Super Links, March 18, 2016

Jezebel

*Note: I originally linked to 4929dc.blogspot.com, my original home improvement blog I started in 2009. I moved the blog to 4929dc.tumblr.com many years ago, so I meant to link to the Tumblr blog. I have serious baby brain right now, so please forgive me. I have corrected the links in the post.

Two sick days with Jack have really eaten into my writing time. I have a post that is finally almost ready, but I'll have to finish it over the weekend. The little guy needs my attention now.

I have some interesting reading for you this week, but I also have a plug for my sister site, 4929, which I haven't updated in a while--until now. I started 4929 soon after we moved into our house in late 2009. It is a record of all the work we've done on the house so far, and it will soon include my plans to update the nursery for Baby Chu #2 (a.k.a., Lady Baby Chu). The latest post is a round-up of our most recent improvements, including refinishing the upstairs floors (oh, lovely heart of pine) and getting a new dresser for Jack's room.

Alright, now that you're finished enjoying our home improvement escapades, here is your reading list for this week:

This one was hard for me to read, because I hate making people uncomfortable--and even reading about someone making people uncomfortable makes me squirm. But I totally agree with the author, even if I can't live her philosophy as fully as she is. The small things, the little gender imbalances and slights, add up over time, and it's so unfair that little girls have to put with so much of it so soon. We have to stand up for them if we want their world to be better than ours.

McSweeney's never fails to make me laugh, and "Reasons You Were Not Promoted that Are Totally Unrelated to Gender" is no exception. "You don’t smile enough. People don’t like you. You smile too much. People don’t take you seriously."

This article is a great starting point for discovering mostly forgotten great female writers. I want to attempt to do a semi-regular feature of my own on feminist writing, starting with "The Yellow Wallpaper." (I am writing this now so that it will actually happen.)

And let's finish things off with a little education soapbox reading. I briefly worked as an elementary school teacher in a low-income school, so I know how administrators are obsessed with homework. But study after study shows it has no benefits for elementary students, so it's time to stop forcing teachers to do extra work that only makes administrators and parents feel better without having any actual impact on student learning.

But wait. One more thing. I want to read this comic book so badly.

Feeling All the Feelings

My woman brain won't let me write a post. Okay, I'm sort of kidding, but after reading two books that insist that women's brains are inherently different from men's--wired for emotions, wired for caution--I think I'm starting to believe it.

Seriously, though, I haven't been able to finish a post to put on this blog. I missed my deadline yesterday, and now, here I am typing a placeholder post, just so I don't feel like a complete failure.

I got stuck for a few reasons. One, I read two books that were so full of gender nonsense that my brain got scrambled. Two, I read a great first-person article on Vox that got me thinking about race and gender and the intersection of the two and the fact that I have an interracial marriage and an interracial child, which is something I rarely think about, and, wait, why don't I think about it more? Three, I started to really doubt my ability to say anything meaningful, a feeling that only made me wonder if I really do have a stupid female brain that is keeping me from succeeding by constantly undermining me with self-doubt.

Obviously, I've got a lot of stuff going on. I'm a thinker. I'm an overthinker. So, at least now you know what you're getting into if you follow this blog. I will think stuff to death. But I'll try to do it on my own time and only give you the edited version.

I'll leave you with a quote from that Vox article, "I Never Noticed How Racist So Many Children's Books Are Until I Started Reading to My Kids" by Leigh Anderson:

The YA writer Shannon Hale notes that when she speaks at school assemblies, the administrations often will grant girls permission to attend her lectures, but not boys. For male authors writing books with male protagonists, the school will allow both boys and girls to attend. Hale writes: "[T]he idea that girls should read about and understand boys but that boys don't have to read about girls, that boys aren't expected to understand and empathize with the female population of the world...this belief leads directly to rape culture." It's not a far leap to imagine that white children reading only about white children will stunt their empathy for people of other races.