Blog Roundup: Editors’ Picks, August 2-6

Ms. brings you all the news that’s fit to link from the feminist blogosphere: Facebook’s racial profiling, sexism on Mad Men, Michelle Obama likened to Marie Antoinette, and more.

Feministing’s Vanessa reports that a transgender woman was ridiculed and refused treatment at an Indiana hospital.

Shelby Knox responds to Dallas Police Chief David Brown’s solution to his city’s 25 percent increase in reported rape: Women must stop drinking.

In a recent interview with the Daily News, Hugh Hefner said the same stuff he’s been saying for the better part of a century, insisting that “Women are sex objects”. The claim, Jehmu Greene points out for the Women’s Media Center, “reveals that he doesn’t know the difference between ‘subject’ and ‘object,’ and doesn’t understand the dangers of objectifying human beings.” But what kind of shrewdness can you really expect from a man who never changes out of his pajamas?

Social networking behemoth Facebook now has a way to predict users’ ethnicity. Jamilah King reveals their methodology at Colorlines.

At The Atlantic, Sady Doyle of Tiger Beatdown argues that Mad Men lets us comfortably believe sexism is past.

Andrea Tantaros at the NY Daily News ickily slammed Michelle Obama for taking a vacation: “Material Girl Michelle Obama is a modern-day Marie Antoinette on a glitzy Spanish vacation.” Media Matters reveals the astonishing frequency with which the Right-wing media bewilderingly compares Michelle Obama to the eighteenth-century French queen.

Over at Feministe, Mai’a critiques feminist privilege and identifies as a “mama”: “When i have been seen as being helpful to another’s liberation, that is when they start calling me mama.”

Above: Hugh Hefner attending Kandy Masquerade at the Playboy Mansion Feb. 28, 2009 Photo courtesy of Flickr user Toglenn under CC 3.0

About

Annie is the Community Editor at The Nation and the former New Media Coordinator at Ms. magazine. She studied sociology and women's studies at the University of Missouri-St. Louis. She's a big fan of birds, plants and things that are funny. Her animal totem is the bat.