A Reason to Believe in Feminism
Feminism | Posted by Anonymous on 09/7/2010 I have for you a tale of feminism in its physical manifestation. It was only weeks ago that I, a nineteen-year-old girl, sat at a window seat on a bus swindling its way down a road in the city one night. Ere long I felt another’s presence, and turned to find a beefy drunkard leering at me as he stumbled to sit by my side. He had prickly grey stubble covering his weathered cheek; bloodshot eyes and thin lips smacked together as he looked me up and down. ‘How ya going, alright?’ ‘’Ow old are ya, love?’ Next I felt his fingers clumsily grasping at my hair; he was gazing at me, trying to fix his unstable vision on my face. A woman, quite small, and no older than thirty, had wrenched the drunkard from me and was standing over him, striking blow upon blow, as I sat there sobbing. Of course I didn’t; and the woman, having instructed the male bus driver to continue on his route, sat next to me with her arm around me and I cried into her shoulder.
Re-Framing Menstruation
In a humorous article, Gloria Steinem asked, “What would happen, for instance, if suddenly, magically, men could menstruate and women could not?” Men, she asserted, would re-frame menstruation as a “enviable, boast-worthy, masculine event” about which they would brag (“about how long and how much”). She writes: Street guys would brag (“I’m a three pad man”) or answer praise from a buddy (“Man, you lookin’ good!”) Perhaps in homage to this article, an artist developed an installation titled “Menstruation Skateboards” for the Secession Museum in Austria, sent in by Zainab K. The exhibition included skateboards that generally mocked sexist language and re-claimed the blood of menstruation: this blood, the message is, makes me hardcore. The t-shirts state it plainly: The art project nicely makes Steinem’s point, showing how things like menstruation can be interpreted in many different ways depending on the social status of the person with whom it is associated. UPDATE!
For Every Girl...
I first saw this poster when I was a first-year staff member at a summer camp in my staff notebook. Before each summer, every staff member comes a week early to talk about procedures and child development. This poster definitely spoke to me and in each of my 4 years as a staff member, I have always been happy when we turned to that page. I saw this poster again in one of my favorite professor's offices last year when I went to go talk to her about peer-teaching for her in one of her classes (which I did), and we both talked about how much we liked it. One of my favorite things about this poster is that it is a reminder that whatever children are showing us might not be what they're feeling.
The Pathology of Normal | Manolo for the Big Girl
Trigger warning: If frank discussion of eating disorders and disordered eating may be triggering to you, this would be a good time to move along. Your well-being is way too important to ignore. If you own a television, radio, or computer with internet access, if you read a magazine or newspaper, if you see billboards along the highway or advertising stickers in restaurant bathrooms or receive junk mail, you’ve seen the messages: eating is bad, food is the enemy, and hunger is the weapon your body uses to force you to eat. Yoplait has a series of commercials where people find that eating a tiny amount of artificially flavored, fat-free yogurt is precisely the same as eating a slice of Boston cream pie or Black Forest cake. Campbell’s soup touts its diet line by assuring us that it’s ‘naturally satisfying’ to fit into our clothes. Applebee’s has a commercial with three women gushing over how thrilled they are to be starting new diets. What do all of these images have in common?
Guest Post: A Doctor on Transvaginal Ultrasounds
A friend of mine is a physician who wants to speak about transvaginal ultrasounds but whose position makes it precarious to speak publicly about it. So I’m letting this doctor borrow my site for an entry to speak anonymously on the matter. Obviously, I will vouch for the doctor being a doctor and being qualified to speak on the subject. Update, 9:14pm: This post is being linked to far and wide, so we’re getting lots of new readers and commenters. It’s important that before you comment you read the site disclaimer and comment policy. Update: 12:13am, 3/21: I’m going to bed, so I turned off the comments for the night. Update: 1pm, 3/21: As a head’s up to people, at 8pm eastern time tonight, I will turning off the comments for this thread permanently. Update: 8pm, 3/21: Comment thread is now closed. Right. I’m speaking, of course, about the required-transvaginal-ultrasound thing that seems to be the flavor-of-the-month in politics. I do not care what your personal politics are.
This is a Post About Literary Rape
I’ve been a reading machine in the past eighteen days. In fact, I’ve read five novels, across five different genres. One was young adult literary, one was young adult genre, one was an adult literary, and two were adult contemporary fantasies All five featured the main female character getting raped. By the time I got to book number five, I was so weary, so emotionally drained, so angry. I galloped over to Facebook and told the world how angry I was. What I want is for there to be less gratuitous literary rape. I’m not talking about books like Speak. And that starts to feel a lot less like realism and more like a malingering culture of women as victims. Yes. Now, on Facebook and Twitter, people said “but then you’d complain about rape and violence against women being under-represented in fiction.” I want to know why this is an easy fall-back, rape. Is it? So what I’m saying is: yes, write about rape. World, we need to talk. *No, I’m not going to tell you what they were. **Oh, wow.
Ask Moxie: A Letter To My Sons About Stopping Rape
Dear Boys, Some really horrible things happened to someone who could be one of your friends, and it was done by some people who could be your friends. You're 11 and almost-8 now, so the incident that made me write this letter isn't something you've heard about, but this stuff keeps happening, unfortunately. First of all, I know we talk all the time about how special your bodies are, and how you’re the only one who gets to decide what to do with your body. And we talk all the time about making sure that if you’re touching someone else that they want you to be touching them. Now I’m going to talk about sex. This is what I want you to wait for. If you’re ever in a situation in which someone is asking you for it and you don’t want to have sex with that person, don’t do it. This letter is almost over but this next part is super-important: Not everyone you know has been taught all the stuff we’ve talked about. Here’s how you should step in: 1. 2. 3. 4. Love, Mom
B-Sides: Esperanza Spalding
Esperanza Spalding has been flying just under the radar for years now, especially for those who don't follow jazz pop news (it's not all about Norah Jones, people!), but recently experienced something of a breakout in her February performance on the PBS program Austin City Limits. The day after her performance, Spalding, became the second most-popular search term on Google and millions of PBS viewers were (I assume) smitten. Spalding grew up in a single-parent home in Portland, Oregon and began teaching herself to play violin when she was four years old. She's appeared in ads for Banana Republic, a profile in the New Yorker, The Late Show with David Letterman and Jimmy Kimmel Live, onstage with Stevie Wonder and at the White House. Spalding has said that her most recent album Esperanza is "just the tip of the iceberg" in terms of musical exploration and improvisation, referencing musicians like Me'shell Ndegeocello and Billy Drew as influences. Swoon.
