I hate doing topical posts, but this feels important. There have been any number of thinkpieces about Wonder Woman and the movie’s importance to female representation on the silver screen. There have also been thinkpieces about the inadequacy of Wonder Woman in that way (a white, cis-gendred, rail thin, young woman with symettrical features is hardly the Every Woman).
But before I get to Wonder Woman, a little story.
The media narrative on what constitutes a successful relationship has been so warped by society that I think real relationships are actively being harmed by it. People are choosing to stay in unhappy relationships or opting out of relationships altogether because they don’t know what a lasting commitment ought to look like.
Today, we begin to debunk them using my favorite medium, pop culture.
Originally, I intended to make this a single post, but I found SO MANY examples that infuriate me that I decided to split it up by theme.
Today? The concept of your significant other being your “other half”. Spoiler alert, they shouldn’t be.
My route to feminism was a bit odd. I’ve always considered myself a feminist, before I even knew the word for it, but as with nearly everything kids do, I had a somewhat perverted view of what it meant.
I HATED pink. Pink was a girly colour, and I was a feminist, so I loved blue. Girls were dumb, so I strove to be the smartest in my class. Girls were meek, so I tried to be the biggest badass.
It took me quite a long time to understand that feminism is quite explicitly against this nonsense. That you can be a modern woman and like pink, or be shy, or anything else. I like to think I’ve grown past the views my 10-year-old self held, but there is nothing like a new experience to prove you wrong.
Enter, my first ever Zumba class.
To be honest, I thought this was pretty cut and dry. In fact, I gave up on the show 20 minutes in because the sexist cliches were as overpowering and nauseating as a teenager using Axe body spray.
But time and distance cool heads. With the second season launched, I decided to give it another go, to see if I had judged a bit too early. Mostly, because I’d seen very little discussion of this subject online. People wax lyrically about female-led shows being this or that, but I think we assume too quickly that a show with a male protagonist will be sexist by default, and that lets a lot shows get away with a lot of short cuts that shouldn’t be acceptable in this day and age.
So – four days and two full seasons later, here is an analysis of the show with a feminist lens.
DISCLAIMER: There will be some very minor spoilers. Also, this isn’t about whether the show is GOOD or BAD, that topic has been covered thoroughly elsewhere.
With the drama around the Oscars controversy and the pretty terrible things some have said about it, I thought it would be a good idea to write a post to help people who do not see the effects of racial inequality understand why it matters, even to you.
So, if you’d like to know why, dear white reader with zero personal stake in racial equality, you should still really really care about it nonetheless, read on!
Continue reading “Totally selfish reasons to care about #blacklivesmatter and #oscarssowhite”
I am an enthusiastic advocate for women’s rights. A part of the discussion around women’s rights, sometimes all the discussion, focuses on women’s bodies. What they can, can’t, should, shouldn’t, etc do/feel about them.
Back in high school, I was very much against abortion except for in the most severe of circumstances.
In fact, it still feels disingenuous to me when we start arguing technicalities about when someone is a person versus a fetus or whatever. What really drove me from the Pro-Life camp had nothing to do with that argument at all.
Replacing rage with love 