Bullets

• I love that Sunday's episode of Looking was cheekily titled "Looking For a Plot" given the show's somewhat ambling pace, but it was also the standout of the season, if not the series. Lauren Weedman was excellent, and I'm glad that the creators let her character develop over the season rather than leaving it as that chick who hangs around with gay guys. (There's another word I could use here that enough people take issue with, so I'll just leave it at that.) Here's the full recap from the AV Club. It's too bad that bearing a last minute change of heart, Looking is probably done for. It's such an underrated show whose primary problem seems to be audience overreach. Why is it so hard for viewers to accept a character who's flawed in normal, human, and yes, unlikeable ways?
• Yay for Girls for showing that a woman can have an abortion without remorse.
• I stopped commenting on Feministe long ago for myriad reasons (along with everyone else apparently), but I still regularly read it, and sometimes find things that make good jumping-off points for posts here, even if I don't promote them. Most of what feminism -- and I'm talking mainstream, online feminism like the kind Feministe promotes -- has given me is the frustration that my girlhood was somehow anathema to it. Or at least, anathema to producing the kind of "come to (insert deity of your choice here) moment" that it's supposed to. I read this yesterday. The part about expecting to be raped really stood out to me because I never thought rape was the inevitable conclusion of girlhood. If I could chalk it up to a sheltered upbringing, I gladly would, but it's not that. I didn't have the resources "cis white girls" are supposed to have either. I had a huge distrust of authority even at a young age, and didn't expect, had I been raped, the law to help me. I got the message to "be careful," but also to "be tough" and learn to "fight your own battles." Only now am I realizing how much this has informed my politics.
• Liberalism as racism Liberal and left are used interchangeably in US politics, which makes having a discussion about liberal racism a little difficult, but here it means classical liberalism.  I won't sugarcoat it: this bothers me. Some of the comments veer too closely to being anti-science (putting "reason" and "rationality" in scare quotes), without acknowledging the entitlement in being able to reject a discipline on intellectual and moral terms. The left itself isn't immune to racism. Despite being predicated on disassembling power structures, the left doesn't really like to talk about the intersection of race and poverty much, or poverty when it comes packaged with racial privilege. 
• Someone in my neighborhood built a snow penis. It was quite, er, realistic. I'll just leave it at that.