Weekly Round-up and Open Thread

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It’s time for another round-up and links this week cover everything from Essena O’Neill quitting social media to Adele’s Rolling Stone cover!

If you’d like to comment on one of the issues covered or share another article that we haven’t included, feel free to get involved in the comments section below or on Facebook/Twitter.

As always, please remember that linking does not automatically mean endorsement or agreement from the F-Word and that some links may be triggering. It is also worth noting that, while we welcome engagement on the weekly round-up, any comments including racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic or disablist language will be deleted.

The Dubious Ethics Of Twitter Mining (The Establishment)

From the article: “But there’s a flip side to all of the positives offered by sites like Twitter. Increased visibility means an increased chance of harassment. Tweets are used by media outlets as free content, often without the consent of the Twitter user. Rather than sitting back and learning from conversations about oppression, people often treat these discussions as a sort of public spectacle. And while these things happen across the board to members of various marginalized groups—women, queer folks, disabled folks, trans folks, and people of color, to name a few—they are done most often and most egregiously to women of color.”

Anonymous sexism in paleoanthropology (Medium)

Essena O’Neill: The Instagram Star Who Quit Social Media (Man Repeller)

My Instagram Pics with the Most Honest Captions I Could Give (Broadly)

New PM unveils cabinet that looks ‘like Canada’ (Al Jazeera)

‘Virgin’ Sex Toy With A Hymen ‘Waiting To Be Popped’ Rightfully Angers The Internet (Bust)

I hate women. You know the ones: skinny, blonde, who know nothing about football ( New Statesman)

All Hail: How Adele’s ‘Rolling Stone’ cover destroys the male gaze (Noisey)

I Love Dick is one of the most important books about being a woman – no wonder it’s being dismissed (Independent)

An open casket (Daily Kos)

“You’re So Brave!”: Pro Sub Stigma And Its Discontents (Tits and Sass)

From the article: “”Often, the arguments used to justify the idea of pro-subbing as inherently treacherous are reminiscent of those used by prohibitionists to marginalize all those within the sex industry. SWERF rhetoric claims that no sex worker can ever truly consent to transactional sex, and that even when we do, our work is so fundamentally risky that we are implicitly at fault when a client violates our boundaries. In the context of escorting and other “vanilla” services, we can see that this is a clearly flawed argument. Yet when it comes to kink, many people seem less willing to acknowledge that while we may consent to certain forms of erotic masochism within a scene, that does not mean that we should expect to be hurt in any other un-negotiated way.””

A tip for the guys: don’t be the guy who records consent (Another Angry Woman)

“Radical Self-Reliance” Is Killing People (Kitty Stryker via Medium)

From the article: “Discussions of how privilege entwines with success are seen as being “overly sensitive” or reflective of jealousy. Even being able to begin to compete in a meritocracy requires technology, time, and often education, none of which come cheap. If we spend our time networking, we wonder if we should have been buckling down and learning things… and if we studied hard we wonder if we needed to talk to more people…”

OP-ED: Germaine Greer’s ‘Censorship’ Is a Red Herring (Out)

From the article: “In 2015, Greer can only command a platform of this size by inciting a moral panic over “censorship.” Indeed, this is the most I have heard about Greer since she was on Celebrity Big Brother. In other words, if you can go on TV to repeat your “censored” ideas, you are not being censored. You are not being silenced. You are louder than ever. So where does it come from, this unreasoning belief that cis feminists are in terrible danger from the evil trans woman thought police?”

A surprisingly difficult question for Facebook: Do I have boobs now? (Guardian)

From the article: “Facebook was widely lauded in 2014 when it replaced a binary-gender choice (of male or female) with a drop-down list of multiple options and then by allowing users to input a custom gender of their own choosing in a free-form field.

But as trans activists point out, this progressive policy is at odds with the nudity policy of sorting users into either “male” or “female” according to the appearance of their bare nipples.”

Should We Be Worried About Feminism Becoming Too Trendy? (Man Repeller)

SEO Madness Turns Emma Watson Into Malala’s White Savior (The Establishment)

From the article: “Words matter. In journalism, this adage holds even more weight. The placement of words in a headline can slant a reader’s perception of an issue, a person, or a community. With a critical media literacy lens applied, it becomes clear that this Guardian headline [Malala Yousafzai tells Emma Watson: I’m a feminist thanks to you] reinforces notions of white saviors helping naive girls of color embrace their own power, when there is arguably no one young person in the world more politically astute or influential than Malala Yousfzai.”

Please Note: The F-Word takes does not condone the use of disablist language and apologises to any readers who may find the use of the word ‘madness’ in the context used in the article title offensive. Despite this, the article itself is an excellent and important read.

Women are never straight – they are either gay or bisexual, study suggests (Independent)

The photograph is used with credit to L.Taylor. It shows a landscape scene. In the foreground there are two bare trees, silhouetted against a very unusual looking sky; a mottled blue and pink colour. In the background there are houses and, behind those, a forest is visible