Feminism Archives

It’s been a long time, we know. But here’s something new and different — the inaugural episode of the monthly Bless Your Heart podcast. Our own Tracy “Brokey McPoverty” Clayton and Nichole Perkins talk about the tyranny of the dick pic, women-centered porn and “Martin.” (Some salty language, obviously.) Let us know what you think Read More

Since 2009, what’s soured many onlookers to Kanye’s music and persona is that his self-love, so-called, is increasingly contingent on contempt for women, derision of inferiors, obsession with his own influence, hapless strafing, and clamoring for attention that he then claims to resent.

I know I have my own hypocrisy to deal with, from my previous romantic entanglements to my music choices.

But at the least, I got a headstart on confronting that hypocrisy. It started in earnest when I was 17, the summer before my senior year of high school, at a leadership camp just outside of Houston.

Cross-posted from The Feminist Texican [Reads]. Houston, we have a problem. Caitlin Moran‘s How to Be a Woman, which was released across the pond last year with much success, was released in the United States this summer. It’s been marketed as a memoirish feminist manifesto, with Moran being billed as a British version of Tina Read More

Over at The Root, Byron Hurt has a candid piece about how watching the fraught interaction between his parents as a kid helped plant the seeds for his adult embrace of feminism:

Feminist writings about patriarchy, racism, capitalism and structural sexism resonated with me because I had witnessed firsthand the kind of male dominance they challenged. I saw it as a child in my home and perpetuated it as an adult. Their analysis of male culture and male behavior helped me put my father’s patriarchy into a much larger social context, and also helped me understand myself better.

You’ll have to forgive me for how jumbled/discursive/TMI this is going to read, but this has agitated a lot of stuff I’ve been thinking about and was frankly saving for a much neater Mother’s Day post.

My own, very flawed feminism is also rooted in my childhood, albeit in circumstances very different from Hurt’s. His father’s presence was inescapable. Mine was imperceptible.

The countries neighboring the Ivory Coast are worried that violence there may spread. After being told their baby had no chance of survival, an Iowa couple was forced to see the pregnancy to term and watch the child die because state law prohibits abortion after 20 weeks. Latoya on being the token Negro on feminist Read More

All this “beiging of America stuff” — btw, have you listened to the podcast? — is muddying things for both statisticians and the government. “Under Department of Education requirements that take effect this year, for instance, any student…who acknowledges even partial Hispanic ethnicity will, regardless of race, be reported to federal officials only as Hispanic. And students Read More

It would be tough to say Clarence Thomas was ever a popular figure, at least among non-conservative Americans. He had relatively little experience (two years as a federal judge) when GHBush nominated him to Supreme Court in 1991, was anti-affirmative action, and proudly undecided on abortion because, according to him, he had never discussed reproductive Read More

I’d had a sucky weekend.  The reasons why, the story about what happened, that doesn’t matter.  Just know that I’d spent my entire weekend indoors, stewing, just wanting to be somewhere else.  Finally, it was Sunday and I spent the day anxious to jump out of the house, if not out of my very skin, Read More

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