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

Month: January 2013

Groom tries to take wife’s last name, is grounded by Florida DMV

If a woman changes her name after marriage, it’s a sign of her love and enduring commitment. (Aw…) If a man does it, he’s a fraud who’s trying to get one over on the state, and such offenses will not stand!

After Lazaro Sopena and Hanh Dinh got married, Sopena decided to change his name to Lazaro Dinh to honor his wife’s Vietnamese family surname.

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More than a year later, he received a letter from Florida’s DMV accusing him of “obtaining a driver’s license by fraud,” and letting him know that his license would soon be suspended.

BREAKING: How you view sex determines how you view sex

There’s this study making the rounds which says that how you lose your virginity impacts the rest of your entire sexual life. Which is an accurate reading of the study, if by “your entire sexual life” you mean “roughly the next one to four years” and if by “how you lose your virginity” you actually mean “how you feel about sex.”

Posted in Sex

Revenge Porn and Misogyny

I’m over at the Guardian writing about “revenge porn,” and how it’s part of a trajectory of gendered harassment that women face online.

There aren’t popular revenge porn sites with pictures of naked men, because as a society we don’t think it’s inherently degrading or humiliating for men to have sex. Despite the fact that large numbers of women watch porn, there are apparently not large numbers of women who find sexual gratification in publicly shaming and demeaning men they’ve slept with.

And that is, fundamentally, what these revenge porn sites are about. They aren’t about naked girls; there are plenty of those who are on the internet consensually. It’s about hating women, taking enjoyment in seeing them violated, and harming them.

The owners to Texxxan.com practically said as much when, in defending their website, they posted a message saying, “Maybe [sic] the site provided an outlet for anger that prevented physical violence (this statement will be very controversial but is at least worth thinking about).” In other words, these are men who hate women to the degree that they’d be hitting them if they didn’t have revenge porn as an outlet for their rage. They’re angry because women have the nerve to exist in the universe as sexual beings.

The whole thing is here.

The idea that “life begins at conception” is a Biblical view younger than the Happy Meal

In fact, it’s really only been considered Biblically “true” since 1979 — before that, Evangelicals held widely varying positions, and even some of the most vocal “life begins at conception” voices today didn’t think that zygote life was the equivalent of born-human life in the 1960s and 70s. But political necessities change, and with them Bible interpretations. Read that whole piece; it’s fascinating. Also worth considering the role played by the new Right, and the need to replace full-throated support for segregation with other issues that could rally racist whites, particularly in the South.

Your wedding is the most special, important, valuable day of your entire existence, but you are a crazy bitch if you plan it too much.

That’s basically my summary of this New York Times article, which covers a small number of women who planned their weddings (or are still planning their weddings) before they even had a boyfriend. And yes, I actually agree that spending large chunks of your free time planning your own wedding when you aren’t actually engaged to be married is… a tad bizarre, and kind of sad. There are so many other things you could be doing with your spare time! And while I think many of us have had the experience of seeing a pretty dress or a nice piece of jewelry online and going, “Oh I like that” and maybe even posting it on Pinterest (hell, even I pinned a wedding dress one time), it’s a whole other level to plan out a venue, monogrammed cocktail napkins and what you’re serving for dinner before you’ve even met the person who you’re planning to wed:

“Racism Still Exists”: The Power of Art

I frequently hear people say that art has no political power, that it is merely aesthetics and/or money. Many countries repress the power of art by punishing the artists. Here the dominant culture disparages art’s power and commoditize it and among other things turn it into a speculative consumer product. Nevertheless, art in our country can be politically powerful and these posters tell it all.

Your Must-Read of the Day

The Longest War, by Rebecca Solnit, details the ways that physical violence against women and political hostility toward women are part of the same epidemic of gendered violence and control, leveled almost entirely by men. Women are beaten, raped, killed, harassed, controlled and abused by men at astounding rates. We write these incidents off as isolated or personal, tragic but certainly not epidemic. On other pages of the newspaper we talk about conservative encroachment on women’s bodily autonomy as if that’s totally separate from violence, as if it’s a “social issue” or a difference of political opinion. But all of it — the violence, the domestic abuse, the street harassment, the online harassment, the gang-rapes, the abortion debates, the contraception battles — comes down to a desire to control women, and rage when that control isn’t maintained.