This blog post is adapted from a forum conversation I had recently. I play the part of feminist Socrates. Glaucon plays the part of everyone else. Glaucon: O feminist Socrates, is it not true that many of the costumes women wear at comics, gaming, and scifi conventions are rather sexualized? Feminist Socrates: It’s true, friend […]
Women need iron. Not the vitamin. The barbell. We are trained by the world around us to have fucked up ideas about our bodies; iron unfucks them. We are supposed to be as thin as possible, as small as possible, perhaps until we disappear; iron teaches us to take up space. We are taught that […]
Jokes and humor defuse tense situations. If you want to put your audience at ease, you make a light joke. What if you don’t want to put your audience at ease? What if unease and discomfort are specifically your aims? What if your goal is precisely to reframe something that’s normally dismissed as trivial? Since […]
License to Lift The orange notebook where I track repetitions of the stitches that I knit and repetitions of the big three is my tiny passport into the country of Squat. The muscled border guards need only see numbers and hashmarks and the focused look on my reddening face. “Excuse me Could I Get a […]
When you’re a woman gamer, it’s hard not to feel like an anomaly. Even though there actually are a lot of us, we’re represented as a minority. Both in the official imagery of games (and their marketing), and in the surrounding gamer culture, we get the message that this space isn’t really for us. When […]
I read some articles written by men in the fitness industry explaining the phenomenon of women being accused of looking too muscular or worrying that they might look too muscular. It was adorable, like watching children develop superstitious causality theories based on incomplete evidence. Women, these men posit, develop neuroses about their bodies because they […]
Say what you will about Twilight, but it accurately captures the experience of teenage girl sexual obsession.That the way teenage girl sexual love expresses itself is kind of unhealthy is reflected pretty accurately in its plot. If you hate Twilight because you hate the way girls are socialized to experience sexual love, then welcome to the […]
Today, I present to you two educational webcomics. First, Dinosaur Comic Explains the Male Gaze. Second, Sinfest explains the Patriarchy using the metaphor of the Matrix and feminist consciousness as taking the red pill. Do you read or create a webcomic that has a feminist message that you wish more people would read?
My brother is an engineer and makes robots. The thing that led him to be so great at his profession is that he sees things wrong around him that others do not and is driven to fix them. For example, when I was living in a shitty apartment with a bathroom door that wouldn’t close […]
“There’s no grays, only white that’s got grubby. I’m surprised you don’t know that. And sin, young man, is when you treat people like things. Including yourself. That’s what sin is.” “It’s a lot more complicated than that—” “No. It ain’t. When people say things are a lot more complicated than that, they means they’re […]
