Sexism Archives

Refusing to learn how to pronounce Quvenzhané’s name says, pointedly, you are not worth the effort. The problem is not that she has an unpronounceable name, because she doesn’t. The problem is that white Hollywood, from Ryan Seacrest and his homies to the AP reporter who decided to call her “Annie” rather than her real name, doesn’t deem her as important as, say, Renee Zellwegger, or Zach Galifinakis, or Arnold Schwarzenegger, all of whom have names that are difficult to pronounce–but they manage.

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 TAPPED.) LZ Granderson used his weekly column at CNN.com yesterday to bury the otherwise unobjectionable objection to over-sexualizing young girls in reductive language that will do more harm than good. In fairness, he likely didn’t write the deplorable headline: “Parents, don’t dress your girls like tramps.” (Next up from LZ Granderson: “If that 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.

So, SNL seems to be getting better. And the last episode had some generally pretty funny moments, though I had mixed feelings about this blaxploitation skit featuring Nicki Minaj. For those who can’t watch it, this gist of the clip is this: Minaj is the bride of Frankenstein’s monster, in a blaxploitation film that’s somewhat Read More

I don’t watch Gossip Girl, but, apparently, Rebecca Traister’s terrific book about women and the 2008 election, Big Girls Don’t Cry made a cameo in Monday’s episode. I did, however, just finish reading that great book. In it, Traister points out something that I had missed and that you probably did too. When Hillary Clinton Read More

Decided to throw this up here before the label undoubtedly takes it down: Kanye West‘s leaked video “Monster.” Soon there will be a host of blogs that pick a part every scene to explain what Kanye is trying to tell us, but here is the short version: there are a lot of dead, eroticized women- Read More
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