Saudi Arabia’s 88-year-old king gave women the right to vote and to run in municipal elections on Sunday. This is a big step towards equality, although women will have more power in theory rather than in practice. They won’t be able to vote until 2015 and will be barred from next week’s elections. It’s disappointing ...
In September, Italy could be the next country to pass a law banning burqas, following in the footsteps of France and Belgium. A parliamentary commission approved a draft of the law on Tuesday. The current draft forbids women from wearing a burqa or naqib, but also prohibits anyone from covering their faces with a motorcycle ...
Tolerance is a quality a lot of people think they possess. In practice, it’s a little more complicated, especially when we tackle the subject of burqas. A Saudi student, Gawheer Saud Al Thaubity, was left in tears on the side of the road after she tried to board a bus with her son in Auckland, ...
The intactivist movement has a strong candidate for a new spokesman in Russell Crowe, who went on a violent rant against male circumcision on Twitter yesterday after one of his followers asked him if he should get his son circumcised. Calling the practice “barbaric and stupid,” he indiscriminately shot down any objections his followers made ...
Fans always want it to be about the love of the game, but for Iranian women following Islamic tradition, their sneakers are laced with deep religious ties. In an Olympic qualifying round held in Jordan, the Iranian soccer team was disqualified because women refused to take off their hijabs. The head of the Iranian soccer ...
Divorce is usually a mutual decision by two people. It’s not always amicable, but the blame for the dissolution of marriage can rarely be placed on one spouse. But women alone are being blamed for the high divorce rate in the UAE by judicial officials. The tradition was that men had to make three statements ...
A group of three men are being charged with the murder of Katya Koren in Ukraine, after allegedly stoning her to death for apparently violating Islam as a beauty pageant contestant. The men in question believe that Katya was betraying Sharia Law by not dressing modestly and participating in the competition, in which she placed ...
Two big changes regarding transgender rights have been proposed this week. One would legally recognize transgendered citizens as a third gender, and one would refuse to recognize a sex change. Let’s see if you can guess which law was proposed in the US and which in Pakistan. If you guessed that Pakistan proposed recognizing a ...
God’s wife was erased from the Bible, a British theologian has discovered. Back in the day before Muslims and Christians, God was called Yahweh and he was worshiped along with his wife, Asherah. At least according to Francesca Stavrakopoulou, a lecturer at the department of Theology and Religion at the University of Exeter. “After years ...
The Northern African Islamic Republic of Mauritania has issued a fatwa, or Islamic law, banning female genital mutilation (FGM). The authors of the law used religious legal experts to support this change in law. The experts supported “their assertion that [s]uch practices were not present in the Maghreb countries over the past centuries” and removed ...
The latest film in the American Pie series, American Reunion, contains a shocking scene – male full-frontal nudity including...
Dear Madame X, I have just started seeing this girl. She seems great, but she recently told me she...
Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved arrived in my hands via a public library, when I was a broke teenager with...
My attention was drawn this week to an article about the reaction at a Canadian university to proposals to...
Airport security. Bloody nuisance. Also a conspiracy designed to subjugate women. Allow me to elaborate. Despite flying quite a...
The Cannes film festival has kicked off this week with controversy over the lack of films made by women...
Dear Madame X, I seem to be only attracted to men who are macho assholes. I like them at...
When A Clockwork Orange was published in 1962, the term sexualized violence wasn’t in use. The distinction between sexualized...
