Check out this shrine to sexy Stephen Harper by his biggest fan Ruby:

Desire and scrapbooking at The Stephen Harper Fan Club!!!

don’t you just want to squeeze him? (www.torontoist.com)

Beyond my requisite Women’s Studies viewing of Marilyn Waring’s Who’s Counting: Sex, Lies and Global Economics (which is kick-ass), I hate economics. Economy talk makes me mad. It’s because pundits talk about it as if it’s something more precious than life itself. Same with the market. Or capital. I like my political talk to start and end with living beings and their rights to live, work, and die with dignity.

Ok, ok, I’m also intimidated by economic talk - even with university courses in macro and microeconomics under my belt. It’s been a long road to realizing that my lack of confidence isn’t just my own personal failing, but this feeling is rooted in the way that economic theory is purposefully held outside the reach of ordinary people. We are led to believe that the economy is a precious stone that can only be handled by a few experts.

My friends and I have been trying to talk through the big news from Wall Street this week on the proposed (and now failed) government-led bailout of the US economy. None of us feel capable to explain it, or understand it. How can anyone even think about allocating $700 billion to the very crooks who created this whole mess?

Lucky me, my union local gave me a free ticket to go see Naomi Klein talk about her new book The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism last night. This post is mostly a synopsis of her talk, which is also available as an audio file, if I manage to get you intrigued.
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Wow, there were so many women and transwomen at Take Back the Night last night here in Toronto. Women sang a capella of freedom, told their herstories in multiple languages, gave testimony of their rape or experience of genocide, shared success stories of ending violence in their lives, read out their frustrations with feminist movements, talked of creative collaborations on the amazing giant puppet that accompanied us, and kids held lanterns high. My bum was cold. But my spirit was warm.

I haven’t been to Take Back the Night since I moved to Toronto four years ago, and all my experiences of this important event came from a small university town where the local women’s shelter headed up the event mostly by memorializing the women killed by domestic violence. While of course I think it is important to remember our dead, I don’t think that Take Back the Night is that time. It always felt like a seriously muted understatement to quietly do our little memorial in a dark park. None of that in Toronto! Just being a part of a group of women come together in the spirit of resistance and survival - hell, not survival, but to flourish - was mind bending, especially since I’ve been hiding away for many months writing my Masters’ thesis. It was a great way to come back out into my community of allies, and I got to come with a friend who had never been to Take Back the Night before. It was hard to yell that oh-so-quiet word RAPE out loud walking down Queen Street West, but when we started chanting “Hey mister mister keep your hands off my sister!” it felt so good to have words this time when so many other times I didn’t.

If you missed it and you’re craving some serious kick-ass women community, on October 2, there is a march and rally happening to support women without status who flee violence.
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My life is way too busy to remember when I’m going to get my period. And at this time of the year, when I’m jetting off to the woods for a few days of camping or going on long road trips, it is a mega pain when I forget that I’m going to bleed and I have to bunch my socks into my underwear to catch the flow.

Never again! Check out Mon.thly.Info, a handy online tool to help you keep track. It even sends you an email reminder when blood is on its way!

When I was a young teenager, I had a pregnancy scare. So of course i went to a crisis pregnancy centre to get the test before I wanted to come clean to my mom or my doctor that I was having sex at a pretty young age. I didn’t have a very open and communicative relationship about my sexuality with any adult and I was leaps and bounds ahead of all my friends in terms of sexual experimentation. This all meant I had no one to talk to.

At the crisis pregnancy centre, instead of good advice and support, I was asked to pee in a cup and then I had to sit in a TV room full of toys and baby clothes and watch a 20 minute video about adoption.

I was lucky - my results came back negative and i could go back to my happy-go-lucky life. I didn’t give it much thought at the time, but the centre I went to was not an impartial and supportive centre that discussed all the options. Instead, this so called “crisis pregnancy centre” was a thinly veiled pro-life centre that used manipulative tactics during a time of high emotional stress in my life.

The centre didn’t even discuss birth control options with me. Eventually, I found another centre willing to do STI and pregnancy-prevention counselling and I got myself set up with some real sexual education.

The always amazing Teen Voices Online website has this page with tips on how to find an authentic crisis pregnancy centre with your reproductive health in mind. Pass it on!

If I wasn’t chained to the Toronto ‘burbs for the next month pet-sitting, I would be at the Allied Media Conference in Detriot from June 20-22. And, of course, I would offer to take all of you with me!

Check out the program, which is all that the Women, Action and the Media conference that I attended in March (sadly) couldn’t be. They’ve got sessions like Transporting Silenced Voices Through Interviews For Film/Video, Revolutionary Parenting, Women Of Color With Disabilities Organizing And Building Community, and yes, a session on the media coverage/grassroots organizing lessons of the Jena Six and the Jersey Four (also mentioned in Issue 11 of Shameless). I’m in awe!

What I love about the way they have organized the conference is that sessions for/about people of colour are integrated within the overall conference design, and aren’t designed as a “space apart.” (Can you guess who must have organized this thing? You got it - a pretty diverse group of people - it sure helps.) Of course there are important times in the agenda for people of colour to get together in a safe space and talk shop. But what sometimes happens is that when sessions that deal with issues that directly affect people of colour ARE open to all, white folks never show up! This creates the ol’ conference colour divide (seen countless times in feminist conferences, circa 1971 all the way to the present). And everyone gets righteously angry because folks who are already multiply marginalized get remarginalized at conferences because of this low attendance and low awareness. And that makes me angry, too.

So, in conclusion, hooray for conferences that don’t divide and conquer, and boo to pet-sitting.

Today’s the day that Stephen Harper is scheduled to apologize for the horrors of the residential schools where Aboriginal peoples in Canada were imprisoned for decades, creating generations of abuse and also of survival.

The apology is scheduled for 3pm today in the House of Commons and you can watch it online livestream on the CBC here.

For me, the government’s apology comes too late to be meaningful. It isn’t happening in concert with acknowledging the multiple thefts of land and culture that are still ongoing in land claim disputes, cultural appropriation, and lack of basic resources like clean water, culturally-relevant and sustaining education.

If I can find any hope today, I want this apology to galvanize and influence white settler folks. Sadly, I think that white folks are more likely to respond and react to white people talking about racism and cultural genocide than the survivors themselves. Will hearing Stephen Harper apologize start the unlearning?

For many, it will do nothing. For others, it will mean something. What does it mean to you?

I’m up late and watching what girls can do on the Internet. Check this out to inspire you for the week ahead!!!

Shameless writer Zahra Rasul just sent me a link to this article about Dunkin Donuts pulling a TV ad with Rachael Ray. The celebrity donut-hawker is wearing a scarf that looks “too Palestinian.”

Rachael Ray lectures us on the evils of American imperialism. Solution to this problem? Buy Dunkin Donuts!

And here I was worried that once Mary Kate Olsen wore one, the keffiyeh became a depoliticized and empty symbol of vapid celebrity! I guess it still has symbolic power when it is draped around the neck of someone whose doesn’t look quite as white as the Olsen twins.

Of course it all started with the conservative Michelle Malkin calling it “the traditional scarf of Arab men that has come to symbolize murderous Palestinian jihad.”

But the question remains: is it, or isn’t it a keffiyeh? And what the heck does a keffiyeh really symbolize, America?

Stay tuned for the next print issue of Shameless to find out, where Zahra will take a look at the keffiyeh’s history. And of course, check out Thea’s blog post on keffiyeh too.