When I was a kid, Phyllis Schlafly used bathroom panic to help defeat the Equal Rights Amendment, which would have made sexual equality a constitutionally protected value. The claim was that the ERA would strip women of the “right to privacy based on sex” in “public restrooms and other public facilities.” Basically, unisex, gender-neutral bathrooms ( Read more... )

I want to talk about Star Wars, but that’s dangerous for me, because I don’t want to deliver any spoilers, but apparently I don’t know what a spoiler is.

I think a spoiler is “a shocking or unexpected plot twist that’s important to the story.” Gandalf dying, then coming back from the dead - those are spoilers, except they’re not, because they were ( Read more... )

About a week ago, yet another violently disturbed young man killed a bunch of people for no reason.

Yes, he was a misogynist of the most toxic kind, with a grandiose and visceral hatred directed at both the women who denied him his “rightful” share of their affection, and at the other men who got all the affection he felt entitled to. And yes, ( Read more... )

Here are some ridiculous things that conservative anti-feminists recently had to say about feminism:
Conservative Women Celebrate Women’s History by Criticizing Feminism.

I can’t believe how much staying power these narratives have. The anti-feminist right has been making the same claims since I was a kid.

I’ve never understood why they do it, ( Read more... )

Score! The in-flight movie was Frozen.


( Read more... )

A New York Times essay attempts to make The Case for Filth:

A recent, large cross-national study on the subject by an Ohio State sociologist found that “women’s housework did not decline significantly and men’s housework did not increase significantly after the mid-1980s in the United States, the United Kingdom, and the Netherlands.” [..] So why ( Read more... )

Okay, okay, I couldn’t resist dissecting this very special February 14th message in the Wall Street Journal (?!?) from somebody I’ve never heard of before: Susan Patton: A Little Valentine’s Day Straight Talk: Young women in college need to smarten up and start husband-hunting.

First of all - what is this deal with middle-aged women feeling the ( Read more... )

This Slacktivist piece on the victim-blaming inherent in certain kinds of advice [When good advice goes bad] prompted an epic comment mudstorm in which I briefly participated, kinda regretted it, stewed for a while, and started writing this essay.
( hidden for length and triggers )

When I was eighteen and a college freshman away from home for the first time, I learned that I was supposed to be afraid to walk alone in urban areas after dark. I learned this on the phone with my mother. I was telling her about my experiences settling into college life, and we had an exchange that went something like this:

Mom: You walked across ( Read more... )

Some things are weirdly predictable. A woman will write something about how much she hates being told to smile by strange men - such as [Smile, baby!] and [This morning a man told me to smile] - and the comments section will be full of guys telling her that being told to smile is no big deal and she shouldn’t dislike it so much. Nice work, random ( Read more... )