illicit diversions

Since my not-really-a-breakup with Pandagon (I still refresh obsessively /o\ ), I’ve been on the hunt for new feminist blogs to fill the void. Thankfully, I Blame the Patriarchy has been briefly active, so I enjoyed and was dismayed by many of the commentariat during Science Week, and thought about a lot of new things during Art Week.

The first new blog I’ve picked up is Tiger Beatdown, a collective lead by Sady Doyle. I’ve heard it mentioned before, but never checked it out until recently. I started reading during Ladypalooza, more specifically, the post about Dude Music. (The rest of the Ladypalooza posts can be found on this archive page and can I just take a moment to tell you that it drives me to despair when people refuse to make it easy on me by tagging their posts in a useful fashion ;_; ) I appreciate that there are multiple posters who all seem to have reasonable things to say (unlike some other blogs with multiple posters :p) and I like the wide range of topics covered and the hipster-ish sense of humor there. That said, I can see why the hipster-ness of it all could be a turnoff for some people. And I would also like to express my appreciation for their NPR-style support of themselves. People should be paid for doing work. And all that is why they are my new jam. I just wish they’d update more often, but then they’d maybe suck more, so I guess I’ll just have to learn patience or something.

The other blog I’ve added to my regular rotation is Fugitivus, which I will delay in linking for a moment. I feel somewhat terribly awkward for reading it and liking it so much, because Harriet very frankly discusses her abuse and rape and how she deals with the long term repercussions of them, which is often extremely distressing. The wonderful parts about her blog are how well she writes and how thoughtfully she discusses coping. I feel like after every post I read I have an entire month’s worth of ideas to chew over and digest, and I really appreciate her very personal approach to Dealing With Problems and Being Better In The Future. It isn’t just identifying a problem, but then also thinking about how to solve it. An other aspect I really appreciate about her writing is how honest she is about how hard she is on herself, and the ways she is working to be kinder to herself and others, which is something I’ve been thinking about a lot recently. Being able to read someone else’s thoughts on the ways they are unkind to themselves and the ways they change to become kinder to themselves has really helped me thinking about how I treat myself and what I want to change. At any rate, you can find her writings at Fugitivus.net and be prepared for explicit discussion of distressing topics.

I’ve also dabbled in Fatshionista, but my engagement is somewhat uneven as I am not really the audience she is writing for, and I am okay with that. I just love that she also loves Lady Gaga and linked to this great performance of Lady Gaga singing Gershwin.