You might not see it because editors are those tireless folks working behind the scenes, but every single post that happens benefits from our blog editor Thea’s vision and sharp editing skills. She’s a key member of the Shameless team and is being called on to new writing projects in Texas. Yup. Texas. I can just imagine the mash-up of Thea and Texas, and it’s real messy.

Today is her last day!

Thea, thanks for your tireless clicking, linking, fixing, learning, nudging and of course, your wacky use of punctuation ne’er seen before by the blogosphere.

The magazine and the blog have immeasurably grown with your compassion, ideas, and humour.

Will you keep blogging here now and again? I hope so.

Love from Team Shameless!

I just walked by a pro-choice demonstration at the University of Toronto and they provided some important facts I wanted to remind you of:

1. Only 15.9% of all general hospitals in Canada offer accessible abortion services.

2. Angus McLaren and Arlene Tigar McLaren estimate that between 4000 and 6000 Canadian women died from illegal abortions from 1926 to 1947 (McLaren 1986) and different sources have estimated that prior to 1969 there had been at least 120,000 illegal abortions performed every year (Childbirth by Choice Trust, 1998).

3. In Canadian medical schools, more class time is dedicated to the study of Viagra than to abortion procedures, pregnancy options counselling, and abortion law and policy combined.

4. Less than 2% of women choose adoption when faced with an unplanned pregnancy.

5. Every year, over 80,000 women die from complications during or after unsafe abortions. (The highest fatality rates are in Africa and Asia.)

6. In the US, death rates due to abortion fell by 85% in the five years following legalization. (Tietze, 1981)

These stats come from Canadians for Choice, Prochoice, and a CBC News backgrounder.

Or does anyone else think it’s a bit messed up that Toronto Alternative Arts and Fashion Week‘s first-ever event is called [FAT]?

Look at the dimensions of their “alternative” models on their webpage, and you’ll see what I’m getting at.

And if you haven’t picked up our newest issue yet, we’ve got a great piece on size activism on the catwalks of the land.

Well, yes I do like to live in the dark here in Canada, and not just during Earth Hour. Or it seems that I do since I was the only one who didn’t know who Helen Thomas was at the Women, Action and the Media! conference in Boston this past weekend. All kerfuffled from a delayed flight and Boston rain, I arrived just early enough to read her bio in the conference program before entering the large lit-up auditorium. Helen Thomas was a big deal to all the excited, chattering women there. She is known as the First lady of the Press and is part of the White House Press Corps. Before she even spoke, the crowd gave her an almost unanimous standing ovation. (Yes, almost. More on that later.)

What a woman. She’s been in journalism since the 1940s, and has been harangued 9 presidents so far with tough questions, like pressing Bush on “Why did you REALLY go to war?” He ignored her, where she sat in the front row of the press, for 3 years. She said that “too much is at stake to throw the president a soft ball.”

I loved some of Helen’s deadpan one-liners quoting others, earmarking her fame, like:

If God had created the world in six days, he couldn’t have rested on the seventh, because he would have had to explain it to Helen Thomas.
- Gerald Ford

Fidel Castro on the difference between Cuban democracy and American democracy: “I don’t have to answer questions from Helen Thomas.”

I think the audience was enraptured with her fame. And she was probably enraptured with their eager, feminist journalist faces - when Helen Thomas started in journalism, she and other women had to fight just to be allowed in the door to the press conferences. She thinks we’ve come a long way.

But maybe not that far.

(more inside…)

Forgive the intense subject line, but this is the question that Audacia Ray had to face from mainstream media jerkos who were interviewing her on the Spitzer scandal in New York state. (It was off-air, but nonetheless off-putting.)

And why is it a nasty question? Well no sex worker wants to be called a whore, especially by some big shot who is about to control how the entire country is going to see you, your work and activism. Let’s just say there is a power differential going on, since sex workers have little to gain from public exposure and just about everything to lose.

And this same media industry also trafficks in representations of sex workers that only deal with the following images: dead hookers, exploitation, trafficking, arrests, and good girls gone bad…few of which truly give voice to the experiences of sex workers. Audacia has a great blog post on why sex workers aren’t accurately represented in the mainstream media, which she read to much acclaim at the WAM! conference session on Sex Workers and Media Representation this past weekend. I love the last line of this post.

(more inside…)

This post is best introduced by this video testimony by a woman worker who was detained as part of the New Bedford sweatshop raid in Massachusetts:

In this particular raid, 361 people were detained and the majority were women. Many of these women are mothers and pregnant women; at least two pregnant women were deported without delay.

The mainstream and also the feminist media isn’t really talking about these raids and other important human rights stories about immigration in the U.S.

Why? Why are these stories ignored when these raids are happening all over the US? When this continent is a dangerous place for immigrant women? When immigrant women are being “disappeared”, detained indefinitely, denied access to health care, torn from their families, deported without seeing a lawyer or a judge? Why?
(more inside…)

A number of writers, editors and artists involved with Shameless are in Boston this weekend at the Women, Action and the Media! conference. Watch for breaking news from the feminist media world on the blog this weekend!

I am planning on attending the following sessions so watch for my blog posts on these topics:
1. Immigration: The Women’s Rights Crisis Feminists Aren’t Talking About
2. Sex Workers and Media Representation
3. Can Blogging End Racism?

Over the past few days I’ve started writing a few different posts for today’s Film Friday feature. One was about up and coming Oscar nominee Ellen Page, who I love. Then, in response to Megan’s blog piece about the lack of women directors, I started a little data compendium of the Oscar nominees broken down according to gender, Guerilla Grrrls style. Then I found someone had already done that here. So check it out.

However, I’m not really a big movie person. I don’t watch or care about the Oscars. I am much more interested in smaller documentaries, indie films, and my local community. And one pathway to those cherished things is now no longer: Suspect Video.

Goodbye, Suspect Video. You can my regular parking spot right outside. For my bicycle, that is. (http://www.flickr.com/photos/wyliepoon/)

Many of you have seen the nation-wide coverage of a six-alarm fire at the corner of Queen and Bathurst. About 10 different stores were totally burned out and many people living in the apartments above were lucky to escape alive.

It was only two short blocks from my home. Yesterday I finally got a chance to walk through my neighborhood and finally got a look at the smoking wreckage. I was surprised by the intensity of my reaction seeing such devastation. I was holding back tears.

I watched coverage on the teevee news on Tuesday night and it focused on Duke’s, a bicycle shop that I also frequent, which had been a family business in that exact location for 80+ years. While I do mourn the loss of the bike shop (I just bought a new Ulock there last week), what I’m really going to miss is Suspect Video.

Now I don’t suppose that a national teevee news show could talk about what kind of stuff Suspect Video did for this community of freaks, geeks and punks and queers. Suspect Video probably couldn’t be described as an upstanding community member. Their windows were always full of garish and freaky figurines with cobwebs hanging all around, both real and fake for effect. When you went in the store, no salesperson greeted you. Instead the guy or girl munched on their pizza and watched some cheesy zombie flick on the screens above the merchandise turned at ultra high volume, shrieks and moans galore. I admit that many times I went into Suspect to just be treated with disdain and humanness. No perky falsity around getting my dollars here.
(more inside…)

Since we’ve been writing about the cultural politics of nasty lyrics, I thought to invite you to a discussion next week where one of my most favourite poets and activists, Staceyann Chin, will be speaking in Toronto.

If any of you have been following the decade-long debate over homophobic lyrics in dancehall, this is the place to hear some really committed activists talk about the best way to address this issue. It’s a public forum as well so you’ll have the opportunity to participate.

Since September of 2007, the Canadian arm of the international Stop Murder Music Campaign has been very active in pushing concert cancellations. And just last week, Gareth Henry, well-known gay activist with JFLAG in Jamaica, announced that he is seeking refugee asylum here in Canada because of persecution in Jamaica.

Meanwhile, dancehall artists such as Buju Banton are singled out as particularly nasty while many other artists also produce demeaning, misogynistic and hurtful lyrics. Who else is guilty of promoting hate in the music industry?

Here are the details:

The Sound of Hate: Where sexual orientation, race, dancehall music and human rights collide.
Panel Discussion and Public Forum
Friday, 29th February 2008
6:30 PM

University of Toronto
Medical Sciences Building
1 King’s College Circle
Room 2158

Moderator:
Angela Robertson

Panelists:
Staceyann Chin -Poet and Activist
Rinaldo Walcott -Associate Professor/ OISE U of T
Nik Redman -DJ and Activist~
Akim Adé Larcher -Human Rights Activist
Promoter -To Be Announced

ASL-English interpretation will be provided.
Sponsors: Stop Murder Music Canada, Egale Canada and CUPE Ontario. For more information: Egale Canada 416-642-5030.