Fat-shaming during bikini season
The diet and exercise industries earn billions of dollars annually. Many of its advertisements attempt to project the ultimate goal as health. However, the high numbers of women featured in their...
Category: Women
Mothers, embrace the insanity!
From the moment we hear our child’s first cry, we are immediately encouraged to perform the role of long-suffering, ever-vigilant, hyper-nurturing and self-sacrificing mother. It begins with the...
The Purity Myth: a review
The Purity Myth (Avalon, 2009) was written by Jessica Valenti of the feminist blog Feministing. It seeks to explore the issue of virginity as obsession and comment on how said obsession is ultimately...
Charlotte Roche’s Wetlands: a review
This is a review of Wetlands by Charlotte Roche, with translator Tim Mohr (Fourth Estate Ltd., 2009). Please note that in keeping with the subject matter, this review contains graphic language. If...
The art of self-pleasure makes it to Oprah
How do you know when you’ve made it these days? When you show up on Oprah, of course. On April 9th of this year, masturbation had its big coming out party and became the subject du jour as part of...
Clean up feminism, then we’ll talk
In the days since I wrote a post about finally claiming the womanist label and the warm welcome I've received since, I've had some of my white transsisters express movement-envy and surprise that we...
Collateral damage: protesting the Swat flogging
A cell-phone video of the flogging of a 17-year-old girl in Swat has garnered much public attention in Pakistan over the last two days. Barely recovered from the previous attack on Manawan police...
Women, Action & the Media: all women matter?
The Annual WAM conference runs from March 27-29. Its stated goals are as follows: “The goal of WAM! is to bring together everyone who has a stake in achieving gender justice in media, in order to...
Rihanna, Chris Brown & the Modern Day Lynching
Domestic violence happens across race, class and sexuality. It is an extremely damaging social phenomenon and yet we rarely speak about it. Until the latest incident with Chris Brown and Rihanna, the...
John Worboys: serial rapist aided by police neglect
The U.K. has a rape conviction rate of 6%. According to the Campaign to End Rape, in 2003/04 " ver two-thirds of cases dropped out at the police stage and did not make it as far as the courts", "...