Social Commentary

Artist JeongMee Yoon was inspired to create “The Pink and Blue Project” when her five-year-old daughter only wanted to wear pink, and to play with pink objects.

“I want to shoot Iggy*,” Ivan often tells me. He and his friends want to shoot Iggy, he says, because “we don’t like princesses.” Iggy is a boy in my son’s preschool class who wears dresses to school – often bringing several, as he may want a new look by midday -- and likes to play princess with the girls.

Why does my son have violent fantasies about this kid? It’s disturbing, to say the least.

Leonore Tiefer is Clinical Associate Professor of Psychiatry at the New York University School of Medicine and the Albert Einstein College of Medicine with an international reputation as a lecturer, author, activist and theorist in the field of sexuality. She has written widely about the medicalization of female sexuality and heads up the New View Campaign, which is a grassroots network challenging the distorted and oversimplified understanding of sexuality promoted by the pharmaceutical industry as a means to profit. In this interview she talks about her work and the race to produce a 'female Viagra.'

Someone should make a bumper sticker that reads So many douchebags, so little time. I'd buy it. Every week when the Douchebag Decree comes around, there are too many douches and it's almost impossible to determine who deserves the honor most. This week, we have two very strong contenders, which is why we need YOU to vote for your (least) favorite in a DOUCHEBAG SHOWDOWN. Two douches enter, one douche leaves!



In one corner: Erick "Ugly feminists return to their kitchens" Erickson! The fightin' feminist-hater!

In the other corner: Margaret "Blogs are a guy thing" Wente! The super cybersexist!

Ladies and gentlemen, place yer bets!

A lot of us working/breathing/organizing in feminist/humanist/womanist communities were running from event to event last week during International Women's Day (IWD) week, and I thought I'd share some of the deconstructing thoughts I've been having aloud about what I witnessed and participated in.

Many of you already know all too well the tokenization that happens when we Indigenous and racialized women get invited to things our own communities are not putting together, the envelopes we sometimes have to push, the chastising we get from both white people and people in our own communities who don't like that we're calling ourselves feminists/womanists/humanists, so on and so forth.

                                                            

The first line of Virginie Despentes’ King Kong Theory (written originally in French as King Kong Theorie and then translated into English) is:

“I am writing as an ugly one for the ugly ones: the old hags, the dykes, the frigid, the unfucked, the unfuckables, the neurotics, the psychos, for all those girls that don’t get a look-in in the universal market of the consumable chick.”

Hooked yet?

The female condom. No one talks about it, no one uses it - it's just one of that group of contraceptives, which includes the sponge and the diaphragm, that everyone sees as outdated and useless. Hormonal contraceptives are considered the high-tech, modern method of birth control and they dominate the market. But lately the male condom had been taking back its share of the conversation – the New York health department launched a new design for the condoms they distribute, Lady Gaga is pushing her own brand and President Obama has not only overturned the condom-hating actions of the last administration but put millions of dollars into research on men's attitudes towards them – and all this is paving the way for the female version to make a comeback.

So, Tina Fey is on the cover of the April 2010 Esquire:

Hello Bitch Media peeps. My name is Jessica Yee and I'm going to be guest blogging here over the next month. I'm a self-described Indigenous hip hop feminist reproductive justice freedom fighter.

I'm a huge fan of Bitch and was asked, like Nadra, to come and do a stint here from Racialicious. I live in both Canada and the United States and try to have my finger on the pulse of the social, political, and pop culture of both as much as possible since I travel across both countries for about 90% of the year.

Oh and I titled this post with the long-ass "deconstructing the academic industrial complex of feminism" because I'm really interested in having discussions about decolonization and feminism as it exists outside of the confining walls of college and university. It's going to get way more intersectional and comprehensive from here.

University of Massachusetts professor Chris Bobel is the author of the soon to be released book New Blood: Third-Wave Feminism and the Politics of Menstruation. In the second part of this two-part interview she unpacks periods and the activism, advertising and controversy that makes them so very personal and so very political.