• • In My Opinion...
  • Media Savvy
  • Rape Culture

  Second Looks: A Sailor, A Nurse, and Sexual Assault

  October 6, 2012 • Meg Pirie

  Photos are funny, aren’t they? A look through an album or Instagram and you see moments in time, frozen with the click of a shutter. It is, as Susan Sontag observed in her book of essays On Photography, proof that you were somewhere. A photo is a pictorial declaration that you took up space, at some point, in some location.

  And then, there are those images that are, for many, instantly recognizable. We might know nothing of the subjects but we know the image. Devoid of context, this particular mix of shapes and shades is familiar. It’s a strange rupture to navigate. Like this image, for instance.

  

  Taken on August 14, 1945 by LIFE magazine photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt, we see, at first glance, a sailor, a woman, a kiss and what looks to be parade. It’s a celebration. World War II is over.

  But there’s more to this story. (more inside…)

• • All About Shameless
  • Arts
  • Event Listings
  • In My Opinion...

  Zines! DIY! Revolution! Activity book! - Shameless Magazine at Nuit Blanche

  September 28, 2012 • Ronak Ghorbani

  If you’re in Toronto for Nuit Blanche the night-to-morning art festival, make sure to drop by the Gladstone Hotel (1214 Queen St. W.) at 9 p.m. for the 12 Hr. Zine Machine!

  Shameless Editorial Director Sheila, and Arts Editor Ronak are working alongside two super rad teens Kaya and Sahlla (the mastermind behind the Fight Like A Girl zine) to craft together a zine activity book on DIY interactive guides to revolution. We have one hour to make it and would love for you to come by and tell us your thoughts, opinions, and what revolution means to you.

  Tweet us at @shamelessmag use the hashtags #DIYrevNB #12hrzinemachine to let us know what revolution means to you and what you’d like to see in the zine!

  Also, make sure to check out the 12 Hr. Zine Machine website throughout the night to download the finished zines being made throughout the night!

  

  The only thing 12 Hr. Zine Machine participants can make ahead of time is the zine cover. This is ours!

  ____________________________________________________________________
  
  More info on the event:

  Drop by the Gladstone Hotel and behold the vibrant and bustling “12 HR Zine Machine” as ten featured Toronto artist groups are challenged to create a handmade zine art book every hour, all night long!

  Join the zine machine by writing your suggestions on a large “Idea Board” in the workroom or tweeting them to @maddycollective. Nuit Blanche audience members are also invited to sit with the zine artists and contribute their own drawings and writings.

  Free limited edition copies of each hour’s unique zine
  will be given out to Nuit Blanche guests. The books will also be uploaded online and downloadable throughout the night on our project website at: www.12hrzinemachine.com.

  Featured ZINE MACHINE artist groups are:

  CAROUSEL MAGAZINE (http://www.carouselmagazine.ca/)
  FIONA SMYTH (http://www.fionasmyth.com/)
  KOYAMA PRESS (http://koyamapress.com/)
  MAMMALIAN DIVING REFLEX (http://mammalian.ca/)
  PAPER PUSHER/PAPIRMASSE (http://paperpusher.ca/, http://papirmasse.com/art/)
  SHAMELESS MAGAZINE (http://www.shamelessmag.com/)
  STATIC ZINE (http://staticzine.com/)
  STEEL BANANAS ART COLLECTIVE (http://www.steelbananas.com/)
  TORONTO COMIC JAM (http://www.torontocomicjam.com/about.html)
  VSVSVS (http://vsvsvs.org/)

  Learn more about the 50+ artists included in our project and read our workshop extravaganza zine on: www.12hrzinemachine.com

  Part of Gladstone Hotel’s “Fly by Night”

  Organized by Madeleine Collective: www.madeleinecollective.com
  

• • Gender
  • In My Opinion...
  • Media Savvy
  • Sexuality

  On the End of Teen Mom

  September 19, 2012 • Manisha Aggarwal-Schifellite

  This week marked the end of an MTV show that has been both polarizing and extremely popular since its inception three years ago. The show is Teen Mom, which began as a 2009 spin-off of MTV’s documentary series 16 and Pregnant. Created by Lauren Dolgen, 16 and Pregnant depicted the lives of real teen parents before and after the birth of their children. After the first season of 16 and Pregnant aired, MTV selected four girls to be part of the Teen Mom spin-off, and filmed their first years of motherhood. Since then, MTV has aired three more seasons of 16 and Pregnant featuring three different casts. Two of these seasons have spawned a Teen Mom series: Teen Mom 2 (in its second season) and Teen Mom 3 (greenlit by MTV). So despite the end of the original Teen Mom series, the Teen Mom franchise remains active on MTV.

  Given the makeup of the network’s other successful programs (Jersey Shore, the Real World, Campus PD, The Hills, etc.), it would be easy to write off Teen Mom as another sensationalized “reality” program that exploits its protagonists for profit. It is important to acknowledge that Teen Mom has changed as a series throughout its four seasons, and that these changes have affected its impact as a hard-hitting expose on being a pregnant teenager in the United States. However, it is a political and cultural event that warrants closer examination for its impact on discussions of teenage sexuality in contemporary arenas.

  

  (http-//upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/0/0d/TeenMomcard.)

  Teen Mom features season-long narrative arcs that involve the women and their families, partners, and children, focusing largely on negative or dramatic events in their lives. This focus is in contrast to 16 and Pregnant, which focused on the financial, educational, and familial issues of one pregnant teen per episode. As a result, Teen Mom focused less on the everyday difficulties of teenage parenthood and more on the dramatic interactions between the mothers and their partners, friends, and parents. This makes the show more entertaining to watch, but takes away much of the “reality” that characterized 16 and Pregnant as a groundbreaking and interesting look at teen motherhood.

  (more inside…)

• • In My Opinion...
  • On The Job
  • Sporting Goods

  What I learned while trying not to watch the Olympics

  August 17, 2012 • Meg Pirie

  Now that we’re no longer inundated with the minute-by-minute updates from London—newsflashes brought to you by Coke and McDonalds—it’s time to take part in Ye Olde Olympic retrospective and for me to confess the following: My name is Meg. I am a feminist. But I also love the Olympics. That said, I am highly, highly critical of the corporate ethos that governs not just the Games’ infrastructure, but also how the labour of amateur athletes is discussed and constructed.

  Really though, there is much to learn from the Olympics. In fact, the Olympics provides us with a perfect snapshot of hypercapitalism. Hypercapitalism is, in brief, extreme capitalism at the expense of traditional values. What exactly ‘traditional values’ implies is anyone’s guess.

  My personal interpretation of hypercapitalism as it relates to the Olympics is extreme capitalism projected as [fictitious] ‘unity’ and ‘oneness’ that is, in reality, founded on exploitation: of the environment; of labour (I’m including behind-the-scenes media workers, athletes, and low-wage service workers that make the Olympics hum along in host cities); and colonialism, since more often than not Olympics are held in settler states or nations that are directly benefiting from ongoing colonization.

  There’s tons to talk about and I’m only scratching the surface in this post. You could spend several posts dissecting sexist and racist media coverage, so I’m going to focus on a few instances that struck a chord with me.

  (more inside…)

• • Anti-violence
  • In My Opinion...

  To the People of the Danzig Community, With Love

  August 8, 2012 • deb singh

  Dear People of the Danzig, Scarborough Community in the City of Toronto,

  I am compelled to apologize to your community members, families, children, mothers, fathers and friends for the great loss you have experienced. My deepest condolences to your community.

  I am aware that many people are talking about the violence that occurred at the Danzig Block party. Some media outlets are talking about who died, how they died, how old they were and who they were loved by. Politicians are talking about gun registries and gun bans. Social workers and community activists are talking about poverty and funding for community programs. And our mayor is talking some crap about ‘hug-a’thug’ programs and that he is a big supporter of youth.

  I’m not sure what you want us to talk about – what you, yourselves are talking about, except I imagine, that grief (can) make(s) it hard to talk about all these other things.

  (more inside…)

• • Activist Report
  • In My Opinion...
  • Indigenous

  One settler on Turtle Island

  May 8, 2012 • deb singh

  My name is deb singh and thanks to Shameless for inviting me to blog! And thanks to the girls, trans youth, young women, and everyone who reads the Shameless blog. Big thanks to the team at Shameless for asking me to write!

  This blog is going to be about me: introducing myself to you, but also connecting myself to the land we call Canada.

  Many of you have heard about the ideas of privilege and oppression from reading Shameless, among other sources, I’m sure. The following is my self-identification, which can be where I identify myself on a spectrum of social locations, places where we all find ourselves via multiple places on the spectrum, if we decide to look and name them. Anti-oppression politics, to me, is about seeing those social locations and naming them as they contribute to our lives and how we get treated by others.

  So here goes: I’m a Canadian-born Indo-Caribbean. I’m Brown. I have Canadian citizenship status. I’m a queer woman of colour. I’m a woman-identified, non-trans person. I’m non-disAbled, with parents who have mental health and addiction issues. I’m working class. I am a survivor of rape, sexual assault and domestic violence, and I work at a rape crisis centre. I was born and raised in Toronto, Ontario. I’m urban. I have an
  undergraduate degree at a University. I grew up with a single mom. I’m not fat and I’m not thin. I’m 33 years old.

  And I’m a settler on Turtle Island.

  Some of you may know what and where Turtle Island is, but just so we’re all on the same page: Turtle Island is a term used by Haudenosaunee, Iroquois and Anishnaabe, as well as and including many other Indigenous communities, for North America. This would include what’s considered Iceland, Greenland, Alaska, Canada and the United States of America. (FYI: Haudenosaunee, Iroquois, Anishnaabe, Cree, Metis, Six Nations, are just some of many Indigenous nations which have their own distinct cultures and languages, and not all Indigenous people call the land Turtle Island.)

  (more inside…)

• • In My Opinion...
  • Media Savvy
  • Race and Racism

  I can’t get no representation: whitewashing storytelling in popular media

  April 25, 2012 • Raisa Bhuiyan

  Dear Shameless reader,

  I’ve just come home from watching popular film of the week The Hunger Games with a sour taste in my mouth and an angry grumbling motion vibrating through my intestines. It seems as though the white-washing of Hunger Games protagonist Katniss has given me yet another case of racial indigestion. In fact, I’m currently cursing myself for being hopeful in thinking that some satisfaction could be had with regards to how people of colour are represented in our popular media.

  Can you blame me though?

  Every time I hear that a big shot film depicting some form of oppression or discrimination is coming out, I get excited. I get excited because I start hoping that there’s been some equitable representation of people of colour in these movies. I get so excited that I start hoping with all my might that some representational justice will be done to the racialized character(s) and that they won’t be doomed to forever remain as the one-dimensional support system to the main, typically white protagonist. I start hoping that maybe, just maybe the character(s) of colour will finally be presented as full, complex human beings.

  But I was wrong.

  If you already haven’t been blasted with Hunger Games-saturated trailers and interviews as of late, do let me remind you that Katniss is the central character of the story, whose experiences as a contestant of the Hunger Games make up the storyline of the book. In addition to being characterized by author Suzanne Collins as a radical female hero-warrior combating institutionalized oppression in a dystopia in the future, Katniss is also characterized as being olive-skinned. But as Hollywood page-to-screen synergy would have it, the casting call for Katniss indicated that only Caucasian actors apply.

  (more inside…)

• • In My Opinion...
  • Media Savvy

  Writing Outside the Lines

  April 3, 2012 • Guest Blogger

  In June of 2011, the intractable Nobel laureate V.S. Naipaul made the claim that women authors are unequal to him. “I read a piece of writing,” he said, “and within a paragraph or two I know whether it is by a woman or not.”

  Naipaul is a far from uncontroversial figure, and can hardly be said to represent the generally accepted position on women writers. Nevertheless, his dismissal of writing by and for women - a dismissal predicated largely on its supposed sentimentality - is revealing on a societal level, and brings to mind Virginia Woolf when she wrote in A Room of One’s Own (1929): “women and fiction remain, so far as I am concerned, unresolved problems.”

  For some working in the media, this perception is not restricted to fiction. In an email interview, Anna North, former editor of and writer for the current events and pop culture blog Jezebel, notes that part of this difficulty comes from the fact that “women’s issues,” while a useful general designation, is also vague and just plain misleading. Just as Naipaul’s designation of women’s writing as “sentimental” is a glossing-over of myriad individual voices, grouping the heterogeneity of women’s concerns together ignores the real differences that exist among women along political, social and cultural lines. Not only that, but such a categorization ignores those who fall outside mainstream definitions of “women,” such as trans- and non gender-conforming individuals. What’s more, North notes, with a “site that is explicitly for women, you can try to be as welcoming as possible, but you’re never going to please all women, any more than you can please all people.”

  (more inside…)

• • In My Opinion...

  On Valentine’s Day, Fall in Love with Your Friends

  February 14, 2012 • Meg Pirie

  On Valentine’s Day we are, quite literally, bombarded by a deluge of nonsensical language. For this reason, I hate this superficial, highly choreographed “holiday” that tells us how love should be expressed. Rather than emotional support and having (a) partner(s) who act(s) as (an) ally(ies), love is reduced to an economic transaction. I’m neither the first nor the last person to comment that Valentine’s Day does more harm than good: it polices who we love, how we love and what shape that love takes.

  Not only that, but these directives on love are inextricably intertwined with and reinforce established norms about sexuality and sex: i.e. sexuality and sex are legitimate and sanctioned when they happen between two people who will eventually reproduce and who are heterosexual, able bodied and white. We don’t hear anything about informed, enthusiastic consent. And we definitely don’t hear about reciprocal pleasure.

  Know what else gets silenced in this saccharine tsunami of chocolates and roses? Intimate bonds that aren’t sexual, but are nonetheless fulfilling and deep relationships for all parties involved.

  So, here’s what I wish I’d known when I was in high school as candy grams were passed out: there is no one way to express your sexuality. Shame, blame and guilt—what Jaclyn Friedman calls The Terrible Trio in her amazing book What You Really Really Want—are destructive emotions. Instead of searching for validation through rigid expressions of love and sexuality, first you should fall in love yourself. And then you should fall in love with your friends.

  We live in a culture that devalues friendships. Friendship functions as as a stepping stone between childhood and adulthood, before we meet our mates. From the time we’re children, we’re led to believe that unless we enter into a romantic bond, we have not really experienced intimacy.

  Well, that’s a bunch of crap.

  (more inside…)

• • Anti-violence
  • In My Opinion...
  • Race and Racism

  I’m a feminist NFL fan, and I’m conflicted about it.

  January 9, 2012 • Julia Horel

  Okay, I understand why I’m an American football fan. I started watching hockey with my dad when I was 13, and soon branched into watching almost every sport I could find on TV. (Yeah, I watch curling.) American football (different from the international term “football,” which some of us know as “soccer”) is exciting, strategic, and often just a big, dramatic circus to watch. It’s my favourite way to spend a Sunday afternoon.

  But football is also a really, REALLY violent sport, more violent than a lot of other sports. The basic concept of the sport, for those who don’t know, is that two teams line up along the width of a 100-yard field, with one team (offense) throwing and running the ball, trying to go forward toward the end zone to score points, and the other team (defense) trying to prevent them from getting there. If the offensive team doesn’t advance far enough after a few tries (downs), the teams switch and the other team tries to go the other way.

  There are lots of rules about what you can and can’t do to try to stop the other team from getting past you, but some of the most common tactics are blocking (throwing your weight against someone to keep them from pushing past) and tackling (grabbing someone and bringing them down to the ground, sometimes landing on top of them). Players are understandably heavily padded with protective equipment. Concussions are common. Often, the bigger the hit, the louder the cheers.

  It’s not actually the violence in the game that disturbs me about my fanship of the National Football League (NFL), although I should probably think about it more often than I do. What’s really been getting me lately is the culture of violence, racism and misogyny that’s spilling out of the game and into the personal lives of a number of NFL players – and the way these cases are treated by the league, the media and the fans of the game.

  (more inside…)

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