Angela Davis T. (KM Stitchery)

The clothing industry can often be an unethical place. Unfriendly manufacturing, sizing that doesn’t reflect actual markets or bodies, and emotionally damaging advertising campaigns create a culture of feminist disenchantment with what we wear and where we buy it. Even American Apparel, a cultural icon positively known for its lack of sweatshop labour, has a CEO who has been known to perpetuate a sexual environment within the company, including having sex with his staff and creating borderline pornographic shoots for advertising (see “Living On The Edge At American Apparel” ).

Needless to say, it’s refreshing to see cool, eco-friendly, feminist clothing like KMStitchery’s, the feminist stenciling of herstory! The premise of her clothing is that it’s ethical clothing for feministing in.

“I think it’s important to remember the womyn who paved the way for us. I am excited to get womyn excited about feminism! Or just to get them excited about political fems! I am disgruntled with how you see mostly male revolutionaries on t-shirts but not fems…I am here to focus on the great womyn of our past.”

Every month KMStitchery cuts a new feminist stencil and to date they range from Angela Davis (above) to bell hooks, Emma Goldman, and Gloria Steinem. All of the stencils are printed on recycled or reclaimed clothes and a variety of articles and styles are present, from t-shirts to skirts to hoodies. In the words of KMStitchery, “Represent! With these powerful ladies!”

Go check out Planned Parenthood’s latest website, takecaredownthere.com, which tackles the “Ins and Outs of the Ins and Outs” and is filled with “nontraditional” PSAs targeting sexually active teens and young adults. The Christian right hates it, but I love it, especially the “Down There Song.”

I am so very happy and completely thrilled to announce that my home territory of Akwesasne now has a fully loaded, all purpose, sex store!

Located on the New York side of Akwe, Totem Pole Novelties opened in January of this year and since then has become a booming, not to mention pleasurable, business! From the hottest erotica to the most salacious how-to DVD’s, Totem Pole Novelties has all your sweet spot needs whether you are going it solo, upping the ante on a long-term partnership, or just looking to have some safe and sexy fun.

I had a chance to visit this week and can tell you first hand that this is the place you want to be to get an up close and personal view of how some amazingly strong individuals are breaking taboos and taking back ownership for pleasure on the reservation to get to the best end result possible: empowerment.

It is so important that we in the Native community remember the power we used to honour in our sexuality and celebrate all of who we are, including our right to enjoy sex! We have so many teachings that support this that are too often forgotten and are instead, thrown into hypersexualized media.

Show them some love on their Facebook group or hit up their website and congratulate these brave Mohawks for keeping it real!

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.

I’ll admit I’ve been quiet on the whole Morgentaler receiving the order of Canada here on the blog, but rest assured it was because I was fending off some media I really didn’t want to deal with, and fighting back on some websites for my pro-choice positions that are attacking me for a new reason as of late…..my culture.

Oh yes. It’s true.

A good one I was sent recently as to why I shouldn’t support abortion rights goes a little something like this:

“(Because we’d be borrowing) from our sordid history of legally defining Jews, blacks, women and aboriginals as non-persons by defining the fetus as such. Astonishingly this approach is supported by Jews (Morgentaler, a holocaust survivor), blacks (Barack Obama), women (Hilary Clinton), and aboriginals (Jessica Yee, Chair, Aboriginal Realities, Aboriginal Choices, and Toronto Action Committee, Canadians for Choice) who ought to know better.”

Wtf?

I usually let stuff like this go since this is certainly not the first website that exists against the work I do, and I’m not going to even give this person the time of my day, but I thought I’d share it with all y’all.

Since it’s that much more offensive when someone is calling out my culture to denounce why I believe people should decide what’s best for their own bodies.

I guess if they actually knew anything my culture, they’d know that we’ve had the notion of reproductive rights way before the word “pro-choice”.

This is a poster put up in Dar Es Salaam by the Roman Catholic organization Human Life International, who “exist… to fight the evils of abortion, contraception, sex education and family breakdown”.

From Elizabeth Pisani’s site:

“Condoms lead to death, apparently. Since one in 10 adults in Dar is infected with HIV, you might think it more likely that unprotected sex leads to death. But perhaps to the Catholic fundamentalist who put up the posters, passing on a fatal virus is preferable to the sin of using contraception.

At the time, I wrote that “The Condoms = Death campaign … marks a shift in rhetoric from anti-abortion to anti-contraception among a small but vocal core of conservatives in the United States. Unless something is done about it very soon, that shift is going to be imposed on millions of women and men across the globe.

It now looks like the first victims might be women on the home front. Under new regulations proposed by the US Department of Health and Human Services, many popular forms of hormonal and indeed mechanical contraception can be re-defined as abortion. And the legislation allows people who work in tax-funded clinics to refuse to provide those contraceptive services if it offends their delicate religious sensibilities. So much for separation of church and state.”

Arts4Choice and Canadians for Choice present:

The Choice Monologues (and BBQ)!

This performance of the Choice Monologues will benefit the Arts4Choice project.

The project involves taking documentary portraits of women who have had abortions, young and old, of different backgrounds, language groups, cultures and geographic locations. These portraits will become a traveling exhibit and a book that we hope to have in clinics and women’s centres across the country.

The Choice Monologues are a collection of true stories from women and men in Canada who have had their lives affected by an unwanted pregnancy.

Come to celebrate Morgentaler and reproductive freedom in Canada!

Date: Sunday, July 27th
Time: 3:30pm
Address: 76 Pauline Ave, Toronto

$10 for performances and BBQ
refreshments available

PLEASE RSVP to:
Jessica Yee, Canadians for Choice
jessica.j.yee@gmail.com
or
Kathryn Palmateer, Arts4Choice arts4choice@gmail.com

This is just the latest from the crazed online materialistic, superficial, and stereotypical world.

The BeautifulPeople Network is an online dating service that has just come to Canada for “beautiful people” only.

Huh?

If you want to join the service, you must submit a picture and profile, and other members of the opposite sex rate you over a 72-hour period, deciding whether you’re worthy of joining their club.

Now I’m not about to lie and say that looks don’t matter at all, but geez, who really gets to have the final say on that?

Thanks to Julia for the link!

Kudos to this strong female in Chile for taking a stand against patriarchy and conservatism.

Monserrat Morilles who is a 26 year old professional pole dancer took her protest to the subways of Santiago where for one week, she would get on at one station, find a subway car with no children on it, and strip in time to exit at the next station. She refused to take tips to make a point, and was arrested during one of her performances.

Chile has a long history of widespread sexual repression, not to mention the fact that abortion is still illegal and supposed public awareness campaigns remain overtly moralisitc.

But it’s not like Chile stands alone on these issues.