Wanda Sykes gets her due

Congratulations to Wanda Sykes and wife, Alex!  Alex gave birth to newborn twins Olivia Lou and Lucas Claude on April 27. Wanda Sykes came out publicly at an anti prop 8 rally after election day, revealing that she recently married,  saying: “You know, I don’t really talk about my sexual orientation, I didn’t feel like [...]

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R.I.P. Marilyn French

From Written On The Body, a short, personal eulogy for Marilyn French, who recently passed at age 79. I think French is one of those feminists who have been deemed “unsafe”, aka “man haters”. Like Andrea Dworkin her writing had a strident tone and caused people to wring their hands and worry about hurting men’s [...]

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“I was the first woman to burn my bra – it took the fire department four days to put it out”

Is their any other daily garment more cumbersome than the brassiere?  “Women who wear the wrong bra size” stories are a staple of the slow news cycle.  It’s always the same: Massive percentage of women wear ill fitting bras; are dumb.  Why don’t those dummies just go shopping? The full story after the break I’ll [...]

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Tough Love, again

This is somewhat late coming–another episode aired on Sunday, but after reading Steve Ward’s comments in his post show interview for last week’s episode, I’ve totally lost what interest I had in watching the show.  That episode, BTW, is called Friends Don’t Let Friends Date Bitches.  That’s not some sly reference to a challenge where [...]

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Tough Love

see the video “Get me out of here” here Tough Love is a relationship boot-camp show for women, hosted by a matchmaker named Steve Ward, a guy who takes pride in telling it like it is.  It’s more similar to The Millionaire Matchmaker than the usual 51 Minds produced shows.  My feelings on this one [...]

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Terrifying

Via Jezebel, a British anesthesiologist(oddly labeled ‘Abortion Doctor’ by the Daily Mail), Dr. Narendra Sharma is being tried on three counts of ” engaging in sexual activity without consent”.  In a frightening nutshell, he took the hands of his semi-conscious patients and used them too rub his exposed penis, while they were having their abortions, [...]

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“The weird part—Ingraham is blonde herself.”

A lesson every cable news channel won’t let me forget: you can always cut an uppity woman down to size by changing the subject to her looks/weight/sexuality/sex appeal because all our value is contained in our usefulness to men, natch. After Laura Ingraham responded to Meghan McCain’s criticism of the acceptance of extremists in the [...]

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Mukhtar Mai

Mukhtar Mai was abducted for the first time in 2002 when she was taken at gunpoint to a stable, gang raped and forced to walk home half naked through her jeering village as the sentence for her 12 year old brother’s alleged sexual liaison with a woman from another tribe. As it came out later, [...]

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Feminism and Race

Octogalore has a great piece up now about feminism’s intersection with race, also touching on the old fracas over Sean Bell at Feministe. One of the reasons I started writing my own stuff here was because I felt like my concept of feminism(that it prioritize the liberation of women; radical, right?) was underrepresented in feminist [...]

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The Other Side Of Purity Is Ruination

Another sickening consequence of the valuation of female sexual purity, which is as robust as it ever was: Iraqi insurgents are arranging the rapes of women, in order to recuit them as suicide bombers.  Since their worth is destroyed and the honor of their family stained, they are recuited as a way for them to [...]

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