Stuff I’ve been reading lately that made my feminist heart go pit-a-pat. Many (OK, most) of these are via this post at Feministe.
NOTE: I like men. I have male friends. I have a boyfriend. My male friends and my boyfriend are good guys. They are not assholes. Anything I may say below or which may be said in the articles I linked should be taken as about SOME men not ALL men. Some feminists (myself included) are bad about including the modifiers when writing about societal trends.
Interview with Ghada Jamsir, a womans’ rights activist in Bahrain. She is AWESOME and doesn’t take any shit from her interviewer, who is kind of a schmuck. My favorite bit is where she points out that the marriages she is opposing, the marriages the reporter says are legal under religious law (implying that she’s beig unreasonable for attacking them) allow men to marry infants, underaged girls, and women they almost never see purely for the urpose of having sex with them. Rawr!
Robert’s Great article about how society’s gender roles hurt men too and how feminism might help that.
An excerpt from Schehezerade goes West, a book by a Moroccan feminist, about the tyrrany of size/diet/appearance in Western culture. I disagree that it’s men who control women’s fashion, though — while men do own the companies for the most part, the average joe doesn’t care nearly as much as women think he does. It’s women at least as much as men who enforce the appearance codes in our society. If a teenaged girl doesn’t dress fashionably, who harshes on her? Her girlfriends. Her boyfriend probably won’t care as long as she looks fairly attractive, but the girls she knows? Hoo-boy. Another issue: the author compares Western agism and fetishization of thinness to the veil and burka worn in hardline Muslim communities. That seems a bit extreme – after all, if a pudgy or old woman is raped, her weight or age won’t be used to demonstrate that she was asking for it. Overweight and old women aren’t beaten in the street for their appearance. Still, it’s a thought-provoking piece.
There were some excellent points made in this discussion about abortion – check out the comments. I especially liked the discussion, about halfway down, comparing having sex and getting pregnant to driving a car and getting in an accident. I also like the point that those who are anti-choice “except in cases of rape or incest” have just given up the moral high ground.
An excellent discussion about why some kinds of humor are offensive while others are not. I think it puts into words better than I can why tshirts that say things like “Stop rape; say ‘yes'” put my feminist hackles up so damn fast.
Why feminism is still necessary even though we’ve made such huge advances here in the US. I agre with this – sure, the laws have really caught up for the most part, but society is still sexist, and that hurts both men and women.
… and on a lighter note, this Alien loves Predator strip is politically incorrect but it sure made me chuckle (mostly because I am well aware that Lifetime TV is generally AWFUL and an instance of a good idea (“television for women”) gone horribly wrong.
