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

Month: June 2012

A hymen primer for romance novelists

On the list of psychological dangers presented by poorly written romance novels (e.g., the fetishization of virginity, the romanticization of abusive stalker vampires), the portrayal of the actual devirginification process itself doesn’t necessarily hover right at the top. But as a writer and a pedant, good God do I get cheesed off by anatomical inaccuracy. And while I’m not aware of scores of young women having penetrative sex for the first time and saying, “Whoa, whoa, whoa–that is not how it was in Fifty Shades of Grey!” (although they may well be out there), I feel the record should be set straight.

Having It All: Not a “Women’s Issue”

Yes yes yes to everything here.

The problem isn’t that women are trying to do too much, it’s that men aren’t doing nearly enough.

A new report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that women—even those with full-time jobs—still do the bulk of housework and childcare. On an average day, 48 percent of women and 19 percent of men did housework. Married women with children who work full time spend 51 minutes a day on housework while married men with children spend just 14 minutes a day.

The One Thing You Should Read Today

Nora Ephron’s 1996 commencement speech at Wellesley:

My class went to college in the era when you got a masters degrees in teaching because it was “something to fall back on” in the worst case scenario, the worst case scenario being that no one married you and you actually had to go to work. As this same classmate said at our reunion, “Our education was a dress rehearsal for a life we never led.” Isn’t that the saddest line? We weren’t meant to have futures, we were meant to marry them. We weren’t’ meant to have politics, or careers that mattered, or opinions, or lives; we were meant to marry them. If you wanted to be an architect, you married an architect. Non Ministrare sed Ministrari—you know the old joke, not to be ministers but to be ministers’ wives.