Guest Blogger
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The Personal is Political: In Defense of Women’s Studies Programs
On Tuesday January 29, North Carolina Republican Governor Pat McCrory attacked Women’s Studies as an expendable and unproductive site of state educational funding as part of his commitment to more vocational training in higher education.
“If you want to take gender studies, that’s fine. Go to a private school and take it, but I don’t want to subsidize that if that’s not going to get someone a job,” McCrory said on a national radio show.
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Cover Art for Bloodchildren
When Nisi Shawl called me up and asked me to do the cover for her anthology Bloodchildren, I was astonished. Not because she asked me but because I knew I was going to say yes. I’ve never done a cover and my photography is normally unsuited for SF anthology. But two days before she called, for the first time I had a clear sense of my new project, and this request fit the areas I was thinking about.
...read moreFeminist YouTube sex educators need your advice…
Regardless how one feels toward V-Day, Eve Ensler or this year’s One Billion Rising, it’s a good springboard for kicking off projects around V-Day’s themes – which for my mates means demystifying female sexuality and women’s bodies. (For me it means cupcakes, but I’ll explain later.)
...read moreThe War on Sex Workers
Melissa Gira Grant has an excellent article in Reason this week, laying out exactly what’s wrong with the war on “sex trafficking,” which is conducted largely by women who identify as feminists, and how and why it is really a war on sex workers. The last paragraph of the article is especially powerful:
...read more“Racism Still Exists”: The Power of Art
I frequently hear people say that art has no political power, that it is merely aesthetics and/or money. Many countries repress the power of art by punishing the artists. Here the dominant culture disparages art’s power and commoditize it and among other things turn it into a speculative consumer product. Nevertheless, art in our country can be politically powerful and these posters tell it all.
...read more“He might be on the spectrum.” But what about me?
It’s like the sun rising in the east: Whenever the subject of harassment or stalking comes up, you invariably get a bunch of dudes barging in, insisting that the guy who followed you and screamed at you for not paying attention to him, the guy who groped you, the guy who tried to follow you home, the guy who kept looking you up and down when you were wearing a turtleneck at brunch with your friend, the guy who refused to accept the “no” and the “I’m not interested,” the guy who waited for you outside of your place, the guy who told you how the way you look gave him a boner, might have had Asperger’s or was somehow autistic. He just had problems understanding social cues/rules.
...read moreWading in Uncomfortable Waters: Abortion and the Politics of Experience
Forty years after abortion became legal in the United States we are still wading in waters that run deep.
Arguably, abortion runs as deep in our modern human history as pregnancy does. Our ancestors had ways of terminating pregnancies long before the U.S. Supreme Court existed. And while we commemorate and celebrate the 40th anniversary of the landmark Supreme Court decision Roe v. Wade, we know that it does not mark an anniversary of the beginning of this family planning method. Abortion has been, and will continue to be, part of a wide array of methods that we use to control our bodies and fertility, regardless of its legality.
...read moreWhat would King learn from us?
An elementary school teacher told a story to me once. I was still struggling to learn English, so over the course of the year I asked her often to retell the story.
Years ago in Alabama, the wife of a young preacher received a delivery of red carnations from her husband. They were beautiful, but as she touched them, she noticed they were artificial. When her husband came home, she asked about the flowers. He said, “I wanted to give you something that you could always keep.”
...read moreRape, consent and responsibility
As someone who was raped after a party, I often find myself falling for rape-apologist language. The guy that raped me would be most likely be horrified if I had accused him of rape. The guy that raped me is a good person. In fact, the guy that raped me was someone I found sexually attractive and had been flirting with for several weeks. I remember accepting his invitation for a ride home from a party. I don’t know what I was thinking. I do know that as a chronic drinker it is nearly impossible for others to tell when I’ve had too much. So, doesn’t my drinking to excess, and accepting a ride home from this guy make me at least a little culpable? If I’d driven home in that state and killed someone in a car accident I couldn’t use the excuse that I was too drunk to make the right decision about getting behind the wheel to not be charged with vehicular manslaughter. I’d have made the decision to drink and drive. Period. Impaired judgment would never enter the conversation.
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The Better Bombshell: Writers and artists redefine the female role model
It’s been an interesting year for gender politics. Anne-Marie Slaughter had everyone buzzing with her Atlantic article, “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All,” the online version of which had record-breaking page views and which sparked a multitude of articles, blog posts and commentary from fourth-wave feminists and male social conservatives alike. We’ve had women in positions of influence, who wouldn’t be where they are today were it not for the feminists who came before them, making public statements against feminism, like Yahoo CEO Melissa Mayer, who just this year became the youngest CEO in the Fortune 500 and, more recently, Billboard’s Woman of the Year, Katy Perry. Hanna Rosin’s The End of Men launched the Fox-fueled hysteria over an imminent “war on men,” which we might dismiss with an eye roll were it not for the alarming number of elected officials, most of them male, some on the national stage, bloviating views and proposing vagislation that would take us back decades.
...read moreA bit of holiday advice
This list is (mostly) for folks who celebrate the upcoming holidays, and are fortunate enough to have people and resources to celebrate with; if you don’t fit that group, skip to the bottom. If you do fit, then even if your family are your favorite people and you look forward all year to the holidays, you still may find useful hints here.
...read moreHow Women’s Health and Social Media Won 2012: Retrospective
“Gentleman and ladies, your hard work paid off. Tonight we demonstrated to the other party what happens when you sneer at rape survivors, birth control and equal pay for equal work.”
By all accounts, it shouldn’t have ended like this. The president running for re-election was supposed to be an enemy of American values, waging the real “war on women” by giving out free contraception on street corners, encouraging girls to become sex objects by sleeping with hundreds of men and covering themselves in venereal disease, having abortion after abortion as their birth control inevitably failed them, until they no longer had any respect for their own bodies or lives – thus destroying the Christian work ethic that once made America’s economy great. And that was on top of Obama’s takeover of healthcare, bailouts for the billion-dollar abortion industry, and attacks on religious institutions that believe they have a right to discriminate against the healthcare of female employees.
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