'Slut dropping' and 'Pimps and Hoes' - the sexual politics of freshers' week - Comment - Voices. The message included a forwarded email, which she said had been sent by the Physics Society to all first year physics students.
It read "Freshers' Lunch...This will be mainly a chance for you to scope out who's in your department and stake your claim early on the 1 in 5 girls. " For female students to be sent an email from a university society marking them out as sexual prey before they’d even started their course seemed extreme and inappropriate. But a few days later, we received another email, this time from a freshers' week volunteer. He wrote of his distress at the "horrific normalisation" of sexist attitudes and sexual pressure during the week’s festivities. He described a group of excited male first-years who told him about “slut dropping”. Another message came from a student distressed about the inclusion of a “Slag ‘n’ Drag” themed club night as part of the freshers’ week festivities at the University of York.
Why 6-Year-Old Girls Want to Be Sexy. Most girls as young as 6 are already beginning to think of themselves as sex objects, according to a new study of elementary school-age kids in the Midwest. Researchers have shown in the past that women and teens think of themselves in sexually objectified terms, but the new study is the first to identify self-sexualization in young girls.
The study, published online July 6 in the journal Sex Roles, also identified factors that protect girls from objectifying themselves. Psychologists at Knox College in Galesburg, Ill., used paper dolls to assess self-sexualization in 6- to 9-year-old girls. Sixty girls were shown two dolls, one dressed in tight and revealing "sexy" clothes and the other wearing a trendy but covered-up, loose outfit. Using a different set of dolls for each question, the researchers then asked each girl to choose the doll that: looked like herself, looked how she wanted to look, was the popular girl in school, she wanted to play with. Important factors. The Rise of Everyday Feminism. Guest blogger Aisha Mirza is a journalist and musician from London. She is an active supporter of EQUALS coalition member UK Feminista, and also UK Uncut. She features in our film My Feminist Body. Feminism is rising everyday. Why body hair is on the frontline of feminist action. Body hair is everywhere!
At least it will be soon. In the two years since I stopped shaving, we have seen a feminist movement build and, frankly, mock the idea that it isn’t needed any more. Women today are told to be afraid of our legs and feel guilty for eating on the way to work, to hate our vaginas and our skin colour at the same time, and are even made to deal with anti-abortion protests outside of clinics because the men with power choose to regulate women’s bodies instead of the climate or, erm, the banks. We have voices. We have bodies too, and body hair is fast becoming our war paint. A few days ago I was invited to the facebook group, “Women Against Non-Essential Grooming”. This month has seen the Armpits4August campaign encourage women to get sponsored to grow their underarm hair to raise money and awareness for Polycystic Ovary Syndrome (PCOS), symptoms of which can include obesity, acne and excessive hair growth. Direct action is not just the forte of groups like UK Uncut.
MacIntyre: Political Philosophy Labor and Monopoly Capitalism: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century: Amazon.co.uk: John Bellamy Foster, Harry Braverman. The Culture of the New Capitalism Castle Lectures in Ethics, Politics, & Economics: Amazon.co.uk: Richard Sennett. Why the Olympics are anti-Capitalist in spirit. It's sometimes said that sport is a mirror of society. Watching the Olympics, though, makes me think the opposite is the case, as Olympians represent values which are disappearing from society. Thanks (but no thanks…) I was overwhelmed by the response I received regarding last night’s documentary!
The sheer amount of people who watched it was one thing, but the amount of tweets and messages wishing me luck and cheering the whole team on was absolutely incredible. For the three of us featured in the show, the fact that we, three female British weightlifters, made it to a mainstream TV channel for doing the sport we love is amazing. A few years ago the idea of that would’ve been unthinkable, which really shows how far the sport has come in such a short space of time. While it is still very much a minority sport, the amount of both participants and supporters is growing rapidly.We’ve even had a few people tell us we’ve inspired them to try weightlifting, which means the absolute world to us.
The obvious choice of slander when talking about female weightlifting is “how unfeminine, girls shouldn’t be strong or have muscles, this is wrong”. Oh but wait, you aren’t. Like this: