Yesterday a jury found George Zimmerman not guilty of second-degree murder in the killing of teenager Trayvon Martin. The decision was based on a law colloquially called “stand your ground” (SYG) which allows people to use proportionate force in the face of an attack without first trying to retreat or escape. More than 20 states […]
Author: Lisa Wade
Occidental College Takes on Rape Culture
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 […]
California College Betrays Own Sexual Assault Policy
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 […]
Men Want to Be Breadwinners: So Do Women!
Both men and women favor egalitarian relationships, yet men won’t give up on being breadwinners and women would rather do anything than be housewives.
The Truth About Pink and Blue Brains
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 […]
Where’s the Line Between Sexism and Sensitivity?
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 […]
Are “Friends With Benefits” Really Friends?
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 […]
Women vs. People
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).
Beauty and the New LEGO Line for Girls
The true beauty of LEGO is its ability to inspire creativity, not enable conformity — something the toy brand seems to have forgotten with its new line “for girls.”
Maybelline’s Latest Infantilization
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 […]