A group of Occidental College students and sexual assault survivors announced yesterday they will be represented by attorney Gloria Allred in a case against the college (an alma mater of President Barack Obama). This development comes at the same time that the Occidental Sexual Assault Coalition–having spent years documenting an unjust and illegal process–has submitted [...]
Earlier this year a coalition of students and faculty at my institution, Occidental College in Los Angeles (an alma mater of President Obama), convinced the administration to make several changes to its sexual assault policy. One of these changes involved adding sexual assault reports to our OxyAlert system. This meant that any time there was [...]
Here’s some great news. The vast majority of young people–about 80 percent of women and 70 percent of men across all races, classes and family backgrounds–desire an egalitarian marriage in which both partners share breadwinning, housekeeping and child rearing. The data come from Kathleen Gerson‘s fabulous 2010 book, The Unfinished Revolution. In practice, however, egalitarian [...]
I loathe to weigh in on the “war on men” conversation, but … alas. While one can use both logic and data to poke gaping holes in Suzanne Venker’s argument that women need to surrender to their femininity and let men think that they’re in charge if they ever want to get married, I just want [...]
It was recently revealed that in a Saudi Arabian version of the IKEA catalog, all of the women were erased. Here are the similar pages from the U.S. and Saudi Arabian catalogs side-by-side: After an outcry over this revelation began, IKEA responded by called the removal of women a “mistake” “in conflict with the IKEA [...]
Hanna Rosin, senior editor at The Atlantic and author of The End of Men, has written a piece about hook-up culture on and off college campuses for the September issue of her magazine. Given that I’ve done some research on hook-up culture, here are my two cents: Rosin isn’t wrong to argue that the culture offers [...]
It’s time for a round-up of all the reader submissions illustrating the annoying habit of having products and products-for-women. The phenomenon illustrates the way we continue to think of men as people and women as women, thereby centering men and men’s lives as “normal” and women’s as “special” (and not in a good way). Anti-Monkey [...]
A few years back we published this fantastic ad for LEGOs as an example of gender-neutral advertising. It appeared in 1981; during my childhood, I’m happy to say. The ad offers nice context for the new effort by LEGO to capture The Girl Market. Their new line of LEGOs, LEGO Friends, has gotten a lot [...]
Maybelline’s brand of lip gloss, “baby lips,” is a straightforward example of the infantilization of adult women: We should be worried about the infantilization of women for two reasons: First, it’s directly related to the sexualization of young girls. As I wrote in a previous post: …on the one hand, women are portrayed as little [...]
Benjamin B. alerted us to a New York Times story about a new trend in Japan: yaeba. Some young Japanese women are now having dentists artificially enlarge their incisors so as to achieve a look associated with a small mouth crowded with teeth: Here’s some dental work to that effect, borrowed from the “after” pictures on a dentist’s website: [...]
