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Welcome to the first bi-weekly listing of some recent articles/blogs related to feminism, media, and technology. Disclaimer: This list is obviously not all-encompassing. It likely reflects an unconscious bias toward what I find intriguing (in the interest of self-reflexivity). If you come across something YOU find interesting that you’d like me to include in the next post, please shoot the link my way. Second disclaimer: Fembot does not necessarily support the perspectives represented in all articles/blogs. Some may be included to inspire outrage, deep thoughts, and/or brilliant criticism.

‘The Boy Kings’ Author Katherine Losse On Life At Facebook: ‘It Was Like Mad Men’
“The Boy Kings,” based on Losse’s experience at Facebook between 2005 and 2010, recounts Mark Zuckerberg’s leadership quirks, Facebook’s privacy foibles, the hierarchies inside the male-dominated office, and the socializing that went on between the architects of the world’s biggest social network — at clubs, concerts, pool houses and online…

What Gay TV Has in Common With Gay Bars
Logo, America’s first gay TV channel, is transitioning. When it launched in 2005, Logo aired news segments, sketch-comedy shows, and original scripted dramas focused on the lives of gay people. Now, in the age of openly gay—and who you might call openly closeted—talk-show hosts, news anchors, and actors, Logo has embraced the slogan “Beyond Labels” and is shifting away from shows about gays to programming for gays (and the people who love them)…

Bias Or Overlooked: Why So Few Women On The Daily Beast Tech Most Powerful List?
The NewsWeek Daily Beast just released their first annual Digital Power Index, an attempt to list the most influential people in tech and the digital sphere. Out of 100 peer nominated digerati, only 8 of them are women…

The Rapey Lara Croft Reboot Is a Fucked-Up Freudian Field Day
A new revamped version of the iconic Tomb Raider aims to explain how Lara became the scantily clad badass fighter teenage boys rubbed one out to in 1997, but if you were expecting a similarly fun romp of Croftian ass kickery this time around, you’ll be sorely disappointed. One executive at the studio behind the new game explains that in this reboot, the men who play Tomb Raider as Lara Croft will be subjected to an emotionally harrowing attempted gang rape scene. It’s not gratuitous, though. It will help players care more about the character. It will make players want to “protect” her…

Women aren’t principal news sources on women’s issues, 4th Estate analysis finds
Men have long been the predominant sources for the news media on issues such as the economy, politics and the military. And a new analysis of campaign coverage found that women aren’t even the principal news source on a topic they would presumably know best: women’s issues.

TV Tropes Deletes Every Rape Trope; Geek Feminism Wiki steps in
Up until a week ago, TV Tropes had a very handy trope index called Rape Tropes. (Note: all TVT rape trope pages in this article link, ironically, to Google caches.) This page also linked to other iterations of rape tropes in popular culture such as Rape as Backstory, Rape and Switch, Rape as Drama, Rape as Redemption, and other rape tropes common in the pop culture idiom.

Facebook’s Sandberg First Woman on Social Network’s Board
Facebook on Monday named Sheryl Sandberg to its board of directors, making her the first woman to serve as a director at a company that recently came under fire for a perceived lack of diversity on its board.

Google’s One-Gender-Fits-All T-Shirts Don’t Fit
Finding ways to empower women was precisely the point of the “Women Techmakers” event, which featured, in addition to sumptuous shrimp and plenty of wine, five top Google executives, including Wojcicki and advanced products VP Megan Smith. Why, panelists wondered, had women fallen from a peak of nearly 38 percent of information technology graduates, which they are believed to have hit in 1985, to levels closer to 28 percent? And, more to the point, what should be done about it?

Lollipop Chainsaw Is Genius Subversive Feminism
Playing Lollipop Chainsaw I kept thinking of the Spice Girls brand of feminism. Juliette with her Baby Spice hair and Sporty Spice wardrobe is, on the surface, just another Spice Girl. She’s a hypersexualized masculine ideal/caricature of a teenage girl. She’s apparently obsessed with her jock boyfriend. She’s got a mad case of body dismorphia and cheerfully extols her boyfriend’s primary virtue, he likes her despite her fat ass. She’s got an oral fixation. She’s cute as hell. She’s absurdly cheerful. She pole dances…

How Many Computers to Identify a Cat? 16,000
Presented with 10 million digital images found in YouTube videos, what did Google’s brain do? What millions of humans do with YouTube: looked for cats.

Marvel Partners With Komen for the Cure to Bring Breast Cancer Awareness to Comics; We Feel Super Conflicted
It’s a part of Komen and Marvel’s partnership to create variant covers for eight comics coming out in October. Above is Captain America. Here’s the Wolverine cover, featuring gender-swapped Wolverine clone X-23, and the cover for October’s issue of The Mighty Thor…

Why Women Still Can’t Have It All
It’s time to stop fooling ourselves, says a woman who left a position of power: the women who have managed to be both mothers and top professionals are superhuman, rich, or self-employed. If we truly believe in equal opportunity for all women, here’s what has to change…

Video Game Company Hires Economist To Study Virtual Worlds
Varoufakis is an academic economist. He recently took a job at Valve, a big video game company. He wants to figure out the virtual economies that exist within the company’s games, which are played by millions of people.

Girls in science: Gender gaps still persist in STEM subjects
Girls in science and other STEM subjects — technology, engineering, and mathematics — are underrepresented compared to boys despite the progress made in the 40 years since Title IX was signed into law.

From the feminists we adore at Bitch Magazine:

Douchebag Decree: Race, Bunheads, and Amy Sherman-Palladino
It’s never a surprise when new shows on television lack diversity. Someone writes about how awfully white a show is, it stirs up some commotion on the Internet but people continue watching, (*cough* Girls *cough*) and that’s about the extent of it. And it’s not so different for Amy Sherman-Palladino’s new ABC Family show, Bunheads (except maybe it’s less addictive than Girls). I mentioned a few weeks ago in an On Our Radar post that Grey’s Anatomy creator, Shonda Rhimes criticized the show (via Twitter) for its lack of racial and ethnic diversity. Totally relevant and very much called for. This has been blowing up all over the interwebs, and of course, Amy Sherman-Palladino responded, but it surely wasn’t what anyone wanted to hear…

Internet Crush: Black Folk Don’t
Filmmaker Angela Tucker aims to complicate some of those stereotypes about what black people do and don’t do with her web series Black Folk Don’t. The second season, shot in New Orleans, kicked off this week with the episode “Black Folk Don’t: Swim.”…

The Five Least (and Most) Princess-y Things About Brave
Yesterday, a group of Bitch staffers/friends/kids attended a matinee screening of the new Disney/Pixar film Brave. While our reviews were mixed—as most reviews of the film have been—we all agreed that it was refreshing to see a different take on the princess narrative that has so permeated the media landscape lately. (Say what you will about Merida, at least she doesn’t wear a pink tiara!)

Finally a plug for the University of Oregon’s Ph.D. candidate, Phoebe Bronstein:

Divas, Lawyers, and Why “Drop Dead Diva” is the Best Summer Show You Are Not Watching
Recently, Jennifer Lynn Jones and Phoebe B. got together over a Google Doc to discuss one of their favorite summer shows, Lifetime’s Drop Dead Diva (DDD). Read on for thoughts on why DDD is the most awesome, the recent season, and much more!