Check out this same blog under a new name/look at Sobsister.com. Gracias mijitas.

Sarah Lacy “flirtatiously interviewed” Mark Zuckerberg during his panel session at SXSW Interactive last night, leading the crowd to cause an uproar at her self-focused and somewhat irrelevant questioning (often mentioning her book, etc.).

Media outlets have covered the story in numerous ways. The first thing I read was the article in Wired, which was the only that addressed her sex and gender as possible factors to the outbreak of criticism.

After careful examination however, especially of past commentary including Valleywag’s quote that she was the “hottest reporter in the Valley,” I figured her perspective might be a bit flighty.

Apparently, she thinks she has to get used to it. And apparently, she doesn’t feel like API social graphs appeal to the public. And one more apparently, she claims being a woman reporter covering tech is hard… try doing what she does. I do.

One of the video commenters said she made a bad name for female journalists… I might agree. And you?

Tomorrow, March 8, is International Women’s Day. And it’s not as bogus as it sounds.

International Women’s Day is an official holiday in over 20 countries, including China, Italy, Cuba, and Russia (here, it’s whatev).

The good news is that UNIFEM, the United Nations Development Fund for Women, went for a bold move for good ol’ IWD ‘08 in letting it coincide with the “Say NO to Violence Against Women Campaign.” P.S. Whose sick of “say no to ____”-slogans? Everyone.

I guess it’s working in China though, where more than 125,000 Chinese added their signatures to the online petition. Yesterday, Austria donated 10,000 Euro to the fund.

The U.S.? Psh. Either the UN still doesn’t interest us, we don’t agree with celebrating a holiday with socialist roots (equality is overrated), or we have something against Nicole Kidman (Tom, did you do this?).

Yep, she’s the campaign spokesperson. I really like Nicole Kidman, mostly based off the Batman movie from 1989 with Val Kilmer where she played a sharp journalist.

All I know is, for IWD I’m going to do my part.

• Give my mom some non-gendered woman’s gift.
• Posting the link to the campaign website/petition to sign: www.saynotoviolence.org
• Wreaking havoc tonight/tomorrow with my lady friends.

Happy woman day!

Maureen Dowd’s opinion piece, “Duel of Historical Guilts,” in today’s NY Times alludes to the divide of the Democratic party after a win by Clinton yesterday in our great state of Texas.

“With Obama saying the hour is upon us to elect a black man and Hillary saying the hour is upon us to elect a woman, the Democratic primary has become the ultimate nightmare of liberal identity politics. All the victimizations go tripping over each other and colliding, a competition of historical guilts.

People will have to choose which of America’s sins are greater, and which stain will have to be removed first. Is misogyny worse than racism, or is racism worse than misogyny?

As it turns out, making history is actually a way of being imprisoned by history. It’s all about the past. Will America’s racial past be expunged or America’s sexist past be expunged?”

Dowd mentions that Black voters hold contempt for those not voting Obama, while women voters hold contempt for those not voting Clinton. Clinton’s campaign has been notorious for using her femininity to attract the female vote:

Hell no I won’t vote for someone because she’s a woman. If I were Black, I wouldn’t vote for someone because she/he is black. Either way, whomever wins out of either marginalized group will cast a mold for the rest of that marginalized group’s members who also desire a shot at the presidency someday.

That means, if Clinton messes up, female presidents might become few and far between.

I think every shitty day I have ever had has included some non-descript male and his non-descript friends in some non-descript car/truck with the windows rolled down yelling completely descriptive degradations at me based on some piece of my body.

This especially blows when its raining because you feel like a wet dog that has a loving home one block away. How’s that for a tangent.

My point actually takes physical place in South Africa, where a woman was assaulted last week by a taxi driver after wearing a mini skirt, pictured here.

Today hundreds of South African women marched to express femininity without being assaulted. The response from the taxi-driving anti-miniskirt gang was that the woman was indecently dressed. The BBC reported that some in the crowd were shouting that women were getting too many rights.

I don’t know if they know what they (the women demanding to wear small pieces of clothing) are getting themselves into.

All I know is, I wish I could wear a miniskirt without American society subliminally letting cat-calls continue, and act like its normal. Hence, you will never see me in a miniskirt.

A video from the protest, if desired:

Charlotte Allen obviously did poorly in rhetoric class, because I can’t tell if her opinion piece, “We Scream, We Swoon. How dumb can we get?” from the Washington Post is satirical, is reinforcing gendered stereotypes of women, or is reinforcing angered/crazy stereotypes of radicalism (and that its taken seriously).

This paragraph, for example, grabs me by the balls:

“I can’t help it, but reading about such episodes of screaming, gushing and swooning makes me wonder whether women — I should say, ‘we women,’ of course — aren’t the weaker sex after all. Or even the stupid sex, our brains permanently occluded by random emotions, psychosomatic flailings and distraction by the superficial. Women ‘are only children of a larger growth,’ wrote the 18th-century Earl of Chesterfield. Could he have been right?”

Go on, Charlotte.

“Then there’s Clinton’s nearly all-female staff, chosen for loyalty rather than, say, brains or political savvy. Clinton finally fired her daytime-soap-watching, self-styled ‘Latina queena’ campaign manager Patti Solis Doyle, known for burning through campaign money and for her open contempt for the ‘white boys’ in the Clinton camp. But stupidly, she did it just in time to alienate the Hispanic voters she now desperately needs to win in Texas or Ohio to have any shot at the Democratic nomination.”

Interesting… so she should have kept a staff member to appeal to a minority community and win votes? WWMD (What would a man do)?

“I swear no man watches ‘Grey’s Anatomy’ unless his girlfriend forces him to. No man bakes cookies for his dog. No man feels blue and takes off work to spend the day in bed with a copy of ‘The Friday Night Knitting Club.’ No man contracts nebulous diseases whose existence is disputed by many if not all doctors, such as Morgellons (where you feel bugs crawling around under your skin). At least no man I know. Of course, not all women do these things, either — although enough do to make one wonder whether there isn’t some genetic aspect of the female brain, something evolutionarily connected to the fact that we live longer than men or go through childbirth, that turns the pre-frontal cortex into Cream of Wheat.”

Read the rest of the article to read statistical evidence that women are bad drivers.

Charlotte Allen is a Harvard grad who was against Harvard opting to accept more women, and spoke up for a professor who was against it, claiming that “feminism” is an ideology that was a force-insert into the societal ebb and flow. Of course, I am referring to her piece in the Dallas Morning News where she discusses it. That piece is entitled, “Martyr or moron? He dared to question feminism’s big lie.”

Additionally, she is gal-pals with Ann Coulter–you might know her as “satan.”

Word of advice to Charlotte: look between your legs. It’s not there.

It’s that time of the month. Deal with it.

I believe the “woman-on-her-period-means-bitchiness” is a stereotype reinforced by women to get away with crude behavior one week a month. I mean, I do it too. And it’s easy because when the red flag goes up (har har) suddenly significant others flock to the videogames.

Periods are great. And I ultimately mean that. For that one week a month, I become the most cynical person on earth. It’s almost like a surreal super-power. As a matter of fact, my roommate and I have a list of our favorite “period jokes” we tell one another when it’s that time (we usually stay in sync). My favorite being, “Vampires could be having picnics in my pants right now.”

Ah yes, these are the days of our pre-menopausal lives.

But my favorite period story goes back to this summer, when I discovered that there were not two ways to plug (tampons and pads), but THREE. And thanks to Google targeted advertising on my Gmail page, I was reminded.

[stolen from Wikipedia]

This, is a menstrual cup. I first found out about menstrual cups in the UK–There they have the “Mooncup.” And in the U.S., the most common are the “Divacup” and the “Keeper.”

Menstrual cups, to break it down:

1. are cups placed in your special place to collect menstrual “fluid.”
2. can be reused/disposable, depending on the brand. If they are reusable, they can last up to 20 years.
3. can be worn up to 12 hours.
4. are better for the environment!
5. have NO HEALTH RISKS (says the FDA).
6. come in two sizes (pre-birth, post-birth basically).

They are an investment, but my best friend and I calculated once that one cup (about $20) which lasts about 20 years saves you $1,700 on tampons/pads for periods (not including the price of inflation…I was taught Economics by a coach in high school).

Here is a video about tampon v. the Keeper cup:

And here are the websites of the products that are located in the U.S.:

• DivaCup
• The Keeper Cup (this website is really ugly)

Any more questions? Check out the Women’s Museum of Menstruation. Celebrate!

Bra-burning, man-hating, lesbian-loving… myth.

The f-word is a word I hesitate to use. I can almost feel the whispers behind me, “She’s a feminist…” “Oh, how tragic.” The idea has zombied into an undying reputation since I wrote about it in a column my sophomore year of high school for the school newspaper.

All though I had read The Feminine Mystique that year, my realization of my “feminist agenda” can be deduced to three essential factors:

1. My mother is the breadwinner of our family (and I am the only child), therefore undulating a very strong influence on the expectations placed on me as woman.
2. Because I grew up in the boondocks, I missed out on societal interactions shaping a distinguished feminine/masculine gender.
3. I was tired of getting treated like shit for reasons I didn’t understand.

It wasn’t until college that I realized I wasn’t a feminist. Don’t gasp so loud, not done yet.
Comparing the Civil Rights Movement is relevant. There are is no generic label for Black people who want more rights or to be treated equally as white people. Why? Because it is understood.

Somehow it isn’t for women. But it should be. It’s not that I believe women should have rights; It’s that I believe shit should be like it’s supposed to be.

I hate trembling when I hear “feminism” or when I find out others tremble too; the media during the first and second waves was inhabited by men who trivialized it. Evidence?

Bra-burning? Never happened. Dykes? Never been one. Even women hate labeling themselves that–It means they have to go so far to say as they want to be human some day.

It’s understood.

Here is an interesting video that surveys what people think of the word. The beginning starts with a woman saying she never says she is a feminist on a first date; I told my boyfriend on the second date. He said, “So?”



]]> http://wwwoman.wordpress.com/2008/02/29/what-is-it-about-the-f-word/feed/ 0 Cecilia http://wwwoman.wordpress.com/2008/02/27/flesh-currency/ http://wwwoman.wordpress.com/2008/02/27/flesh-currency/#comments Wed, 27 Feb 2008 21:29:11 +0000 Cecilia http://wwwomanesource.com/?p=80 ]]>


The border between the United States and Mexico is no fine line; it represents the metaphorical finish line for some Mexican people, but for some Mexican women, it represents justification of suffering on either side–no green grass to be found.



The movie “Trade,” written by the same dude who did Motorcycle Diaries, debuted in September 2007. Behind the movie’s dramatic story of a pre-pubescent girl in Mexico City getting kidnapped for the sex trade is the underlying saintly principle of “making people aware” (oh independent cinema, you should be canonized).

The movie was actually based off of an article written by Peter Landesman for NY Times Magazine, entitled, “The Girls Next Door,” in which Landesman discusses how common sex slave-trafficking is here in the states–right inside the gates of your subdivision.

It is estimated that at least 10,000 people are smuggled into the U.S. to be sex slaves. Over 50 percent are minors. Over 80 percent are female. Most of the sales take place in online auction.

All though I didn’t like how the movie stereotyped Mexican people and still had a white male hero (played by Kevin Kline), it was pretty accurate and reflects the typical process of sex-trafficking.

See if you’re interested:



]]> http://wwwoman.wordpress.com/2008/02/27/flesh-currency/feed/ 0 Cecilia base_26.jpg http://wwwoman.wordpress.com/2008/02/26/may-irony-always-inspire-change/ http://wwwoman.wordpress.com/2008/02/26/may-irony-always-inspire-change/#comments Tue, 26 Feb 2008 04:07:30 +0000 Cecilia http://wwwoman.wordpress.com/?p=77 ]]>


Why I opened my door, and what a pleasant scene I did see!



Chalk one up for the fight against macho West Campus douchebaggery.

]]> http://wwwoman.wordpress.com/2008/02/26/may-irony-always-inspire-change/feed/ 1 Cecilia Clean!