By now you’ve heard that you’re “not allowed” to say “ho ho ho” anymore because Teh Evil Feministz have heartlessly taken that phrase away from your beloved Christmas culture with much pretense of being mortally wounded by it. I’ve been telling people feminists absolutely aren’t behind it, and my bet is on conservatives putting words in our mouths to give us some negative spin in the press.

Turns out I wasn’t that far off. Snopes.com reports that the whole thing originated … READ MORE

In the discussion thread at a recent post regarding the “Don’t Rape Her” meme, something came up which may explain a lot of disjointed conversations I’ve had online over the years.

Men really hate it when they’re discussed or addressed as people who can and desire to commit grievances against other human beings. In a lot of conversations about rape and abuse by men of women, men will get defensive, and we will tell them they’re privileged, and the conversation stalls … READ MORE

TRIGGER WARNING: more hypothetical examples of rape to illustrate points.

Yesterday, I posted some facetious thoughts on the Don’t Rape Her meme. Today I’m going to explain what I really think. It boils down to this:

Do you want a world in which women trust men, or not? That’s the only question here. You can’t expect us to trust you and be emotionally available to you and bear the burden of sorting out which ones of you intend to rape us now … READ MORE

George Lakoff is a prominant linguistics professor at Berkeley who is reasonably well known outside the field for his accessible analyses of political discourse. In his more academic work, he details the ways that cognitive structures are set up based on series of linguistic and metaphorical “schema”. The title of one of his early books, Metaphors We Live By, gives a fairly concise explanation of what he’s getting at in his theories.

In the 1987 book Women, Fire and Dangerous Things … READ MORE