Tag Archives | Gender

Washington, D.C. Launches Transgender Respect Ad Campaign

By on September 20, 2012 in News 14

The new series of PSAs breaks ground as the first such effort by an American city. DCist writes:

Mayor Vince Gray and the D.C. Office of Human Rights yesterday launched an ad campaign promoting respect for the city’s transgender and gender-non-conforming residents. The five ads, which will appear this fall, use images of members of the transgender and gender-non-conforming and convey the message that they are no different than any other D.C. resident.

City officials say that the government-funded ad campaign is the first of its kind in the nation to focus on transgender and gender-non-conforming residents.

At the launch of the ad campaign yesterday, Gray admitted that while the ads themselves would not be enough to stop discrimination and acts of violence, they would serve to raise awareness and highlight legal rights and protections that members of the community enjoy under the expansive D.C. Human Rights Act.

… Read the rest

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Men Recognize Cars and Women Recognize Living Things Best, Psychological Analysis Finds

By on September 18, 2012 in News 7

Picture: Lewis Clarke (CC)

You know, because women evolved as the hunters and men evolved as the drivers.  Via ScienceDaily:

Women are better than men at recognizing living things and men are better than women at recognizing vehicles.

That is the unanticipated result of an analysis Vanderbilt psychologists performed on data from a series of visual recognition tasks collected in the process of developing a new standard test for expertise in object recognition.

“These results aren’t definitive, but they are consistent with the following story,” said Gauthier. “Everyone is born with a general ability to recognize objects and the capability to get really good at it. Nearly everyone becomes expert at recognizing faces, because of their importance for social interactions. Most people also develop expertise for recognizing other types of objects due to their jobs, hobbies or interests. Our culture influences which categories we become interested in, which explains the differences between men and women.”

The results were published online on Aug.

… Read the rest

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Pioneering Radical Feminist Writer Shulamith Firestone Dies

By on September 6, 2012 in News 41

The controversial and brilliant thinker predicted a future in which reproduction would be divorced from sex, with fetuses grown outside the body via technology, which she felt could end the oppression of women. The Villager says:

Shulamith Firestone, who shot to fame at age 25 with her best-selling book, “The Dialectic of Sex,” was found dead in her East Village apartment on Tuesday. She was 67. Suffering from mental illness, she had shut herself off from contact with other people…the cause of death is unclear at this point.

“The Dialectic of Sex” was a key feminist work that presaged today’s issues surrounding birth and science. “No one can understand how feminism has evolved without reading this radical, inflammatory, second-wave landmark,” said Naomi Wolf.

According to Amazon.com, “The book synthesizes the work of Freud, Marx, de Beauvoir and Engels to create a cogent argument for feminist revolution. Identifying women as a caste, she declares that they must seize the means of reproduction — for as long as women (and only women) are required to bear and rear children, they will be singled out as inferior.”

According to Wikipedia, “She advocated the use of cybernetics to carry out human reproduction in laboratories as well as the proliferation of contraception, abortion and state support for child-rearing; enabling [women] to escape their biologically determined positions in society.

… Read the rest

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Finally, Amazon Sells Pens For Women

By on August 31, 2012 in News 16

Some would argue that in our patriarchal, capitalist society, the male-female gender binary is enforced and emphasized, and a never-ending supply of unnecessary consumer items is churned out for people to purchase. Case in point, presenting BIC’s new “For Her” line of pens, with pink coloring and easy glide smoothness (Women were having difficulty pushing pens across paper?) , at last allowing the fairer sex to write by hand. Now for sale on Amazon:

… Read the rest

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Enter the Gulabi Tiger

By on August 29, 2012 in News 0

Picture: McKay Savage (CC)

Pakistan’s Engish Language The News International has an in depth profile of Sampat Pal Devi, the leader of India’s Gulabi Gang—a group of feminist vigilantes in the rural north of India:

Seeds of rebellion were sown early in Sampat Pal’s mind when her parents refused to send her to school. But despite opposition, she learnt to read and write by watching through the boys’ classroom window without letting her parents know of it.

. . .

Resident of village Bidausa, Bundelkhand in Uttar Pradesh, Sampat became a child bride in a region where child marriages are common. Having her first child at the age of 13, by the time she turned 20 Sampat had five children. But that did not deter her from being on her own.

She took up a job as a government health worker and added to the family income. Her husband had by then known that his wife was an independent minded woman and encouraged her in her pursuits.

… Read the rest

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The Western Media Refuses To Respect Pussy Riot

By on August 21, 2012 in News 27

Pussy Riot are some of the most powerfully effective artist-dissidents of our era, so why does our news depict them as punkette Manic Pixie little girls lost? Michael Shean deconstructs:

The members of Pussy Riot have done something remarkable in modern Russia, both in their actions before their arrest and in their statements during trial and conviction: they have straight up called President Putin on this political floor show, and declared bluntly and loudly that the Emperor has no clothes.

What I did not expect was for the complete and utter marginalization of the three performers by the Western media. Perhaps it is naive of me to think that at least some major news outlets west of Moscow would try and handle the situation in a mature and factual manner, but from the very start these women have been pushed into the comfortable, sexualized box of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl.

… Read the rest

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Study: Doctors Using Dangerous Steroids On Fetuses In Experiment To Reduce Lesbianism, Tomboyism, Intersexuality

By on August 20, 2012 in News 2

In short, U.S. doctors have injected at least a thousand pregnant women with hazardous, non-FDA-approved synthetic steroids (without warning them of the risks) in a bizarre experimental effort to reduce future “tomboyism, lesbianism and bisexuality” in fetuses that may be genetically prone to those traits. The Northwestern University News Center unravels the disturbing medical news:

A new paper just published in the Journal of Bioethical Inquiry uses extensive Freedom of Information Act findings to detail an extremely troubling off-label medical intervention employed in the U.S. on pregnant women to intentionally engineer the development of their fetuses for sex normalization purposes.

The pregnant women targeted are at risk for having a child born with the condition congenital adrenal hyperplasia (CAH), an endocrinological condition that can result in female fetuses being born with intersex or more male-typical genitals and brains. Women genetically identified as being at risk are given dexamethasone, a synthetic steroid, off-label starting as early as week five of the first trimester to try to “normalize” the development of those fetuses, which are female and CAH-affected.

… Read the rest

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Saudi Arabia To build Women-Only City.

By on August 16, 2012 in News 8

Photo: Two women dressed in nikab, Wikipedia (PD)

Saudi Arabia wasn’t on my list of places to visit, but with this latest bit of news I just may have to change my mind. In order to encourage career-minded women to pursue their goals and dreams, while maintaining strict adherence to Sharia Law, Saudi Arabia is going to build a female only city within the next year or so. From the Daily Mail:

Saudi Arabia is planning to build a new city exclusively for women as it bids to combine strict Sharia law and career minded females, pursuing work.

It is thought the Saudi Industrial Property Authority (Modon) has been asked to bring the country up to date with the rest of the modern world with the controversial city, which is now being designed with construction to begin next year.

It is hoped it will allow women’s desire to work without defying the country’s Islamic laws.

… Read the rest

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Misogyny, Misandry, Freedom of Speech … and Video Games

By on June 29, 2012 in News 9

Ally Fogg, writing at Heteronormative Patriarchy for Men:

… I don’t have much in the way of informed opinions about misogyny in video games, I’ll leave that to others. Nonetheless I couldn’t help but be sucked in by the debate surrounding Kickstarter Anita Sarkeesian, as good an illustration as we’ll ever need of the vitriol of the new gender wars. An intense storm of hatred was roused by her modest idea to crowd-fund research into sexism in the games industry. The many thousands of hostile comments posted on Sarkeesian’s YouTube video were of course heavily gendered and sexualised, but so too was some of the retaliation – notably Charlie Brooker’s description of the mob as “idiotic pebbledicks” who are terrified of women.

If one of the worst offences committed by sexists and anti-feminists online is to reduce women…

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Remembering The Barbie Liberation Front

By on June 26, 2012 in News 1

An ahead-of-its-time covert shopdropping (the opposite of shoplifting) endeavor, in which the mass produced toys sold to children were “corrected”:

The Barbie Liberation Organisation was an organization that caused a significant cultural jamming intervention in 1993. Having purchased many Barbie dolls and GI Joe action figures, the group switched the voice boxes from a pair of dolls (one from either group) and then placed them onto store shelves. Customers who purchased the toys were surprised to find gung-ho, combat ready Barbie dolls or effeminate GI Joes that were more interested in shopping than shooting.

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