Category Archives: feminism
Turning Indian Girls Into Boys
Indian parents are paying to have their daughters turned into sons through sex-change operations that cost about 145,000 rupees ($3,200). Up to 300 girls have been surgically turned into boys in one city.
The procedure involves fashioning a penis from the little girls’ female organs. Afterwards they are injected with male hormones, which they will need to take throughout their lives. The procedure will leave these children impotent and infertile in adulthood. No sons or daughters for them.
The Madhya Pradesh government is investigating.
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Scrutinizing My Body Takes All My Time
On a typical day, you might see ads featuring a naked woman’s body tempting viewers to buy an electronic organizer, partially exposed women’s breasts being used to sell fishing line, and a woman’s rear—wearing only a thong—being used to pitch a new running shoe. Meanwhile, on every newsstand, impossibly slim (and digitally airbrushed) cover “girls” adorn a slew of magazines. With each image, you’re hit with a simple, subliminal message: Girls’ and women’s bodies are objects for others to visually consume.
So says Caroline Heldman, Assistant Professor of Politics at Occidental College, in a piece for Ms.
This notion of bodies for consumption leaves us constantly judging ourselves and others. How do we stack up? How do “they”?
Our friends declare someone too fat or too thin, sitcoms quip on body weight or shape, tabloids spot celebrities’ flaws, men bluster about big boobs, Howard Stern picks women apart while Rush Limbaugh insists feminism was established “to allow unattractive women easier access to the mainstream of society.” (Yes, really, Rush and Howard think they are in a position to make unkind remarks about other people’s appearance.)
All this leads women to “self-objectify” so that we see and judge ourselves through others’ eyes, and especially, the male gaze. Women live in “a state of double consciousness … a sense of always looking at oneself through the eyes of others,” says Heldman.
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Gender-Swapping Grammar Lessons
A Chrome app called Jailbreak the Patriarchy switches gendered words and makes for an eye-opening experience.
This app has inspired me to go a little further to see how the world looks when gender changes. So I’ve spiced it up by changing gendered names, etc., too.
“I Kissed A Boy (And I Liked It)” (male singer, of course)
I kissed a boy and I liked it,
the taste of his cherry chapstick.
I kissed a boy just to try it,
I hope my girlfriend don’t mind it.
It felt so wrong,
it felt so right.
Don’t mean I’m in love tonight.
I kissed a boy and I liked it.
Or how about this headline:
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10 Things U.S. Women Couldn’t Do Before the 70s
by Natasha Turner (Reposted from Ms. with permission)
While we still have a long way to go to secure total equality for women, let’s take a moment to celebrate how far we’ve come. Before the 1970s, an American woman could not:
1. Keep her job if she was pregnant.
Until the Pregnancy Discrimination Act in 1978, women could be fired from their workplace for being pregnant.
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Looking Sexual vs Being Sexual
Is “beauty” really sex? Does a woman’s sexuality correspond to what she looks like? Does she have the right to sexual pleasure and self-esteem because she’s a person, or must she earn that right through “beauty”?
– Naomi Wolf
![Black_and_White_love_romance_kiss1[1]](https://broadblogs.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/black_and_white_love_romance_kiss11.jpg)
A lot of women and men confuse looking sexual with being sexual. We look at an attractive woman and think, oh, she’s really sexual. Then we see a not-so-pretty woman and suppose she’s not.
But “pretty” and “sexuality” are actually two different things. Sex is all about feeling, not the surface experience of just existing, however beautifully.
But as Naomi Wolf points out in The Beauty Myth, too many women don’t enjoy sex because they think they don’t look sexy enough. And since a lot of women think they don’t look sexy because of their body type, age, or low self-esteem, a lot of women miss out on great sex.
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Does Porn Objectify? Experts Disagree
![Playboy_Bunnies_2011[1]](https://broadblogs.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/playboy_bunnies_20111.jpg)
When men view porn do they see women as mindless objects? Psychologist, Kurt Gray and his colleagues wanted to know.
Humans have needs, goals, emotions, the ability to act, and hopes and dreams for the future. Mere objects don’t.
So the researchers showed men pictures of women in various states of dress and undress and asked how much “agency” they had, meaning self control and the ability to plan and act. They also asked about their ability to feel fear, desire and pleasure.
The study focused on these two areas because research on the mind shows that that’s how we categorize humans.
Turns out, the more skin women reveal, the less they seem agentic, but the more they are thought to feel.
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Man Chops Off Wife’s Fingers Because She’s More Educated Than Him
Rafiqul Islam told his wife that he wanted to give her a surprise present. He blindfolded her, taped her mouth shut (huh?) and asked her to hold out her hand.
Then he chopped off all five of her fingers.
Why? Because she was working toward a college degree without his permission.
Mr. Islam had only made it to eighth grade and was a migrant worker in the United Arab Emirates. He did not want his wife thinking that she was better than him with some hoity-toity education and future career.
His wife, Hawa Akhter, promptly moved in with her parents and took to writing with her left hand in order to finish her studies.
According to the Daily Mail, this was one of a series of attacks against educated women in the Middle-East. Here’s another: Read the rest of this entry
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Beauty, Self-Esteem and Aging
What’s the power of beauty? What does it do to your ego? What happens when it fades?
That’s what filmmaker Timothy Greenfield-Sanders wanted to explore in his HBO documentary, “About Face: Supermodels, Then and Now.”
Sheila Nevins, the film’s producer sees the models as, “their own instruments. What do you do when you’re a Stradivarius and you’re losing your strings?”
And what can ordinary women learn from aging models whose worth seems so dependent on their beauty?
For models, the trouble starts sooner than expected.
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Betas Pushing Theory That Insults Them
Some guys who call themselves “Betas” (gentler, less macho men) complain that women want successful, dominating “Alphas,” instead of them.
Despite evidence to the contrary.
Turns out, women actually prefer Betas. I know I do. (Well, I prefer most Betas: the one’s who aren’t complaining about what idiots women are for wanting Alphas.)
Actually, they aren’t always complaining. They are often explaining, matter-of-factly, that women want Alphas because of evolution. Because dominating genes are just better genes, or something.
And sometimes these guys aren’t just telling me. They are adamantly pushing a cause.
I “get” the complaining. Who wants to feel rejected?
But why are they so tied to a theory that puts them down? And that leaves them no hope (in their minds)?
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Who’s Afraid of a Feminist? And Why?
CLICK IMAGE TO ZOOM
CLICK IMAGE TO ZOOM
Scary stuff, eh?
Placing these images on the Internet was only the third frightening thing that 17-year-old Jinan Younis did this year.
A group of men in a car started wolf-whistling and shouting sexual remarks at my friends and me. I asked the men if they thought it was appropriate for them to be abusing a group of 17-year-old girls. The response was furious. The men started swearing at me, called me a bitch and threw a cup of coffee over me.
In response to this and concerns about other ways girls suffer – eating disorders, abusive relationships, and pressure to put out – she started a feminist group. She didn’t anticipate how ominously boys in her peer group would find it:
They took to Twitter… One boy declared that “bitches should keep their bitchiness to their bitch-selves #BITCH” and another smugly quipped, “feminism doesn’t mean they don’t like the D, they just haven’t found one to satisfy them yet.” Any attempt we made to stick up for each other was aggressively shot down with “get in your lane before I [ridicule] you too,” or belittled with remarks like “cute, they got offended.”
Next, girls were photographed with white boards that completed the sentence “I need feminism because…” and posted on the Internet. The response?
We were told that our “militant vaginas” were “as dry as the Sahara desert,” girls who complained of sexual objectification in their photos were given ratings out of 10, details of the sex lives of some of the girls were posted beside their photos, and others were sent threatening messages warning them that things would soon “get personal.”
Luckily, most guys don’t act that way.
But why do these guys feel so threatened? Read the rest of this entry
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