guardiancomment:

Now, I know that air travel is really just a portal to foreign climes: a privilege for people who can afford to go on holidays abroad, an efficient means of transport for those whose work enables them to travel, and maybe even, for some, a one-way ticket to a new and better life. I know this, everyone on the plane knows this, so why is the notion that air travel is the sexiest thing since records began still pushed on us by endless tedious advertising campaigns? Wouldn’t Richard Branson do better to put down the women he insists on picking up for photo opportunities and spend his money on food that doesn’t taste like a foot, instead? ‘Sorry, Virgin - sex and air travel don’t mix

guardiancomment:

Cambodia’s women activists are redefining the housewife

By leading a sustained campaign of nonviolent protest against forced evictions, Cambodian housewives are changing the country’s political map. Excerpt:

Western feminists should not lose sight of the fact that in many countries around the world, women’s role as wife and mother remains central to their family and societal status. When homes are threatened with destruction, it is women who are disproportionately affected. While women are commonly framed as defenceless “soft targets” in forced evictions, Vanny and her fellow housewives complicate this assumption. Harnessing softness as a strategy rather than a hindrance, these women have committed themselves to a sustained campaign of nonviolent protest. Worried that involving men would only encourage violence, “turning men into goldfish clashing with each other”, they are using their positions as wives and mothers to co-opt riot police through their songs of suffering and to morally shame them when they are publicly beaten.

Photograph: Erika Pineros/Demotix/Corbis

Women we love to love and women we love to hate

Why is it that Jennifer Lawrence, Michelle Obama and Adele get all the love, while Anne Hathaway, Taylor Swift and Peaches Geldof get it in the neck? Sophie Lawrence explores on Guardian weekend

Photographs: Rex Features; Getty Images 

guardiancomment:

Steve Bell on the budget … Hic!

Steve Bell’s cartoon on today’s Guardian front page

Femen’s aims are straightforward, broad and radical. A war on patriarchy on three fronts, calling for an end to all religions, dictatorships and the sex industry. The group has been offered a space in a rundown theatre in Paris as headquarters, and it is here I meet Inna, 24, at the start of a training session with 20 young Femen activists. She is giving instructions on the correct stance – feet apart, firmly rooted, aggressive. Femen warriors never smile, she says, they are not there to please anyone. The group has been protesting topless since 2010, using their bodies to attract attention, to lure journalists, and they have been roundly criticised by some people, who accuse them of playing into sexist stereotypes. Read more

Photo: KENZO TRIBOUILLARD/AFP/Getty Images

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guardiancomment:

Today, we want to defend Tumblr, after it was cowardly hacked yesterday.

Bim Adewunmi: You can hack it, you can bash it, but Tumblr’s still got it

Like any internet community, it is not without its flaws. Here, the hackers’ comments came uncomfortably close to a lot of Tumblr users’ excesses. It is sometimes a deeply silly place, keen on self-congratulation. It is also largely decadent, and because it is made of millions of fallible human beings, it’s not always terribly original or profound. But that does not mean it does not have the capacity to be those things, and it often is.

Tumblr is where I go to laugh, but it also a fantastic place to learn: this is where I first read about Trayvon Martin, for example. It often hosts some of the most eloquent and nuanced conversations about society, from gender to race to equality and social justice. It is a community that gives and shares and supports its own – only last night, I witnessed people organise a whip-round for a fellow Tumblr user who needed to get out of an abusive situation fast.

It can be a brilliant place, because it is a lot more than the sum of is parts: you get out of it what you put in. Not many sites can give you all of that and a gif of Chris Evans punching a bag in slo-mo. And for that reason, I’ll remain onboard. No contest.

Read the rest here

Great piece on Cif right now…

guardiancomment:

The Western media has chosen not to run the graphic pictures of the children killed in Gaza this weekend (nota bene: this is not the picture above, which shows members of the Daloo family during the children’s funeral yesterday).

Priest Giles Fraser asks: do pictures of children killed in Gaza force us to face a gruesome reality?

Let’s start slowly, carefully, with what can be said. Photographs show four small children dead on the cold aluminium surface of the morgue.

They are positioned in such a way that they look like they might be sleeping together. Are these pictures real? Are they staged? That already feels too suspicious a question to be asking so early on. And one’s emotional instincts will rail against the premature engagement of critical faculties. But one needs to bracket out the feelings just for a moment.

Earlier photographs have come in from multiple reputable agencies showing these children being pulled out of the rubble. Other images show numerous film crews witnessing the same event. The children’s bodies are accompanied by the press to the morgue. Those who are trained to spot discrepancies in this sort of story believe that it hangs together. The pictures are real, so it is concluded. And once that is accepted, one immediately feels more than a little uncomfortable that their provenance was ever questioned. Like disbelieving a rape victim when she first tells you her story.

So they are real. Dead children, killed by an Israeli missile while still in their pyjamas and the sort of clothes suited to playing in the street. The western media has chosen not to show them.

Read the rest here.

Photograph: Bernat Armangue/AP

Great piece on Cif worth checking out