Your ego is far less important than the safety of an individual. By Sophie Grayson The last few days we’ve all seen so many people telling women what our response should be to cat calling (what I like to call street harassment.) Some of it’s been good, some of it not so good and some of…
Category: Blogposts
Safe Space and the University
By Lucy Allen I’m turning over a lot of thoughts about safe spaces and triggers at the moment. Next year, I’m going to go into a lecture hall, hopefully with about 50-70 undergraduates, and I’m going to talk to them about how a brutal rape becomes funny, and then, about how men use it as…
Butchering Women, Caressing Animal Flesh: Maroon 5 and The Sexual Politics of Meat
By Amy Calvert In The Sexual Politics of Meat, Carol Adams highlights important intersections between the treatment of women and the treatment of animals in contemporary western society. She argues that they (women and animals) are mutually oppressed and exploited through the pervasiveness of their body-only representation across various media platforms, for example in advertising.…
Fashion, Freedom and Feminism: How technology saved us from burning our bras
By Lori Smith People often mention ‘bra burning’ when they speak of second wave feminism, as if an allegedly oppressive undergarment was the most important thing that the feminist movement fought against in the late twentieth century. They also talk about it as if this were complete and utter truth, when it is more likely…
Becoming Mrs Someone Else: What’s in a Name?
By Bianca Franqueira Hanks (‘name n. A word or words by which an entity is designated and distinguished from others….’) In recent years, as I have watched more and more of my peers shuffle off into marriage, one thing that never fails to fascinate me is that age old question relating to what happens to the…
Time for Questions and Switching places: When men are made into the commodity and women become ‘the pimp’.
By Alice Rowlands Reverse role play anyone? … Starting with a bad joke is never the best, but I thought it would be appropriate considering the topic of the day! In the last post I discussed the unfair ways in which women are presented in both male and female artists’ music videos. This isn’t…
LGBT Culture: A place for all?
By Fran Hayden It is unfeasible to explore the place a woman occupies in society without delving into most aspects of her life. Not as an act to strip her of her privacy of course, but because sexism isn't confined to one area of her life. One woman may experience sexism in the workplace, in…
2014 – The Year of the Empower-Ad?
By Lydia H Delamere With the amount of media material that infiltrates our brains on a daily basis, no wonder our society constantly scrutinises each other with the help of perfect images of big-boobed, tight-abbed super-people. According to research, around 56% of television ads aimed at women used beauty as their primary product appeal, leaving…
Greta and Boris, and tackling gender stereotypes in children’s fiction
By Sian Norris I wrote the first draft of my debut novel, Greta and Boris: A Daring Rescue, http://www.foyles.co.uk/witem/childrens/greta-and-boris-a-daring-rescue,sian-norris-9781780996233 during the university summer holidays, for a competition. It didn’t win. Disappointed, I put my manuscript away and went back to London to finish my degree. But I never quite forgot about Greta’s adventures. When I self-published my…
The Contextual Influences of Elizabeth Thomas
By Amber Howells Born in 1675, Elizabeth Thomas was the only child of Elizabeth Osborne and Emmanuel Thomas. Despite her gender, she was very well educated and by her mid-twenties, she was a part of a literary circle and had shown her works to various distinguished writers such as John Dryden. Throughout her life, she…