Skepchick

Women in Secularism 2 is underway this weekend, with dozens of badass female leaders scheduled to take the stage. Things got off to an interesting start yesterday with the opening lecture, given by Ron Lindsay, the CEO of the Center for Inquiry. You can read the text of his talk in full here. To summarize, Lindsay spends a good deal of time arguing against the idea that feminism as a movement has no significant internal disagreements, an absurd idea I have never actually heard expressed by any […]

Fun fabulous female funeral directors wanted – I want to be this fabulous female’s friend, this video is hilarious. Here’s the casting call she references. From Hayden. Transgender Studies Quarterly Kickstarter – “TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly will be the journal of record for the vibrant, rapidly evolving interdisciplinary field of Transgender Studies–and you can be part of its groundbreaking debut in 2014.” The opportunity to help an academic […]

Rebecca is off to the Women in Secularism 2 conference, so I’m covering Bad Chart Thursday this week. In today’s Quickies, Amanda included a link about a map showing hotspots in the United States for racist, homophobic, and ableist language in geotagged tweets, and commenters expressed valid concerns and questions about the methodology and data presentation. So I went to investigate further, finding more information in the FAQ about the map and the original post accompanying it. […]

In December I put down my eighteen-year-old cat George Burns.  It was awful, and it still makes me tear up to think he won’t be there when I get home from work today. Bah. Now I live in a one-cat household. Abe Vigoda doesn’t seem to mind being an only, and so far, it’s even made him a bit more outgoing. He’s thirteen, portly, epileptic, stunningly scaredy and doesn’t mind having all the catnip to himself. So, we haven’t “replaced” George so that […]

Trigger Warning for Body Image Issues and Eating Disorders Ah, fat — that charged, overloaded, connotation-carrying word. There is a lot I could say about the word, but for the sake of my point, let us fast-forward past the debates over fat-shaming, Health at Every Size, thin privilege, BMI, and so on. Let us make even more haste as we zoom right past people who simply hate fat people for whatever (or no real) reason. Oh, and for the love of all that is creamy and delicious, let me […]