Every year on March 8, feminism and feminist concerns are suddenly in the media in a happy and encouraging kind of way. To the extent that focus on world problems can be happy and encouraging. It almost gives you hope for mankind. And then there is the rest of the year. My plan is as follows. Every week (I hope) I'm going to update this post with some of what I come across, pretending that the days from March 9 to 7 are also days when feminist concerns are important. I'm interested to see how it will look on March 8 2014.
Feel free to add to it through the comments section.
March 17 (Yes, I was supposed to do this yesterday; I plead marking).
This was always going to be about highlighting tendencies, and here is the first one: Epad femme has finally arrived (how did we do without it; oh, yes, that's right; just like everyone else). See also, from earlier years, this Ellen video on Bic for her. Not the end of the world? Not as insidious as LEGO Friends? Maybe not; but damned annoying and insulting.
In other news, there was a good article on rape in literature and films in The New Statesman. And meanwhile, the rest of the world is going steadily to hell in a handbasket -- especially if you are a woman in a conflict zone.
And ending on the upbeat note again (because it is good for mental health): the Veronica Mars kickstarter is looking very healthy, demonstrating once again (to those who doubt it) that kick-ass women as protagonists is not a way to lose an audience.
March 9: To get us started: Amazon.co.uk once again showed itself to thrive at the nadir of human decency last week, helping to sell "Keep Calm and Rape A Lot" t-shirts (produced by Solid Gold Bomb), as well as "Keep calm and Hit Her" and variations thereof, accidentally demonstrating that algorithms hate women, too. Except, while the claim is that the t-shirts were automatically generated by matching an inane slogan with random verbs, "keep calm and +verb" does not give any result for a number of other verbs. Moreover, according to reports, "her" (not "him") was added at the end of a number of these t-shirts. I am no computer expert, so for all I know there is a perfectly reasonable explanation for this.
In a more upbeat segment: Feminist Frequency has finally published the first video in the Tropes vs Women in Video Games series, which caused such consternation and misogynistic dimwittery (yes, I made up that word) when it was launched. Please watch it.