Perhaps behind our insistence of “preference” and “desirability” lurks something far more insidious, far uglier than we first thought. When talking with the foreigner female community in Japan, the topic of dating Japanese men usually comes up and we quickly bemoan how so many of them really don’t want to date us. We curse, shake […]
Men speak 70 percent of the time in mixed gender groups, with degrading effects on group decision-making. Women are rarely viewed as among the most powerful, influential, or relevant speakers. Their introduction of topics, or attempts to shift conversation, are frequently ignored. And their speech is routinely interrupted. Do you have listener bias? Do you think men […]
When I’ve met Millennials whom I’ve come to admire I’ve simply categorized them with a group of my own allegiance rather than consider the possibility that I’d been using blanket stereotypes to make myself more comfortable. The other day I was in the back of an Über car scrolling through comments on an acquaintance’s Facebook […]
The fact that my son has two mamas does not mean that one of us needs to take on the role of father. In the early years of our son’s life, my partner Valerie and I struggled at times to define complementary parenting roles. As lesbians, we did not fit neatly into traditional mother-father gender definitions. […]
In the face of so much injustice, who wouldn’t be angry? “You’re a feminist? You don’t seem that angry.” The first time (of many) that this question was posed to me in high school, I stared blankly at the peer who asked it. I felt incapable of coherently responding: an uncommon experience for a self-proclaimed […]
If you think people project things onto you now, why would a wedding ring stop them? Women are carpet-bombed with the idea that marriage is their happy ending from their first viewing of Cinderella to the last potboiler Rom Com they saw starring Sarah Jessica Jennifer Kate Meg Julia Whatsherhair. Marriage is also ever-present in […]
In my attempts to define myself as different from those around me—people I assumed were less educated, full of prejudice, and generally less interesting—I became the one full of prejudice. My one-word question sounded as if the “y” had been turned over on its side, stretching the sharp “eye” sound into a lower, longer “ah” […]
“Do you have lots of threesomes?” We like to think we’ve come a long way. We like to think that, when it comes to LGBTQIA+ rights, we’ve made leaps and bounds toward equal rights and social acceptance. And we have. But there are still subsets of the queer community that are being ignored or ridiculed, even […]
Enough with this sexist stereotype. The majority of my experiences with girls and women has been positive, even life affirming. In 1988, when I was in eighth grade, I contracted an eye infection and wasn’t able to wear my contact lenses. At the time, my eyeglass lenses were inches thick—just like the proverbial Coke bottles—and […]
This originally appeared on Everyday Feminism. Republished here with permission. Many people put single dads on a pedestal while hyper-policing single moms. Recently, I was gossiping with my neighbor about a mutual friend whose wife had moved out, making him the primary parent to their 2- and 4-year-old children. “He’s been pretty amazing,” I said. “She even took […]
What is problematic about this segment, I think, has far less to do with the manner in which it implicates women by way of being sexist, and far more to do with the way in which it traffics racist stereotypes of the sexualized Latina. Sofia Vergara, an actress perhaps most famous for her role on […]
Comments such as “the girls don’t stand a chance” or “the ladies better look out” about my 8-month-old son make me feel incredibly uncomfortable. If I had a dime for every time a person, often a stranger, said something to the effect of “the girls don’t stand a chance with those eyes” about my son, […]
