background preloader

Feministy

Facebook Twitter

Hello. Testing.

Is Gender-Flipping The Most Important Meme Ever? There’s an old analogy about boiling a frog alive. If you drop poor Froggy into a pot full of hot water he’ll jump right out again, the story goes; but start with cool water and heat it slowly, and the temperature will rise so gradually that he won’t notice until it’s too late. He got used to 29 degrees, and so didn’t register when it turned into 30 degrees; he got used to 30, and then it was 31, and so on. (This is not science, by the way. Do not try to boil any frogs to make a point.) Now, imagine Monsieur Grenouille had a friend, waiting in a pot full of cold water next to the stove. Monsieur brushes her off with typically Gallic dismissiveness: “Mon oeil!

In the wise words of Community’s Dean Pelton, sometimes we don’t see our own patterns until they’re laid out in front of us. That’s what Dustin Hoffman is talking about in that clip that did the rounds last week. “That was never a comedy for me,” says a very teary Hoffman at the end of the clip. Gender-Flip The Images Walk A Mile. Adventures in Feministory : Charlotte Perriand. Although she's often overlooked in favor of bigger names like Le Corbusier, Charlotte Perriand was one of France's most influential designers. Born in 1903, Perriand attended art school at the Ecole de l'Union Centrale des Arts Décoratifs, where she was less interested in the Beaux-Arts curriculum as she was in the metal and industrial design of modernism. Le Corbusier, the functionalist/modernist architect, had mastered modernist exteriors but found he could not furnish their interiors with the right furniture.

When Perriand approached him with her portfolio, she was dismissed with "We don't embroider cushions here," which was about the equivalent of "Make me a sandwich" in modernist design lingo—women learning avant-garde design were often shuffled toward weaving and textiles rather than architecture. After seeing her "bar on a rooftop" project, made out of aluminum, steel, and glass presented at the Salon d'Automne of 1927, Le Corbusier realized the error of his ways ways.

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.

Her prodigious talent led her to study at the Berklee College of Music when she was just 17 and become an instructor there when she was only 20. Now 25, Spalding has composed and recorded two album's worth of gorgeous jazz pop, supported by a daunting tour schedule and mesmerizing live performances. Swoon. Guest Blogger Starling: Schrödinger’s Rapist: or a guy’s guide to approaching strange women without being maced | Shapely Prose. Phaedra Starling is the pen name of a romance novelist and licensed private investigator living in small New York City apartment with two large dogs.

She practices Brazilian jiu-jitsu and makes world-class apricot muffins. Gentlemen. Thank you for reading. Let me start out by assuring you that I understand you are a good sort of person. You are kind to children and animals. You respect the elderly. So far, so good. Now, you want to become acquainted with a woman you see in public. “But wait! Well, no. So when you, a stranger, approach me, I have to ask myself: Will this man rape me? Do you think I’m overreacting? I don’t. When you approach me in public, you are Schrödinger’s Rapist.

Fortunately, you’re a good guy. To begin with, you must accept that I set my own risk tolerance. The second important point: you must be aware of what signals you are sending by your appearance and the environment. This means that some men should never approach strange women in public. Yeah. Like this: Why I Love Meghan McCain. 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!”) By giving fives and saying, “Yeah, man, I’m on the rag!” …Military men, right-wing politicians, and religious fundamentalists would cite menstruation (“men-struation”) as proof that only men could serve in the Army (“you have to give blood to take blood”), occupy political office (“can women be aggressive without that steadfast cycle governed by the planet Mars?”)

, be priest and ministers (“how could a woman give her blood for our sins?”) The t-shirts state it plainly: All images borrowed from Menstruation Skateboards. UPDATE! The Many Incarnations Of Rosie The Riveter. 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. The ‘and of course the only way that will happen is if you stop eating’ is deafeningly silent. What do all of these images have in common? Religion and Modesty. Another post about rape « Fugitivus. By the by, I consistently use that title because I mean for it to operate as a trigger warning.

I write a lot about rape, but sometimes I write about other things, and I don’t want anybody taken off-guard transitioning from “help computer” into wtf rape-talk. Case you were wondering. I was re-reading my five billion goddamn posts about rape and force, and I realized (surprise!) There is a more succinct way for me to express what I was thinking. I tend to go on and on, circling a subject, trying to get out everything in my head that possibly relates to it, and then sometimes find I didn’t really address the subject at all. So, here is what I wanted to say in those five billion posts about rape: If women are raised being told by parents, teachers, media, peers, and all surrounding social strata that: If we teach women that there are only certain ways they may acceptably behave, we should not be surprised when they behave in those ways.

You could follow the rules. That wasn’t concise at all. 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.

So I need to talk to you about it. 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. I’ve never made you put anything in your mouth that you didn’t want to, or touch anyone you didn’t want to, or talk to anyone you didn’t want to, because I wanted you to understand that you and you alone control your boundaries. 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. Here’s how you should step in: 1. 2. 3. 4. Love, Mom. Original Essay: The Not Rape Epidemic.

*Trigger Warning* Latoya’s Note: So, as promised, here’s the original version of the essay that appears in Yes Means Yes. If you see this popping up in your reader, I do not recommend you read it at work. Rape is only four letters, one small syllable, and yet it is one of the hardest words to coax from your lips when you need it most. Entering our teenage years in the sex saturated ’90s, my friends and I knew tons about rape. We knew to always be aware while walking, to hold your keys out as a possible weapon against an attack. Yes, we learned a lot about rape. What we were not prepared for was everything else. Not rape was all those other little things that we experienced everyday and struggled to learn how to deal with those situations. When I was twelve, my best friend at the time had met a guy and lied to him about her age.

Another friend of mine friend shocked me one day after a guy (man really) walked past us and she broke down into a sobbing heap where we stood. 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. Come for the Pizza, Stay for the Deconstruction of Masculinity. One Thursday last month, during the lunch hour at H.D. Woodson Senior High School, half a dozen teenage boys have gathered to eat pizza and talk about hollering at women. “From where I come from, you holler at a girl,” one student tells the group. “A girl can’t be too upset when a guy is paying attention to her.”

“It depends on the type of girl and whether she has respect for herself,” another says. “Some girls will say, stop. But they like it, for real.” “But what if it’s hot out?” “What if all her other shorts are dirty? Getting teenage boys to engage in gender theory can require a soft approach. Griffin facilitates two MOST club meetings a day at nine different DCPS schools. Thus Griffin has become accustomed to addressing thorny concepts in abbreviated time frames.

Griffin doesn’t just stroll into D.C. public schools with a pizza and start engaging boys on topics like rape. In order to illustrate what that means, Griffin performs an exercise he calls “The Real Man.” Sexist Beatdown: Megan Fox Shrinks Michael Bay’s Camera Boner Edition. Lady Robots: The Shape of Things to Come On. So, here's another story for you. It's grimmer than the last one, but we tell it almost as often. It goes like this: She's perfect. She's perfect because we made her perfect; because everything about her is entirely within our control. She's your long-lost love, your new and improved wife; she's the girl you never got over, or the girl you could never have. And now, she loves you. The fear of robots is the fear of the twentieth century. For one thing, we have to include them because people will seriously not stop making sexy robot girls. “She can’t vacuum, she can’t cook but she can do almost anything else if you know what I mean,” said Douglas Hines of Roxxxy.

The fembot, and the weird but unignorable demand for it, so precisely encapsulates the worst fears of women that it's maybe inevitable that women are finding ways to rewrite and inhabit her. Let's start with one of the first robot girls on film: The central character in Fritz Lang's Metropolis. And Now, I Scream Because That's What Girls Do. I’m afraid today’s gonna be a rant. It all started because of a blog post I read yesterday, about stereo-typing gender in novels.

And then got sort of nudged on its way by a book I was reading last night. And then my annoyance and rant was finally solidified this morning when I was hunting for Legos for my daughter’s birthday. I’ll spare you the agony of my thought processes and instead sum up the thesis that all three of these things were putting forth: men and women are inherently different. Different enough to want drastically different things out of life.

Different enough that the same behaviors mean different things. As an author, I write people who are not like me all the time. But I have to tell you, I don’t think that merely crossing the gender divide is enough to make me trade my writer pogo stick for a jet plane. Bu they’re in reviews, in product placement, everywhere. The thing is this: yes, there are some physiological differences between men and women. The Gift of Fear. 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. One of the most interesting things about working with kids with such a huge age range (age 7-15) is that they're all in such developmentally different places. And even among kids the same age, some kids just figure out who they are and what they like earlier in life. 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. Girls Read Comics Bingo. Being a mother isnt always a choice, not yet. When Does Life Begin. Who’s fight is this? « Everysaturdaymorning's Blog. Guest Post: A Doctor on Transvaginal Ultrasounds. If I had a hammer... It wouldn't be pink - Feministing.