Feminism | Posted by Holly Grigg-Spall on 12/12/2011
Ms-guided: I Was A Teen On Drugs
When I was 17 years-old I was put on the birth control pill. I had painful, heavy periods that would get me out of gym class, but that wasn’t the only reason I was taken to the doctor. My mum, who became an adult in the 1960s, just as the Pill was introduced as a tool for female liberation, was afraid I would get pregnant. Not that I had a boyfriend, or even had sex – and, in fact, I wouldn’t for another four years. It was just the responsible thing to do, the right thing to do, and I swallowed that, quite literally, without question. I had no idea how the Pill worked, nor even how my own body worked. Aside from some embarrassing and misleading classes at my …
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Feminism | Posted by Christina B on 12/9/2011
Chicks Before Dicks
In high school (and in life) people learn that they have to have priorities. Do grades come before sports? Do friends come before family? Does my boyfriend come before everyone/everything else? After a year and a half of high school (only two and a half left – yippie!) I feel that I have a pretty good sense of how high school relationships function. Many of my friends, teammate and classmates have had boyfriends or girlfriends and so have I and what has become very obvious is that people more often than not choose their boyfriend/girlfriend over their friends, which I think is really damaging.
It’s not secret that teenagers’ hormones are raging all the time. Walking into a high school is basically like walking into a hurricane of hormones. Unfortunately, …
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Feminism | Posted by Julie Z on 12/5/2011
The Anita Hill 20: Sexual Harassment and Teens
On October 15th, I had the honor of participating in the “Sex, Power and Speaking the Truth: Anita Hill 20 Years Later” conference. I spoke on an intergenerational panel that also featured speakers Kimberle Crenshaw, Virginia Valian, Gloria Steinem and Devon Carbado, which was terrifying and beyond humbling, but also probably one of the coolest things I’ve ever had the opportunity to do. Using your feedback about sexual harassment and my own observations, I pulled together a speech that I thought reflected our generation’s attitudes towards sexual harassment.
I’m beyond late sharing this with the FBomb community, but I hope you enjoy it and would still love to hear your reactions to my speech or any of the other panelists’ speeches and your thoughts about sexual …
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Feminism | Posted by Anna D on 10/31/2011
We Love the Female Orgasm! Do You?
Starting college is pretty exciting; everyone’s meeting new friends, getting the hang of their classes, and, if they’re lucky, learning about female orgasm. A few weeks ago, my college’s Sexual Health Educators brought the program “I Love the Female Orgasm” to our student body. After seeing the attention-grabbing posters around campus, my roommate and I went to the event, not quite sure what to expect. What we ended up seeing was an in-depth presentation on female sexuality and its relation to society. The presenters, Rachel Dart and Marshall Miller (co-author of I Love the Female Orgasm: An Extraordinary Orgasm Guide with Dorian Solot), explored a variety of subjects and asked the audience about our opinions. It was exciting that such an under-discussed, even taboo, subject was being discussed openly; students …
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Feminism | Posted by Lizzie M on 10/28/2011
My Sexuality Is None Of Your Business, Thanks
Probably the most common thing I hear regarding my collegiate matriculation selection is one of a pejorative why I would ever, in-the-name-of-sanity, select to attend an all-female institution. Unsurprisingly, I have a lengthy and rather complicated reply that first must unpack the question (like a true Mount Holyoke Woman, assuredly). This answer, as you have no doubt gleaned, is one I am indirectly (but also directly) answering in these five posts illustrating facets to life here that I love.
However. This is, as the Buddhists would say, a question wrongly asked.
To begin: Mount Holyoke may exclusively admit women only, but not all of its students identify according to the gender binary, and some are in the midst of a sex change whilst at MHC. I am not going to …
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Feminism, Pop-Culture | Posted by Sarah M on 10/14/2011
Sluts and Whores
You know that scene in Mean Girls where Tina Fey’s character tells all the girls that they need to stop calling each other sluts and whores because it only makes it okay for guys to call them sluts and whores?
I wish Fey would tell that to girls everywhere.
There’s pretty much two types of that sort of name-calling and they both piss me off.
First, there’s the casual, “Hey, slut, what’s up?” or “Hey there, ho!” that friends say to each other. Now, this would be one thing if they were trying to reclaim the word, if this was some sort of movement or statement – but in the vast majority of cases, it’s not. These girls are just trying to fit in with the patriarchal bullshit that tells …
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Feminism | Posted by Harriet S. Hughes on 10/12/2011
London Calling: Feminism Across The Pond
The political terrain of Britain is shifting beneath our feet. Children of the ‘80s and ‘90s will have no memory of anything comparable to the dramatic, fundamental transformation of our nation that’s currently taking place. In an atmosphere of such instability, where the media’s frantically trying to keep pace, women’s issues – sidelined at the best of times – are slipping further and further down the agenda. That’s where we come in: YouFem is a London-based feminist organisation, aiming to harness the political power of young people and draw women’s issues back into the light…and to have fun doing it.
The elections of 2010 landed us with a Conservative-Liberal Democrat Coalition. Since then, Britain has been made to swallow a manifesto that no-one voted for; we’re facing a tsunami of …
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Pop-Culture | Posted by Susannah F on 09/30/2011
The Art of the Text
In our world of technology and instant communication, sentiments often get lost in cyberspace. In fact, there’s a whole website devoted to some of the crazy mishaps that can occur during texting. But when texting is successful, I can confidently say that one of its most common (and more recent) uses is as a means of hooking up and conducting relationships.
Some of my friends use text messaging in order to conduct their booty calls in college. If you meet someone at a party and exchange numbers, a text conversation is sure to ensue in the hopes of ultimately having a sexual encounter. One of my friends told me that if she is planning on meeting up with someone that she has been casually texting, she will continue to text …
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