My Body is Not a Moral Issue

I know this thing is extremely long, but I don’t want to put anything behind a cut, because I kinda like the damn thing. Semi-sincere apologies for that. 
I was once talking to a guy I didn’t know very well who was in the process of getting over some serious illnesses. I commented that he was [...]

What Privilege Really Looks Like (Plus: Purposeful Subversion Means Playing in the Box)

My titles are just getting longer and longer.
There’s been tons of discussion on transphobia by feminists/radfems around the blogosphere recently. There’s a thread over at Feministe from a couple of weeks ago, filled with everything from awesomeness to throw-hands-up-in-hopeless-despair, and certainly a few things in between. This comment by miss sophie, exemplifies a lot [...]

I *Knew* I Should Have Gone for Easter Lilies

Natalia Antonova has performed for us the truly arduous task of wading through misogyny in Russian just so we can all appreciate this brilliant piece of analysis highlighting one of the many, many problems with celebrating International Women’s Day:
Women are given flowers, and the givers know well that a flower is a plant’s genital organ, [...]

Almost Like the Borders are Not Where We Think They Are At All

Via matttbastard, I discovered “Hidden from History”, exposing the too frequently ignored/denied story of the genocide of indigenous peoples in Canada, and it’s fucking frighteningly recent components. Full length documentary included via google video – I haven’t had a chance to watch it yet, but I hope to shortly. During the same tour of my [...]

Gender Essentialism from All Sides

This is a very long essay that I’ve written mainly for the purpose of connecting dots in my own head, so it goes from some broad “Feminism 101″ analysis to a more specific point about the theoretical treatment of gender essentialism within (some) radical feminist circles. I don’t think it really has a target audience, [...]

How Did You Know?

I say this a lot, but it bears repeating – as cynical as I may appear, I can still be incredibly naive and optimistic about people. I’ve come to actually be proud of that, because it’s not a naiveté borne out of not having bothered to live or open my eyes, and certainly not one [...]

Seriously, When Did This Become Revolutionary?

Amanda at Pandagon has a post entitled “We have nothing to lose…” that reads, in its entirety:
By letting sex workers have a voice in the feminist movement. Surely we can disagree on the best practices for reducing the male abuse of sex workers without excluding people from the movement? I have to register my disapproval [...]

Neuroscience Makes People Stupid

I’ve been stuck in bed all day with crippling amounts of pain and somehow ended up browsing through the legions and legions of posts that Language Log wrote about the book The Female Brain (list at the bottom). Towards the end of it, even the author says that it’s all “more than any sane person [...]

The Meaning of Rights (aka “Not Being an Asshole, The Sequel”)

A few weeks ago, it was International Sex Workers’ Rights Day. Renegade Evolution wrote a post on Alternet lamenting the lack of feminist commentary on the subject (not having noticed it at the time, I feel a *little* hypocritical saying something three weeks later, but remaining timely in the blogosphere, both reading and writing, has [...]

Separate Planes of Comparison

One of the other recurring themes in that Feministing thread I referenced in my last post was the point that housewives can’t be feminists. One commenter on this theme went so far as to say
If its about choice then I choose that women cant be housewives and feminists at the same time.
…at which point you [...]