A new public awareness campaign designed to lower teen pregnancy rates has sparked public debate after billboards were recently rolled out across Chicago. The posters, aimed at teenagers and their parents, feature Photoshopped images of topless, heavily pregnant teen boys with the tagline: ‘Unexpected? Most teen pregnancies are’. The billboards and posters have been concentrated…
Read more
FEMEN member and activist Amina Tyler has reportedly been arrested again in the Tunisian holy city of Kairouan. Her arrest comes as she allegedly snuck past through heavy security checkpoints, where police were preventing extremely conservative Islamists from holding an annual conference. Tyler was disguised in a veil, and after she passed through security, she…
Read more
Well good ol’ K-Rudd is the latest politician to jump on the gay marriage bandwagon and give it his stamp of approval. Pity he’s a few years too late to action it as PM, but I could not be happier! In a post on his blog, he wrote in detail about how his opinion about…
Read more
Wow, what a week! I don’t know about you, but I’m only just beginning to recover from the madness and excitement of this year’s federal budget. As we tear down the streamers and clear the empty bottles, we can start to piece together our patchy memories and reflect on the week’s giddy highlights as well…
Read more
I am not one for particularly conflated language or hyperbole – but when half the population, of any group of people, is having their life negatively impacted on by an outside entity, which forces its way on or into your person, causing grief, sickness, or even death, that is what we call an epidemic. The…
Read more
Actress and director Angelina Jolie has revealed she has had a double mastectomy to reduce her chances of getting breast cancer. In an op-ed for the New York Times, she discussed her motivations for the choice and encouraged other women to find out if they were at risk of the disease. Jolie’s mother died from…
Read more
Israeli Justice Minister, Tzipi Livni, has announced the drafting of legislation that will outlaw all gender-based segregation in public spaces. ‘Today, I instructed the Justice Ministry to draft legislation … that will make any segregation of women and their humiliation in a public space a criminal offense,’ Livni posted on her Facebook account. The proposed…
Read more
Paid parental leave for women (of calibre) Tony Abbott’s choice of phrasing got him in a little strife in the battle between paid parental leave schemes when he told a press conference his model would actively encourage ‘women of calibre’ to procreate. The Coalition’s model would see women be paid for leave at the level…
Read more
Opposition leader Tony Abbott was on the receiving end of backlash and mockery online after comments surrounding his proposed parental leave regulations. At a press conference on 7 May, Abbott told reporters the regulations were necessary if educated women were going to pursue careers. ‘If we want women of that calibre to have families, and…
Read more
The internet has been flooded with articles and commentary on the Ohio kidnapping rescue story that broke Tuesday AEST. While many articles simply recap the events, other pieces have surfaced that reflect the underlying issues of sexism, racism, and discrimination against the mentally ill that pervade the media. The story itself is captivating, and it…
Read more
A recent study by global charity organisation Save the Children has produced a ranked list of the best and worst countries in the world to be a mother. The results in the State of the World’s Mothers report show that the best country to be a mother is Finland, followed by Sweden, Norway and Denmark….
Read more
By now, you would have heard about the intense tragedy of this Bangladesh garment factory’s collapse. Rana Plaza was an eight-storey building in Dhaka’s manufacturing zone, housing multiple factories where clothes for Western brands were manufactured. The owners and managing director of the complex allegedly ignored safety warnings and employees saw cracks in the walls…
Read more
If you see plenty of women wearing white shirts today, it’s because it’s White Shirt Day. White Shirt Day was launched by OCRF in 2011 (with help from Witchery, and madison editor Lizzie Renkert), in order for all Australians to show their support for women suffering from ovarian cancer. And why? One woman dies of…
Read more
Before Twitter was as omnipresent as it is now, the concept was regular fodder for the writing of op-ed columnists. Experts, journalists and technophobes started philosophising about what this latest social networking site meant for privacy, intimacy, and communication. Globe and Mail writer Ian Brown even theorised that Twitter’s appeal had something to do with…
Read more
