Shameless is still looking for new bloggers to join our team, and we’ve extended the application deadline until Friday, September 19. See below for details and how to apply.

We’re looking for new people to join our team of bloggers.

Bloggers post once a week or more, keep up with what’s happening on the blog and contribute to discussions in comments. Like all other positions with our volunteer-run magazine, blogging is unpaid.

We are also looking for someone to take over our Film Friday column. Like our Comics are for Everybody and Wired Wednesday columns, Shameless Film Fridays look at films from a feminist perspective, or highlight films that deserve the attention of our readers.

Have another idea for a column you want to pitch to us? We’d love to hear about it.

Ideal candidates will:
1) understand and be passionate about the values of Shameless
Magazine.
2) have some familiarity with online writing and the feminist (or progressive) blogosphere
3) have some experience as a writer or blogger
4) have some interest in and knowledge of our broad array of topics
including politics, pop culture, independent arts, reproductive rights, gender and sexuality, violence against women, media criticism, size acceptance, and the intersectionality of feminism with race, class, sexuality and ability.

To apply, send a cover letter and two examples of things you would blog about (one of which should be written up as a sample post) to Cate Simpson (webeditor@shamelessmag.com).

DEADLINE FOR APPLICATIONS IS SEPTEMBER 19, 2008.

So, I’m really usually not the type to read young adult romance novels. Don’t get me wrong, if that’s your thing then that’s great, but it’s not generally mine. Also, at 23 I’m slightly stretching the definition of “young adult”. But we all need holiday reading and last weekend when I was readying myself to lie on a beach for a couple of days I picked up Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with the series (which hit #1 on the NY Times Bestseller list and is soon to be made into a movie), it’s about a 17 year-old girl who moves to a small town and falls in love with a vampire. Right from the beginning, it began ringing alarm bells in my feminist consciousness.

At first, I thought I was being over-sensitive. It’s really about a woman who’s submissive, and that’s not necessarily disempowering. But my list of complaints with it are stacking up, so it’s time for a rant.

Almost the first thing Edward the vampire boy does is save our protagonist Bella’s life, which would be all well and good except that he then saves her from distress every few pages throughout the first book. For reasons that have yet to be explained, Bella is so clumsy that she goes wide-eyed with fear at the prospect of running, walking or anything that requires basic motor skills. Her car is this bitchin’ pickup truck, which would be totally awesome except that once she and Edward start dating he jumps in the driver’s seat every time they go anywhere together and refuses to let her drive.

In fact, Bella is so helpless she can’t even figure out how to buckle her seatbelt in Edward’s jeep and he has to help her (after he helps her get in by lifting her bodily into her seat), all the while chuckling condescendingly at her.

And so far, everything Edward does to show his love for Bella is completely creepy. After a while, he reveals that he’s been watching her sleep from outside her room every night since they met. Her reaction? Embarassment that she’s been saying his name in her sleep. Not for a second does she chew him out for invading her privacy.

The really supremely icky thing about the book though is the root of Edward’s desire. From the second he first sees her, he’s consumed by lust for her blood. At first he can’t even get close to her because he’s so overcome by fear that he won’t be able to control himself. Instead he finally settles for telling Bella repeatedly, “I’m really dangerous. Really, I could totally kill you and you wouldn’t be able to do a thing about it. You should stay away from me.” Instead of backing the hell off and getting as far away from him as possible, Bella quietly decides that if she dies, she dies - at least she’ll get to be with this boy. Argh.

Give me Buffy the Vampire Slayer with its powerful female characters, sharp dialogue and singing demons any day.

This ad from 1934 (see here for full size, and also this ad from the 60’s) is a reminder of how long the media has been in the business of convincing women to change their bodies.

It’s also a reminder that we can couch defenses of the current fat-hating trend in society in health terms all we want, but when it comes down to it - it’s about fashion. Curves are out, thin is in.

We’re looking for more people to join our team of bloggers.

Bloggers post once a week or more, keep up with what’s happening on the blog and contribute to discussions in comments. Like all other positions with our volunteer-run magazine, blogging is unpaid.

We are also looking for someone to take over our Film Friday column. Like our Comics are for Everybody and Wired Wednesday columns, Shameless Film Fridays look at films from a feminist perspective, or highlight films that deserve the attention of our readers.

Have another idea for a column you want to pitch to us? We’d love to hear about it.

Ideal candidates will:
1) understand and be passionate about the values of Shameless
Magazine.
2) have some familiarity with online writing and the feminist (or progressive) blogosphere
3) have some experience as a writer or blogger
4) have some interest in and knowledge of our broad array of topics
including politics, pop culture, independent arts, reproductive rights, gender and sexuality, violence against women, media criticism, size acceptance, and the intersectionality of feminism with race, class, sexuality and ability.

To apply, send a cover letter and two examples of things you would blog about (one of which should be written up as a sample post) to Cate Simpson (webeditor@shamelessmag.com).

DEADLINE FOR APPLICATIONS HAS BEEN EXTENDED TO SEPTEMBER 19, 2008.

You’d be forgiven for not knowing what a blogging carnival is, but lately they’ve been catching on in popularity. Basically, one person introduces a theme and calls for others to blog about it and send them the links, and then they collect them all together into a single post.

Angry Black Woman held a Carnival of Allies back in April, and this week the organizer of yennenga - a LiveJournal community for women of colour - posted the results of a Women of Colour and Beauty Carnival she held after a conversation with a Native friend about cultural values of beauty and attractiveness.

Racialicious has exerpts from some of the best posts.

…while you and several of your friends have sex with her.

Beer commercials have started to swing towards the rapantly sexist lately, but this is the worst I’ve seen so far.

And there I run out of words.

Correction: Diageo has confirmed that Guinness didn’t make the ad, which was in fact made by some guy with his own money, and for no apparent purpose. See comments below for Guinness’ response to a letter from one of our bloggers.

There is nothing worse than being fat.

That’s the message we get from every magazine that obsesses over the weight of (mostly female) celebrities, and every movie that places someone heavy in the leading role only to make them ridiculous and asexual (again, this mostly applies to women: think chubby teenage Monica from Friends, who miraculously stops being a total spaz about dating once she loses the fat suit).

Now there’s a special boarding school opening in England for kids aged 11-18 who are more than 20lbs overweight. In addition to the regular high school curriculum, there’s a regime of “intense physical activity”, and a strict diet of 1,500 calories a day and 12g of fat.
According to the UK programme director of an existing British “fat camp” at which participants are allowed 1,200 calories a day, the average weight loss is 10lbs a week.

I am concerned.

Isn’t the consensus that the best way to lose weight is slowly? Haven’t studies suggested that overweight people do more long-term damage to their health through dramatic yo-yoing than they would by keeping their weight high but steady?

I can see what they’re trying to achieve. It’s seriously tough being heavy in school, and it’s also tough to start exercising when you feel like everyone’s staring at you, so maybe getting to play soccer with other kids who look like you isn’t such a bad thing.

But why is it only the fat kids who are singled out for nutritional boot camp? What about those skinny girls who, like many I went to school with, are so obsessed with their weight they skip lunch every day? Is that setting up healthier patterns for life than having an extra serving? Wouldn’t it be better to just teach healthy balanced eating in schools, all schools?

I worry that this school will only succeed in teaching young people to hate the way they look at an early age, precipitating a struggle with their bodies that will likely go on for the rest of their lives.

Maybe we should stop screaming about the dangers of obesity for a second and spend some time talking about emotional health.

One of our readers, Danielle, was outraged enough by Catherine’s post about a ridiculously over-the-top anti-condom poster, that she was inspired to create this pro-contraception t-shirt:

Who says we can’t fight back and have a sense of humour about it?

Check out Danielle’s blog here.

Since Catherine posted on the “pregnancy pact” that TIME reported at a high school in Gloucester, Massachusetts, I thought we should include the more recent developments on that story.

What emerged, after several days of musings from everybody but the girls themselves on what might have motivated such a pact, and various articles condemning them for being everything from irresponsible to radically right-on to borderline delusional, is that there seems not to have been a pact after all.

TIME hasn’t seen fit to publish a correction, although they did release this follow-up article reporting that the school’s principal is now “foggy in his memory” of how he heard about the pact in the first place, and that no one else has been able to confirm its existence.

The comment by principal Joseph Sullivan that sparked the first article deserves repeating:

“Sullivan told TIME on June 11… that “a lack of birth control played no part” in a quadrupling of the number of teen pregnancies at the school this year compared with last year. “That bump was because of seven or eight sophomore girls,” Sullivan told TIME. “They made a pact to get pregnant and raise their babies together.”

Of course, what possible connection could there be between a lack of birth control and pregnancy?

Still, nobody has hazarded a reasonable guess at how seventeen girls came to be pregnant by the end of the school year. Peer pressure and small-town boredom don’t quite do it for me as an explanation.