Category Archives: Feminism

In “Life in Synchro,” this hyperfeminist sport empowers women to work together

Synchro is women skating in skimpy uniforms. To music.

I guess it’s hyperfeminist in the same sense the Rockettes are.

OK, fair enough, they’re both difficult, require coordination, have skimpy outfits and are done to music. Just as long as we know what the definition of feminist is these days of course.

After the horrific murder of Grace Millane, it’s worth reflecting on safety measures for dating

Seems fair enough, there ought to be such rules.

Which we used to have of course. Don’t bed anyone you’ve not got to know for example. Dropping knickers making on vulnerable and thus something to be done either sparingly or after due consideration.

Sure, that then reduces the amount of fun the blokes are having too but it was a set of rules that did largely work to address the problem.

Possibly a pity that the set of rules was abandoned as being unfashionable, eh?

Women’s Equality party candidate pulls out of London mayoral race

Ocado chief executive Tim Steiner and his partner, the Polish lingerie model Patrycja Pyka

Ms. Pyka is no doubt highly intelligent, multilingual and all that. It would seem likely that she also looks cracking in her undies.

How odd of a very wealthy man to shack up with such after the break up of the first marriage, no cliche here at all.

Last year, Greer said of Markle: “I hope in a way that she’ll bolt, but maybe she’ll take Harry with her.” Top marks for prescience. This time, in an interview with Australia’s 60 Minutes, Greer spoke about the couple’s “awful” “showbiz” wedding and how they may “slide into complete obscurity”. Then, Greer went low, saying that Markle had better be in love: “If she’s been faking it all this time, oh boy, what misery. How many orgasms will it take? How many fake groans will get her through this?” Well, I wouldn’t know, though maybe no more numerous than the publicity orgasms Greer presumably had when her vile and crude comments went all over the world.

Orgasms, fake groans… Who even has the energy to unpack all the tired, reductive woman-on-woman nastiness in that? This is the author of The Female Eunuch pondering whether a woman is a conniving fame-whore, who views her husband, the father of her child, as a lucrative “john”. And yet, far from being shocking, what’s striking is how predictable, even monotonous, all this is. Who isn’t attacking Meghan these days?

My own reading of reductive woman-on-woman nastiness is that whatever any woman says about someone else there’ll be another woman ready to say “Oooh, she’s such a bitch, didja hear what she said about…..?”

But then given that I’m male I’m not allowed an opinion on such, am I?

The families of three female high school runners filed a federal lawsuit on Wednesday seeking to block transgender athletes in Connecticut from participating in girls’ sports.

Nearly three decades ago, when I was an overweight teenager, I sometimes ate six pieces of sliced white toast in a row, each one slathered in butter or jam. I remember the spongy texture of the bread as I took it from its plastic bag. No matter how much of this supermarket toast I ate, I hardly felt sated. It was like eating without really eating. Other days, I would buy a box of Crunchy Nut Cornflakes or a tube of Pringles: sour cream and onion flavour stackable snack chips, which were an exciting novelty at the time, having only arrived in the UK in 1991. Although the carton was big enough to feed a crowd, I could demolish most of it by myself in a sitting. Each chip, with its salty and powdery sour cream coating, sent me back for another one. I loved the way the chips – curved like roof tiles – would dissolve slightly on my tongue.

After one of these binges – because that is what they were – I would speak to myself with self-loathing. “What is wrong with you?” I would say to the tear-stained face in the mirror. I blamed myself for my lack of self-control. But now, all these years later, having mostly lost my taste for sliced bread, sugary cereals and snack chips, I feel I was asking myself the wrong question. It shouldn’t have been “What is wrong with you?” but “What is wrong with this food?”

Back in the 90s, there was no word to cover all the items I used to binge on. Some of the things I over-ate – crisps or chocolate or fast-food burgers – could be classified as junk food, but others, such as bread and cereal, were more like household staples. These various foods seemed to have nothing in common except for the fact that I found them very easy to eat a lot of, especially when sad. As I ate my Pringles and my white bread, I felt like a failure for not being able to stop. I had no idea that there would one day be a technical explanation for why I found them so hard to resist. The word is “ultra-processed” and it refers to foods that tend to be low in essential nutrients, high in sugar, oil and salt and liable to be overconsumed.

It’s never, ever, the fault of the individual woman, is it?

The Home Office and the Department of Health have vowed to tackle the “harmful practice” of “virginity repair” surgery and the “deeply regressive” attitudes that drive women to have it done.

It’s now government and societal policy that crafting a new cock for a woman is a ‘uman right. Crafting a new hymen is not.

Hmm.

A steak restaurant in Liverpool has launched a ‘ladies fillet’ because they say that their female diners struggle to eat the larger cuts.

The steak “is for the ladies” boasts the menu of the Manhattan Bar & Grill on Fenwick Street, which offers a cheaper, smaller, fillet for women.

The restaurant said that they had introduced the 8oz steaks after they received “countless queries” from female visitors and hen parties asking if they had anything smaller than their classic 10oz fat free version.

But some people have criticised the restaurant and said that the gendered menu is sexist.

Managing Director of Manhattan Bar & Grill, Karl Hassan, said the restaurant was simply responding to demand.

Consenting adults indulging in voluntary exchange have every right to be as sexist – or not so – as they wish. What’s it to you what they do, Pal?

‘Kickass women win’: Warren makes case to Iowans why she can beat Trump

It just doesn’t ring right, does it? A 71 year old law professor kicking ass? And how?

After the transgender mixed-martial-arts fighter Fallon Fox began—literally—smashing opponents’ heads, Rogan said this on his podcast:

Look, [Fox is] huge! She’s not just huge, she’s got a fucking man’s face. I mean, you can wear all the lipstick you want. You want to be a woman and you want to take female hormones, you want to get a boob job, that’s all fine. I support your life to live, your right to live as a woman.

Fight guys, yes. She has to fight guys. First of all, she’s not really a she. She’s a transgender, post-op person. The operation doesn’t shave down your bone density. It doesn’t change. You look at a man’s hands and you look at a woman’s hands and they’re built different. They’re just thicker, they’re stronger, your wrists are thicker, your elbows are thicker, your joints are thicker. Just the mechanical function of punching, a man can do it much harder than a woman can, period.

Many Democrats would find the above opinion, and the people who would uphold or express it, abhorrent.

Reality isn’t optional folks. it just ain’t.

Equal rights? Sure, even Hell Yes. Equal in every way? None of the rest of us are nor ever will be….

Poppy Noor:

Vaginas come in a variety of sizes and shapes, and the tightness of one’s vagina has nothing to do with how much pleasure can be derived from it.

Slightly depends which end of the process you’re on at the time. As with other things sex and size related really.

Not just that, but the idea that a dry, tight vagina is desirable is a frankly depressing sexual idea, and misinformation of the worst, most misogynistic kind.

It’s also a very sub-Saharan African one – dry sex as it is known – which mightily contributes to the spread of HIV. But this is the Guardian so perhaps best not to mention that, eh?

A judge refused to overturn part of Utah’s lewdness law on Tuesday in a blow to a woman who is fighting criminal charges after her stepchildren saw her topless in her own home.

So, she and hubby were hanging drywall. She took her top off to keep it from getting dirty. The stepkids walked in.

Yes, in her own house, charged with lewdness.

Septics, eh? But the real point of the story is here:

The charges against her were filed after the children’s mother reported the incident to child welfare officials working on a separate investigation involving the kids.

Bet that was an amicable divorce…..

A few years ago I hadn’t given menopause a second thought. These days it’s pretty much all I think, talk and write about, but that was never the plan. In the summer of 2012, I had to undergo a total abdominal hysterectomy, including the removal of both of my ovaries, due to suspected ovarian cancer.

How different modern feminism is from previous manifestations of femininity. The personal is all consuming.

We’ve spent a long time trying to tell each other that skin colour, sex (or gender) don’t matter in vast areas of life. Including who governs. Apparently this is incorrect:

Sanders is the most progressive and revolutionary candidate on the merits, these folks argue, so the fact that Warren is a woman – and similarly progressive – can’t matter. The insistence that an elderly white man’s socialist revolution will better address my 21st-century black feminist gender concerns is textbook white liberal paternalism. How will Sanders white masculinity affect and inform how he governs? This is a question that we should get to ask. Being progressive doesn’t mean that one’s race or gender ceases to matter in one’s leadership style and prerogatives, especially not in a world where gender and race are always presumed to matter for how women and people of color will govern.

Oh, so gender (or sex) and skin colour do matter when governing. Therefore we should be taking both into account when we elect someone.

So, far I’ve just repeated what she’s said. Not changed it at all.

But what’s the implication of that? That the way birds and melanies* will govern is different precisely because they are birds and melanies. Which does mean that we’re all now allowed to not vote for them, to deliberately vote against them even, on the grounds that we don;t want to be governed the way that birds and melanies would.

Which isn’t what she wants to say at all, I’m sure, even as she is saying don;t vote for Bernie ‘cuz he’s white and a man.

*Those endowed with the superpower of extra melanin

Free bus travel for Waspi women ‘discriminates against men’

How can this not be true?

Women living in County Durham who have been affected by the rise in their state pension age will be entitled to free bus passes, in a controversial project that has been criticised by experts.

Durham County Council’s cabinet approved a scheme yesterday to give free bus passes to around 3,000 women who could be facing financial troubles due to the equalisation of retirement ages between men and women.

Female prisoners are made to shower with transgender women offenders who are still “anatomically male” in at least one Scottish prison, an MSP has said.

Kenneth Gibson, the SNP politician for Cunninghame North, made the revelation to Scottish Parliament today after calling for a ban on transgender offenders who are physically male being admitted to female prisons.

Not the showering together, that’s only fun when it’s voluntary. But the can of worms being opened here. Checking grollies to decide between male and female seems sensible, logical, and in terms of prisons and enclosed environments, just plain right.

Then we’ve the currently fashionable insistence that grollies don’t matter and aren’t what defines.

Who to believe, eh?

We’ve now got tribunals deciding what is work of equal value.

Samira Ahmed has won her equal pay claim against the BBC in a landmark case that lawyers say could leave the broadcaster facing a bill running into the millions for similar claims by other female staff.

Ahmed, the presenter of viewer feedback programme Newswatch, claimed she was owed almost £700,000 in back pay because of the difference between her £440-an-episode rate and the £3,000 an episode Jeremy Vine received for hosting the similar Points of View programme.

As Adam Smith pointed out all jobs pay the same in the end. But even excluding that idea this is still something of a can of worms. For there are undoubtedly popsies out there being paid sums to be toothsome when their male counterparts aren’t. Be interesting to see that before a tribunal, eh?

And when will we see sex discrimination cases about the sexy movies? The women always do get more than the men after all.