Olympic fencer Shin A Lam refuses to leave the floor after unfair ruling.

(via ahoneko)

thepoliticalnotebook:

Since yesterday was the opening ceremonies of the 2012 Olympics, here’s a round-up of some gender and sexuality related news for this year’s games, the good and the bad. Above is a Reuters photograph of Sarah Attar, a middle-distance runner, and one of the two Saudi Arabian women sent to this year’s Olympics, as she took part in the Parade of Nations yesterday. Here are more photos of Saudi Arabia’s female athletes at the opening ceremony.

• This is a pre-Olympics article from this June on Deadspin, but it’s a truly fabulous article. Marking the retirement of Olympic gymnast Shawn Johnson, Dvora Meyers looks at how critics and the public discuss female gymnast’s bodies in code. Unbelievably insightful and relevant to the coming weeks.
• This will be the fourth Olympics for Australian swimmer Liesel Jones, who first competed at age 14 and has since collected three gold medals, four silvers and a bronze and holds a number of world records. Some people, though, just want to take some page space to consider the important question of whether or not she’s gained weight.
• Clare Malone wrote yesterday at The American Prospect about female boxers, aesthetic femininity and our perceptions of women we see as competing in men’s sports. This is the first Olympics to feature women’s boxing.
• And, of course, there is the hormone question. Rebecca Jordan-Young and Katrina Karkazis wrote a mid-June op-ed for the New York Times decrying the IOC’s policies on sex verification, which will ban women with hyperandrogenism (naturally heightened levels of testosterone) from competition because it gives them an advantage deemed unfair. In the conversation had on Andrew Sullivan’s the Daily Dish, a number of points were brought up, including that other biological advantages, like Michael Phelps’ genetic disorder that gives him long limbs and hypermobile joints or other athletes who have unusually large aerobic capacities, are not treated in this way. (Oh, and remember Caster Semenya? She’s now reportedly receiving some sort of treatment that allows her to qualify under IOC hormone regulations and is being hailed as more “feminine.” Dear lord.) Check out Feministing’s mid-June post about policing femininity in sports and the Olympics.
• Quite disappointing news… Afghan female boxer Sadaf Rahimi was originally extended a wildcard invitation by the IOC despite not qualifying officially. The International Boxing Association, however, has decided that she cannot compete, citing concerns over her abilities in the ring. Check out some amazing photos of her, though. She’s still a trailblazer.
• Keelin Godsey also won’t be attending the games. He was hoping to be the first openly transgender competitor.
• In awesome things that have come out of the Olympics, though, the US managed to celebrate the 40th anniversary of Title XIV in true style by sending more female athletes than male to London, a first for us. 
• It’s also a global first: the first time that all participating countries are sending women to compete in the Olympics. Saudi Arabia, Brunei, and Qatar have ended their tradition of sending only males to compete.
• Saudi Arabia’s female judo competitor, Wojdan Ali Seraj Abdulrahim Shahrkhani, is currently in negotiations to be able to compete in a hijab.
• Over at the Washington Post, Nadia Mohammed considers the pivotal roles played in 2012’s Olympic Games by Muslim women.
• And check out some pieces profiling women athletes… The Atlantic on 17-year-old US boxer Claressa Shields, AKA “T-Rex.” Buzzfeed profiles America’s strongest person, Sarah Robles, who lives in poverty and remains ignored by sponsors despite her weightlifting prowess. Vogue has an awkward profile of flyweight US boxer Marlen Esparza (Vogue is awkward, not Esparza), but her story is definitely worth a read.

(via bluepeets)

silversolicitor:

gazmonster:

erections:

Anne Hathaway was a cat woman in 2002, and now she is Catwoman in 2012

AKJDNFKEJNWFKJEF

WAIT DID SHE

SHE DID 

huh

bigbigtruck:

mynameismad:

So for a long time I’ve had this idea for a MAGICAL GIRL COMIC???? about a girl who is chosen to become a magical girl, but wait she doesn’t have time for this shit she just graduated high school and she’s gotta go to college in the fall, so she breaks the rules and gets all of her coworkers from her part-time summer job at a convenience store to help her destroy a whole bunch of awful monsters so she can make her dorm move-in date in September. 

But the only way they can help her is if they all wear pieces of her STUNNINGLY BEAUTIFUL sailor-moon-wedding-gown-esque magical girl costume.

Eric gets first dibs on the tiara. 

i would read the shit out of this.
(also attn: autumn and amanda)

zerevolution:

Palestinian Women:

Kicking zionism’s ass since 1947.

(via socialuprooting)

thegreenpapaya:

Here’s a short snip-it of an article on the topic of Hmong women, traditional roles and how that plays out in American society.  

June 11, 2012

By GOSIA WOZNIACKA, Associated Press

FRESNO, Calif. (AP) — In a crowded refugee camp in Thailand, Misty Her often sneaked away to a school house and listened through a hole in the wall. She knew she could never attend, being Hmong and a girl.

For centuries, the Hmong — an ethnic minority group clustered in Asia’s mountain villages — held to a rigid division in gender roles. Boys were revered and nurtured. Girls were men’s property, to be married off for a dowry, forbidden to study or work.

Even in California’s Central Valley, where Her’s family and other Hmong refugees fled en masse after fighting in America’s secret war in Laos, rigid roles endured. But Her would help break that mold.

Now 36, she overcame resistance, got a college degree and climbed the career ladder. She became an assistant superintendent with the Fresno Unified School District this school year.

So Vicky Xiong teaches embroidery to her 12-year-old daughter Rachel Lor, who plans to become a fashion designer someday.

“The hope,” Xiong said, “is that our girls can realize that you can be successful and still be Hmong.”

via MPR News

(via bluepeets)

sydneyflapper:

feastingonroadkill:

Hollywood victim. Olive Young aka ‘Yang Aili’

“Born Olive Young in St Louis Missouri on June 21, 1903 or 1907,  In Chinese film credits she was billed as “Yang Aili”  杨爱立, a Sinocized version of her actual name. Olive’s original trip to China came at the age of 16, when her parents sent her to Hong Kong to complete her education.  The record doesn’t tell us specifically how she got into acting, but two years later she was in Shanghai, where she appeared in two films for the Anglo-American Tobacco Company’s Film Department in 1925.  The following year, she moved to the Great Wall studio, and quickly became one of its leading stars, acting the lead or a major supporting role in seven silents made between 1926 and 1928.  In 1929, Olive Young had the lead in one more Chinese film, with the Minxin Film Studio, after which she returned to the U.S.  She had a brief career in Hollywood, appearing in three early sound movies, in one of which, the 1930s Western “Trailin’ Trouble”  starring Hoot Gibson, she had a major supporting role.  During this time, she seems to have been a favorite on the Hollywood party circuit, as her name turns up in several gossip columns of the day.

 Her last film role was an uncredited part as a maid in 1931, after which the record of her life is blank until the end.  At the end of the 1930s, Olive was a New York-based nightclub singer, and on the evening of September 29, 1940, after appearing in a floor show in Bayonne, NJ, she collapsed and was taken to the hospital.  She contracted pneumonia, and died on October 4, 1940.”

I just went looking for more on Olive Young / Yang Aili after lascasartoris’s post!

Fascinating story - I’d love to see more work done on her, as it sounds like there’s a rich vein to research there. Would love to know what happened in her “missing years” before her death.

(via bluepeets)

thevintagerat:

checkmateprolifer:

This is Gisella Perl, a  a successful Jewish gynaecologist in Sighet, Romania in the 1930s and 40s. She was taken to Auschwitz in 1944, where she treated women with kindness and compassion. She was asked to report all pregnant women to Josef Mengele- better known as the Angel of Death. When she discovered what was done to them (medical experimentation and torture, ending with often being thrown alive into the crematoriums) she vowed that there would never again be a pregnant woman in Aschwitz. So she began the abortions. 

In her time in Aschwitz, Dr. Perl performed over 3,000 abortions in spite of her professional and religious beliefs as a doctor and an observant Jew. Any babies born alive in Aschwitz were usually drowned, despite Mengele’s orders to allow them to starve to death. Because of Dr. Perl’s brave actions in performing these abortions, many women made it out of Aschwitz alive, able to go on and have families after the war. 

Although she was vilified by many for her actions, there is no doubt that she is not the monster abortionists are made out to be. This woman, this doctor, this abortionist was a hero. Despite her personal beliefs, she understood what had to be done. If you click the photo, you can go to a more extensive biography of her- she was a true hero.  

amazing

(via spookyhouse)

Plastic wrapped so you can’t masturbate in the aisles!

(Source: wtfanime, via spookyhouse)