Tag: Guest Blogging

Ask a Bisexual: “Can Men and Women Ever Just Be Friends?”

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Guest blogger: L.M. from The Lobster Dance (http://odorunara.com) and I’ll Make It Myself! (illmakeitmyself.net)

In this Feminist Friday post, I’m going to discuss bi1 erasure in social science research and news coverage. It’s bad enough having to do the closet hokey-pokey literally every single day of my life2, but when heterosexual/monosexual/cisgender social scientists and writers decide to pointedly ignore non-monosexual folks or write their thrilling conclusions about our personal lives without our input3, it very much affects us.

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VLOGGING – Can Virgins Have Oral Sex?

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From outside, it probably seems we quit the Feministe vlog after just 4 months of vlogging. In actuality, despite scepticism from professors, we’ve been labouring for 4 months behind the scenes to reboot the vlog, brainstorming ways to deliver content with appeal beyond the feminist blogosphere. Frankly your mates and ours might need this more than you, if they never got sex education in school. So come, judge what we came up with. For one thing, it involves Call of Duty…

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The march backwards

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Guest Blogger: Thilde Knudsen, Head of Marie Stopes International’s Europe Office

Women’s sexual and reproductive rights at risk: Spain is about to criminalise abortion; politicians in the UK repeatedly attempt to reduce the 24-week limit and today (Apr 10) in Brussels, a Parliamentary hearing is discussing a European Citizens’ initiative that if successful would block European Commission (EC) development funding for maternal health.

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“Strength” of Character: How the Silver Screen Perpetuates Gender Stereotypes

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What do we mean when we define a female character as “strong”? When an actress is the protagonist, her conflict is decidedly different than the average male protagonist’s: In literary terms, we often see the female protagonist engaged in a “man vs. self” struggle, while male protagonists wrestle with outside forces. The point is not at all that any one iteration of female “strength” is more admirable – more worthy of depiction on-screen – than another, but rather than our female characters consistently demonstrate one kind of strength while our male characters demonstrate another. Furthermore, when our female characters demonstrate stereotypically “male” strength, they do not win the awards.

These complications of storytelling are all exacerbated by Hollywood demographics :

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The return of regular guest posts

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You may have noticed we’ve fallen down on the job of publishing guest posts over the last few months. It seems each of the editors was hoping that the others would pick up the slack, and it just didn’t happen. Apologies to all who have sent a submission to us and not heard back.

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Sex + Cookies 2.0 | Episode #5: Tampons vs. Virgins

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“How come I can stick a tampon in myself, and still be considered a virgin? I understand a non-virgin is someone who’s had a penis penetrating a vagina before. But if penetration is that important, how is being penetrated by a tampon any different? It’s like sexuality only counts when it’s involving penises or something.”

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Sex + Cookies 2.0 | Episode #6: Rape Myths vs. Guns

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So begins a miniseries for the next couple months on rape culture and the finer points of victim-blaming illogic, as part of an effort to stray from tried-and-true topics and cover more divisive subjects that typically attract online harassment and rape threats. Afterward we’ll talk next semester’s plans and ask how you’d grade Feministe’s first attempt at vlogging this year. But first, here’s our last episode of 2013, as of this writing…

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Beyoncé’s Break from the Shell of Respectability

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As one blogger asked, where were you when Beyoncé’s self-titled album was dropped on December 13, 2013? The world was shell-shocked when the Beytomic bomb exploded on the musical landscape. After this initial shock and awe, fans of her music have been able to digest her masterpiece in all its glory. We can surely talk for days about her more explicit sensuality. Or her refined ratchetness. Or how this coincides with her shift in musical expression. I’d like to explore the latter of these two. And what it means for her as black woman who grew up middle class in the south. They are these intersections of race and class—not to mention gender, which has already been talked about a good bit in feminist spaces—that make Beyoncé so fascinating and, as one of my homegirls and Melissa Harris Perry (my homegirl in my head) put it, will doubtless be the album that launches a thousand woman’s studies papers.

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