I have that damn Friday song in my head! Which is a good and bad thing. It's good because, YAY! IT'S FRIDAY and bad because, OMG! that song. Either way, here's some of what I read this week that made me think. (Which is not what that damn song does!)

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1. Ready for another round of which Hollywood starlet wants you to know that she is definitely NOT a feminist and LOVES all the mens? Yeah, me neither, but you know, stupid sells. With some notable NOT stupid feminist actresses stepping up to the plate.

The actress Amy Poehler, 42, told Elle earlier this year: “Some big actors and musicians feel like they have to speak to their audience and that word is confusing to their audience. But I don’t get it. That’s like someone being like, ‘I don’t really believe in cars, but I drive one every day and I love that it gets me places and makes life so much easier and faster and I don’t know what I would do without it.’ ”

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2. Get into any kind of conversation about rape culture or feminism/anti-feminism or sexism or misogyny and you are going to hear from at least ONE person (usually male) tell you that NOT ALL MEN think/act/believe THAT way. For a brief history of every dudes favourite argument (and perhaps it's signalling of some kind of positive shift for SOME men), please read the following from Jess Zimmerman at TIME.

It’s true that previous derailment favorites like “patriarchy hurts men too” were paraphrases in a way that “not all men” is not. The demand is the same — “please move me to the center of your discussion” — but “not all men” is, in many cases, straight from the horse’s mouth; even an amateur Reddit spelunker can turn up plenty of sulky or defensive uses of the phrase.

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3. When Hip Mama magazine tried to publish it's latest edition with a photo of artist Ana Alvarez-Errecalde's breastfeeding her son on it's cover, the backlash was swift. It showed us just how far we have NOT come in our efforts to normalize images of breasts performing their primary function - breastfeeding. Vendors refused to carry the magazine in their stores and (not surprisingly) Facebook banned the photo multiple times from multiple accounts. Please read the following from Ariel Gore, the editor of Hip Mama, about what happened next.

Violence towards women begins with the repression of sexuality, the appropriation of childbirth, the interference with all vital cycles and the creation of manipulative roles. A negated mother will also negate her body and her presence to her children, so they will all ultimately conform to our unattended, unloved, and unnourished society. 

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4. Last Thursday was the end of this season's Grey Anatomy and the end of the era of Cristina Yang. I have watched this show since its beginning and have always been invested in the lives of these characters and the choices that they make for themselves. And it wasn't until Cristina uttered those final lines to Meredith last week that the full scope of what this show has done for women (and perhaps even for me) really hit me.

"Don't let what he wants eclipse what you need;

He's very dreamy, but he's not the sun.

You are the sun."

I just loved these lines; they perfectly define the secondary roles we adopt because we have been conditioned to think this is normal, natural. Women are malleable, and so, we sacrifice because we think we want to. It's easier, isn't it, to just go along with the unspoken rules?

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4. And finally, the video "Hugs" by JC Little is pretty much the best thing on the internet this week!

[youtube]http://youtu.be/SHFhepoy-Rs[/youtube]

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"HUGS" everyone!

Have a great weekend.

n~