We teach our daughters about rape, but men can be victims too, as the author learned the hard way. So why are men so often left out of the conversation? Several weeks ago, my college-aged son was raped by a male acquaintance. With the immediate crisis stage behind us, my whole family has started to […]
Mainstream media has painted Bode Miller as a dedicated father in a brutal custody battle. But where’s the focus on his attempt to control the life and restrict the rights of a pregnant woman? Nowhere, says Soraya Chemaly. Today, a New York family court will decide where the nine-month old baby of “America’s most decorated […]
Stop freaking out about the dating habits of the Facebook generation, says Ashley Lauren Samsa. Teens aren’t losing the ability to communicate, they’ve just found new tools to rewrite an old story. “Do you like Josh? Circle yes or no.” I remember the first time I got a note like that one. It was written […]
This originally appeared on Mamamia. Republished here with permission. “I am prouder of my years as a single mother than of any other part of my life. Yes, I got off benefits and wrote the first four Harry Potter books as a single mother, but nothing makes me prouder than what Jessica told me recently […]
Not a fan of organized religion, Traci Foust preferred to live by a different standard: Be kind, don’t judge. So when her young son announced that he wanted to join the local Baptist church, she had no choice but to let him. As I watched my AC/DC album burn in our fireplace, by order of […]
Do we ever outgrow our desire to have “one big happy family”? When I was a kid, we always had really big Thanksgiving celebrations—loud, crowded dinners where aunts and uncles and distant cousins five-times removed would eat too much and tell dirty jokes that went right over my head. I loved the noise and the […]
Wouldn’t you want to be remembered when you’re gone? Wouldn’t you want to imagine that when people gather in the spirit of goodwill that rather than say nothing at all, they invoked what you meant to them? The holidays are problematic. Everybody knows this, and the complicated feelings around any “meant to be awesome” celebration […]
We do real harm when we refer to girls as bad asses for making certain decisions, because the subtly-whispered subtext is, “You’re not supposed to be doing that. Girls don’t do that.” When enrollment suddenly and drastically dropped at my son’s preschool (long story), his class of 10 kids shrank to four: him, and three […]
The most important question you could ask a new mom is how she’s doing. How she’s really doing. One of the most common things to emerge after I recently started to speak more openly about my struggle with severe postpartum mental illness (postpartum psychosis) was the amount of people who told me that they had […]
The message that women are untrustworthy liars is everywhere in our culture—from TV and music, to politics and religion, says Soraya Chemaly. Two weeks ago a man in France was arrested for raping his daughter. She’d gone to her school counselor and then the police, but they needed “hard evidence.” So, she videotaped her next […]
This originally appeared on Mommy Man: Adventures Of A Gay Superdad. Republished here with permission. One of the more neglected purposes of my blog is to share information (and dispel myths) about makin’ gaybies. I want to educate people about my family—and at the same time help prospective parents, gay or straight, who might be […]
Gender equality will remain stalled until men and women are afforded the same rights to paid leave, says Soraya Chemaly. Josh Levs would like to stay home to care for his third child, a newborn daughter. As he explains in a Tumblr post, “I have only two choices: Stay out for 10 weeks without pay, […]
