Already Thursday! How?
* Brian K. Vaughn, you had me at “post-apocalyptic heist movie.”
* “You’d better sit down,” he said. “The finger is not human.”
* Disgraced Pope to be quietly reassigned to another Vatican on the other side of the state.
* Welcome to the official Twitter page of the Office of His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama.
* Thirteen ways of looking at Liz Lemon.
* I linked to this before, years ago, but here it is again: Kurt Vonnegut on the impossibility of telling the difference between good news and bad.
* And Roger Ebert, who admittedly likes every movie he sees, likes Hot Tub Time Machine.
Gerry Canavan 
This part was badass:
3.
I have, for some time, been referring to a particularly irritating brand of privileged semi-feminism as “Liz Lemonism.” I associate this brand of feminism with a certain variety of white, coastal-city dwelling, fairly well-to-do heterosexual cisgendered woman, a woman with a comfortable white-collar job that is so very comfortable and so very white-collar that she is free to spend her spare time yearning for, and semi-believing that she could attain, something with more “meaning.” This woman doesn’t do Blogspot, but she does do Tumblr; she doesn’t do posts about sex workers’ rights, but she does do complaining about “raunch culture”; she doesn’t do anti-racism, disability activism, or trans ally work to any huge extent, but she does do “body image” (and oh, does she ever do body image, without taking much note of the fact that as a white, abled, cis person she conforms to the “beauty standard,” and benefits from conforming to it, in more ways than she will ever let on); she can’t have a conversation with you about Michelle Tea, Sugar High Glitter City, Kathy Acker, or Carolee Schneeman, but she can tell you that as a feminist she has a right to be Concerned About Porn; she’s Brooklyn not Queens, brunch not breakfast, flirty not slutty, fond of cupcakes and feminist theory but unsure how to make either one herself, and thoroughly incensed about Vajazzling.
I am describing a stereotype. No one woman fits all of these qualifications, or is this woman precisely. But this woman takes up a larger and larger space in my head lately; she has become the spectre who haunts my days and nights. She is, can I tell you, one of the reasons there are fewer posts on Tiger Beatdown lately, because I worry that she reads me, and I don’t want to be her entertainment. And because Tiger Beatdown has, until this point, nominally been a “feminist blog,” and last night, while getting drunk with C.L. and talking about our lives, I came up with a perfect metaphor for how I feel about feminism. I was standing in my tiny living room, and I said:
“Okay, so here’s me. Privileged in basically every way. White, middle-class, cis, straight, first-world American, whatever. Except, I’m a lady. That’s the one way I might be oppressed a little. So here’s me standing in my privilege.”
I walked over and stood in the doorway to my study.
“Here’s me in feminism. In the doorway.”
I stepped over the threshold and into my study, which is a much larger room.
“And here’s me in the entire rest of the world, dealing with all the ways people have their humanity denied, dealing with concern and solidarity with basically everybody who is not privileged. And realizing there are way more people without full, uncompromised privilege than with it, and that this is kind of an essential fact of the human experience. Dealing with, like, the experience of being human on Planet Earth.”
Feminism being, in this metaphor, not the endpoint, not the destination, but the necessary way in to the actual problem; feminism being not the room, but the door. Liz Lemonism is a door with a wall of brick behind it: you don’t get anywhere after you’ve opened it. So my imaginary enemy, the woman who is not a feminist but a Liz Lemonist, gets to the point at which she can start to politicize her specific problems, but she can’t get any further. And what she does then is to boil “feminism” down to an excuse to permit herself certain rudenesses and complain about certain issues only as they pertain to her own personal life.
Kate
March 25, 2010 at 4:25 pm