Feminism is defined as “the belief that men and women should have equal rights and opportunities”. The broad spectrum of feminist ideologies (from radical, Marxist to liberal) have different expressions of this core belief, but they are all fighting to create an egalitarian society. Many branches of feminism also place emphasis on intersectionality, which considers…
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Electroconvulsive Therapy: kind of conjures up images of sterile hospital rooms with old-world medical machinery attached to a helpless young woman strapped to a gurney. Well, sadly, if you pictured that image, you would have been pretty close to the truth. Electroconvulsive Therapy, otherwise known as ECT, was a form of treatment used primarily in…
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Sex often inspires differing opinions about what actually constitutes “It.” If a lady pal says she had sex with a younger guy from Batemans Bay, it’s often standard for it to be assumed that penetration was involved. I was in a way directly asked about definitions of sex by a friend who assumed I was…
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When a poem begins with the line: ‘To the man on the bus I overheard in conversation tell a woman, presumably a friend, “You are too ugly to be raped”’ you cannot simply close your ears and move onto the next thing on your agenda. I was shocked to hear that someone actually said that…
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My Mum used to tell stories at bedtime, and one of my favourites was Upside Down World. Visitors to this realm would sip donuts through straws and slide backwards up slippery dips; the laws of our universe were reversed. In The Age this week, Amrit Dhillon explores a society that sounds like a real Upside…
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Former politician turned blogger, Louise Mensch likes to dress up for her husband. Saying so, she writes on her blog Unfashionista, is a feminist ‘mortal sin’. Op-eds jumped on that single comment in an interview with the Guardian. Her twitter feed and inbox were flooded with comments revoking her capital F feminist card. Mensch, who…
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Does any women have complete power over her choices? The agency and reproductive rights of women come into question in Maureen McCarthy’s YA novel The Convent. McCarthy writes in her “Author’s Note”: ‘History is so often told from the male point of view, with the female experience either ignored or trivialised.’ In The Convent, she…
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Joumana Haddad is a truly a remarkable woman. Born in Beirut in 1970, she speaks and writes in several different languages, is an advocate for women’s rights, is studying for her doctorate on the Marquis de Sade and also teaches Italian at the Lebanese-American University in Beirut. I was so inspired after I read and…
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I’d never really thought about it before, until I started reading Joumana Haddad’s Superman is an Arab, but Superman really is a disastrous invention. I’ve never been drawn to the character or the stories surrounding him and have never seen the movies, but still, why doesn’t it raise more eyebrows that Clark Kent is only…
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Old = patriarchal wedding traditions New = consumerist ‘bridezillas’ Borrowed = societal pressures from bygone days Blue = feminists!!! For those who have decided that a “married feminist” is not an oxymoron, it’s time to reconsider the meaning behind those wedding trappings and discard some of the traditions from an act that is so, well…
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The news has been rife with stories recently of women making cruel or nasty comments towards other women. It all started with Germaine Greer criticising Prime Minister Julia Gillard’s choice of jackets on the ABC’s Q and A. Later, we saw British Daily Mail columnist, Samantha Brick, claim that women are nasty to her because…
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My skirt length is not proportional to my IQ. I would have thought this much would be a given in this day and age. I mean, there was such a thing as third wave feminism right? That wasn’t some sort of whacked out fever dream, right? And yet… I remember being 15 and having my…
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