The Call Up

The best of the internet as curated by me. Put me in coach.

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April 14, 2012 6:32 pm
"We park and walk up to the entrance. No running the gantlet between pickets shouting at me that I’m a murderer, no fear that someone will throw a bomb. The receptionist takes my name and says, “You just have to talk with a counselor first.” I don’t mind, I figure it’s part of the procedure. I tell the counselor I already have four children and I don’t want any more. I’m on a different track now. She nods understandingly and says they’ll be ready for me soon. No judgment, no showing me pictures of fetuses, no trying to make me feel guilty. She just wants to be sure I’m sure."

—

This is excellent.  Remarkable that we have allowed this to happen — or rather that certain groups have succeeded in taking the law of the land and turning it into an ongoing finger-pointing, name-calling, slug fest. 

(Source: The New York Times)

March 12, 2012 7:41 am
"To be honest with you, we are rattled because just a few years ago this nation was brought to the absolute brink and we nearly lost everything,” Doyle said in a telephone interview. “If you were comfortable in your lifestyle, had your Colonial home with a picket fence and thought ‘this is my entitlement, I am supposed to have this,’ and then learn that it can all go away in a hot New York minute? And instead of creating jobs, helping us stay in our homes, improving roads and schools, these dangerous men are in the state legislature obsessing over our wombs."

—

What’s most amusing about this article is how totally clueless its male author is. This quote from the woman he profiles is the lone piece of sanity. It’s becoming clear to me how the men perpetuating these idiotic crusades are totally unaware of how much power women have, how angry they are getting, and why. I mean honestly, why are we still talking about this? Can’t these assholes get over the fact that they can’t control women anymore and just get on with it? Why do we keep fighting these fights?

(Source: Washington Post)

February 2, 2012 2:12 pm
"‘Politics have no place in health care,’ [Bloomberg] said in a statement. ‘Breast cancer screening saves lives and hundreds of thousands of women rely on Planned Parenthood for access to care. We should be helping women access that care, not placing barriers in their way.’"

—

This is just so…right.  I had a moment during the GOP debates the other day when they were all pissing and moaning about “Obamacare” (but offering up no credible alternatives) when I thought, what a beautiful revelation it would be if a Republican stood up and said something akin to the above.  If someone got up and said, “You know what it’s not perfect, but it’s real and it will provide services for millions of Americans.  It will make us healthier and help peoples’ budgets and this is important.”  Amen, Mayor Bloomberg. 

(Source: The New York Times)

February 1, 2012 3:47 pm
"Anti-abortion advocates and Web sites have criticized the Komen foundation’s financing of Planned Parenthood for years. And in December, LifeWay Christian Resources, which is owned by the Southern Baptist Convention, said it was recalling a pink Bible it was selling at Walmart and other stores because a dollar per copy was going to the Komen foundation and the foundation supported Planned Parenthood."

—

This makes me wonder how calculated the decision was to back off Planned Parenthood.  Did someone take a good look at the financing and decide they’d bring more dollars in and offer more services if they didn’t back Planned Parenthood?  Or was it purely ideological?  The fact that they don’t seem to have anything to say about it makes me think it’s just politics.

(Source: The New York Times)

January 26, 2012 12:00 pm
"Generalizing, the reaction seems to be: Bridesmaids did it first; Bachelorette is doing it second. This is bizarre! Is Bridesmaids really going to be positioned historically as the very first thing that “allowed women to be gross and funny”? Yes, Bridesmaids made lots of money, and that couldn’t have hurt the green-lighting of all kinds of other female-fronted comedy. But Bridesmaids as some kind of “ultimate proof” that women can be funny like dudes? Sorry, no. At the very least, as Judd Apatow put it early last year, “At Saturday Night Live, the women have dominated the show for almost 10 years at this point."

—

Bah!  Women behaving badly and being funny while doing so should not be this revolutionary.

(Source: grantland.com)

7:48 am
"But on further reflection, I realized I was surrounded with weepy men. My best guy friends have dissolved like otter pops over no less than the Lost finale, or an overly fond description of a long-dead parakeet. I’ve tended to date graduates of the Nick Hornby School for Maudlin Young Men, and I deal with it poorly. I once ended perhaps one of the most fulfilling sex-only relationships of my life because the guy cried over a soccer game."

—

There are many ways in which this column is spectacular, I encourage you to read the whole thing.

(Source: GQ)

January 13, 2012 2:51 pm
"Related: Pretty sure my overall project as a writer/human/girl is to convince other people that caring what other people think of you, especially of your social choices, is an infection. Staying in is not only radically vulnerable (or, should be: if you’re not sweating staying in to watch TV then you are definitely staying in to watch TV too much, and also, are your friends boring? Consider this) but also socially threatening. There will, inevitably, be conflicts with your friends about your intentions, because they’ll read your at-home-ness as rejection and try and make you feel bad about it. But, whatever. “To be unoffendable is, like, an incredible position of power,” is something that Simon Doonan, who is the rare mainstream fashion person who isn’t a brittle shell of human value, said in an interview with Rich Juzwiak for The Daily."

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Oh hell yeah.  Did you know Vice has a “Girl News” column?  It actually is News for Girls and other things we should read.

(Source: Vice Magazine)

January 8, 2012 11:30 am
"There are many bad TV shows, but most of them are terrible in the same dispiriting ways. Few, of course, are as jaw-droppingly horrendous as Work It, a retrograde shame-spiral of a series that hates women nearly as much as its viewers will hate themselves. But this detestable disasterpiece doesn’t even have the courtesy to be interesting in its inanity; it’s merely the latest (and, hopefully, the last) in a head-scratching run of new network shows aimed at what is apparently America’s least served demographic: misogynists…Compared to this tired swill, Bosom Buddies was executive produced by Betty Freidan."

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I feel like standing and saluting Andy Greenwald.  I do not generally watch football or man sports on a regular basis.  But when I do, I notice that every second commercial uses the traditional setup: overweight, lazy husband does something (or nothing) to irritate shrill, demanding wife which causes him to sneak around and generally behave like a buffoon.  Oh ha ha, women are so annoying and hate fun.  The commercials that punctuate these are usually for trucks or SUVs which feature men hauling heavy things and getting dirty.  The takeaway: Men, rise up and be assholes!  Behave like apes!  Do manly work!  Leave the women to mind the children and the housework!  Of course women are oblivious to this phenomenon because we do not watch sports, instead we are busy discovering all the ways in which our husbands and boyfriends have failed us and chewing them out for it.  Obviously. 

(Source: grantland.com)

December 13, 2011 10:09 am
"If men’s magazines do, on occasion, speak pejoratively of women, women’s magazines, by and large, speak pejoratively to women."

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Agreed. (via cheatsheet)

Yup.  The lady mag paradox continues.

(via cheatsheet)

November 30, 2011 9:55 am

pantslessprogressive:

“In August, the administration announced new rules requiring all new insurance plans to cover birth control and emergency contraception by 2013. At an early October fundraiser in St. Louis, President Obama himself hailed the rule. And when President Obama appeared before the U.N. in September, the administration touted the contraception rule as an example of America’s commitment to women. So when Carney says “this decision has not yet been made,” he’s wrong. It has been made—and by reopening it, President Obama is succumbing to pressure from anti-choice groups.

Even worse, Carney says President Obama is trying to “strike the right balance between expanding coverage of preventive services and respecting religious beliefs” without acknowledging the fact that the rules announced in August already included an exemption for churches.”

White House says Obama considering rolling back mandatory insurance coverage of contraception

FUCK.THAT.SHIT.  Come on.  Exasperation has become a state of being.

(via pantslessprogressive)

November 9, 2011 7:53 am
"It’s very hard to complain about someone saying you’re in Tina Fey’s immediate family. But I do think it’s a little unfair that there’s never any debate about whether there’s room for Will Ferrell, Steve Carell and Aziz Ansari. But with women, it’s like, OK, Kristen Wiig is having a moment now, we’re done, we’ll put the rest of them on the backburner. And that’s just ridiculous."

—

MINDY KALING, on a particularly frustrating, unfair hardship for women in the entertainment industry, in The Guardian.

(Read the full interview here.)

Mindy knows, people.  I think this is becoming a blog only about women.

November 8, 2011 5:39 pm

thefortressofsteezhood:

Iggy Azalea just released her mixtape “Ignorant Art.”  This visual was uploaded last night. Into it. 

So this is a thing.  What I am noticing with regards to women in pop/hip hop, is that their success seems intrinsically tied to their ability to affect a persona.  Gaga, Minaj, Sasha Fierce, St. Vincent, Lana del Rey, even Taylor Swift and Lykke Li.  They are all characters in their own one-woman show more than artists doing whatever comes naturally.  Granted this is part of music generally, but for the men the character seems to follow the success (Kanye, Hova, Cudi, Drake, Jack White, Jim James, etc.).  They make what they want, fame follows, and then their personality takes on its own momentum/definition.  Not so much for the girls—they have to build on some kind of absurdity to get taken seriously and elevate themselves.

7:41 am
canarycoal: alexbaca: I’ve lost two pairs of jeans to nearly a year of daily riding and I am fed the fuck up with the lack of technical-but-stylish cycling-focused gear for women. Outlier has been out of stock of their women’s daily riding pant in the size I need for almost as long as I’ve had my Jamis, and Levi’s does not appear to be extending their commuter styles to women’s cuts anytime soon. Women on bikes are a pathetically underserved market. Our choices are spandex (and I refuse to wear spandex, because my cycling is transportation, not sport), or wiping chain grease on our probably-pretty-nice jeans that most certainly aren’t designed for ambling around on a bike. I’ve thought seriously about starting a women’s cycling fashion product blog—not a cycle chic blog but, rather, a place where I find and review technical-but-normal-looking clothing and gear—but I’m just so disheartened by the true lack of options. Sure, a lack of cycling-specific clothing for women is just some dumb fashion blogger bullshit whine, right? Except it’s not at all. Studies have shown that office dress codes can disincentivize biking to work for women, and I’m willing to bet that the repeated destruction of everyday clothing—which is not designed for riding—taps into a similar mindset. I just think it’s so, so stupid there are literally zero options for someone like me: a daily rider not subject to a dress code who’s fucking fed up with ripping out the crotches of her jeans. I’d pay good fucking money for appropriate clothing, but it doesn’t exist. TL;DR female citizen cyclists are not taken as seriously as their male counterparts and if I started this blog would anyone read it? yea i just buy super cheap jeans I was just thinking about this and wondering if those commuter Levi’s or the Bonobos would be too ill fitting for a lady behind to try. Someone make me some jeans with some flex in the hip, a high rear rise and a reinforced seat dammit.

canarycoal:

alexbaca:

I’ve lost two pairs of jeans to nearly a year of daily riding and I am fed the fuck up with the lack of technical-but-stylish cycling-focused gear for women. Outlier has been out of stock of their women’s daily riding pant in the size I need for almost as long as I’ve had my Jamis, and Levi’s does not appear to be extending their commuter styles to women’s cuts anytime soon.

Women on bikes are a pathetically underserved market. Our choices are spandex (and I refuse to wear spandex, because my cycling is transportation, not sport), or wiping chain grease on our probably-pretty-nice jeans that most certainly aren’t designed for ambling around on a bike.

I’ve thought seriously about starting a women’s cycling fashion product blog—not a cycle chic blog but, rather, a place where I find and review technical-but-normal-looking clothing and gear—but I’m just so disheartened by the true lack of options.

Sure, a lack of cycling-specific clothing for women is just some dumb fashion blogger bullshit whine, right? Except it’s not at all. Studies have shown that office dress codes can disincentivize biking to work for women, and I’m willing to bet that the repeated destruction of everyday clothing—which is not designed for riding—taps into a similar mindset. I just think it’s so, so stupid there are literally zero options for someone like me: a daily rider not subject to a dress code who’s fucking fed up with ripping out the crotches of her jeans. I’d pay good fucking money for appropriate clothing, but it doesn’t exist.

TL;DR female citizen cyclists are not taken as seriously as their male counterparts and if I started this blog would anyone read it?

yea i just buy super cheap jeans

I was just thinking about this and wondering if those commuter Levi’s or the Bonobos would be too ill fitting for a lady behind to try. Someone make me some jeans with some flex in the hip, a high rear rise and a reinforced seat dammit.

(Source: socialsurvival, via nachodiet)