In defense of the sanctimonious women's studies set || First feminist blog on the internet

Month: February 2012

Pay No Attention to the Man Behind the Curtain

Years of anti-gay bullying, teachers afraid to confront students for calling other students faggots because of a policy against supporting “gay lifestyles,” and a school district too cowardly to confront Evangelical political interests lead to a rash of teen suicides in Minnesota. Whats this got to do with madness and diagnosis? Well, as it turns out, the story includes two very good illustrations of the ways in which certain assumptions about madness serve to privilege certain interpretations of an event.

Who I am, how I see the world, and a question for the Feministe community

One of the things that has always struck me about how we discuss madness is the terms we use. “Words mean things” has become something of a trope in the feminist world, but its especially important to remember when we’re talking about madness because, in a very real way, all we’ve got in the world of psychology is language.

“I Use Injectables”

Whitney Davis, 18, could have been part of a startling statistic: by the age of 19, nearly 60 percent of all women in Liberia have started childbearing. However, Whitney doesn’t intend to add to this childbearing statistic. “I am on family planning,” she says. “I use injectables.”

Is the United States the only country where more men are raped every year than women?

That’s the claim in this n+1 piece, which is well worth a read:

In January, prodded in part by outrage over a series of articles in the New York Review of Books, the Justice Department finally released an estimate of the prevalence of sexual abuse in penitentiaries. The reliance on filed complaints appeared to understate the problem. For 2008, for example, the government had previously tallied 935 confirmed instances of sexual abuse. After asking around, and performing some calculations, the Justice Department came up with a new number: 216,000. That’s 216,000 victims, not instances. These victims are often assaulted multiple times over the course of the year. The Justice Department now seems to be saying that prison rape accounted for the majority of all rapes committed in the US in 2008, likely making the United States the first country in the history of the world to count more rapes for men than for women.

The many types of prostitutes in ancient Rome

UPDATE: After posting this guest entry, it was brought to my attention that the blog from which it is cross-posted contains material that is racist, misogynist, fat-shaming and transphobic. Had I known that history, I would not have allowed this post to be published on Feministe. We will not be publishing work from this author again. And going forward, when guest posts are offered, I will do more homework into a blogger’s background and past posts, instead of just generally perusing their blog for anything that immediately stands out. The Feministe team is also discussing ways to prevent this from happening in the future. I apologize that a piece from such a problematic author was posted in this space. -Jill

Rick Santorum is against pre-natal screening

Which would be totally fine if babies were delivered via stork, but in the real world, pre-natal screening is a pretty important component of the pregnant woman’s health and the future baby’s health. Santorum doesn’t like it, though, because abortion (that, by the way, should be Santorum’s campaign slogan — “Rick Santorum: Because Abortion.”

Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta shames fat kids to save them

It was surveys of two towns in Georgia that convinced Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta that the nation’s relentless campaign against childhood obesity wasn’t hitting hard enough: Georgia has the second highest rate of childhood obesity in the U.S., and parents in the towns surveyed seemed unaware of their kids’ obesity. So to promote their Strong4Life campaign, Children’s decided that a painfully blunt approach was necessary, and damn the consequences–even if those consequences involved putting sad, overweight children on billboards and TV ads to shame their parents into action.