Susan Jacoby is up! She is a journalist and author who’s written a bunch of awesome books, including The Age of American Unreason, which I recently read. 1:50: Susan Jacoby opens with a poem published in 1837 about the trend of women speaking publicly about political causes. Oh, the humanity: 1:53: The reason we’ve been …
Tag Archive: feminism
May 18 2013
[#wiscfi liveblog] Sexism and Religion: Can the Knot Be Untied?
I’m finally up and watching Katha Pollitt speak! Pollitt is a poet (say that five times fast) and a columnist for The Nation. 10:10: I chose the topic of my talk today because I didn’t know the answer: can religion be disentangled from the misogyny in its texts and its practices. I asked a random …
May 14 2013
“But I’m a man and I don’t feel like I have any privilege.”
Another one inspired by the comment thread of doom. The hardest thing about explaining privilege to members of dominant groups is that, usually, the fact that you’re advantaged in certain ways doesn’t mean you’re not disadvantaged in many other ways. So when we’re talking about gender and a man is told that he’s privileged–or when …
Apr 03 2013
Busting Myths About Feminism With SCIENCE!
Well, Monday’s April Fool’s joke left such a bad taste in my mouth that I was compelled to hurry up and write this post, which I’ve wanted to write for a while. Feminist activists are invariably compelled to respond to silly, derailing claims about feminists’ supposed appearance, personalities, sex lives, attitudes towards men. You know …
Apr 01 2013
Where Feminism Fails: The Ongoing Need for Men’s Rights Activism
So, this might be kind of awkward given my past writing and activism, but it’s time for me to come clean: I’ve decided to become a Men’s Rights Activist. I’ve realized that feminism’s biggest failure–much more important, in fact, than its historical disregard for women of color, poor women, and trans* people–is that it does …
Mar 06 2013
Totally Unsolicited Advice For Feminist Guys
Jezebel has a pretty good piece up about feminist men and what “we” (by which I take it the author means feminist women) want from them. Some excerpts: [E]ven allegedly unfunny feminists acknowledge how extra-dry fighting sexism can be, and so we hope that when men join us, they, too can have a good, not …
Feb 01 2013
Feminism and Victimhood
What’s this I keep hearing about feminism promoting “victimhood”? Anti-feminists often suggest that feminism encourages women to “see themselves as victims,” that feminism is actually insulting to women because it suggests they need “special rights” in order to be able to compete with men. The concept of programs that encourage women to pursue STEM professions …
Jan 26 2013
Feminism Is Not About Who Pays The Bill
So, I know that I’m really young and spent most of the feminist movement as a mere wish in my mother’s brain (well, hopefully). But I’m really confused about why an entire generation of men seems to have heard the message of feminism not as “Women want the same rights and opportunities as men” or …
Jan 08 2013
The Role of Feminist Criticism
In one of my recent pieces, I criticized a particular aspect of the love stories often found in popular books and movies. Whenever someone critiques pop culture–especially from a feminist perspective–it raises a lot of questions for many people. Questions such as: Does it really matter that this work is “problematic”? Can you even have …
Jan 01 2013
Six Months
Every New Year’s Eve, I write a post about the year that’s about to end. When I was younger, I mostly used these posts to talk about significant things that had happened to me (getting a boyfriend, losing a boyfriend, getting into this or that program or college, and so on), explain what I’d learned …
About the Author
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- I keep hearing all this stuff about how secularism/atheism has nothing to do with feminism and...I keep hearing all this stuff about how secularism/atheism has nothing to do with feminism and blahblah. Here’s the interesting thing. For me, my journeys to each of those identities were deeply intertwined with one another. Although I haven’t believed in god for a really long time, what really led to my final break with organized religion was when I travele […]
- "How unfortunate is it that my parents had to literally force me to wear beautiful parts of my..."“How unfortunate is it that my parents had to literally force me to wear beautiful parts of my culture because I was afraid of being ostracized, but Selena Gomez can take aspects of the clothing I grew up with and make money off of it? How unfortunate is it that South Asian immigrants and South Asian Americans are Otherized every single day for the way they […]
- "The next question people always ask me [about being a model] is, “Do you get free..."“The next question people always ask me [about being a model] is, “Do you get free stuff?” I do have too many 8-inch heels which I never get to wear, except for earlier, but the free stuff that I get is the free stuff that I get in real life, and that’s what we don’t like to talk about. I grew up in Cambridge, and one time I went into a store and I forgot my […]
- "It’s not just the internet. And we can’t push the problem aside with a wave of our hands and an..."“It’s not just the internet. And we can’t push the problem aside with a wave of our hands and an offhand comment of “Oh, that’s just how the internet is. Don’t you know better than to go to reddit?” For many women, reddit is not an isolated internet thing. It’s the community that we have to deal with face to face, day in and day out. So yes, we need to chang […]
- "I am one of the lucky ones. I managed to turn my history of science and philosophy degree into..."“I am one of the lucky ones. I managed to turn my history of science and philosophy degree into graduate education in a semi-practical field. I’m not too worried about my employment opportunities once I finish my PhD. But I have friends who are suffering. They are being bounced around between unpaid internships, or desperately sending out resumes, or stuck w […]
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Two things to keep in mind:
1. I am bad at answering lengthy emails. Sorry!
2. I may ask you for permission to blog about our correspondence. However, if you are harassing/abusive/trollish, then I no longer have to ask you for permission. Proceed with caution!
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