After Stan Wawrinka bowed out of his second round match against Nick Kyrgios at the Rogers Cup, I wondered if they’d shake hands. The post-match handshake is sacred but it can convey either deep respect and friendship or stewing loathing and passive aggression. They did shake hands, likely because Wawrinka hadn’t heard the comment…
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When Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie told graduates at Wellesley College to forget likeability, it made headlines. Not only because when Adichie, a prolific novelist and feminist, speaks people tend to listen, but also because this is not something young women hear often. ‘All over the world, girls are raised to be make themselves likeable, to twist…
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As last year wrapped up, Emma Watson was named Feminist Celebrity of 2014 by Ms. Foundation For Women, in partnership with Cosmopolitan.com. With her UN speech last fall, she added her name to a growing list of celebrities who have either declared themselves feminists, had some kind of feminist epiphany, or have said something tangentially…
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It’s become something of a cliché to say that television has never been better. Whether that’s just the natural progression of production and arts or a sudden spell of great stories and storytelling (or both) is subjective. I’d argue that what everyone is reacting to are the incremental steps toward diversity, to the voices of…
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Late last month, police in Thunder Bay, a small city in northwestern Ontario, Canada charged two students from the University of Ottawa hockey team with sexual assault. Both men, David Foucher, 25, and Guillaume Donovan, 24, were in Thunder Bay for an away game against Lakehead University when they allegedly assaulted a 21-year-old woman. The…
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In Lynn Coady’s short story ‘Hellgoing’, published in the 2013 collection of the same name, the protagonist unleashes on her friends a weekend’s worth of frustration after visiting her father. Her friend Ruth leans in, ready with a ‘discussion question’ as the conversation turns to men in general. A feminist and academic, she never…
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For the first time in a decade, Monica Lewinsky, is speaking out. Not about her affair with then president Bill Clinton exactly (of which she says only that it was an abuse of power and also consensual) but the aftermath. The essay in the June 2014 issue of Vanity Fair is for many people…
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The short-lived meme, ‘Is this feminist?’ was perfect for two reasons: 1) it proved the feminists can have a sense of humour about themselves, despite what a vocal minority might think and 2) like Community’s Britta Perry, it managed to parody of third-wave, feminism without relying on lazy and misogynist stereotypes. That is, the academic,…
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For a while, her name and picture were everywhere. In Nova Scotia, literally, on papers covering the province. Loretta Saunders, a 26-year-old criminology student disappeared on 13 February. She was writing her Masters thesis on the hundreds of missing and murdered Aboriginal women in Canada. Saunders, originally from Labrador and studying at Saint Mary’s University…
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Judging by the think pieces, blogs and professional reviews of the last few months leading up to award season, 2013 was a good one for women in Hollywood. According to writers Versha Sharma and Hanna Sender of Voctiv, movies featuring ‘strong female roles’ earned more than twice as much than movies that didn’t. They used…
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If you were like me, International Men’s Day went by quietly or without any mention at all. It wasn’t until wasting time online the next day that I saw a mention of it – so fleeting I can’t even remember where exactly it was. I think I scoffed at first and moved on to something…
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The list of the offenses for which liberal – or even left-leaning – activists, journalists and thinkers are accused is long. Perversion. Oversensitivity. Reverse-anything. Propaganda. Hysteria. Philosophical and political differences are a game of inversion, and both sides are convinced that their view is correct and the other is a gross distortion of reality. (So,…
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In a recent and candid interview, Canadian literature professor David Gilmour told Hazlitt that he only teaches ‘guys’. If you’re a woman (with the exception of Virginia Woolf), non-white, queer or even an effeminate male writer, your work will not appear on his syllabus. ‘What I teach is guys. Serious heterosexual guys. F. Scott Fitzgerald,…
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‘Journalists are supposed to be objective.’ If ever there were a mantra for journalism students, this would be it. No group of people (except maybe judges) is expected to set aside their personal beliefs and values for their profession quite like journalists. But no matter how often we repeat the creed, no one actually believes…
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