Recommended reading for July 1st

A social history of Diet Coke, the drink of choice for many ladies.

FWD/Forward talks about Buffy in the beginning of season 2 as a treatment of depression:

This stings close to home for people who deal with real life depression, over loss in their lives, or any of the other reasons that mental illness comes crashing down or tries to suffocate us. Often, the people around us give up trying to support us, and withdraw, leaving us to lash out or sometimes give up.

Perhaps Joss didn’t fail as much as I first said.

Perhaps, in Buffy, he has attempted to personify the utter helplessness and angst that people in a deep depression sometimes feel. Perhaps, he has done a perfect job of showing what it feels like to not be able to yell out exactly what is going on inside, how it feels to have suffered what you have suffered because no one really can truly empathize, no one can truly feel your pain…

Perhaps.

If only defeating your demons was as simple as smashing a set of bones with a giant mallet.

The Angry Black Woman writes about the problematic race issues of the new The Last Airbender movie, and why you should skip it and see the movie instead:

And this is about them, those producers, casting directors and everybody who took a fucking property and ripped out the guts of what made it successful, what made it true, what made it unique, what made it so special to so many minorities; because they once again decided that only ablebodied, misogynist, het, cissexist white males deserve to see their culture being reflected and respected and validated in entertainment. The rest of us, women, racial and disabled and lgbtaqi minorities? We don’t matter. We are adjuncts to the great white male, and our stories? Don’t get to be told. And if by some rare chance our stories do get to be told? Able-bodied, het, cissexist White people (for the most part) are going to buy them, make movies out of them, and replace us with themselves, just to make it goddamn clear that only they matter in this universe and there will be very very few things that minorities of any type will get to have and hold and enjoy.

Yes Means Yes! combats the idea that bodily response is the same as consent:

Following that logic, anyone who can turn us on can do whatever they want to us. No feminist would make that claim about cis women, of course. No feminist would listen to the story of a cis woman who has been raped or molested and whose body has responded with arousal and say, “you were not raped because your body wanted it.” (Would the commenter argue for a different rule for trans women with cocks? I’m not assuming any measure of reasonableness or good faith with that asshole.)

We all know that people are not their bodies, right? Isn’t that an important general rule? Disabled people are not the limitations of their bodies and trans people are not the histories of their bodies or the anatomy of their bodies, right? Women who have uteruses and can reproduce are not their uteruses or their capacities to reproduce, right? Isn’t it always true that we are not our bodies? And when we die, we are gone, but our bodies will remain.

Shakesville blogs about human rights violations at the G20 protests. Trigger warning: the post includes descriptions of verbal abuse, threats of rape, and physical abuse against women.

Thus Spake Zuska reminds us that things are not that much better for women in academia as they were when she was an undergrad and grad student.

And some happy for the day, from Hark! A Vagrant: