Laura Elizabeth Woollett’s The Love of a Bad Man begins with tenderness: ‘Baby, wake up,’ he says, and he’s kissing my eyelids, my cheeks, trailing his fingers over the bib of my nightgown and it’s so soft it must be a dream. Woolett’s short-story collection focuses on the lives of twelve women (or in the…
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Belinda McKeon captivatingly examines youth and sexuality in her second novel, set in late ’90s Ireland. Tender focuses on a loving turned obsessive friendship between Catherine and James, recent arrivals to Dublin from their respective rural communities. Catherine is studying English and art history at Trinity College Dublin while James is pursuing his dreams of…
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While bingeing on Orange Is the New Black on Netflix I’ve fallen for the show and its “diverse” cast. I’ve relished seeing women of all ages, all sizes, all sexualities, women of colour and, of course, seeing trans advocate Laverne Cox killing it. I didn’t really think about what OINTB wasn’t doing well until I…
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Apparently the age-old adage of ‘sex sells’ is no longer quite right. Nowadays, gender sells, with feminism increasingly being used as a marketing tool. The merging of feminism and advertising has been called “femvertising”. Women as a consumer group are a $14 trillion market globally, and this number is expected to rise in the future….
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Before 50 Shades of Grey inspires you to go paddle shopping, I feel like I should butt in (see what I did there?). It’s actually kind of hard to tell whether spanking is: (a) the mark of a free woman who apologises to no one in search of her own pleasure, or (b) the patriarchy…
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‘[Prison] relieves us of the responsibility of seriously engaging with the problems of our society, especially those produced by racism and, increasingly, global capitalism.’ – Angela Davis In Western Australia last year, 22-year-old Julieka Dhu, who was jailed for an unpaid $1000 parking fine, died. Dhu complained to police about severe pain, vomiting and partial…
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