It’s full of fierce independent women. Adda Þóreyjardóttir Smáradóttir (also, full of great names) demonstrated for equality by posting a picture of herself bare-breasted on twitter — if men can do it, women ought to have that privilege, too — and as you might expect, immediately got a rash of misogynistic comments. So what did other Icelandic women do? They posted pictures of their breasts in solidarity.
For your perusal, a new Gender Workshop post by Crip Dyke. Herein we discuss how feminists, in particular Katha Pollitt, can fail to recognize feminism when it comes in the form of transfeminism. The readers themselves will have to judge the applicability of the title. For more active exercises in the workshop series, this here is a link back.
CaitieCat, a regular commenter here, recently brought to my attention this article, which discusses trans* persons’ reproductive rights in the context of feminist reproductive rights activism.
Along the way, it mentions a recent Katha Pollitt piece in the Nation. Together, these pieces have created a good opportunity to explore transfeminism’s role in current feminisms.
Transfeminism, as I have defined it in my teaching, is the integration of feminism into trans* advocacy simultaneously and in coordination with the integration of trans* advocacy into feminism. It is of necessity something that is often labeled “intersectional feminism” (though we’ll critique that in another post). Here I won’t go much further into what transfeminism is. Rather, we’ll take a look at how current feminism demonstrates the need for a strong transfeminist response. [Read more…]
I’m beginning to think that one of the big problems facing atheists is … incompetence. A representative from the Secular Policy Institute approached another organization and tried to convince them they ought to sign up with SPI. In the back and forth that followed after the organization expressed their lack of interest, the representative said a few things.
We all know that Vox Day is a terrible, awful human being. How terrible? There is no depth to which he won’t sink.
Every year, UMM students put on the F-Word Conference — workshops and conversations about feminism. They’ve been very good the last two years, and it’s coming up again this Saturday. You can register online (it’s free! They just want to know who’s coming).
Sure, they’re young earth creationists. That’s ridiculous enough, a view that is in complete denial of all of the evidence, and it makes them a fringe group that, if they didn’t have so much political influence, could be safely ignored. Just the fact that they reject the entirety of science ought to make them pariahs.
By the way, my latest reading is Martin Rudwick’s Earth’s Deep History: How It Was Discovered and Why It Matters
…I try to show how an emerging sense of the Earth’s deep history was related to earlier conceptions of a much briefer kind of history in far more interesting and important ways than this tired stereotype allows. The surprising revival of “young Earth” ideas by some modern religious fundamentalists, and the even more surprising political power of such ideas in certain parts of the world, should not distract us from tracing the main story. I deal briefly with the modern creationists at the very end of this book, but in such a way that I hope it will be clear that they are a bizarre sideshow, not the climax of the narrative.
Even as a bizarre sideshow, though, their beliefs have social and political repercussions, and unfortunately, belief in creationism has a host of correlated consequences.
One of those consequences is the possession of a set of rigid sexual mores that defy biological reality. Another of the horrible, nonsensical ideas that AiG promotes is that gender is fixed and unchangeable, ordained by God, and so transgender people are freakish abominations who should not be accommodated in any way.
I guess this fellow was just trying to bring back traditional values.
A man punched a pregnant woman, tossed her to the ground, kicked her and told her he was going to kill her baby — all because she didn’t thank him for holding the door, according to the victim and NYPD.
"He said, ‘I’m going to kick this baby out of your womb,’" victim Lakeeya Walker told DNAinfo New York.
This one is kind of a double-whammy. Rebecca Watson rips up Cernovich’s claim that heterosexual men can’t get AIDS rather thoroughly…and yeah, getting pwned by Rebecca Watson has to be especially humiliating for an MRA.
Ashley Manta was discussing her own rape trauma with a friend, when she named her rapist: a fellow named Ben Ketchum. There followed one of those series of confirmations that are rather terrifying: her friend had also been raped by Ketchum. Then she put up a blog post naming her rapist, and more women who knew him came out to say what he’d done.
Maybe if we all rise up and say it, it will get better.
