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 ...
Usually getting fired is a bad thing. But, somehow, this woman is happy about it. Can you imagine...
My attention was drawn this week to an article on the resurgence of the market for men’s underwear. It...
Meh, the night bus. It isn’t ideal, but with the price of trains nowadays and the hellish standing-up-from-Edinburgh-to-Manchester situation...
Ladies, learn to know the signs of ovulation! So many women have no idea and so many headaches and...
Remember that time when I was with my friends and I saw you playing pool with your friends and...
Dear Madame X, My girl is hot but every single time we get into a fight she is all...
My first encounter with Kitchen, Banana Yoshimoto’s 1988 novel (translated into English in 1993 by Megan Backus) was in...
A slut is a person of any gender who has the courage to lead life according to the radical...
