Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved arrived in my hands via a public library, when I was a broke teenager with vague ideas about what it meant to be a feminist at the turn of the century. The central character, Sethe, is an African-American woman living in the United States in the late 19th century. An escaped ...
Apparently it’s not done for women to wear their engagement rings to interviews. Personally I think it’s a good policy for women of a certain age to leave their wedding bands at home, because the assumption will either be that you already have kids or that you’ll get hired and then immediately run off and ...
Pornographic images and sex acts depicted on tokens dating back to the Roman occupation of Britain have been found in the UK. It is thought that these are tokens that were used at brothels and are considered an important find in terms of the history of pornography and art in general. But it is also important ...
After watching movies like Taken and Trade, and reading the real-life details of the ongoing Pickton inquiry, it’s hard to think anyone would be a sex worker voluntarily. We assume that all sex workers are somehow coerced into the trade because a life of selling your body for profit is unimaginable for most of us. But a ...
Supporting heterosexual marriage is not, and should never be, about dismissing gay marriage. Throw in a casual denial of the severity of slavery and you’ll find yourself in a well-deserved political shit storm. Republican presidential candidates Michele Bachmann and Rick Santorum learnt this the hard way. The pair, and a host of other politicians, recently ...
It’s one thing to agree with the exchange of sex for money and quite another to propose it should be legal for women to be sex slaves. Salwa al Mutairi, a female Kuwaiti politician, has said that men should use women as sex slaves. But there’s more. She adds that prisoners from war-torn countries would ...
Are women more amenable to slavery? For years and almost without exception, every time one particular group of mistreated women open their mouths, they swear their (sometimes brutally physical) torture came at the hands of other women.
The Other Man
So, we’re having this baby. It’s due in a few weeks and we’re trying to get organized with all...
I recently heard about what is claimed to be the rising phenomenon of Japanese men remaining virgins for longer...
Ladders. Patriarchal conspiracy. I’ll explain… This week I climbed a ladder. I was trying to reach a loft space,...
Dear Madame X, My boyfriend needs to look at porn while we have sex. It bothers me because I...
Mrs. Dalloway is yet another feminist classic that I had to grow into. Wrapped up in Woolf’s instantly recognizable...
Last week saw a Big Thing come to our soggy little island. Well, it was a Big Thing for...
Last weekend I was entertaining a guest, you know, the sort I was planning to have lots and lots...
All little girls want to be princesses… right?! It’s bad enough that toy aisles are separated out by what...
