journeys of a restless mind

tsunami & limon

Sometimes, I get to take fotos for work. I love it when that happens. Here's a recent one.

bee & thistle

please stay behind wall

pinecones

dungeness

speaking of things we're not over yet

Yesterday I wrote about how much I hate the term "post-feminism."

Kelly over at Mocha Momma has this to say, in her post on diversity:

"Many of the women I came in contact with this weekend [at BlogHer] also got to hear about how much I detest the word “post-racial”. What does that even mean? Why are we throwing it around as an excuse to no longer recognize racism? It irritates me to no end to hear, “Well, we have a Black man in the White House. We’re post-racial!” It’s all folks can do not to jump for joy as all of our problems with race have magically disappeared! Please. Tell me what color the sky is in your world because I want to live there."

She makes her point with much more humor and grace than I made mine. I suggest you go read the whole thing.

Updated to add: Just because we have made progress on some fronts--I'm not denying that progress has been made--doesn't mean we get to sit back and relax on issues of race and sex. There is still lots of hard work required. This seems so obvious to me, which is why I didn't write it in the first place, but since it's apparently not so obvious afterall, I'm going to keep saying it (and working on it).

And while I'm appending this post, let me say that I am well aware of all the criticism that white feminists receive and have received about their treatment of race and women of color, so as a white feminist, I am really thinking about that, too.

post-feminist world my ass

It seems that most of the people I come across in my every day life, even in this very liberal town, feel that feminism is boring, outdated, and just plain not needed anymore. I get my panties in a wad all the time trying to argue otherwise, but in those moments I never seem to be able to make my point effectively because I am usually reduced to a fuming, sputtering, hot mess of anger and disbelief. What is so nose-on-face obvious to me, that we need feminism more than ever, appears to be rather more like a message written in invisible ink and nobody has the magic chemical that will make the writing appear.

So, I tend to just shut up about it and fume silently and begin to think I'm crazy.

I don't want to do that anymore, which led me here. Maybe what I need to do is start writing stuff down. Maybe rather than relying on many of the other fabulous feminist writers in the blogosphere, I need to start formulating my own (at least semi-) coherent thoughts on the subject so that I can figure out a way to get people that matter to me to listen to what I'm saying instead of just blowing me off as one of those people.

With that in mind, I bring your attention to this little nugget. My admittedly lax attention to the news means I didn't even know about the dude who killed women in a health club in Pittsburgh.  Anyone who wants to argue that we no longer need feminism gets slapped in the face not only with the blatant hatred of women that the crime itself embodies, but by the lack of media coverage so eloquently pointed out by Violet Socks where she brings it to light and calls the murders what they are: a hate crime.

Which brings me right back to the fuming. Why the fuck doesn't anybody care about women anymore?

(Brought to my attention a lot quicker than I would have found it via Chris Clarke's twitter stream @canislatrans)