I vividly remember the first time I ever experienced street harassment. I was on my way to class and saw in the distance a group of young men drinking and carrying on in a very loud and obnoxious mann...
The story sounds hideously like another—one of a chaotic, predatory attack on a woman journalist in Cairo’s Tahrir Square. Clothes torn from her body, hundreds of men surging to grab her breasts and claw at her. A woman wondering, “Maybe this is how I go, how I die.” It has been almost a year and a half since CBS correspondent and CPJ board member Lara Logan endured an attack like this. Now, an independent journalist and student named Natasha Smith reports that it has happened to her.
I don’t have a diagnosed eating disorder and that makes me sad. That might sound like a strange thing to say, but what I mean is that I think it's wrong that my daily obsession with counting calories,...
Silence: A symptom that plagues all scenarios of sexualized violence, rape, and abuse, no matter what communities we’re addressing. In the Sudan conflict, rape was used to silence women. When a woman named Safiya Ishaq unashamedly spoke about her rape, she was forced to flee the country for fear of retribution. The potential of being stigmatized has prevented women in the Democratic Republic of Congo from seeking medical treatment for rape.
Michael Kimmel is among the leading researchers and writers on men and masculinity in the world today. The author or editor of more than twenty volumes, his books include Changing Men: New Directions ...
I'm not going to pretend like I haven't been critical of Miley Cyrus / the Disney machine in the past. But I was recently watching an interview with Miley Cyrus on an episode of The Conversation, and...
Something has never felt right for me with fairy tales. Even before I knew what feminism was, I knew there were aspects of fairy tales that made me uncomfortable. By fairy tales, I mean stories that o...
Now, before launching into this, let me make one thing clear: I love the TV show Bones and have for a long time. I also kind of like Rizzoli & Isles, but there’s one thing that’s been irking me ab...
I volunteer at the children’s service at my synagogue on Shabbat (the Sabbath). Every week, the kids walk around with kid-sized Torahs, some of which are stuffed toys. The Torahs are red, yellow, blue...
A couple days ago, I, like millions of other college students across the country, logged on to Facebook as a pathetic attempt at procrastination. I expected to flip through some of my friends’ newly p...
I never thought much of gender construction as a child. I just knew what I wanted to wear, how my hair should be cut, and what interested me. Did I want to proudly wear my new matching dragon shirt an...
I’ve often wondered if those who are provided with less, make more with what they are given. A few weeks ago, I went to a screening of a documentary called To Educate A Girl, and was convinced once ag...
It’s a common presumption in our society that if you’re female, tall and skinny, you have it all. You are the perfect woman: you have the attributes of a high fashion model, and you should be extremel...
When I first saw Miss Representation it stunned me—in the best of ways. I didn’t immediately take the time to reflect on it, but then a few nights ago I was unlucky enough to witness the newest Carl’s...
Political disagreements aside, I have to respect Meghan McCain's recent discussion about her body: specifically her criticism of the way the media has responded to her body and her refusal to change a...
I’m currently a senior at my high school here in the Dominican Republic. I was born in the States and have lived overseas almost my entire life. I’m also Hispanic-- both my parents and the rest of my ...
I've always hated numbers.
Ok, maybe not "hate" since they do impact my daily life in positive ways.
But overall I really dislike numbers.
Not for what they inherently are or what good they've done fo...
If you had asked me six months ago if I was affected by the media’s presentation of women, I would have responded with an unequivocal no. Yes, TV and magazines bombard us with horribly warped images o...
The majority of us in the UK will remember the controversial 2002 campaign for the chunky, ‘King size, not Queen sized’ Yorkie chocolate bar. This campaign's primary slogan stated daringly: ‘It’s Not ...
Recently, I was taking a course on linguistics, and we were discussing syntax. My professor asked the class-- a room of roughly a hundred English students, mostly female-- what pronoun to use when rep...
As Grand Rapids, Michigan yawned good morning at 7:45 am and the sun began blinking hello, I sat in my human sexuality and relationships class, watching one of the best videos I have ever seen in an a...
A friend of mine recently created a zine about the slut/stud double standard for a electives course called Feminisms that she’s taking. She included various fairy-tale-esque ads she found in magazines...
Right after we graduated high school, I gave one of my best friends a bumper sticker that read "This Is What A Feminist Looks Like." It was partially a joke - something to remember her über-feminist f...
In its formative days (in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and then in the 1960s and ‘70s), feminism was, above all, about promoting equal social and political citizenship for women. Contempora...
As I was doing my AP Psychology homework about the psychology of language recently, I came across some interesting studies about the effect of using gender-neutral speech.
Janet Hyde, a professor of ...