Category: feminism

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Ivy League Assholes

A bunch of guys who go to Yale took a photo outside of Yale’s Women’s Center with a sign that said “We love Yale sluts.”

& Yes, they did belong to a frat! How did you guess? I was so surprised by that. Can the Yale administrators kick them out of school for being a redundant parody of themselves? I hope so. I’m more offended by how lame an idea this was than by the sentiment, even.

I’ve spoken at the Women’s Center at Yale, for Trans Awareness Week, four times in fact, and it’s an understated little office with a few old couches, the kind of place where if a male student had wanted to have a discussion about the use of the word “slut” as a positive term for a sexually-liberated women, they probably would have let him.

IvyGate has provided a higher-res version of the photo, presumably so women know which assholes not to date, though I’m sure there’s a third-waver out there who will end up dating one of these morons while taking issue with the Women’s Center suing Zeta Psi for sexual harassment.

(via Feministing.)

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Blog for Choice Day

Blog for Choice Day

This year, the organizers of Blog for Choice have asked us all why we vote pro-Choice.

I grew up Catholic, as many know, & my first opinion on abortion – once I realized I should have one – was to be Pro Life. I was already against the death penalty, & in this instance, the Church’s rulings – against human beings messing with life & death – seemed consistent to me.

It was only later that I became a feminist and realized that pregnancy is often considered only a woman’s problem, that men are barely even expected to use birth control when they have sex, and that not only do we preach – as a culture – that women have to be sexy, but that it’s bad that they are. There’s a certain ‘head in the sand’ quality to the way we deal with these issues, and when, a few years ago, a pro life friend told me women should just keep their knees together – she wasn’t kidding, either – I’d had enough of the double standard.

So that’s why I vote pro-choice.

If people find others who are blogging for choice, do link to them here.

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Designa Vagina

An interesting commentary from The Guardian about all the new surgeries available to women to “fix” their vaginas.

“We rightly condemn female genital mutilation (FGM) when it’s forced on women and girls in the name of culture and tradition, yet we’re quick to embrace it when it’s sold to us packaged in the language of choice. There’s a glaring inconsistency in the western notion of female empowerment, when enshrined within that is the right of women to go under the surgeon’s knife in pursuit of a socially imposed model of physical perfection. It’s no wonder we face accusations of hypocrisy and cultural imperialism, when glossy magazines carry worthy articles about the horrors of FGM in the developing world on the one page, and advertisements offering the latest in designer vaginas in the classified section at the back.”

(Thanks to Petra for the link.)

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Good Riddance, 2007 – #21

Most Subtle Sexist Advertising:

Prefer-On, the bogus medicine to get rid of scars, has a woman applying the product where most women get stretch marks from pregancy, while the voiceover refers to “embarassing scars.”

(If men gave birth, there’d be awards for whose stretch marks were the largest & most noticeable, celebrating the effort & physical sacrifice it takes to carry & birth a child.)

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Good Riddance, 2007 – #11

2007’s Most Depressing Feminist Moment

Discovering my well-loved Harper’s, to which I’ve been a subscriber since 1986, had the lowest percentage of by-lines by women writers. (I switched to Atlantic Monthly.)

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Smells Like Fish

Is anyone else horrified by Vagisil commercials? The most recent one has a woman in it who is all dressed up but sees her own reflection as looking crummy, in a hoodie. And why does she feel that way? Because she worries that other people will smell her bad smell.

Ugh. I mean, come on already.

Buying a tube of whatever because your vagina is itchy and/or smelly is demented. First off, if things are itchy and/or smelly temporarily, that’s just how it goes – you don’t need Vagisil; you need a bath and maybe to wear cotton panties for a week. On the other hand, if your vagina consistently and chronically itches or smells bad, you need to see a doctor, not buy a tube of Vagisil. Yeast infections can be fatal, and you can give anything else that would cause itching (like crabs) to sex partners, and you know, that’s just not nice.

But the whole “women are icky and smell bad” = specifically because their vaginas smell bad = is misogynist bullshit. Women’s reproductive systems actually work to maintain a PH balance on their own, and while having a lot of unprotected sex with multiple partners throws off that PH balance, that’s not really an advisable thing to do anyway, considering all the possible STDs, including HIV, and of course potential pregnancy.

Read Natalie Angier’s Woman: An Intimate Geography. It’s a great, scientific, readable book about women’s bodies and how they work, a must-read.

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Gagged Twice

The Global Gag Rule, which feminists have been pointing out is bad news especially for the world’s poorest women, isn’t just about abortion. It’s about birth control, and family planning, which the very poorest women often need the most. For those who don’t know, it’s the law that demands that any organization that even mentions abortion lose all its U.S.-backed family planning funding which means they don’t get basic contraception.

Chair Nita Lowey (D-NY) (of the House Appropriations Subcommittee on State and Foreign Operations and Related Programs) added: “In some cases, the largest distribution centers for contraceptives have experienced decreased access for over 50% of the women they serve.”

Besides: it doesn’t make much of a difference in the amount of abortions. What legal abortions provide is women who live another day.

Whether abortion is legal or illegal, rates are about the same. But the “shocking” difference is how dangerous it is to women where it is illegal. At least 67,000 women die each year from unsafe abortions.

I suppose it’s useless to point out that half the countries we’re funding aren’t, um, Christian, and may or may not feel that abortion is immoral.

(source: Feminist Daily News, 11/1)