Where are you from? Part 3

My mother is asked this all the time by strangers in the street. And she’ll answer, hesitatingly, with the country in which she lived prior to coming here, because that’s what people want to hear, satisfied they’ve correctly deduced her accent. (Or they’ll push for more, because her looks say something else.) But I’m not all too sure she thinks that that is where she’s “from”. It’s telling that this is generally asked by those with what are here the dominant background and the “right” accent.

The dignifying power of design

I had the great fortune to go to the ribbon-cutting ceremony for a newly constructed headquarters for GEMS last week. For those who don’t know, GEMS, which stands for Girls Educational & Mentoring Services, is an organization that serves girls and young women who have experienced commercial sexual exploitation and domestic trafficking. It was founded in 1998 by Rachel Lloyd, a survivor herself.

What’s So Great About Happiness?

As we celebrated the 100th anniversary of International Women’s Day this week, there was a lot of retreading over the age-old question: Has feminism made us happier? So, so many people think they’re quite clever by telling us: No! It has not! It has, in fact, ruined everything! Phyllis Schlafly and her niece, Suzanne Venker,

I Am Not Black

Is it “chivalry” if women do it as often as men?

A pregnant woman in Brooklyn kept track of how often people gave her their seat on the subway. The results? People give up their seats a lot! Except on the G train, where people are bastards (probably because they’re mad they have the ride the worst train in the city — understandable). And men and women give up their seats at roughly the same rates.

Ladyblog Debate: Can Feminists Be Sexy, Professionals Pretty?

After getting some friendly feminist Twitter flack for our name when we relaunched as The Sexy Feminist, we teamed up with Pretty Young Professional (another site whose name has been questioned) and The Daily Femme (who’d done someof the questioning) to debate whether feminists can be sexy and young professionals can be pretty without compromising

Tony Porter on "The Man Box" (short video): on oppressive masculinity and het men’s choice to be humane instead

Paris Gyms: Enter At Your Own Risk

From a very young age my mother instilled in me a certain logic, if you can call it that. There were clothes that could be worn to school, to friends houses, out to dinner and to events and then there were what she called “play clothes” – clothes for lounging around the house, playing outside or engaging in any kind of athletic activity. The two were not to overlap. From the moment I would get home from school I was told to go upstairs and change into my play clothes before doing anything else. I never found this to be unusual since the only time I would see my mother in anything but her play clothes (jeans, a sweatshirt and slippers) was when she would run errands or go out to dinner with my father on the weekends. It was an irritating rule but not something I perceived as abnormal.

Mapping fragmented movements

As many of you have already read, I’ve been organizing a summit focused on challenging the toxic culture that makes girls and women hate their own bodies. The shared goal of the five summits around the world, taking place this March, is to collaborate on an international campaign. As such, I’ve been thinking a lot about movement building.

On Media, Heterosexism, Misogyny, Racism, and Men’s Willful Refusal To Get What Women Experience Daily

The image above, and several others: racist, heterosexist, as well as grossly hostile to women, have been discussed for a while at the blog Sociological Images. I was part of a discussion there months ago. And recently some fellow named Lawrence has shown up to offer up one of the more inane and preDICKtable replies to viewing such images as the one above.

What’s provocative and what’s offensive? And who gets to decide?

Let’s start this week off with some controversy, shall we? Salon.com recently wrote a piece about shocking child photography, and the fine line between what is “art” and what is, by many people’s standards, child porn. I guess this is another example of an argument that may never be resolved because of the subjectivity involved, but surely there should be some clear, consistent guidelines in order to protect children. The slideshow attached to this article serves to show that sexualizing young children in the media certainly isn’t new – it’s been around for a while.

The Zen of Young Money: Being Present to the Genius of Black Youth

I am a member of a criminalized generation of black geniuses. My twenty-something age-mates and the teenagers behind us are often dismissed as materialistic, crass, empty-headed, impulse addicts. Elders mourn our distance from the forms of social movement participation they would have imagined and mass media relates to us as a market to be bought, exploited and sold back to ourselves, ever cheaper.