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{ Monthly Archives } May 2005

Being a feminist

I was browsing on babble.ca yesterday and was served up a Google ad for Being Jane’s catalog of feminist T-shirts. Usually I just ignore the ads, but this one caught my eye, and since I use Adsense on some of my other sites, I figured that I should be drinking the Kool-Aid too, so I clicked on it. In particular, I like this shirt:

As I was browsing around in their catalog, their categories of merchandise caught my eye:

  • Accessories
  • Biker Accessories
  • Games & Cards
  • Headwear
  • Motorcycle Shirts
  • Feminist Shirts

Okay, so their target market is both feminists and biker chicks? Or feminist biker chicks? Or are they just making an assumption that all feminists are leather-wearing, ass-kicking, Harley-riding motorcycle mamas?

What bothers me are the assumptions that are made about women who use the word “feminist”. The Being Jane example is a classic one, loosely derived from the original derogatory “all feminists are butch” line. Another one, surprisingly, came from the recent documentary “I Was a Teenage Feminist“. Brilliant film, definitely catch it when it comes to a TV network or theatre near you. It was originally aired two months ago on W Network in Canada (which used to be called the Women’s Network until somebody got squeamish), and now is making a few screenings in the U.S. There’s a scene right at the beginning of the film where the filmmaker/narrator is standing in front of a Victoria’s Secret billboard, and the gist of her message is that Victoria’s Secret is A Bad Thing for feminists. Later in the film, she has some interviews with young women about why they won’t call themselves feminists, and many of them state that it’s because feminists aren’t “feminine”.

We have Being Jane equating feminists and biker chicks, and a feminist documentary dissing Victoria’s Secret: is it any wonder that young women are making the assumption that you can’t be both a feminist and feminine?

In the 70’s, when I was a teenager, being a feminist was a badge of honour since we were still in the 2nd wave of feminism and there were some very visible battles to be fought. I was the first girl to attend “shop” classes (actually, electronics and mechanical drafting) in my high school in 1975, I was one of only a few women in engineering at the University of Waterloo when I went there at the end of that decade, and I was definitely the first woman doing electrical design and making trips underground at a northern Ontario mine that I worked at a few years later. It was not always a lot of fun (how many ways can guys say “we think that you’re fucking your way to the top” when you out-perform them at school or work?), but I like to think that I made the way a bit easier for the next woman on the same path, and I’m proud to call myself a feminist. However, I’m not a biker chick and I do wear Victoria’s Secret, so I hope that I still qualify.

2005 05 06 women Comments (0)

Toronto geography

This is a bit weird: does anyone else notice that they seem to have relocated the Ontario Place Cinesphere east of where it should be, somewhere around York Street?

2005 05 05 toronto Comments (0)

Lazaridis ponies up another few million

The founder of RIM has given another $17.2M to the University of Waterloo, my alma mater as well as his. I feel like such an underachieving alumnus!

Seriously, though, it’s great to see someone with scads of money roll it back into the institution that he credits, in part, for his success.

2005 05 03 business Comments (0)

Fressen: vegetarian for non-vegetarians

Went to a fabulous restaurant for brunch today: Fressen, on Queen West in Toronto. Vegetarian, in fact I think that everything on the menu was vegan, but nothing that your non-vegetarian friends would stick up their noses at.

I mostly try to stick to macrobiotic fare since an overindulgent month vacationing in Europe last year had Damir and I reassess our eating habits: I read the very accessible “You Are What You Eat” and even catch the associated UK TV show online when I can find it, and read “The Hip Chick’s Guide to Macrobiotics” for a more comprehensive view of macrobiotics. I tend to go mostly vegetarian (except for last week’s tilapia binge), so given that macrobiotics discourages dairy and egg, that means that I’m fundamentally vegan most of the time.

The food at Fressen was great. I had scrambled tofu (okay, your non-vegetarian friends might turn up their nose at that, but it’s a good textural equivalent of scrambled eggs and was nicely spiced) that was served with a whole plate of other goodies: black beans on a crisp tortilla shell, a squash-stuffed tomato, some really wonderful bread and roasted potatoes (the latter of which Damir ate, since I’m not a big potato fan and they’re not macrobiotic and he’s eastern European so potatoes are a basic food group). The other two had spiced Moroccan stew of chickpeas and other veggies, with a mound of brown and wild rice. Too yummy, and we were all stuffed by the end of it.

Always nice to find another good place in the neighbourhood.

2005 05 01 food & wine Comments (0)

Comments on blogs

My pet peeve du jour? Commenting systems on blogs that require you to fill out both an email address and a website (rather than one or the other, or even neither), but don’t tell you that both are required until you try to post. First of all, I usually put my blog site on my comments and not my email address, in case the commenting system publishes the email address. Although Yahoo hosts my email and has great spam filtering, I don’t need any extra crap in my inbox. Secondly, what sort of sucky user interface is that? Didn’t the person who designed that ever look at the conventions for indicating required and optional fields?

2005 05 01 blogging Comments (0)