It’s International Women’s Day and time for an important reminder: All women are women, no matter who they are, where they come from, or their background.
Keep your transmisogyny out of International Women’s Day
Tag: women
Sexism on Sons of Anarchy
Sons of Anarchy provided an interesting fictionalised glimpse into the world of motorcycle clubs, but it was also painfully sexist.
Trashing uptalk and vocal fry
July brought us yet another charming turd from Naomi Wolf, self-appointed arbiter of modern feminism — and source of much frustration to political and cultural critic Naomi Klein, who has to remind everyone that she’s not the same person every time Wolf says something irritating. Wolf informed readers that women need to alter their voices to […]
You Don’t Need to Apologise
I was recently clunking my way down yet another impossibly narrow airplane aisle when the line unexpectedly stopped and I slammed into the woman ahead of me, catching her with the corner of my shoulder bag. It must have hurt. ‘Sorry!’ she said. I was momentarily confused, as I had been opening my mouth to […]
The Things We Learn: Quiet
Stand in a party with a group of people, and notice something. The women are quieter, and smaller, than the men. Not unilaterally, but it’s a very clear trend. Women lower their voices, shrink down to take up less space, turn their bodies in nonconfrontational ways. Men are loud, facing conversations head-on, gesticulating. Is this […]
Television’s Women’s Worlds
What do Orphan Black, Bletchley Circle, and Call the Midwife have in common? All three of them only have men as supporting characters — important ones, often, as in the case of Felix, but still, the shows place women front and center. To a lesser extent, the same is true of Scandal, though President Grant occupies a much more key role […]
‘We’re All Women’ Isn’t Enough
Every time a group of marginalised women speaks up about the issues they face as a specific subset of the community, it tends to attract a great deal of negative commentary. One of the most common and frustrating forms of commentary comes when women criticise the actions of other women; people respond by saying ‘we’re […]
Empower Girls, Don’t Blame Them
Being socialised as a woman in this society is extremely difficult. You spend your entire life essentially learning that no matter what you do, you can’t win. You’re either too meek or too aggressive, too big or too small, too loud or too quiet, not driven enough or too focused on work, shrewish or too […]
Look. Women Really Don’t Belong In the ‘Life and Style’ Section
Looking for a story on women business owners? Women politicians? ‘Women’s issues,’ by which the media seems to mean ‘anything with a lady in it’? Your first bet should be the Life and Style section, the segment of the paper where these things are shunted so they don’t contaminate the important news, you know, the […]
Faking It
I recently saw something which referred to some tools of gender performance as “fake.” It was a list of things which people were supposed to add up to determine their percentage of “fakeness,” from wearing lipstick to getting plastic surgery. It troubled me. A lot. It bothered me when I first saw it and I […]