Category — Feminist Theory

I recently wrote a post to explain the difference between street harassment and sincere flirtation. Unthinkingly, I wrote it to an audience of women. I guess I unconsciously assumed any man who would yell sexual remarks at strange women would not come to this site in an attempt to figure out why “that uptight bitch” [...]

One of the most vile phrases I have ever heard is “high maintenance” in reference to a woman. Not just because it’s a term better suited to automobiles (something else hetero men like to climb into and control). Not just because it puts a value on the amount of work men have to do to [...]

Culture teaches us to look at the world with a skewed perspective. As an American kid, I was taught that this is the easiest country in the world and everyone, bar none, wants to immigrate here. I was also taught that white, heterosexual men like Ben Franklin were responsible for, oh, everything humanity had achieved [...]

I talked about Spice Girls feminism a while ago; now I’ve decided to label another form of feminism that I disagree with. I’m calling it Narcissist Feminism.
Narcissist Feminists - let’s call them NF’s - are, so far in my experience, white heterosexual middle class women who experience feminism only as a friction occurring between themselves [...]

Every now and then someone asks whether it’s worse to be a woman or a person of color. Usually, they phrase it just that way, defining the whole term “woman” to mean “white woman”, which gives you a great opportunity to shut down the discussion by pointing out that they just ignored the existence of [...]

A recent book I was reading re-introduced me to the folklore of vagina dentata, the notion that women once had - or Sinister Women have now - teeth in their vaginas. A common variant (found in Europe, Africa, and the Americas) being “witches” whose vaginal bite robbed men of their power and virility, and [...]

An Open Letter to All Feminists: Statement of Solidarity with Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim Women Facing War and Occupation
by Piya Chatterjee and Sunaina Maira
http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/cm130308.html
As feminists and people of conscience, we call for solidarity with Palestinian women in Gaza suffering due to the escalating military attacks that Israel turned into an open war on civilians. This [...]

One of the fundamental promises of patriarchy is that if women will just surrender themselves to men, men will protect them. There are two problems with this promise. The first is that it rarely gets kept because what men are protecting women from is generally other men, and there’s no screening process to “other” men [...]

A while ago, I wrote that this site would no longer allow gender essentialism and evolutionary biology arguments in comments. People who’d seen these arguments (ab)used again and again to silence people understood why I was doing that. But other people since have had questions, and I want to address that.
First, here’s the thread that [...]

This more an FYI than anything else.
 Teaching the Levees is an AMAZING teacher’s resource for introducing discussions of race, class, and gender in the classroom. While the DVD focuses on the events surrounding Hurricane Katrina, its historical component and other supplementary resources make it clear that the events in question are not without context or politics. The website www.teachingthelevees.org [...]