fat”.

On two separate occasions, I spied women sitting opposite me jotting down the title and author on the back of a phone bill or a drug store receipt, scrawling hastily between surreptitious glances from beneath an overhang of hair. I wondered: were these women seeking to learn which trendy nutritional supplement would protect them from the perils of infectious fatness? Or were they burning to write a venomous letter to the author, verbose in its feminist ideologies?

And, finally, 60 students at a New York high school staged a cross-dressing protest in support of a transgender student, The Bilerico Project has more.