Tough enough.

My morning routine (while waiting for High School Girl to catch her 6:15 am bus) includes reading the AJC online, scanning emails to prioritize my day (deadlines change by the hour), and checking into Ravelry, my favorite knitting virtual world.

This morning, I saw this:  Tough Gals: Do They Still Exist? 

Women are girly. Again.

Don't believe me? The proof is in the blogosphere: Women who blog about cupcakes! Women who blog (okay, rant) about gardening, Hello Kitty, and knitting! Even BUST magazine is sponsoring a Craft Fair in NYC. Women who blog about cats! And then there are cats who blog, but let's not get into that just now. Don't get me wrong, these are all lovely blogs, smart and entertaining. And some blogs, like the wonderful Jezebel, keep us on our toes pointing out what a long way we haven't come, baby (like in this piece on how female superheroes are sexualized). But.. seriously... cupcakes?"

Oh, bless her heart. This one-dimensional thinker has mistaken women's hard-won choices for copping out. She implies that the things men do are preferable to "girly" activities such as running a cupcake business, knitting for relaxation between working all day/tending to family needs, and wearing high fashion as we wage business wars.

So women can only be feminists if we act like men, work like men, look like men, and do "manly" things?

Ridiculous.

One commenter said,

"Perhaps women are girly again because finally we can be, without being thought weak. The hard work of a generation of feminists who felt they needed to be ball busters in order to be taken seriously has yielded this fruit: women who are not afraid to show their creative side, women who have been able to turn passionate hobbies into successful careers, women who are REAL."

There are trace elements of men who still patronize women in the workplace. Women have learned to deal with them deftly, moving around them or bowling over them when necessary. But bloggers like this, someone I believe is a young woman, are simply unfathomable in their snide superiority and complete lack of understanding that the success of the women's equal rights movement isn't a manly paradigm ... it's the opportunity to be women, in all the wide diversity of the gender.

As for the knitter the Huffington Post blogger "dissed," the Yarn Harlot has garnered over $1 million in donations to Doctors Without Borders. While knitting. And talking about knitting.

I am knitter. Hear me roar.

Stuff knitters like

One of today's AJC op-ed pieces covered a funny web site, www.stuffwhitepeoplelike.wordpress.com, which had me howling. The satirical site pokes fun at a certain population's quirks. (Today's edition covers water bottles. I'm wincing.) So, of course, I started thinking about knitters and our own special likes.

Stuff Knitters Like

1. The sale bin at the LYS - it has to be filled with a sweater's worth of really expensive yarn, specially marked down to $1 a skein just because I want a bargain (the fact that the LYS would make zero money on the sale must be irrelevant)
   
2. Free patterns (designers have to earn a living? really?)
   
3. Yarn that doesn't pill after you've worn the knittable a few times (the cheap stuff looks good on the sales receipt, but it sure doesn't perform well)
4. Low arms on chairs - how does a chair designer expect me to wield the needles with that decorative arm poking me in the elbow?
5. Knitting totes - you can never have too many for those WIPs
6. Ravelry - the developers can't get it running fast enough for the demand!
   
7. iPod - not for the latest music downloads, but for music to knit by and knitting podcasts
8. Easily memorized patterns - it's hard to chat with your knitting circle if you're having to mark a row, knit it, count the stitches, frog, mark the next row, curse, pick up the dropped stitch, correct the purl that should have been a knit, frog, etc.
9. A LYS just a few minutes away - that's essential in metro Atlanta, where 15 miles turns into an hour's drive at any given moment. I'm still mourning the loss of Dunwoody Yarn.
10. Rowan - we meld with each new design, living vicariously in the English countryside where they work and have their photo shoots, and imagine wearing those exquisite knits like a size-2 model. Ahem.

Oh, there's more. Want to suggest some? More to come!