Boy books. You’re thinking The Boys’ Book of Trains and The Hardy Boys, right? I’m thinking most of the books I took in high school English. Consider Knowles’ A Separate Peace. Separate indeed. It’s set at a boys’ boarding school. The boys are obsessed with jumping out of a tree. This involves considerable risk of …
Category: sexism
Oct 26 2015
The Default Male
“Why the Default Male is Not Just Annoying, But Also Harmful” check it out at http://cratesandribbons.com/2013/01/27/why-the-default-male-is-not-just-annoying-but-also-harmful/#comment-124981
Oct 15 2015
Why Women are Leaving Law Firms
“Here’s my theory: women aren’t leaving law firms at an abnormal rate. They’re leaving law firms at a perfectly rational and normal rate. It’s men who are staying in law firms at an abnormal rate. Women aren’t the faulty outliers; men are. “When you look at the situation that way, a lot of things start …
Aug 17 2014
Reporting What Women Do
What if for just one year, the media reported 90% of the time what women were doing instead of, as is now the case, what men are doing? Not because what women do is better, or more newsworthy, but just to see how it would change our outlook, our world view. The news might be …
Jul 28 2014
On the Radfem Doctrine of Separatism
Here’s the thing. Men are already separatists. (So really we have no choice.) Men already exclude women from anything, everything, important. (Any inclusion is tokenism: a false symbol, a PR move.) Men already refuse to get involved with ‘women’s issues’, whether personal or political. That feminism itself is considered a special interest thing indicates that. …
Jul 07 2014
Why aren’t there any great women Xs?
A new (for me) answer to the classic question, Why aren’t there any great women Xs, occurred to me when I saw a website for a small company of composers specializing in music for dance troupes (all four composers were male) shortly after a male friend of mine confessed that if he wasn’t getting paid …
Jun 09 2014
Brilliant Piece – “Little Women, Big Men” – check it out!
“…what many unthreateningly call “the male ego” (an inadequate term to describe the drive behind men’s collective undermining of women)…” – one of the many brilliant lines in “Little Women, Big Men: Sexism and the Language of Size” by Andrea Safran. http://www.saidit.org/archives/vol4no2/language.html
May 19 2014
Brunettes, Blondes, and Redheads
So the other day I started reading Iron Shadows by Steven Barnes. He’s apparently a bestselling author. Which is really disturbing. Because four sentences in, he describes a woman as “a small wiry brunette”. Seriously? Does anyone actually identify women by their hair colour any more? That’s so—1940s. Isn’t it? I check. The book’s copyright …
Mar 05 2014
Pointlessly Gendered Products
Check it out: http://www.buzzfeed.com/erinchack/pointlessly-gendered-products Be sure to read the comments/captions. They’re great.
Feb 23 2014
Dangerous Sports
I haven’t really kept up with the sexism in the Olympics, mostly because the nationalism bothers me so much I don’t even watch them anymore, but I suspect there are still some sports in which women aren’t allowed to compete. Perhaps because of the tired, old, and fucking patronizing ‘You could get hurt!’ This from …