Read an interview with the one and only Gloria Steinem!
Read here

Feminism | Posted by Julie Z on 03/5/2010

Tags: , , ,

But You Don’t Act Like A Feminist?

high school, must accurately portrayed in Disneys HSM movies

high school, must accurately portrayed in Disney's HSM movies

High school is a magical place. Throw a bunch of horny teenagers who are trying to figure out who the hell they are into a building that looks more like an insane asylum circa 1960 than a place of eduction. Add an average of 4 hours of sleep to trigonometry and there you have it: a group of completely accepting, totally open minded individuals.

Except not at all.

To some extent, I can understand why there are so many teenagers who are pretty close-minded. For one, we’re young. We haven’t had a lot of life experiences or been exposed to that much (relatively). Of course that’s not always true, but there are indeed…

More >

Rate this post 16       Comments

Pop-Culture | Posted by Jamie N on 03/4/2010

Tags: , , , ,

The Healthy Aesthetic?

dieting = healthy?

dieting = healthy?

I’ve had a theory brewing in my head recently: if all the women in the United States were a size 2 yet as a society we still struggled with heart disease, diabetes and certain cancers then the “health” argument would be very different. After watching the recent Nightline segment “Is it Okay to be fat” my theory was confirmed. The title should’ve read, “Is it okay for women to be fat?”; and then at least it would have been more honest.

It’s hard to debate health when what you’re really debating aesthetics. A serious debate on health would’ve seen men on the panel, since this issue is a societal problem and not something women should have to shoulder alone (though…

More >

Rate this post 10       Comments

Awareness, Feminism | Posted by Jaded16 on 03/3/2010

Tags: , , , , , , , , ,

Someone Needs To Take The Negative PR Off Of Abortion’s back

abortion in India: not everybody feels this way

abortion in India: not everybody feels this way

As I was reading this post on “Abortion Doulas” I got to thinking about being pro-choice, abortion in general and about abortion in India in particular (as this is where I live). Out here, we tend to look at abortion as something shameful, disgusting, a thing to keep under wraps. No “good Indian” girl ever gets an abortion. If she does, people whisper about her in hushed tones for what she did was indeed disgusting. Interestingly, this is the attitude for abortion only for single women, unwed mothers etc. Within the sanctity of marriage, many women are forced to abort their unborn female fetuses. That isn’t entirely looked down upon. In fact, aborting…

More >

Rate this post 5       Comments

Awareness | Posted by Julie Z on 03/2/2010

Tags: , , , ,

I Can’t Believe This Still Happens: Honor Killings

a map of countries that have reported cases of honor killings

a map of countries that have reported cases of honor killings

It’s kind of hard to convince American teenagers that we still need feminism. “But my mom works,” many a peer of mine has stated in response to finding out that I identify with the f word. “She even kept her own last name. We’re totally post-feminist.”

Ah, yes, it is fun for us to live in the privileged little bubble that is the United States, where our Moms do work and can keep their own last names (how far we’ve come…). Even with the rate of women earning 77 cents for every man’s dollar (as of 2007), not to even go into all of America’s feminist short comings, we are incredibly…

More >

Rate this post 14       Comments

Feminism | Posted by Nona Willis Aronowitz on 03/1/2010

Tags: , , , ,

Thoughts on “Hook Up Culture,” or What I Learned From My High School Diary

hook up culture, as demonstrated by Blair and Chuck

hook up culture, as demonstrated by Blair and Chuck

Debates about “hooking up,” swinging from genuine concern to hysteria on both sides of political spectrum, have been raging throughout the 2000s (Most of the freakouts over the “hookup scene” happens in the context of heterosexual relationships, since according to the majority of sexual conservatives, queer teen girls don’t have peen-in-vadge sex and therefore, as Kate puts it, “don’t exist.) And this week, it’s seemed to bubble up to the surface again. I’ve spent the day reading ruminations by teen girl expert and Teen Vogue advice columnist Rachel Simmons, the always-thought provoking Kate Harding of Broadsheet, and Amanda Marcotte, who gives us a searing and passionate rebuff of any sort of nostalgia we might have about dating rules and traditions.

This rips…

More >

Rate this post 5       Comments