Category: gender issues

The Proverbial ‘Walking Alone in a Park at Night’

In a rape trial, that the woman was walking alone in a park at night has been considered relevant – presumably it’s a mitigating circumstance: the accused can be excused for thinking she wanted it if she was walking alone in a park at night.

What!?  Why? Why is it that a woman walking alone …

Continue reading

Show a Little Initiative!

If you just do as you’re told, you don’t get promoted, you don’t get advanced up the ladder, because you’re not showing initiative.

Yeah right. Every time I showed some initiative, I got fired. Or at least reprimanded.

Then I realized that’s because there are different rules of advancement for men and women. Initiative in …

Continue reading

Arrogance, I think

Fresh from the office of my supervisor who persists in gently giving me unsolicited advice, despite being neither older nor wiser, I’m struck by Rousseau’s tone (in his “Marriage”):  “Extreme in all things, they [women] devote themselves to their play with greater zeal than boys.  This is the second defect.  This zeal must be kept …

Continue reading

What’s wrong with being a slut?

slut, n. Slovenly woman, slattern

slovenly, a. Personally untidy or dirty, careless and lazy, or unmethodical

slattern, n.  Sluttish woman

Not what my mother meant when she called me a slut.  For whatever else I am, I am tidy, clean, careful, industrious, and methodical.  Quite methodical.  So just what did she mean?  I don’t know.  …

Continue reading

Whereas very few boys grow up looking forward …

“Even if we don’t think of women wanting to BE married, we at least think of them as wanting to GET married. … Whereas very few boys grow up looking forward to the day that they’ll be a groom.  There is no “American Groom” magazine.  G. I. Joe does not have a little tux with …

Continue reading

Let’s Talk about Sex

[This one’s a little old, as you can tell by the Salt-n-Pepa reference, but still relevant, I think.  Sigh.]

Disc jockeys generally come in two sexes: male and female.  So what, you may think, sex doesn’t matter.  Oh but it does, so sad to say.

I used to deejay for weddings and other parties, and …

Continue reading

Men’s Precision Teams

Have you ever wondered why, in the sport of figure skating, there are no men’s precision teams?

Sure, precision skating requires attention to detail and a highly developed spatial sense.  But both are surely male capabilities; in fact, aren’t they male superiorities?  Isn’t that why (so we’re told) men dominate science and engineering?

And of …

Continue reading

First (and last) Contact

Women have a long tradition of being diplomats.  “Historically… marriage has been the major alliance mechanism of every society, and little girls are trained for roles as intervillage family diplomats…the married woman straddles two kin networks, two villages, sometimes two cultures” (The Underside of History, Elise Boulding, p.53-54).

Many women have decades of experience, settling …

Continue reading

Swedish Cinemas using the Bechdel test!!

Check it out here!

 

[Hell Yeah, I’m a Feminist is a feminist blog, often radical feminist (radfem), always anti-gender and anti-sexism.]

What happens when men do the cooking and the baking?

Used to be women did the cooking and the baking.  Then men starting getting into it.  And in theory, I have no problem with that.  In fact, I’m all for making everything gender-unaligned.  But now that men are in the kitchen, suddenly it’s important.  So important it’s being televised.

And my god, the drama!  (And …

Continue reading

Load more