I'm doing better! and feminism.

It's come to my attention that I often write to wail and then fail to follow up. Look, I'm following up!

I'm feeling pretty well now. I got to see my mom on her way out to her next paid working vacation in the Carribean. (This is me shaking my fist. I am not in the Carribean.) L and I took her out on the town and went to Babeland.

This prompted me to buy a copy of Cunt, which I first saw on xiadyn's bookshelf yeeeaarrs ago. It's an interesting read; I've never read any of what I've heard called "hot feminism" before. ( Hot hot feminism! )

The strongest thing I took away from this book was realizing how strong a tribal affiliation gender is for some people. I've always identified more strongly with "geek" than "woman," long before trans issues even crossed my radar. Reading the perspective of someone who feels more comfortable in the company of women because they're women was really news to me; I had an intellectual awareness that people felt that way but I couldn't grok it before. For other women who feel that way, this must be a really powerful rallying cry.

I'll stick with rallying for the underlying social change, but it was really interesting.

---

In other news, I led a class discussion on book banning. It was so much fun! Wow it was fun. We worked quite hard at bringing in a selection of books that might bother liberal librarian types:

• Racist tracts (The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam and the Crusades, which has a TERRORIST on the cover was my favorite, but we also had Tim McVeigh's bedside reading and the Protocols of Zion.)


• Creationist textbooks


• Sex books (The Ethical Slut is about polyamoury and Lost Girls is intensely pornographic; we also brought in some of the classic kid sex manuals.)


• Vapidism! Someone found a teen novel about being popular and shunning losers; it was really appalling.


• Dangerous instructions... we failed to bring in real copies! I ended up finding citations online for "Killer Commando Techniques," "We Can Make You Talk," and books on manufacturing meth, but they were not to be found in library collections locally. I asked in the UW Chemistry Library for books on making bombs and drugs. It turns out they were constantly stolen, so she put them in a side room, but then no one was ever using them, so she put them in off-site storage. So they are, for effective purposes, gone unless you want to make a special request and wait several days.

We also brought in some classic challenged kids' books, like My Two Dads' Marriage (whee!), And Tango Makes Three (gay penguins!), Captain Underpants (very unpleasant portrayals of authority figures), and Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark (we're still trying to figure out, but it was one of the top ten challenged books of the 1990s).

It was fun. A lot of fun. I've been accomplishing more things since I wailed, and I was very thoughtfully kidnapped to the zoo on Sunday. I'm getting through it.