Tag: feminism

link farm #2: the tennis edition

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Wimbledon 2013 Champion, Marion Bartoli

So this weekend saw the end of a historic Wimbledon tournament. Men’s singles champion Andy Murray made British sports history on the court and was showered with praise and glory and even a possible recommendation for knighthood.

Women’s singles champion Marion Bartoli was showered with tweets suggesting that she’s too fat and ugly to be good at tennis.

But the crude and often violent commentary from these few (hundred) tweets are surely just an aberration, I hear you cry! It’s just the Internet, it’s just assholes trolling! No real people would ever actually suggest that Bartoli’s victory is somehow undermined by her looks!

Unless, of course, they’re John Inverdale and they happen to be doing the BBC radio commentary on the women’s singles final.

SEXISM IN SPORTS IS TOTALLY NOT A PROBLEM AT ALL.

Sigh. Here is some stuff that is not tennis!

The Box Trolls – coming in 2014 from Laika, the same studio responsible for Coraline and ParaNorman. It’s stop motion and it shows an awareness of non-traditional non-heteronormative families. I don’t know what more you could want!

So You Want To Compare Something To Slavery? – Well, I’m sure your comparison is completely measured and legitimate and not at all deeply insulting to any historically enslaved group! But maybe you should read this first, just to be sure…

A Woman’s Right To Chores – Over on Feministe, Molly Schoemann writes a light-hearted screed on strangely old-fashioned advertising for cleaning products. Come for the lols, stay for the comments full of “BUT THAT’S NOT SEXISM IT’S MARKETING IT’S NOT SEXIST IF IT SELLS.”

Word War Z, or Something Not Quite Like It – “I’m not sure why Brad Pitt bothered buying the rights to it really, because they essentially took all the things that made World War Z such a compelling and scary and fascinating read in the first place and just fucked it all in the bin.“

the sex education I wish I’d had

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The banana of sexSo I have had almost zero formal sex education.

When I was ten, our teacher held the girls back at break time and solemnly informed us that we were due to start bleeding out of our vaginas any day now. If this happened while we were in school, we were to tell NO ONE but immediately locate the nearest female teacher, who would provide us with something to soak up THE SHAME OF OUR WOMB. She did not actually say that last bit, but even at ten years-old, I felt it was strongly implied. This was my first introduction to periods.

When I was fourteen, our science teacher skipped over the chapter on the reproductive system. She told us it was very unlikely to come up in our exams next year, and even if it does, you’ll have lots of questions to choose from so you can just skip it. I stared at the diagram of the penis in the book for a while. There was no diagram of the vagina, only the ovaries and uterus.

The same year, a lady from Tampax came to speak to us about periods and gave us heavily branded booklets about growing into our new bodies. At this point, I was wearing a C cup and I’d been using tampons for over two years, so it felt a bit belated. Nobody had any questions at the end of the talk.

When I was seventeen, we had forty minutes of “Health Ed” class every two weeks. There was no syllabus, but our teacher was smart and engaged. He led a lot of interesting discussions – about drinking, drugs, smoking, bullying, about stress and good study habits, depression, body image, more drugs, more bullying – but something was notably missing from the laundry list of things seventeen year-old girls typically worry about.

And that was it. I could definitely blame this on growing up in Ireland, a country so deeply steeped in Catholicism that it’s difficult to find a school where saying prayers in morning assembly is not the norm. But a friend of mine also went to an all-girls convent school, and she did have a sex ed class. Which apparently involved trying to put a condom on a banana with one hand.

I’ve started thinking about the sex education I wish I’d had. I even went as far as drafting a syllabus, because I’m obsessive like that, but I will not inflict it on the Internet because I’m not an educator and also it’s five pages long. But I will show you my wish list. Because maybe it’s just my inner Hermione Granger talking, but I do wish there’d been a class.

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link farm #1

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In my spare time, I farm links. Here’s this week crop from faffing around on the Internet! First, watch I Know Girls, an amazingly beautiful song/poem from Mary Lambert (the same lady who sang the refrain for Macklemore’s “Same Love”) and then tell me it did not give you goosebumps. Required watching for anyone who has ever hated their body.

It’s Time – Watch this video from the Equality Network campaign for same-sex marriage in Scotland, it’s really touching and hits all the right notes and has somehow made me like Scotland even more than I already do. A+ Scotland!

I was a Manic Pixie Dream Girl Laurie Penny on sexism in storytelling. “Irony is, of course, the last vestige of modern crypto-misogyny: all those lazy stereotypes and hurtful put-downs are definitely a joke, right up until they aren’t, and clearly you need a man to tell you when and if you’re supposed to take sexism seriously.”

I Need Feminism in Cambridge 60 photos of Cambridge University students and the reasons they need feminism in their lives. “… because they told her Harry Potter wouldn’t sell if it was by “Joanne” Rowling.”

Everyday Sexism A powerful video charting the meteoric rise of the @EverydaySexism Project and highlighting the importance of women coming together to say “Yes, I believe you and yes, it’s happened to me too.”

“Lawrence” Croft So hey guys, imagine if every strong male protagonist available to you in videogames looked a little something like this super sexy Lara Croft genderbend by Ulysses0302.

Six Fairy Tales for the Modern Woman “Once upon a time a woman never got married, but had many fulfilling relationships, a job that kept her comfortable, an apartment that she got to decorate just for her, and hobbies that stimulated her mind.”

Hairy Tights and Taylor Swift Andrea Fox on the weirdest “solution” for avoiding unwanted male attention. Ever.

Help Us, Great Warrior! WELL THIS COMIC IS JUST ADORABLE

an ode to sansa stark

tinyorc4 Comments
“At least my hair still looks fab.”

Housekeeping: This post is based solely characterisations in the TV show. SPOILERS for Game of Thrones up to Season 3. 

I like Game of Thrones for many reasons, up to and including my pantsfeelings for Tyrion. But as the series has developed, one thing that has really stood out to me for all the right reasons is the characterisation and treatment of female characters. When feminists advocate for more strong female characters and better treatment of female characters, a lot of people seem to hear ALL FEMALE CHARACTERS MUST BE PERFECT and NO BAD THINGS MUST EVER HAPPEN TO FEMALE CHARACTERS, respectively. This is not what we are advocating for. We are advocating for female characters who are, respectively, well-rounded and flawed in interesting ways, and who are more than disposable props used to further the male protagonist’s emotional journey.

Game of Thrones is full of women; all of them are flawed, some of them are outright detestable and, as one would expect, they are in no way immune to having graphically violent things happen to them. Granted, those violent things are usually pertinently gendered (we did all just watch a lady get stabbed to death in her pregnant belly a few weeks ago) and deserving of their own discussion, but in terms of character creation, the series has so far done an excellent job of portraying the women of Westeros as complex and engaging. Read More »

thank you for your concern

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Concern troll of the week
Concern troll of the week

Susan Venker has a lot of ideas about what women need to do to be happy. Most of them involve marrying young and giving up their jobs and their income to raise children and do housework. She likes writing articles about how all the successful driven women out there are going to be sooooooo sorry that they pursued careers instead of focusing on settling down with Mr. Right and how they are going to be sooooooo lonely when they realise that all the “good” men out there actually want submissive little housewives because BIOLOGY OR SOMETHING.

Her entire outlook on life is stupid for a variety of reasons.

Primarily:

  1. She lives in a heteronormative bubble. She is going to be shocked when she discovers that gay and queer and trans* women are a thing now.
  2. Marriage is no longer the pinnacle of female achievement.
  3. Very few of these bright successful women she’s so worried about are going find marital bliss with a man who wants a glorified servant/fuck toy combo.

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street harassment, now with extra sad

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Stop Telling Women To Smile - the anti-street harassment artwork of Tatyana Fazlalizadeh, photo courtesy of NYU News
Stop Telling Women To Smile – the anti-street harassment artwork of Tatyana Fazlalizadeh, photo courtesy of NYU News

A few weeks ago, my friend Emily of Rosie Says almost broke the internet with her article on Role/Reboot, A Letter To The Guy Who Harassed Me Outside The Bar. It’s a fantastic piece that cogently and calmly articulates why being on the receiving end of “jokes” and “compliments” from strange men is rarely a funny or flattering experience. Response was overwhelming and Emily has been documenting a lot of the feedback, both negative and positive.

Today, she posted A Letter To The Girl I Harassed, a response from a male reader that attempts to flip the perspective once again and give us insight into the mind of a harasser. While the letter writer admits that his attitude is not healthy, he feels that other guys will relate to it. Emily says she finds the letter disturbing and a little scary, but mainly sad, and calls for empathy on all fronts. My reaction was less kind. For me, this letter reads as a steaming pile of entitlement and essentialism and I find the “predator/prey zero sum game” narrative kind of terrifying. But there is one paragraph that really stuck out to me.

“Being in the presence of a woman can be anguish. It’s loneliness (and sometimes horniness), and all that other Freudian bullshit rolled up into mundane moments. Just walking down the street can make me feel helpless when I pass a woman sometimes. I can’t shake it. If I could shake it, I would. Trust me. It’s no fun. But this is the hand I’m dealt, so I roll with it.”

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savita

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Source: The Irish Times
Source: The Irish Times

My country was dragged into the international spotlight last week. Because, not to put even remotely too fine a point on it, Ireland killed a woman. This news made me feel physically sick. This happened so appallingly close to home that for a while I couldn’t process it.

How close to home?

I was born in University Hospital Galway. Both my parents have worked there at various points in their lives. It is where my mother had her mastectomy. I worked in the foyer coffee shop for a summer when I was a teenager. This time last year, I sat with my dad in the intensive care unit, listening to a machine do his breathing for him and wondering if he would ever open his eyes again.

I spent significant stretches of my life in the same hospital that took Savita Halappavanar’s life.

I have been trying to write something about this for over a week. At first I was too angry, then I was too upset and ashamed of my country to form coherent sentences. The details of the case have been well-covered (here and here and here for anyone who missed it) so I’m not going to reiterate them again. I think it is extremely clear – to me, to Ireland and to the rest of the world – that there is no reason on this earth that Savita Halappavanar, a 31 year-old dentist from India, should not have survived her miscarriage and gone on to live a full and happy life with her husband.

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