- Will be boys – “A report from both sides of the male gaze.”
- 15 year old’s TED talk on feminism – Tavi Gevinson (who is the founder of the site in the previous link!) on why fictional female characters are important.
- 5 minutes with Rebecca Watson – Wry Republic interviews Rebecca about her panel at SXSW.
- Birds evolve shorter wings to survive on roads – “Nature, red in wheel and fender. Birds in Nebraska have evolved shorter wings, which may help them avoid dying on roads by taking off quickly and darting away from cars.”
I saw Gavi Tevinson speak at Idea City (a similar thing to TED, held in Toronto every year) a few years ago. She gave one of the most interesting and well-thought-out talks I saw while there (and I sure don’t care about fashion, so that’s even more impressive), which you can see here: http://www.ideacityonline.com/talks/tavi-gevinson-on-feminist-fashion-magazine/. What sticks out most for me is how the first thing she said upon taking the stage was that she wasn’t going to talk about fashion, she was going to talk about feminism. After her talk, the host of the conference, who apparently hadn’t been listening to a thing she said, asked her who her favourite fashion designer was. She basically just looked at him cock-eyed for a few seconds, and then clearly decided it was better to just answer the question rather than offend her host (who is a pretty powerful media type). It made me very annoyed at the conference’s host.
Reminds me of an interview from the sixties I saw years ago. It was a short documentary about a team of female astronauts who were being trained along with the Mercury 7 astronauts (I don’t believe any of them actually made it into space). They were all qualified military pilots. There was one clip where an interviewer asked her, while she was sitting in the cockpit of a jet aircraft, what her favorite coockie recipe was. All she could do was laugh.
Nice to know how far we’ve come since the sixties.