Babies, babies, babies are everywhere. There are so many people around me having babies lately. They’re little and cute and completely underestimated by the majority of the adult population. With the knowledge that the first five years of a child’s life are the most influential, it seems crucial that everything that surrounds these early learning…
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Recent reforms and policy decisions related to maternity leave may be to the delight of women throughout Australia, but new research shows that such policies do not overcome the serious wage toll suffered by women who decide to take time off work in order to be the primary carer of a child. Paid parental leave…
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‘Jordan texted me 49 times last night,’ Momo told me as she walked into work one morning. Jordan was a guy that Momo had been seeing (exclusively, but still “seeing”) for a few weeks, and as more facts came to light (he was drunk, and they were largely sentence fragments varying between ‘please come get…
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The brand of feminism has suffered considerably over the years. I’m not sure when exactly it happened, but somewhere along the line, being a feminist became a really ugly label, one that apparently means you’re an angry, humourless, hairy-legged man-hater. No one wants to be associated with that image. Girls and women are always careful…
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In the 1970s, Robin Morgan said that ‘pornography is the theory, rape is the practice’. She was an integral part of the Women Against Pornography association, which had set-up an office in New York City, setting up tours to show interested people, even high school students, the places around the city which exploited the bodies…
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I think I was Googling something rather pathetic like ‘why do men lie’ (which speaks volumes either about the men I foolishly fall in love with, or the pitiful level of desperation I’ve succumbed to) when I somehow came across Dick Masterson’s Men are Better Than Women blog. Now, I’m going on the assumption that…
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Feminist blogger and freelance writer Lena Chen talks to me about coming out as a feminist, as well as discussions and conflicts between feminists and how we can live out our ideological perspective. Lena is a really thoughtful woman. I’ve been reading her blog, the Ch!cktionary, for a while now and she deals with a…
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The male gaze and its relationship with the objectified female body is one of the most common tropes throughout art history. Sylvia Sleigh tried to reverse this tradition, turning conventional portraiture on its head by painting male nudes in poses that recalled the female subjects of artists such as Velazquez, Titian and Ingres, challenging not…
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We see the words ‘kids are having to grow up faster than ever before’ all the time in magazines, books and on TV. They especially refer to girls in saying this. Apparently, it’s the case that children are forced out of their precious childhood years too early. They should be free to enjoy themselves more…
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Oh, Stephen Fry. Just because everybody loves you, it doesn’t mean you don’t need to think before you speak. In fact, I’d suggest that being so revered by so many people means he should be especially careful. In particular, when he’s suggesting that women don’t actually enjoy sex; they just put up with it “because…
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Recently, some cast members of Fox TV show, Glee have posed for racy photographs for GQ magazine. For the assumedly very few who don’t know, Glee is a comedy/drama set in an American high school. The characters in the ‘glee club’ are often unpopular so they use the club to find friends, and presumably find…
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Recently, my university residential hall has established a men’s officer. Reading through blogs and opinion news sites, I feel conflicted about what role an officer supporting men has to play in this setting. For a very long time we’ve had a women’s officer whose role was never really clear in the first place. Once a…
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Recently, the Rudd government has posed the following parental leave scheme: Working mothers will receive the minimum wage ($544 per week) when they take maternity leave. ‘Working mothers’ are those who work at least one day a week in ten of the thirteen months before birth. There are no provisions for paid paternity leave. Of…
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I have always been annoyed at the predominance of the objectification of the female form in art. Even today. Not because it is condescending to women but because it is not socially acceptable for the male form to be treated in the same way. People walk down the street with Kate Moss on their shirt…
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