Another election is coming up in Canada. As things stand, the Conservatives are in a position to win a majority in Parliament. We cannot let that happen . The Harper Conservatives are without a doubt the worst party we have on women’s rights. They’ve tried to introduce legislation that would create a legal basis for recognizing fetal personhood. They [...]

Cross-posted at This Is Hysteria! Dear Lady Gaga, I love what you do. The populist spirit with which you insist that pop culture is art. Your devotion to performance. The sense of community that you’re building with your fans. That you’re not afraid to make out with butch women in your music videos, or be photographed in drag. I love [...]

Cross-posted at This Is Hysteria! Dear Lady Gaga, I love what you do. The populist spirit with which you insist that pop culture is art. Your devotion to performance. The sense of community that you’re building with your fans. That you’re not afraid to make out with butch women in your music videos, or be photographed in drag. I love [...]

You can add this to the list of anti-woman things the Conservative government has done: treat sex-workers who work indoors instead of on the street like members of organized crime. New regulations were recently announced which allow the government to crack down on certain offences associated with organized crime, without having to go to the [...]

Trigger warning for links: violent and abusive language By now, we’ve all heard about Mel Gibson’s racist and misogynistic rants threatening his wife.  I can’t say that I’m surprised by Gibson’s behaviour. What I have been rather stunned by is how his rants have caught on as a meme – although in retrospect it shouldn’t have. We are, [...]

Cross-posted at my blog, Hysteria(!) This past fall I had a disagreement with a classmate, in which she maintained that universal human rights (in their current form) are distinctively Western. I felt it was arrogant to imagine that only Western culture could give rise to values like equality. (I guess our two positions weren’t necessarily exclusive. It felt [...]

Jezebel has really been bothering me lately. First, it was the comments on Amanda Hess’ take down of Mary Elizabeth Williams’ condescending, victim-blamey post about sex-tapes . Which were very dismissive of the possibility that a woman who chose a career in the public eye could want to maintain any personal boundaries at all, and aren’t famous women [...]

There seems to be a rising trend in Japan of boys wearing skirts . Which I think is pretty cool. The article links this trend to ” Vegetarian Boys ” – that is, boys who don’t spend their time “hunting” girls. The second article frames this as a problem that will exacerbate Japan’s decreasing birth rate, and of course places [...]

I’m planing a comparative essay on non-Western feminist law reform (or at least law reform efforts). I’m intending to examine how culture is negotiated and constructed, with the goal of showing that enforcing equality rights does not necessarily mean abandoning the local legal system in favour of Western liberalism. Basically I had this conversation with someone [...]