Feminism | Posted by Sheridan T on 02/8/2010

A Woman and Her So-Called “Girly Parts”: The Shaving Dilemma

Schick Quatro "TrimStyle" – one such product made for them girly parts

Pubic hair has become kind of a controversial topic, especially among feminists, who seem to have gotten a reputation for being, well… hairy. But with so little exposure in porn and in the media to what an actual average female looks like… what can we say really? Who knows how many women shave? As far as I know, nobody’s done a poll or drawn up statistics. No one seems to be talking.

Google pubic hair and you’ll find several resources… some of them rather intriguing (You can style it in a Mohawk! You can dye it pink!) but none informative. When women talk about shaving with other women, they often use terrible euphemisms: “shaving the girly parts,” “pruning the garden,”…

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Pop-Culture | Posted by Julie Z on 02/7/2010

Support Women Artists Sunday: Petracovich

Petracovich

Based out of San Francisco, Petracovich is Jessica Peters with an old-world version of her family name. Her great-grandfather came to the US from Russia at the turn of the century, and one of the only things Peters knows of Abraham Petracovich is that he loved to listen to the New York Opera from the radio in the living room. Out of respect for the music, he would always wear his best suit.

Many years later, his 9 year old great-granddaughter would be at the piano, practicing Chopin and Debussy, which evolved into writing unrequited-love songs in highschool, and spending her 20’s in long, blissful hours on a living-room floor, creating sounds and beats, twisting knobs, tinkering and writing.

The new live show includes drummer Max Diez of Audio Outsend, adding…

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Randomness | Posted by Julie Z on 02/5/2010

Give It A Ponder

James Lipton wants you to ponder before you text. I wholeheartedly agree with him.

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Articles | Posted by Julie Z on 02/4/2010

An Interview with Carol Jenkins

Carol Jenkins, WMC Founding President

It’s no secret that the media is dominated by men. The sexist treatment of Clinton and Palin in the election coverage is only one example of how women are viewed as less seriously as men, and certainly as less important in what we consider news. And while the treatment of women in news coverage is abominable, the story behind the scenes in news rooms isn’t much better.

Carol Jenkins, the founding president of the Women’s Media Center, knows all about it, and is working hard to combat it. The Women’s Media Center is a nonprofit advocacy organization that was founded in 2004 to make women more powerful in the media. She is also an Emmy award winning former television anchor and correspondent.

Ms. Jenkins talked with The FBomb…

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Feminism | Posted by Kate S on 02/3/2010

International Night for Dummies

yay diversity and stereotypes

This post occurs at the same boarding school where girls have to wear pastel dresses for commencement. Ah, the bright future that lies ahead of us as the esteemed, Ivy-Leagued educated CEO’s wives…

Another tradition (among many) that irritates me is International Night. This is an evening event hosted by yours truly, ASB, where the student body celebrates its diversity through ethnic dinners, performances, and finally, dance. The motivation behind the event is truly commendable: a campus fraught with students from various regions around the world takes benefit of its diversity and celebrates it. However, when applied, it becomes a crow-pleaser—a victim of superficiality.

As an avid critic of school events, I have never attended this event since my freshmen year (a traumatizing event we won’t get to…) but in…

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Feminism, Pop-Culture | Posted by Julie Z on 02/2/2010

The Super Bowl and Abortion

2010 Super Bowl

This year I, like nearly 100 million other Americans, will watch the super bowl. However, this fact has very little to do with the game of football. I have no idea what occurs in this game, and if you asked me to name more than 3 football games I’d probably just walk away. The few times I’ve gone to see my high school team play I’ve left even more confused than before. No, I watch the super bowl for the ads.

Let’s be honest, the ads are awesome. About 99% of the time I watch T.V. ads make me want to bang my  head against a cement block repeatedly (a lethal combination of sexist and stupid), Super Bowl ads are different. First of all, they’re well put together because…well…

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Feminism | Posted by Shira and Dina on 02/1/2010

Coming of Age

Source: Rachel Papo, “Hanging Out on the Weekend.” 2005.

I have always thought the Jewish coming of age ritual for a girl was a Bat Mitzvah, the grasp of the Torah in ceremoniously manicured hands a rite of passage. Rachel Papo’s photographs show me that the coming of age for Jewish women in another hemisphere is the army, the positioning of a weapon in expecting hands a passage to a nationality that overrides patriarchal assumptions of femininity.

The United States military continues to be dominated by men. Masculinity continues to be conflated with violence and weaponry with notoriously phallic connotations. Maybe because of their minority status (women make up 20 percent of the US armed forces) and maybe because of the rampant macho-ism army institutions promote, one in three female soldiers…

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