Check it out here!
[Hell Yeah, I’m a Feminist is a feminist blog, often radical feminist (radfem), always anti-gender and anti-sexism.]
Nov 01 2013
Surrogacy – Why Not?
Sure, women should be allowed to be surrogates. We all do work with our bodies, some of us also include our minds in the deal (some of us are allowed to include our minds in the deal), so why not? As long as they get paid for service rendered.
Being a surrogate is sort of like being an athlete. You have to be and stay physically healthy, for the duration: you have to eat and drink the right stuff, and not eat or drink the wrong stuff; you have to get the right amount of physical activity. And so on. It’s important. Use during pregnancy of illegal drugs (such as crack cocaine and heroin) as well as legal drugs (such as alcohol and nicotine) can cause, in the newborn, excruciating pain, vomiting, inability to sleep, reluctance to feed, diarrhoea leading to shock and death, severe anaemia, growth retardation, mental retardation, central nervous system abnormalities, and malformations of the kidneys, intestines, head and spinal cord (Madam Justice Proudfoot, “Judgement Respecting Female Infant ‘D.J.”; Michelle Oberman, “Sex, Drugs, Pregnancy, and the Law: Rethinking the Problems of Pregnant Women who use Drugs”). Refusal of fetal therapy techniques (such as surgery, blood infusions, and vitamin regimens) can result in respiratory distress, and various genetic disorders and defects such as spina bifida and hydrocephalus (Deborah Mathieu, Preventing Prenatal Harm: Should the State Intervene?)
To be an elite surrogate, Continue reading
Nov 01 2013
What happens when men do the cooking and the baking?
Used to be women did the cooking and the baking. Then men starting getting into it. And in theory, I have no problem with that. In fact, I’m all for making everything gender-unaligned. But now that men are in the kitchen, suddenly it’s important. So important it’s being televised.
And my god, the drama! (And they call us drama queens.) The tension, the conflict… Chefs (yes, men are chefs; women were just cooks) scream with self-righteous anger at their minions, they rush around with great urgency making sure every sprinkle of cinnamon is just right, because, well, it’s so frickin’ important.
The phenomenon defies logic. Drama, therefore importance? No, because then the toddler screaming about his toy truck in the shopping mall would rank right up there with nuclear disarmament.
If anything, Continue reading
Oct 25 2013
The Right to Life – a given?
What if the right to life was a natural, inalienable human right to age 18, but after that it was an acquired, alienable right? So you had to deserve it somehow, you had to deserve to be alive. And you could lose it, by doing any of a number of things…
Oct 24 2013
The Pill for Men
‘Outrageous!’ That was the word used way back in ’85 in response to the expectation that men take a contraceptive that had a side-effect of reduced sex drive. Hello. Let me tell you about the contraceptive pill for women. Side-effects include headaches, nausea, weight gain, mood changes, yeast infections, loss of vision, high blood pressure, gall bladder disease, liver tumours, skin cancer, strokes, heart attacks, and death. Oh, and reduced sex drive. (Thing is, and get this – do not pass go until you do – taking the pill is, for many of us, preferable to getting pregnant.)
But, you know, Continue reading
Oct 18 2013
Needs and Wants
I don’t like living in a global community. When everything is so interconnected, everything I do (or don’t do) is bound to be at someone else’s expense. Mere self-interest seems impossible; selfishness is inevitable.
For example, Continue reading
Oct 17 2013
The Wife
The Good Wife, The Trophy Wife, The First Wives Club…why in the 21st century do women continue to be so frequently identified as wives? That is, identified in relation to men?
We don’t see a similar proliferation of tv shows and movies with “husband” in the title. The word is emasculating. It would be especially so if it were in the context of “The Perfect Husband” or “Julia’s Husband” or some such.
Why don’t people see that “wife” is just as bad, just as subordinating?
(They do. That’s why the male writers, directors, and producers use it so often.)
(On a somewhat related note, I once read with amazement the synopsis of a movie that went something like “A man’s wife goes missing from their house and …” — why didn’t they just say “A woman goes missing from her house and …” ??)
[Hell Yeah, I’m a Feminist is a feminist blog, often radical feminist (radfem), always anti-gender and anti-sexism.]
Oct 14 2013
Ladies, It’s Your Fault – GREAT video!
Check out this GREAT video! “Ladies, It’s Your Fault!”
Oct 11 2013
Our Christian Language
I hadn’t really thought about it until I saw ‘his word’ corrected to ‘His Word’ on a Writing Competency Test at a publicly-funded university.
I can accept a capital on ‘God’ because the word is being used as a name, and names are generally capitalized. (Though I do find it rather presumptuous to so appropriate a common noun. It’s also a bit coercive: to use a common noun without an article is to imply there’s only one – the claim ‘Cat is happy’ demands the question ‘Which cat?’ unless you think there’s only one; so when the rest of us want to refer to the Christian god, since we must say ‘God’ instead of using a real name like ‘Zeus’ or ‘Hela’, we are unwillingly implying the same belief.)
And I can accept capitals on ‘The Bible‘, as well as italics, because the words refer to the title of a book, and such words are generally capitalized, as well as italicized.
But what’s the rationale for capitalizing ‘His Word’? Continue reading
Oct 10 2013
Marriage: A Sexist Affair
Marriage, by its very (traditional) definition, is a sexist affair: it involves one of each sex, one male and one female. And I suppose this is because, traditionally, the purpose of marriage was family: to start a family, to have and raise children.
This view is fraught with questionable assumptions, glaring inconsistencies, and blatant errors. I’ll give one of each: the connection between having and raising children is not at all necessary, hence the ‘one male and one female’ is not at all necessary; if the purpose of marriage is to have a family, why do couples who do not intend to have children nevertheless marry – and why don’t couples routinely divorce once the children are raised; the marriage contract goes well beyond family concerns – indeed, it barely approaches family concerns – one pledges to love and honour one’s spouse, not one’s children.
Notwithstanding the very mistaken connection between marriage and family, I’d like to suggest another reason for the sexism in marriage. Assuming that marriage entails love, and love entails ‘looking after’, sexism makes things ‘easier’.
Consider this: Continue reading
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