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POPSMichael Kimmel: Why I am a feminist More: The biggest mistake we make is to assume - and men often think this - that gender equality is a zero-sum game. That if women win, then men are going to lose. And I think what we have to do is to show people that feminism is a win-win. I think we can do that at the personal level in terms of the quality of our relationships with our children, our partners and our friends, and also in terms of public policy.
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POPSBarbara Ehrenreich: Are women getting sadder? Not necessarily
More: So why all the sudden fuss…? Mostly because it's become a launching pad for a new book by the prolific management consultant Marcus Buckingham…a cookie-cutter classic of the positive-thinking self-help genre…all bookended with an ad for the many related products you can buy, including a "video introduction" from Buckingham, a "participant's guide" containing "exercises" to get you to happiness, and a handsome set of "Eight Strong Life Plans" to pick from… It's an old story: If you want to sell something, first find the terrible affliction that it cures. In the 1980s, as silicone implants were taking off, the doctors discovered "micromastia" -- the "disease" of small-breastedness. More recently, as big pharma searches furiously for a female Viagra, an amazingly high 43% of women have been found to suffer from "Female Sexual Dysfunction," or FSD. Now, it's unhappiness, and the range of potential "cures" is dazzling: Seagrams, Godiva, and Harlequin, take note.
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POPSWhy are feminists like Azar Nafisi called "right wing" "neo cons?"
The quotes in the clip are welcome antidotes to the attitude our Beloved Leader is flacking towards the Islamic Republic of Iran. But the article itself leads into the story of <p>"a vibrant and beautiful young girl, Neda Agha-Soltan, and not the men who rule over Iran has become a symbol of Iranian people's fight for democracy and pluralism. Her murder, like those of Politkovskaya and Estermirova, gives the lie to the claims of those who vainly tried to silence them, and reminds the rest of us that we neither should or can evade the truth and its consequences."</p> The article is about a journalism award in honor of the Russian journalist, Ana Politkovskaya. She says that it was Politkovskaya's <p>"single-minded commitment to truth, and her demand for justice, that made her so dangerous to the tyrants in her country and inconvenient to leaders of western democracies.</p> More than this, Nafisi takes us on a world historical tour of feminists and feminism.
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POPSA clarification of "The Terrible Bargain" More: Iain's taken a long look at the Terrible Bargain from its other side, and doesn't want the easy comfort of unexamined privilege at the cost of my trust. And so he does his best to quell that reflexive defensiveness and listen. And in those moments of listening, we forge a new bargain, lovingly struck: He looks inside himself for the hardened bits of internalized misogyny that yet linger, unexamined; I hand him in exchange the crumbling bricks of a protective wall built long before we met. The rubble collects at our feet, and we kick it away.
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POPSComplaining about sexism means you're a "ranty-pants"? More: You don't have to be anti-sex, or even anti-porn, to chafe at a dominant aesthetic that just happens to play right into the pocketbooks of the beauty and anti-aging industries. Our cultural preference for skinny, nubile women is at least as much about money as it is about male desire — and it's about the least taboo thing I can imagine. Rebelling against a system that actually tells men what to like — as well as, of course, telling women how to be — actually seems kind of sexy. And refusing to do what you're told — in this case, to quietly accept sexism so as not to seem "strident" — can be exciting. So rather than reading Turner's new column…as the blotter of the fun police, I'm going to think of it as a dispatch from the fun radicals, a textual Molotov tossed into the edifice of institutionalized misogyny. And I'm going to enjoy it.
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POPSWhy rape is not "just rough sex" [CAUTION: likely triggery] More: Worse: imagine that you are so frightened that the person will kill you that you just lie there, unresisting, unmoving, trying hard not to really be there in your body because then the stick shoving dessert down your throat doesn’t hurt quite so badly…. Imagine that you survive the forced-feeding, and that as your attacker leaves you, either in the place of attack or having dropped you off somewhere to make your own way home, that they mock you by talking about how wonderful your favourite dessert tasted, and how lucky you were that they gave you more of it than you’d ever had before. And now for the kicker: * Imagine that when you tell people what happened, and how bad it was, and how scared you were and how hurt your body is, they look at you blankly, and say: “But what’s the problem? Everybody knows that you really, really like that dessert!”
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POPSThe terrible bargain we have regretfully struck: confronting casual misogyny More: There are men who will read this post and think, huffily, dismissively, that a person of color could write a post very much like this one about white people, about me. That's absolutely right. So could a lesbian, a gay man, a bisexual, an asexual. So could a trans or intersex person (which hardly makes a comprehensive list). I'm okay with that. I don't feel hated. I feel mistrusted—and I understand it; I respect it. It means, for me, I must be vigilant, must make myself trustworthy. Every day. I hope those men will hear me when I say, again, I do not hate you. I mistrust you. You can tell yourselves that's a problem with me, some inherent flaw, some evidence that I am fucked up and broken and weird; you can choose to believe that the women in your lives are nothing like me. Or you can be vigilant, can make yourselves trustworthy. Every day. Just in case they're more like me than you think.
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POPSHow the media skew gender research More: could it just be that studies that appear to support traditional roles for women tend to get picked for instant popularization? This phenomenon doesn't just apply to studies about daycare with the potential to guilt-trip working mothers. Rush Limbaugh, also last March, cheerfully reported the results of a Swedish study that seemed to show a correlation between poor health and a more gender-equal distribution of societal resources. That same study was picked up by the British Independent. The popularized message was that feminism makes you sick. Neither Rush Limbaugh nor the Independent paid any attention to an earlier study by the same researchers showing the reverse. They also ignored other studies finding a positive correlation between greater gender-equality and better overall health. It seems that a researcher can garner more press just by publishing a study with results that social conservatives wish to hear.
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POPSCourage for a Change - women at Forefront This woman had immunity because of her job and is shedding it to challenge the law in Sudan that makes it illegal for women to wear pants in public. Women all over the world have fought for their rights and still do. Would you be willing to undergo the lash to stand for your rights. Shades of Amelia Bloomer (http://www.greatwomen.org/women.php?action=viewone&id=22)
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POPSThe Old Double Standard I'd bet all of my earthly possessions that this question would NEVER be asked of a man! Sadly, the gender role bias that says a woman cannot be opinionated, strong, forceful in arguing her point is alive and well. I'm pissed!
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POPSMisogynistic Mad Libs More: In which woman (bonus if not remotely a feminist) can independent act , yet Ronald Reagan is allowed to die! As the Bible says, verse (bonus points if it mentions submission, Eve, or the Virgin Mary; minus points for Mary Magdalene) . And as ill-defined group such as "some people" have warned, vague alarmist statement . What will happen to the men of the world if these weird, outdated term for "women" are allowed to take control? What will happen to our values? The only solution is for women like female public figure who is not Ann Coulter to get back in the small, restrictive space so that they can return to euphemism for breastfeeding and men can return to euphemism for bludgeoning . :lol:
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POPSCount Sparkula, teaching girls to love abusive boyfriends "To put it simply, dear reader, I was horrified,” says Kellen Rice of Blast Magazine . "Not just by the sickeningly purple prose or the lack of general writing quality, but the books themselves are insulting on every level -- as a woman, as a teenager, as a literature student, and as a graduate of the Harry Potter craze. What’s worse is that so few seem to realize it.”
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POPSReally Want to Help Afghans? Help the Women! It is good that there is a call for taking rape more seriously but tougher laws are seldom successful unless authorities are willing to enforce them. In neighboring Pakistan, it took one woman years to get her attackers charged - then they were freed and now being charged again. Hers was not an unusual case.
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POPSMavis Leno: tireless champion of Afghan women's rights More: My parents were not sexist, and my father thought I could do anything in the world and then some. When I was 7, I wanted to be a jockey. My father told me women weren't allowed. I couldn't believe it. I was perfectly willing to fail on my own merits, but to be flunked at birth? What kind of crap was that? That made me insanely angry. I read everything on the original suffragists, and they became my heroines, because the only women who ever did anything in the history textbooks of my childhood were Sacagawea and Betsy Ross and Marie Curie. That's it. And Betsy Ross sewed .
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