Category Archives: sexism
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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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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Nice Girl Doing Cheap Tricks
By Lexi White
Cruising East Palo Alto in a ‘97 RAV4, rappers cussing through blown out speakers, I’m strung out looking for a fix. I need to get high. My body beaten, black eye and bloody lip. Stringy hair and lackluster skin. I need to get high. My insides are empty and dark. My spirit is long gone. I need to get high. I am looking for a lonely John who wants a cheap trick. I need to get high.
But I can’t get high anymore. I am trapped in a miserable hopeless cycle and see no way out. I have written myself off. I am destined to be a dope fiend and I accept my pathetic short life because the occasional bliss that copious amounts of drugs give me keeps me handcuffed. I have faint whispers of something different…
It wasn’t always like this.
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Advice Women-Haters Could Use Via Ashton Kutcher
You may have seen Ashton Kutcher’s Teen Choice Awards speech. After all, it went viral.
He says a lot of great stuff. I’ll focus on this:
The sexiest thing in the entire world… is being really smart. And being thoughtful. And being generous. Everything else is crap, I promise you! It’s just crap that people try to sell to you to make you feel like less.
Now, Ashton Kutcher can’t help but be sexy, so what does he know?
On the other hand, anyone could become more attractive by following his advice.
Think about it.
Being smart is a confidence-builder. And confident is the sexiest thing you can be.
The thoughtful and generous also hold an air of confidence. And they don’t scare people off.
Unlike some men who write to tell me how much they hate women because they can’t get one. Like this guy:
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She Asked For It?
Why are victims so often blamed for rape?
What’s “her” motive in the situation? What drives the rapist? And who has control?
I’ve been thinking about this as two men are sentenced for joining eighteen others to brutally rape a 16-year-old Richmond, California girl.
—
She wore a lavender dress to the homecoming dance. But she left early and began dialing her dad to pick her up. And then a schoolmate invited her to join some friends who were drinking on school property, and who encouraged her to drink too much. She said they were polite — at first.
She doesn’t remember anything after one kicked her in the stomach and she fell over.
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Deep Throat. Porn Star? Or Victim?
Lovelace, staring Amanda Seyfried, comes out this weekend. Seyfried plays Linda Lovelace, a porn star who famously played a woman with a clitoris inside her throat. So she LOVES giving head in Deep Throat.
Nora Ephron checked out the film when it came out in the 70s, approaching it with an open mind. But when a hollow glass dildo was inserted inside Linda’s vagina and filled with Coca-Cola, Ephron felt both humiliated and terrified, worried the glass might break. Guys chided her for overreacting, calling the scene “hilarious.” So she asked Linda about it. Her response?
I totally enjoyed myself making the movie. I don’t have any inhibitions about sex. I just hope that everybody goes to see the film… (and) loses some of their inhibitions.
That was then. Years later Linda wrote a memoir that told a very different story, entitled, “Ordeal.”
Her ordeal began Read the rest of this entry
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