I just don't know what to do anymore...

Okay, so I’m going to be expanding the purpose of this blog somewhat. First of all, livejournal is frustrating me sometimes, because I’m feeling generally discouraged from posts that a) are long enough to cover what I’m really thinking, and b) involve thinking. Second, what I’m watching includes the internet, so yay semantics!

As a result, I want to put forward a couple of posts that outline the basic principles from which I’m operating--why I’m writing from a feminist point of view, for example, or what "rape culture" means, or what the hell is so frustrating about contemporary Christianity, or how it is that I manage to reconcile myself to being a feminist Christian at all.

Since I started posting at Hathor, I've taken to following a lot of the links to prominent feminist blogs and encountering first and foremost an awesome number of sites by passionate, articulate, much-smarter-than-Sarah feminists, but secondly a hell of a lot more stories and anecdotes about sexism and misogyny, both heinous and creepingly innocuous. I feel like crying a lot of the time. The stories about the threats against Kathy Sierra have been probably the most upsetting, and the very fact that it's being constantly called into question whether she's "overreacting", or whether this is in fact a case of misogynistic violence, makes me ill.

What it also makes me realize, however, is that I often have trouble formulating cogent arguments against those criticisms, and by extension, explaining why I am a feminist. I've seen Café Press ads for feminist statement t-shirts all over the place, and I totally want one that says "This is what a feminist geek looks like", as advertised on Hathor. But when I think about it some more, I realize that wearing a shirt like that means that I am going to have to explain what the hell that means, over and over again, every time I choose to put it on. I'm going to have to answer the people who just don't get it, who insist on telling me that as white men, they have now reached the point where they are at a disadvantage in looking for a job, or the people who dismiss as entirely ridiculous my desire not to be seen as a sexual "object", or the people who assume that "feminist" means sexless, humourless, incompatible with also enjoying wearing revealing clothing.

As I put up these posts, I'll be updating this one with links to them, and trying to create a sidebar list of links that cover some of my basic positions as points of reference. Hopefully, if people actually start reading this damn thing, they can serve as a starting point.