Gender Archives

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.

Here’s Jam-Rock with the topline: Together with one of the most hard-nosed campaigns in recent memory, Obama managed to bounce back from the nadir of 2011 to one of the broadest re-election victories in recent memory. At this point, news networks have called New Hampshire, Iowa, Wisconsin, Colorado, Nevada, Virginia, and Ohio for President Obama. Read More

Cord Jefferson wrote a widely criticized piece for Gawker calling for a reconsideration of how we deal with pedophiles — criticized in large part because it seemed to pussyfoot around actually referring to the rape of children as “rape”. Jennifer Bleyer has a less ham-handed take on that idea over at Slate. “Fred Berlin, the Read More

Last week, the Kinsey Institute released the results of a study that surveyed 1,009 heterosexual couples on their attitudes toward physical affection and sex. The “shocking” pull-quote making media rounds has to do with men in long-term relationships valuing physical affection (i.e. kissing and cuddling) more than women in long-term relationships, who claimed sexual satisfaction Read More

x-posted from CaribBelle’s Minority Report. Here’s another example of the impact of “modesty laws”: two women (Sec of State Hillary Clinton and a National Security Council Director of Counterterrorism) get cut out of the situation room picture when the photo is published in a Hasidic newspaper. This story reminded me so much of a conversation Read More

In August, as the seventh season of Top Chef wound up, I wrote about how tough things were for chefs who aren’t white and male on the show. So tough that in seven seasons, only one woman and one Vietnamese-American had ever won. In the seventh season, the first African-American chef took home the top 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.

E. Ann Kaplan gives some insight to why sexism (or in this case, the representations of sexism) is not a zero sum game. …two further elements enter in: to begin with, men do not simply look; their gaze carries with it the power of action and of possession that is lacking in the female gaze. Read More

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