Journalist – Historian – Speaker
Carolyn Cox at The Mary Sue has a terrific essay about “Dadbod” Ken. Not only is she good on the specific issue, but she handles how to talk about the ways in which patriarchy in fact oppresses men, without losing sight of the more destructive oppression of women. She writes: As Maddy wrote in reference to …
Men’s Rights Activists are a particular strain of misogynist who couch their hatred of women in appropriating a language of victimhood. As an avowed feminist, I have encountered them many times, including when I put a defense of feminism on a website haunted by MRAs, and hung around in the comments for a few days …
One definition of feminism: A critique of the gendered nature of power in a given society and a series Charlize Theron as Imperator Furiosa in ‘Mad Max: Fury Road’ (2015). She holds a rifle and is in front of an armored truck. Courtesy of Warner Brothers Pictures of actions stemming from that critique. In Mad …
No. No no no no no. Also no. According to a piece in The Telegraph (a right-wing British newspaper. Do Not Link used here), here’s how to fight body image issues among girls: A doctor and author says teachers should ask boys to tell girls what boys find attractive. Then girls will realize that boys like …
CS: I would urge people, especially young women, to check out the local laws in your state for cyber-bullying because I think a lot of times crimes are being committed and people don’t know. So Curt Schilling, baseball hero, conservative activist, and failed video-game designer, discovered internet misogyny recently when awful sexual comments were directed …
Open a new browser window and do an image search for boys. Here’s what I got. All but two images in the first four rows are, in fact, boys (there are two adult male actors in row three). Now do the same thing for the word “girls.” It’s breasts and butts and lace and sexualized …
The Australian author Colleen McCullough died at age 77. The obituary in The Australian begins as follows: COLLEEN McCullough, Australia’s best selling author, was a charmer. Plain of feature, and certainly overweight, she was, nevertheless, a woman of wit and warmth. In one interview, she said: “I’ve never been into clothes or figure and the interesting …
Yesterday, a video on catcalling went viral. Today, Hanna Rosin at Slate wrote a piece on how the editor edited out the white guys, making it a long string of black and Latino men harassing a white woman. The video is a collaboration between Hollaback!, an anti-street harassment organization, and the marketing agency Rob Bliss Creative. …
I write a lot about privilege and I have a lot of privilege. I’ve long argued that it’s important to be very thoughtful when writing about academic labor while tenured, gender while male, race while white, disability while able-bodied, and so forth. When writing about a given power dynamic, I often have the power by …
In the New Republic, historian Sonya Michel has written a scathing indictment (with a response and followup) of the “National Women’s History Museum,” a group dedicated to making a real museum on the Mall in D.C. According to the piece (and many other historians, including – full disclosure here – my mother), the NWHM has gone out of …