Max ePad Femme – the tablet for women that's hard to swallow | Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett The Max ePad Femme – 'one downside is that it doesn’t seem to include a driving simulator.' You know that when even the Daily Mail calls a product sexist then you're onto a winner. Yep, just when you thought Bic for Her had finally done one on behalf of all ladyproducts, a new one comes along: the (Max) ePad Femme. It may sound like a sanitary towel, but it's actually an electronic tablet for chicks, being as it is "less complicated" than the iPad, a device even babies and puppies seem able to use with ease (as I write, six-year-olds the country over are running up bills on their parents' iTunes, or, if you're my little brother, using Dad's eBay account to bid on Bob the Builder merchandise). Yet women are a different question entirely. The marketeers behind most ladyproducts seem to have gone for one of two strategies. As such, the (Max) ePad Femme has a lovely pink background and nice big buttons for those with the learning difficulties so frequently associated with our gender.
Too feeble for unisex? Try a lady product | Kate Murray-Browne We all know that being a woman requires specialist material. For instance, your vagina needs its own deodorant, stylist, and stick-on jewels just to get it through the day. We need hundreds of things men don't, like lipgloss and Veet, and we're used to that now. But recently, there seems to have been some quite amazing ingenuity in producing special lady products where we all thought a unisex one would do. Victoria Pendleton has created "the first all-female bike range" for Halfords; Cadbury have just released Crispello, a chocolate bar specifically for women; Bic recently launched a range of pens "for her" (provoking some very scathing, very funny comments on its Amazon page), and London Transport produced (and then swiftly revoked) a leaflet called Tube Tips for Women. Nowadays, you can go on women-only bike rides or to women-only gyms, and, if you can't control your alcohol intake all by yourself, there are women-only drinks available.
Honda Fit's Pink Car Made Just For Ladies Honda First there was the "Bic for Her" pen. Then there was the Fujitsu "Floral Kiss" lady-computer (complete with a built-in scrapbooking app and bedazzled keyboard!). Honda just took things to the next level by producing the Honda Fit "She's" — a pink car made specifically for women that's marketed as "adult cute." The $17,500 car, currently only being sold in Japan, has loads of lady-friendly features. Apart from pink aesthetics and a dainty heart to replace the apostrophe in "She's," design features include: A windshield that helps prevent wrinkles, and a "plasmacluster" air conditioning system that Honda says will improve skin quality. If you don't like the pink tone, don't worry. While cars like the Volkswagen Jetta have often been stereotyped as a more female-friendly car (there's even a Tumblr called "Hot Girl. The vintage cars, complete complete with hat, purse, and lipstick storage space, came in colors ranging from "Dusty Rose" to "Pigeon Gray." Here's what the car looks like:
Why should married women change their names? Let men change theirs | Jill Filipovic Excuse me while I play the cranky feminist for a minute, but I'm disheartened every time I sign into Facebook and see a list of female names I don't recognize. You got married, congratulations! But why, in 2013, does getting married mean giving up the most basic marker of your identity? And if family unity is so important, why don't men ever change their names? On one level, I get it: people are really hard on married women who don't change their names. But that's not what you usually hear. It may be the case that in your marriage, he did have a better last name. Not that I'm unsympathetic to the women out there who have difficult or unfortunate last names. That is fundamentally why I oppose changing your name (and why I look forward to the wider legalization of same-sex marriage, which in addition to just being good and right, will challenge the idea that there are naturally different roles for men and women within the marital unit). Your name is your identity.
Gender-neutral isn’t new | Motivated Grammar Gender-neutral language really burns some people’s beans. One common argument against gender-neutral language is that it’s something new. See, everyone was fine with generic he up until [insert some turning point usually in the 1960s or 1970s], which means concerns about gender neutrality in language are just manufactured complaints by “arrogant ideologues” or people over-concerned with “sensitivity”, and therefore ought to be ignored. I have two thoughts on this argument. But my second thought is this: the very premise is wrong. Freshmen. Mankind. He or she. Person as a morpheme. Singular they. In conclusion, I’m definitely not saying that gender-neutral language was as prominent in the past as it is today. – *: I just want to jump in and note that I find firefighter more precise and cooler-sounding than fireman; then again, I may have some unresolved issues with the latter term stemming from the difficulties I had in beating Fire Man when playing Mega Man. Like this: Like Loading...
Say my name When are you too old to call your other half boy/girlfriend, and what do you call them instead? We look at a very modern social dilemma J ennifer Aniston’s impending wedding to Justin Theroux is causing a great deal of relief in the celebrity media. But on gossip sites and in chatrooms, it is widely agreed that the English language has exhausted itself trying to document Jen’s string of — what? Beaux? Of course, for most unmarried couples over the age of 17, describing the emotional bond between you and your live-in partner is problematic. “When we first met, we 'Yo' Said What? : Code Switch The Code Switch team loves thinking, talking and hearing about language and linguistics — see our launch essay, "When Our Kids Own America," and "How Code-Switching Explains The World." So we wanted to share this report from NPR's Arts Desk that's about the use of "yo" as a gender-neutral pronoun. Over the past few decades, we've made a lot of changes in the English language to make it more gender neutral. But there's one thing we can't seem to get right: pronouns. But some kids in Baltimore have come up with a solution that has caught the attention of linguists. At the UMAR Boxing Gym, you hear the word "yo" a lot. "You know, like yo hit me ... yo took my stuff! Instead of "he" or "she," it's "yo." Margaret Troyer, a former Baltimore-area teacher, published the first paper showing that "yo" is being used to replace "he" and "she." "Some examples would be 'yo wearing a jacket,' " Troyer says, referring to her research. So Troyer began to study her students. "I change it up for a girl ...
Using toys for both boys, girls may be good for kids While there isn't one set of directions for picking out a good toy, experts suggest looking at age and interest. What are the ABCs of finding a good toy for a child? Experts stress that a child's age and interests should come before gender. The debate over gender-specific toys was stirred again recently after toymaker Hasbro said it will start selling its classic Easy-Bake oven in gender-neutral colors. Hasbro's announcement followed news stories about McKenna Pope, a 13-year-old girl from Garfield, N.J., who started a petition asking the toymaker to redesign the oven in other colors. STORY: Unisex Easy-Bake oven on the way "We value input from our consumers, and given the widespread interest in McKenna Pope's story, we extended an invitation to McKenna and her family to visit Hasbro," the company said in a statement. Researchers agree with Pope that toys should be inclusive of boys and girls. Emily W. Play also can contribute to the development of practical skills. -- Expands creativity
At Boots, science is for boys and pink princess toys are for girls | Megan Peel | Science Last summer, driving our firstborn girl home from hospital, the world outside the car window seemed suddenly strange and new: the trees greener; the road grittier; the blossom in the hedges fluffier. From out of the shell-shocked fug of my brain, the opening lines from Sylvia Plath's poem Child emerged unbidden: Your clear eye is the one beautiful thing I want to fill it with colour and ducks The zoo of the new Over the past 10 months, I have watched our daughter's clear eyes open to the world, and seen how voraciously they devour each new object they encounter. And yet I know this will not last. One day in the not too distant future, she will be standing in a shop and her clear eye will be filled not with "colour and ducks", but with a wall of pink. The issue was brought home to me this week when I logged onto my Facebook page and saw a photo that my friend the children's writer and illustrator Helen Stephens has posted on her wall.
Yes, Page 3 is bad for women. But so are the photos in OK! magazine - Comment - Voices What they found, in fact, in a house they called the Villa of Diomedes, was the space left by the body of a woman without much on. But when they tried to make a mould of it, all they got, according to Mary Beard in her book Pompeii, was a breast. It was put in a local museum, and drew crowds from all around. Nihil sub sole novum, as the Romans might tell us if they’d found the time to read Ecclesiastes, which was written about 1,000 years before. There’s nothing new under the sun, as Mary Beard, who has found the time to read a lot of things, could translate. There is, she might add, nothing much new in The Sun. “Hello, boys! Four and a half million is about two-thirds of the daily readership of a newspaper which is still the tenth most popular newspaper in the world. What he didn’t say is that naked breasts are in The Sun for the same reason they’re in any magazine, or on any website, or in any club (apart from a gym) that has women anywhere near poles.
Casual sexism from politicians is no joke MSP Murdo Fraser: his language is 'straight out of the 1950s', said one Twitter user. Photograph: Danny Lawson/PA Archive/Press Association Ima An Indonesian high-court judge sparked international outrage when, during a recent interview for a position on the supreme court, he suggested that women might "enjoy" being raped. Murdo Fraser, Member of the Scottish Parliament for Mid-Scotland and Fife, discovered last week that the wife of former Liberal leader Lord Steel had declared herself pro-independence. Fraser's words closely echo those of Austin Mitchell, Labour MP for Great Grimsby, who a few months ago launched a misogynistic online tirade against former Conservative MP Louise Mensch, tweeting: "Shut up Menschkin. The comments may have been less serious than those made by Judge Muhammad Daming Sanusi. MP George Galloway: ignorant of the law on rape. Is it too much to ask that our elected representatives support women rather than tear them down?
Caroline Frost: Does 'Call The Midwife' Fail The Sexism Test... For Men? Call the Midwife is perfect Sunday evening telly fare - with its nostalgic look at poverty-stricken East London, the hardships and deprivations of the 1950s soothed by the tender administrations of the clear-skinned midwives and their elders, stroking the cheeks of young to old, smiling with good-humoured compassion and easing the passage of world entry while they're about it. But, this dewey tableau has been pilloried this season around for giving men a hard time... when they're not serially bashing their wives, they're neglecting them in fire hazards of homes, marrying two sisters at a time (that was all a bit weird) or queueing up on the ship to take their turn with the captain's daughter. A useful test to see if any TV show passes muster for female equality is to ask three simple questions... is there more than one female lead character? Do they appear in scenes on their own without men as well? Is there more than one lead female character? Loading Slideshow
Hamleys' baby steps towards gender equality In the 70s, guns were for boys and dolls were for girls. Animals, transport and building-simulation were unisex, and if you really wanted to test the limits of female objectification, you could get a severed head with retractable hair. That was called a Girl's World. Oh what a world. Our hippy parents did not know they were born. This is why even parents who aren't that interested in gender politics still object: it's the narrowness of it all, the very extreme versions of masculinity and femininity that this consumer world represents. OK, nobody wake up the politburo, they have this under control: they were not pressured, they decided on their own. Not that much has changed, if I'm honest: even if the third floor signage is no longer pink, that doesn't make a huge amount of difference when all the toys are pink. The gender-stereotyping of the toy industry is not as ham-fisted as you might imagine. Neuroscientists talk about "brain sex" now in an openly deterministic way.
Trans people, pronouns and language In 1910, German sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld published The Transvestites: The Erotic Drive to Cross-Dress – the first investigation into the practice of wearing clothes designated for the “opposite” sex, and those who wanted to be the “opposite” sex or find space between “male” and “female”. With no recognised word to describe any of these positions or practices, Hirschfeld popularised “transvestite” from the Latin trans- (meaning “across”) and vestitus (“dressed”), variations on which had been used across Europe since the sixteenth century. (Zagria’s Gender Variance Who’s Who provides a potted history here.) The sexological categorisation of gender-variant practices, and the new possibilities opened by scientific advances and changing attitudes throughout the twentieth century, posed a significant challenge to European languages, which had not previously been seriously demanded to accommodate areas between the two established sexes or genders.