Award-winning poet and author Marilyn June Coffey is republishing her groundbreaking novel Marcella, 40 years after it made literary history in 1973 as perhaps the first English work of fiction to […]
Author: Georgia Platts
Georgia Platts holds a Ph.D. in sociology from UCLA and currently teaches sociology and women’s studies at Foothill College in Los Altos Hills, California. She has occasionally lectured at San Jose State University.
Her specialties are psychology of women and social psychology. As a qualitative sociologist, she’s interested in the personal identities, emotional worlds and realities people work to create as they interact in everyday life.
She is currently working on a book on motherhood.
Georgia also volunteers with RESULTS, an anti-poverty group that works to economically empower the poor through adequate health care, asset building and education, with a strong focus on women and girls.
Should Organized Religion Have More Rights Than Women?
Right now, Catholic bishops, charities, schools and universities are demanding exemptions from new rules requiring that insurance plans cover contraception for women, free of charge. And President Obama is listening, […]
Penn State Teaches Rape Culture 101
A man sexually assaults children. Witnesses are appalled. But no one tells anyone outside their tight circle. The assailant is eventually accused of attacking eight boys. Yet members of the community […]
Man as Object: Reversing the Gaze
“Men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at,” art critic John Berger famously observed. Now some feminist artists are turning the tables in […]
Testosterone Damages Verbal Skill. Yet We Have Shakespeare
Penn State psychologists assert that career choice begins in utero, hinging on exposure to sex hormones in the womb. Since testosterone damages both verbal and social skills, it simply makes sense that […]
Conservative Columnists Blame Abortion–Not Patriarchy–for Skewed Sex Ratios
A woman’s right to safe, legal abortion has created a world of missing women, according to the most recent anti-choice talking points. A new book by Mara Hvistendahl, Unnatural Selection: […]
Are Vibrators Coming Out of the Closet?
Not so long ago, vibrators were illegal in several states, including Texas, Mississippi and Alabama, or found only in seedy sex shops. But as The New York Times reports, today […]
Does Sexual Objectification Lead to Bad Sex?
Turning women into sex objects heightens the erotic experience, right? A growing body of research indicates the opposite: for women and, surprisingly, men. A new longitudinal study out of Pennsylvania […]
She Drinks, She Flirts, She Passes Out … Is It Rape?
Trigger warning: Material about sexual assault. Around midnight at a college party, several young women soccer players are alerted that a 17-year-old girl is barricaded in a room with eight […]
Click! My Church Is Against Battered Women’s Shelters?!
“We’ve got to stop those feminists from setting up a battered women’s shelter!” So proclaimed my piano teacher in numerous post-lesson conversations with my mom. When she wasn’t grumbling about […]