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Social Commentary

Maxim's "Cure A Feminist" Spreads the Sexism Even Farther Than It Dared to Hope

Social Commentary post by Sharday Mosurinjohn on March 26, 2012 - 11:56am; tagged education, feminism, Maxim, misandry, misogyny, Mohanty, online anonymity, relativism, young men.
I noticed a friend’s Facebook share the other day of a Maxim “article” along with a critique of the language of “lads mags.” Here's the magazine feature, which is disgustingly violent in the most straightforward of ways, in order to give some context, but what I really want to talk about are some of the public conversations that have followed it.
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53 comments

School's Out: Rainbow Health Ontario & the Trans PULSE Project

Social Commentary post by Sharday Mosurinjohn on March 22, 2012 - 12:19pm; tagged 519 Church Street Community Centre, education, GSAs, Healthcare, Rainbow Health Ontario, schools, TransPULSE, youth.

The idea was that a study capable of producing statistics and other empirically grounded information could be used as a way to get more funding for existing services and in the creation of new services for trans people. Of course Scanlon and Travers already knew there was a pressing need for better health services, but they had to find a way to formalize and support what they already knew so that the government would have a harder time ignoring their requests.

With a community-based research model directed in significant part by a community engagement team of trans people, researchers Greta Bauer from the University of Western Ontario (my alma mater!) and Robb Travers from Sir Wilfrid Laurier University were (rigorously) interviewed and hired to help out on the project with the provision that they met a specific set of criteria, one of the most important being their ability to let trans people be experts in their own issues. Trans PULSE has used respondent-driven sampling, where access to a comprehensive online or paper survey is shared through networks of trans people who already know each other. This method allows the project team to access an appropriate sample of what they’ve called “hidden populations” who can’t be randomly sampled.

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5 comments

School's Out: The Bathroom Debate

Social Commentary post by Sharday Mosurinjohn on March 21, 2012 - 12:53pm; tagged Bathroom Bill C-389, child safety, gender-neutral washrooms, Trails End Market, trans* rights.
One of the most troubling anxieties of the public bathroom is one that purports to care about the safety of women and youth, but really only ends up further marginalizing, and perhaps sometimes outing, trans* people and other gender-variant folk. This space of the illicit—a place where we perform excretory functions, inextricable from all their associations with sexual functions—has all kinds of confused conceptual proximity to the vulnerability of children and what might happen to them in these semi-private spaces of semi-nudity.
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7 comments

Phone a Friend with the Circle of 6 Violence Prevention App

Social Commentary post by Kelsey Wallace on March 20, 2012 - 11:48am; tagged apps, Circle of 6, Sexual Assault Awareness and Prevention Month.
screen cap of the phone app showing six contacts in a circleThe Circle of 6 iPhone app, designed to prevent sexual assault and dating violence among young adults, launched today—just in time for Sexual Assault Awareness Month. And it's free!

Users of the app select six trusted friends—Circle of 6 provides tips on choosing them—to form a "circle." The app then allows you to send pre-programmed messages to your circle like "Come and get me. I need help getting home safely," and "Call and pretend you need me. I need an interruption" with just two taps of your phone.
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2 comments

School's Out: The Real World?

Social Commentary post by Sharday Mosurinjohn on March 19, 2012 - 11:28am; tagged GSA, It Gets Better, PIRGs, school vs. the, sexuality, students.
Apparently, we have to get an education in some land of make-believe shot through a vaseline-covered lens in order to get a “real” job, and then endure the “real world” where we won’t have it so easy, and then, at some undisclosed point in the future, “it gets better”? If we don’t expect the level of community and political engagement that is growing all the time at all educational levels to translate into “real life,” then how are things going to get better? Are people suddenly going to start taking seriously the labor laws that compel companies to give perfunctory seminars on how not to sexually harass your coworkers? Probably not. I think it’s going to involve breaking down some of the boundaries between “school” and “work” that treat theorizing and activism and even a little naïve enthusiasm as immaterial to the way the rest of the world works.
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2 comments

Open Thread: Does Feminism Really Need "the Next Gloria Steinem"?

Social Commentary post by Kelsey Wallace on March 19, 2012 - 10:49am; tagged Gloria Steinem, new york times.
The New York Times ran a profile of Gloria Steinem by Sarah Hepola on Friday that asked the question, "Where is the next Gloria Steinem, and why—decades after the media spotlight first focused on her—has no one emerged to take her place?"

How could one person speak for all of capital-F Feminism at this point? Why would anyone want to? Of course, I can't speak for everyone either, which is where this open thread comes in. What do you think? Does a monolithic feminism even exist anymore? Should it?
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11 comments

School's Out: Amnesia and the Other

Social Commentary post by Sharday Mosurinjohn on March 16, 2012 - 10:39am; tagged Aren Aizura, exception, free speech, Gay Imperialism, hate speech, human rights code, Islamophobia, Jin Haritaworn, pinkwashing, Sarah Ahmed, Tamsila Tauqir, Trinity Western University, War on Terror Esra Erdem, William Whatcott.
When education systems of "the West" forget their LGBTQ history lessons, it can spell trouble for "the rest."
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0 comments

School's Out: Of Sexts and Sex Textbooks

Social Commentary post by Sharday Mosurinjohn on March 15, 2012 - 10:33am; tagged education, Go Ask Alice, kids, sexting, sexual health research.
What do you think? Is it more important to adhere to laws that draw the age of minority at 18 for the protection of young people? Or to allow people under the age of 18 to participate in research about their own sexual health that concerns the erotic materials that they access and make?
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5 comments

Internet Crush: My Body Gallery

Social Commentary post by Kelsey Wallace on March 14, 2012 - 1:23pm; tagged fat acceptance, My Body Gallery, size acceptance, weight.
While we might know full well that in real life being 5'4" and weighing 180 pounds doesn't look the same on one person as it does the next, it can be difficult not to internalize those numbers and let them mean more than they should. That's where My Body Gallery can help.
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6 comments

"Become a Porn Actress": Sasha Grey's Equal Pay Day PSA Misses the Point

Social Commentary post by Kelsey Wallace on March 12, 2012 - 11:32am; tagged equal pay, porn, Sasha Grey.
screen cap from the video of Sasha Grey looking sadMarch 20 is Equal Pay Day in Belgium, and to draw attention to the country's 22% wage gap for women, zij-kant (a women's group organizing the equal pay efforts) has launched an awareness video and corresponding campaign starring porn actress Sasha Grey. It hinges on the fact that, according to the video, porn is one of the few industries where women are consistently paid more than their male counterparts. It is also a very strange and weirdly sad PSA that misses the point by making the equal pay issue all about porn, with a tone that is at once both slut-shaming and sensationalistic. (Also, it's NSFW.)
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