More links! So much homework to catch up on, but I wanted to post these anyway!

Brought to my attention by Threadbared on Facebook, a 15-year-old Muslim girl in France shaves her head over headscarf ban.

At school on Friday she said: “I will respect both French law and Muslim law by taking off what I have on my head and not showing my hair.”

Awesome analysis of the NiqaBitches video I posted about a few days ago.

The self titled “Niqabitches” aren’t really a novelty in the discourse surrounding the niqab. While my first instinct was to rally behind these women, on the basis of their irreverent and seemingly unorthodox parade of “anti-burqa ban” sentiment, I later retracted my enthusiasm when I found myself asking the obvious questions: Did this accomplish what these ladies wanted it to? Was their message even clear? And if not, then isn’t this display damaging to Muslim women?

It was announced Monday that TV show Huge was canceled and would not run another season. (Personally, I’m really pissed about this. It was a genuinely good show and it was amazing to see fat people in a context that showed them as human beings rather than the butt of jokes). Jezebel talked to Nikki Blonsky about her thoughts on the show’s cancellation.

This is what a lot of people in America look like. We’re all not skinny tiny little people. This is what we look like, and it’s OKAY. It’s okay for us to go to the beach, or wear a bathing suit at the pool. We should be able to be comfortable and proud.

Oprah gets schooled on HIV by a guest on her show.

Midway through the segment, Oprah attempted to compliment Bridget on how healthy she looked by saying, “You look at people like Magic Johnson, and you realize that you can live a healthy, happy, long life” with HIV. But Bridget didn’t want to hear any of that. She interrupted Oprah and proceeded to make that experience a teachable moment for Oprah. Not everybody, she explained, has access to cutting edge treatment.

Homophobia starts to manifest itself early in young boys, and both straight and gay boys are affected by it.

But to fight intolerance against gay boys, we also need to acknowledge its toll on straights – and our entire culture. Homophobia hurts all of our boys, by driving a wedge between them. Sharing your deepest feelings with another man? That’s so . . . gay. Or so we’ve been taught.

Here are some links to stories I think are important from this past week:

The word ‘Latina’ banned from Google search results. What?

But according to the Daily Beast the hackers at Hackers Quarterly have figured out a list of words that Google has banned from Google Instant results, presumably to protect under-age users from turning up explicate results. On the list is obviously explicate terms, and some controversial terms, but “meat”, “teen” and yes, “Latina” are also on the list.

Awesome breakdown of the whole Jon Stewart-Rick Sanchez debacle.

His comments on the biased nature of news media were dead on until they veered into bigoted territory. His attacks on Jon Stewart, specifically about his ethnicity, veered fully into old antisemitic tropes. This led to Sanchez’s firing from CNN on the day the news broke.

Fantastic post about the trend of cultural appropriation of native culture. Includes a link to a zine about that, too!

i am fed up with it. fed up with seeing “Othered” cultures reduced to shitty stereotypes for uncritical (mostly) white people to buy into, as a product, and then to attack me when i ask them to think about what they are wearing, when i ask them why they choose to wear what they wear. is that such an offensive question? is it really us who are so hypersensitive and who take things “too seriously,” or is it you who just wants to refuse to think for two seconds?

Tennager actually shot because he refused to pull up his pants. What the fuck?

Tucker told cops that he and Taylor were walking to a candy store when Bonds “began yelling at them to pull their pants up,” according to an Memphis Police Department arrest warrant affidavit. “Bonds got angry when Tucker and Taylor refused and that’s when the three got into a heated argument,” reported police.

Police in Australia taser an Aboriginal man 13 times.

The CCC released the tape of the Aboriginal man being repeatedly stunned while surrounded by nine officers. He was unarmed, and was not threatening the police, who attacked him after he refused to be strip-searched. The commission said it was likely he was suffering from a mental illness or was affected by drugs.

Lesley at Fatshionista’s beautiful post in response to the homophobia related suicides of this past month. (As well as the video version for the “It Gets Better Project”)

I will not say that people will always be easier on you, later in life, just because you’re older. That’s not a promise I can make. What I can promise is that while the world may not dramatically change, you will. You will learn to let other people’s bullshit go. You will learn to bend without breaking, and you will learn to fight without backing down. And every single day that you go out into the world as yourself without apology and without regret, you are changing things, bit by bit.

Speaking of the “It Gets Better Project”, this post is really interesting and greatly complicates the idea that this will help LGBTQ youth.

7. We shouldn’t be talking, we should be listening. Telling our own stories from our incredibly privileged positions, overwrites youth experience.

Homophobia in high schools may be framed as an American problem, but it is just as rampant in Canadian high schools.

“It’s a non-issue for so many people these days. They don’t recognize how bad the situation is for so many people,” said Taylor. She and University of Manitoba sociology Prof. Tracy Peter are conducting a national survey on homophobia in schools.

“Kids are being tormented and terrorized, and very little is being done about it,” she said.” Winnipeg Free Press

Confused by the point of the “Where do you like to put your purse?” meme on Facebook? Yeah, I don’t get it either but Feministing sums it up & why it’s inadequate in raising awareness about breast cancer.

Most of the people are doing this because it fun or funny but they aren’t doing anything more. They’re not thinking about the implications of their statement. They’re not doing a self-exam which is likely to lead to early breast cancer detection. They’re not funding research which can lead to a cure.

In 2005, 15-year-old Ashley was facing trial in Manhattan Family Court for lying to police after she told officers she didn’t know who had assaulted her on the way to school.

As she waited in the court’s holding area for her court appearance, juvenile counselor Tony “Tyson” Simmons came up to the handcuffed girl, took her in an elevator to the building’s basement, and raped her.

Moments later, Ashley — who’s withholding her last name for fear of reprisal — was in the courtroom being sentenced to 12 months in prison for filing a false police report. This week, Simmons was sentenced to 10 years’ probation for the sexual assault on Ashley and two other teens.

It took me a minute to believe this was a real news story. But then I remembered that this kind of shit happens all the time. Let’s break this story down to see just how ridiculous it is.

1) This girl is in court because she came to police about being sexually assaulted on her way to school. She tells police that she didn’t know who had sexually assaulted her, and because of this, gets charged with ‘filing a false police report’. Did she get charged with this because she actually did lie about the assault? (Which seems highly unlikely) Or did she get charged because police simply assumed she was lying about an assault for attention when she couldn’t identify the perpetrator? I’m going to bet it’s the latter. However, I don’t know what exactly is meant by ‘filing a false police report’ so if I’m messing up on police lingo, please inform me.

2) While she’s in court, in handcuffs, waiting to go to trail for this false report, juvenile counselor Tony Simmons takes her into the elevator to the basement and rapes her.

3) He brings her back upstairs to the courtroom and Ashley is charged with 12 months in prison. While a man who raped her less than half an hour ago is standing in the same room.

4) Facts later come up that he not only raped Ashley, but had been found guilty of raping a ’16-year-old in a pantry, and assaulting a 15-year-old in a waiting area.’

5) For this, he is on 10 years probation and must register as a sex offender.

Looking at all these facts, it’s obvious to see what the justice system sees as truly deviant. Not a man who used his position as a juvenile counselor to prey on young teenage girls, but rather a girl who actually dares to come forward about sexual assault. She was not believed the first time she came forward, what would make her think anyone would believe her a second time?

There are so many reasons I love James Franco, and this photo on the cover of the new Candy Magazine just added one more to the list.

“CANDY is the first fashion magazine ever completely dedicated to celebrating transvestism, transexuality, cross dressing and androgyny, in all its manifestations.”

Can I just say how excited I am that a magazine like this exists? And James Franco being on the cover of it? Almost too much awesome to be true.

James Franco has been exploring sexuality for sometime — his art show included lots of male genitalia; in his student film he “dashes” through the Louvre wearing a penis on his nose. He did an interview with The Advocate, the world’s leading gay news source. He’s played gay men, and directed movies about gay men. He says he’s not gay, but he certainly seems interested in sexual identity, gender and self-expression through performance art.

I’m really glad to see how open he is being about exploring his sexuality and that he isn’t afraid to play with gender. I think that’s pretty rare for a big-time Hollywood male actor because of the risk of being portrayed as gay or effeminate in the media, but he totally owns it. Candy Magazine’s promo video also looks amazing, I want a copy real of it bad.

This is so great. In light of the recent burqa/niquab ban in France (which is now sweeping through the Netherlands and Belgium as well) two female students calling themselves the “NiqaBitches” decided to wear short shorts with niqabs to protest the ban and walk through Paris visiting several government buildings.

In an opinion piece published on the news website, rue89, the anonymous duo – political science and communication students in their twenties – said the film was a tongue-in-cheek way of criticising France’s niqab ban, which the Senate passed last month and is due to go into force early next year.

It has gotten considerable media attention in France but I wonder how successful it will be in getting the law overturned by France’s constitutional court. I guess we can only wait and see, and hope that France wakes up and realizes how racist, sexist and unconstitutional this ban really is.

Interviewer: Your band has many more members than a conventional band, including dancers…

Eugene Hutz: [Interrupts] We don’t have any dancers. There were never any dancers. They are participants in the band. That’s also another stupid thing that we are trying to crack, which is the idea that girls are only good for doing back-up vocals and the decoration, or at the most get to play keyboards. I think the image of the girls that Gogol Bordello promotes is confident and independent, not those once again pretty outdated ideas of what girls can do on stage, so calling them dancers would be pretty degrading. Especially since it’s obvious that what they do the most is play percussion.

The rest of the interview is pretty neat too.

Alright, so I think I should just come out and say that I am no lover of fashion. I have never had any interest in the fashion industry, don’t particularly care about whether my clothes are fashionable, and couldn’t name a fashion designer from the top of my head.  Personally, I think an entire industry that  glorifies people who happen to meet the social standard of beauty is kind of uninteresting. When I hear the term ‘fashion industry’ I think ‘white, thin, rich, able-bodied women’ and in essence, seems like something that has continually marginalized anyone who doesn’t fit that particular ideal.

In my mind though, there is a huge difference between fashion and style. I dig people with their own style, regardless of what’s cool at the time. Fashion represents whatever is popular until too many people have access to it. It always seemed really exclusive and as though it depended on the reinforcement of social hierarchies. I always loved this quote by Oscar Wilde that goes “Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months.”

Anyway, the documentary I just saw is called “The Color of Beauty” and it’s about racism within the fashion industry.

Renee Thompson is trying to make it as a top fashion model in New York. She’s got the looks, the walk and the drive. But she’s a black model in a world where white women represent the standard of beauty. Agencies rarely hire black models. And when they do, they want them to look “like white girls dipped in chocolate.”

In this film, Renee talks about how much more effort she has to put into making a lasting impression on agencies because she knows they are way less likely to hire a black model versus a white one. What’s remarkable about this documentary is how the model agents talk about the blatant racism without ever naming it. It all is just framed as something to shrug about and is swept under the rug as “just the way things are”. As if that has ever been a good reason to tolerate injustice. Jezebel nails it when they say:

In general, though the subject here is clearly racism, the film — and the people in it — dance around the word racism. Jeanne Beker of FashionTelevision says, “Racism — I hate to call it that.” What else do you call a person being discriminated against for their looks and ethnicity? Beker admits: “Sometimes you do see a black girl on the runway and it’s sort of a tokenism.”

At some point, a man who’s basically deciding whether Renee has a job or not, actually refers to her as having an “amazon” look. Really? She’s wearing a white tank top and black jeans. Oh, you mean the fact that she’s “ethnic” makes her synonymous with the wild, untamed creatures in the amazon? Way to replicate tropes that constantly depict women of color as animalistic and exotic.

It is said over and over again in the film how model agencies are specifically looking for white models. And when they are seeking black models, they want them to have the physical characteristics of white women. How does this not register as inherently racist and unfair to anyone who isn’t born with white skin? Something I didn’t know before watching this film was that agencies can (and do) specify that they will not accept black models. Seriously? It’s 2010 and there are still “Whites Only” signs in this industry? Who okay-ed this? This is said to be justified by agents saying that “black doesn’t sell” or that because white people have the money, they will only buy what white models are selling. This rationalizing of racism seems to minimize the significance of this issue. Instead of simply accepting the idea that white women only want to see white models, why not delve into why this may be?

Has anyone thought that maybe this is because they’ve simply grown accustomed to seeing white models and are then thrown off by the random woman of color? Why not yell a collective ‘fuck you’ to those who place whiteness above all else, and feature models of color regularly as a way of showing that models of color do indeed exist and are just as valuable as white ones? Why keep feeding the idea that beauty can only come in a white package? When there are so many models of color trying to break into the fashion industry, why not give them the opportunity to turn the idea of beauty on its head and force these so-called white consumers of fashion to acknowledge that these women exist and will never go away?

Even though I don’t particularly care for the fashion industry, I’m still outraged over the way white supremacist ideas have seeped into it and still retain as strong a foothold as it did in the 50s. I thought fashion was supposed to be about forward-thinking, progressive, innovative ideas, yet the reality of racism within it remains unquestioned. You should definitely watch the documentary; it’s free on the National Film Board of Canada website.