Speed Blogging 9/26/2013. On the Pope, Revenge Porn, Girls Having Cooties and Affirmative Action Bake Sales

Katha Pollitt asks whether the new Pope is actually any better for women than the previous ones were.  

Emily Bazelon talks about revenge porn and the fact that there is no current legal remedy to the harm it causes. 

Soraya Chemaly writes about the way we teach boys not to be girly in the US.  I think the boys' school crisis partly links to the idea that if girls can do education it's not worth doing, at least in some subcultures.  The other (and bigger) reason, as I've written before, is that what women can earn without college education is chicken feed and whatever we call women (chicks) they cannot bring up a family on those earnings.  The average male earnings based on just a high school certificate are considerably higher than the average female earnings based on the same certificate.

The Young Conservatives of Texas had another bake sale to protest affirmative action.  The idea is to sell cookies for less to members of minorities and women, to show how wrong this is.  What I've always found hilarious about the concept is that the average earnings of all minorities except for Asian-Americans are lower than those of non-Hispanic whites, and the average earnings of women are less than the average earnings of men.  So there's a sense in which we could have a bake sale about that or at least to realize that the relative sacrifices different kinds of people have to make for the same cookie actually ARE different.  But that's probably too difficult.

Finally, just for fun, pictures of medieval head-dresses created in an airplane toilet.