Pop-Culture | Posted by Julie Z on 02/25/2012
Saturday Vids: Awesome Teen On Relationships
densing11 on “our culture’s expectancy of marriage & relationship and how it affects the self-worth of particularly younger girls.” Some damn good advice.
Feminism | Posted by LodB on 02/22/2012
Doctors, Nurses And One Terrific Professor
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Recently, I was taking a course on linguistics, and we were discussing syntax. My professor asked the class– a room of roughly a hundred English students, mostly female– what pronoun to use when replacing the noun ‘boss’. It wasn’t a very serious question, but the response made him stop in his tracks. Over half the class had casually, but eagerly, called out ‘he’. It wasn’t until my astonished professor eyed us that everyone realised what they had said: that they had confirmed something we all thought to have been a thing of the past. There were nervous giggles and some shocked faces, including my own, because what’s so horrific is that I hadn’t realized it either.
Pop-Culture | Posted by Fiona L on 02/17/2012
Maybe SHE’S Just Not That Into You
A friend of mine recently created a zine about the slut/stud double standard for a electives course called Feminisms that she’s taking. She included various fairy-tale-esque ads she found in magazines depicting women as love-obsessed. Watching her make her zine got me thinking about the image we always see of women as relationship-focused and emotional. Specifically, it got me thinking about the way we’re generally told girls and boys view random hook-ups, and I began to question whether those views are as widespread as we’ve been led to believe.
Remember the movie He’s Just Not That Into You? For those of you who missed it, the basic premise of this highbrow film (read: crappy rom-com) is that women and girls make up all kinds of excuses to rationalize men’s jerky behavior. According to He’s Just Not That Into You, we come up with justifications when a guy doesn’t call us, ignores us, or just treats us generally badly.
Apparently, we all need to realize that, upsetting as it is, he’s just not that into us. I agree. If someone is treating you badly, chances are they aren’t worth your time. But I have one issue.Movies like He’s Just Not That Into You and nearly every other rom-com in existence (save, maybe 500 Days of Summer) tell us that men often act like jerks and sometimes act nice. They usually tell us to find the nice guys, but they never address the fact that women also act like jerks, and sometimes she’s just not that into you.
Feminism | Posted by Ashley B on 01/25/2012
Let Me Buy You Dinner
“Let me buy you dinner,” he said with a smile. He looked at me with confidence. He was close to me in age, and handsome. His actions were presumably innocent. On the surface, there was no reason for me to refuse. He thought he was simply asking me on a date, but it implied a deeper meaning.
He didn’t phrase his proposal as a question, but I still had a choice. I could say yes and smile endearingly; I could take the sandwich he wanted to buy me and thank him for his generosity. But I knew that if I wanted to live with myself, the answer would be no. I could not carry on as a hypocrite. I could not relinquish my self-respect for a sandwich.
“Why?” I asked …
Feminism | Posted by E.Locke on 10/7/2011
The Inequality of Breasts
Take a minute and think about how beautiful breasts are. They feed babies, they provide immense sexual pleasure, and look nice! And yet we see breasts as shameful and are socially and legally forced to cover them (there are actually only two states in which it is legal to expose your breasts publically). Women who do show their breasts are either shamed or sexualized. Others take it upon themselves to tell her to cover herself up or to try and sexually harass her. Is this really what we want for ourselves, our bodies and personal freedom?
I believe that women should be held to the same standards as men in all aspects of life, and breasts are no exception. Men are free to expose their chests in public without being …
Feminism, Pop-Culture | Posted by Emma E on 08/24/2011
Reversing Gender Roles With A Little Help From Ke$ha
When most people think of Ke$ha, feminism is not the first word that comes to mind. But I think her music does have some vaguely feminist merits.
I remember some time before I even discovered the FBomb (my life must have been so meaningless…) I was thinking about sexism in music. I remember thinking, “I wonder why most music by women is all about how much they love their guys, and men’s music is all about hooking up with random, personality-less girls at parties? Women almost never treat men like meaningless objects in music, but men do all the time.”
I tried to think of a song where women treat men like men treat them. The only one I could come up with was a little-known song from Ke$ha’s debut album, …
Feminism | Posted by Alec A on 08/8/2011
DSK the Woman Hater and That Hooker Maid: A Gender Story
Unless you’ve taken to your fallout shelter in tepid anticipation of the national default – which has for the moment been averted – you’ve undoubtedly caught wind of the Dominique Strauss-Kahn maid bashing that has shot vitriol all over the court like a Sharapova tennis match.
Beneath the French public’s unsurprising distaste for the impotence of the American justice system (and American noses turned up to sniff the dubious legal proceedings) lies oblique gender commentary.
Let’s recap. During May this year DSK – until recently the managing director of the International Monetary Fund – checked into the swanky Sofitel hotel in New York City. A thirty-two year-old maid – Nafissatou Diallo of Guinea – alleged that she was assaulted upon entering the financial giant’s hotel room in order to perform …
Feminism | Posted by Kelsie M on 08/5/2011
Thank You, Slutwalk
July 31 marks the one-year anniversary of the night I was raped. On August 6, I will be participating in Slutwalk when it comes to Philly. They could not have picked a better date. I find it ironic that the very word that kept me from getting any help that night a year ago is now the very same word that is saving me.
I know that Slutwalk has many critics, and in a way I think that most of it may stem from simple ignorance. I don’t mean this as an insult, but rather that until someone is in the situation of rape, they simply can never understand.
You will never understand the 3 am feeling of laying on the cool tile of the bathroom floor after puking up …
