Jezebel posted a list of 5 (sort of) feminist anthems in response to the AV Club’s 17 well-intentioned yet misguided feminist anthems, and I tweeted about it, asking my friends to make some alternate suggestions. Here they are. Add your own in the comments! What are your personal anthems/theme songs?

We’ll start with mine. I love all of Liz Phair’s Exile in Guyville to bits, but it’s hard to top the first track, “6′1″” as a feminist anthem. Other things I thought of, off the top of my head, include my current cellphone ringtone, “Revolution” by the Veronicas, and also maybe “Rise Up with Fists!!” by Jenny Lewis:

(I have a little bit of a girlcrush on Jenny Lewis, so you get to watch the silly video.)

Other suggestions from my Twitter peeps:

“Extraordinary” by Liz Phair
“I Love Myself Today” by Bif Naked
“Control” by Poe
“Girl” by Tori Amos
“Bad Reputation” by Joan Jett
“That’s Not My Name” by the Ting Tings
“Short Skirt, Long Jacket” by Cake
“As Cool as I Am” by Dar Williams [also kind of a personal theme song for me]
“When I Was a Boy” by Dar Williams

And generally songs by Otep and the Donnas and Slater Kinney and Sarah Slean and Tegan & Sara and I’m sure I could come up with a bunch of girl rockers I love if hard pressed.

What are your personal anthems/theme songs? What are some rockin’ feminist tunes?

I recently discovered Advertising for Love, a blog that’s been posting personal ads from the 19th century. Some of it’s just fun, but I was struck by this post showing some women in desperate straits. It shows why women in 19th century New York would marry: for financial support. An unmarried woman in the city without a family had nothing.

I’ve been reading Beyond Heaving Bosoms, the Smart Bitches guide to romance novels, and in the chapter on heroines, they discuss a problem with historical heroines: in romances written today about bygone eras, women are usually empowered to a point, and they always marry for love, which is nice and all but undermines the basic fact that women in the 19th century married because they had to in order to survive in many cases. Plenty of women did marry for money. These women didn’t have other options. The advertisements highlight that.

Speaking of romance novels, I think this ad sounds like the potential beginning of one. Two people spend almost a week together, then the woman doesn’t show up for their second scheduled rendezvous. What happened? Did she move on to greener pastures? Was she already married? Was she actually a prostitute? Was she struck ill or killed in a carriage accident? The possibilities are endless, no?

I bring you another edition of: Interesting things I ran into on the internet this week that I did not also Twitter about. That’s right, bitches, original content!

Anyway. Possibly some unpopular opinions follow.

+ Every couple of years, someone publishes an alarmist article about how girls are outperforming boys academically. I’ve seen some theories on this phenomenon, mostly that the women’s movement has encouraged more girls to be competitive and study traditionally male disciplines like math and science, while boys, who have had an easier go of it generally, are more complacent about their academic success. Well, believe what you want; Isis the Scientist gets steaming mad over an article about boys not competing in science fairs. Her whole post is pretty insightful, but I agree whole-heartedly with her conclusion:

I am so pleased that young girls are becoming better represented in science and I certainly hate to think that young boys are not pursuing science. However, to conflate this with the success of women in science is short-sighted and fails to appreciate the complexity of the factors that keep women from transitioning from trainee to career scientist

+ The headline on this Jezebel post is a little needlessly alarmist, but I think it highlights an interesting consequence of the fundamentalist abstinence movement: This couple has been married for 2 years and they’re both still virgins. Why? Well, it sounds like the wife has vaginismus, and I think it’s a great tragedy that such a condition even exists. My amateur postulating has led me to conclude that the psychological aspects of the disorder are due mostly the conflation of sex with sin and then pressure to make the wedding night “special.” The fear of sex drilled into this woman from a young age combined with her feeling pressure to make the honeymoon magical led her to not be able to perform at all. I wouldn’t go so far as to argue that this happens to all couples who wait; I’m sure there are plenty of people who wait for marriage to have sex that have perfectly healthy and satisfying sex lives. But I feel terrible for the woman in the Jezebel post and I wonder if her problems could have been avoided if she’d been taught about sex differently.

But alas, I’m making a post to lament the fact that I never post anymore.

So let it be known that the quick links and things that used to get compiled into quickies posts are mostly winding up on my Twitter, so follow me there for fun and games.

But, here are some things that didn’t make it to the Twitter.

+ Urban Sketches has some really cool drawings of Brooklyn.

+ Here are some women pioneers.

And that’s all she wrote. I am laaame.

Today is International Women’s Day.

Also, check out this great site put together by the New-York Historical Society: Brooklyn Revealed. Lots of old photos of Brooklyn and histories of the 6 original towns that made up what we now call the borough of Brooklyn. This photo of Eastern Parkway amazes me; the museum looks so lonely out there by itself! I wish I could find a contemporary photo from the same angle, but alas. I did find this postcard that shows all of the apartment buildings that have since been built across the street and here’s my photo of the museum.

Nothing I have written today makes much of a statement. Sometimes there are just days like this.

+ I have a pretty small carbon footprint, about 1/5 of the national average, which I feel pretty good about. I wonder how much of this is due to the fact that I do not own a car.

+ Via Jezebel, how great is this?

+ Some writing things. This post on Jenny Crusie’s blog got me thinking about what constitutes a romance novel. (My friend T says, though, that, if you can take the romance plot out of a novel and still have a story, it’s not a romance. Hmm.) Also, men read romance.

+ Check out these awesome fashions from 1928!

+ I have acquired a KINDLE!

I upgraded WordPress for shits and giggles. I feel like a WordPress expert now, like between this and being the Technical Team for the Mahablog, I’ve encountered almost every issue out there. Crazy! Speaking of which, I’m in the process of updating the design on the Mahablog, and I’m seriously hating CSS right now. There’s going to be a brawl. Why won’t design elements just go where I tell them? Why??

Anyhoo, it’s the new year, I’ve got some ideas for new blogging directions, we’ll see how much follow up I have. In the meantime, here are links:

This looks interesting:

I once sat through the whole of Ric Burns’ bonus episode to the New York documentary, which is entirely on the WTC. The first two parts of it are interesting: the architecture and design, the construction, Crazy Philippe Petit on the tightrope. The last part will give you panic attacks if you have any real-life frame of reference for 9/11. It’s, like, a whole hour of footage from that day. I had nightmares after I saw it the first time, I won’t make myself watch it again. But I think it’s pretty fascinating generally speaking and I would like to see this movie. (One review of it said it’s less about Petit and more about New York in the 1970s, which is a topic I’m kind of fascinated with. Have you read Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bronx is Burning? Excellent book.)

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On a completely different track, there’s an interesting article in the Times on underground abortions in New York, where it’s ostensibly legal. Most of these abortions happen in the Catholic communities (like the Dominican one where I used to live in Washington Heights/Inwood) where the women are too ashamed (mostly due to community pressure) to go through legal channels. Scary stuff.

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I’m reading a lot of westerns right now. I just got the book in which the Viggo cowboy movie Appaloosa is based out of the library. Looks like fun. I should go back to reviewing books on the blog, yeah? Or actually update my book blog. Hmph.

The publishing industry is busy eating itself (major layoffs at Random House, Simon and Schuster, and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt today) but I have links!

+ Women are earning combat awards but still no respect in the military.

+ Check out this knit motorcycle cozy.

+ The first LOLcat.

+ The Life Magazine photo archive is now online and there’s lots of good stuff here.

+ There’s an interesting profile of mystery writer Patricia Cornwell in USA Today in which she talks about the Kay Scarpetta series and her 2006 marriage to a woman.

+ Prop 8: The Musical! (Funny, but too little, too late, no? Where were these guys two months ago?)

more animals

+ Hollywood’s 5 saddest attempts at feminism.

+ Related: Masculinity and Disney movies.

+ Fashion at my alma mater. I’m sure glad I graduated before that words-on-the-ass-of-your-sweatpants trend started. Or, maybe what I really need are some of these. Hot, right?

+ I’m kidding.

+ McCain Shenanigans Watch: McCain pulled out of an interview on CNN because Campbell Brown actually, you know, did her job by asking some tough questions.

+ Cool skyscraper photography.

+ Some baseball card fun: The 23rd card in a set of 22.

+ Grease in Lego.

One of my coworkers pointed out today that, in the event McCain gets elected and then decides not to run for reelection in 2012, the likely Republican candidate would then be Sarah Palin, and, theoretically, she could run against Hillary Clinton, and then we’d have to elect a woman.

There’s been a lot of weird anger about the choice. I thought at first that it was purely a ploy to pull disaffected Clinton voters towards the McCain ticket. If the last few days have anything to show for it, this is probably true, as it doesn’t seem like McCain really checked her out in advance. It really was kind of a, “Well, she’s got a vagina,” choice. Because, you know, women are stupid and think all women are the same.

Here’s a brief list of blog posts about Sarah Palin that I have read. Maybe this encapsulates my thoughts.

Jezebel: Bristol’s pregnancy should be off limits. Bristol’s pregnancy is fair game.

One of the best posts on this topic was by Lauren at Feministe.

Sign of the apocalypse? Lindsay Lohan speaks about Sarah Palin articulately “I think the real problem comes from the fact that we are taking the focus off of getting to know Sarah Palin and her political views, and what she can do to make our country a less destructive place. Its distracting from the real issues, the real everyday problems that this country experiences.” Hey, that’s a really good point. Makes you wonder if it’s all part of the strategy, eh. “So, John McCain, what’s your plan for Iraq?” “Hey, what’s that?!”

The babies and the news media: what the scandal, such as it is, says about the candidates and the media.

Giuliani says Palin is more qualified than Obama. Of course he does.

Gawker has a clip of Sarah Palin talking about pregnant teens two years ago.

Bristol Palin’s pregnancy is fair game because Sarah Palin cut funding for pregnant teens. Bristol comes from a privileged place as part of Alaska’s first family and has resources available that an overwhelming number of pregnant teens do not, thanks, in part, to her mother.

If anything, this is why I think it’s relevant to talk about, beyond the fact that it’s kind of a fascinating human interest story. Sarah Palin’s family should be off limits from speculation, except when it reflects on policy. Here’s a woman who benefited from the feminist movement but is vehemently against it. A woman who slashed resources for teen mothers but is the mother of a teen mother.