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

Month: October 2012

Fangirls, mean girls – and that grand pastime of calling each other “ugly sluts”

“Everyone knows that bitch got knocked up by someone else and TRICKED him into marriage! Ugly slut! I hope they divorce!”

It sounds like a comment you would find on a Daily Mail article about some celebrity drama. But the poor man allegedly “TRICKED” into marriage is meant to be my husband. And the “ugly slut” is me. A friend who had written a blog entry about how my husband and I collaborated on a play together encountered these comments, and many more. She deleted them, but not before I had already read them. The friend was shocked, but I wasn’t. The same person who had posted those comments had already tweeted at me, left abusive comments on my site, and sent me detailed arguments as to why all of my much my pictures suck via Facebook. And she wouldn’t be the first to pursue this course of action.

Hi, my name is Natalia. My husband’s fangirls stalk me on the Internet.

Read More…Read More…

The most phenomenal thing you will read all week

I know it’s only Tuesday, but I feel fairly safe saying it’s this. The piece is about support groups for children whose parents have cancer. But the truths that Mary Elizabeth Williams extracts are profound. That culturally, we fear death, when really there’s power in acknowledging it. That for all of us, but especially for children, in situations that are socially cast as tragic or abnormal, there is power in a community of your peers — even if the very fact of that community means there will be pain and loss. That as MEW writes, in a way that universalizes the lessons she and her girls have learned:

Safe and legal. And rare.

Given the choice between needing and not needing minimally invasive medical procedures, most people would rather not need them. But abortion is the only such procedure where the solution offered is to outlaw the procedure entirely. You don’t hear a lot of arguments that angioplasty should only be available for patients with congenital defects, because everyone else “got themselves into that position and now has to deal with the consequences.” (God has a plan.) Safe, legal, rare angioplasty is seldom up for debate. But to the anti-choicers, abortion is both the symptom and the disease.

The Myth of Male Decline

Stephanie Coontz is a national treasure and I wish her work were required reading for everyone in the world. She’s in the Sunday Times writing about how all of this “End of Men” / women are dominating / Girls Rule! stuff is… not quite true. We’ve made some progress, but gender parity is still long off. Oh, and the reason why it seems like men are “doing worse”? Is because for a very long time, men were the beneficiaries of some major gendered affirmative action through a “patriarchal dividend” in which women as a class were largely excluded from public life, propping up men as a class and offering virtually no competition: