You can't knock me down.

lovebeyondmeasure:

Quick, messy graphic to explain a concept that seems obvious to me:

We shouldn’t be helping women because they’re related to someone else. We shouldn’t be helping women because someone else cares about them. We should be helping women because they are people. 

We should be helping women for their own sake.

Why is that a hard concept for people to grasp?

(via wretchedoftheearth)

siennajune:

Edna St. Vincent Millay was the first woman to win a Pulitzer Prize for poetry. She was openly bisexual and had affairs with other women and married men. When she finally married, hers was an open marriage. Her 1920 poetry collection A Few Figs From Thistles drew controversy for its novel exploration of female sexuality. She was one of the earliest and strongest voices for what became known as feminism. One of the recurring themes of her poetry was that men might use her body, but not possess her or have any claim over her. (x)

(via colloquializm)

(via worthmuchmorethantruth)

"In one recent study, more than 100 university psychologists were asked to rate the CVs of Dr. Karen Miller or Dr. Brian Miller, fictitious applicants for an academic tenure-track job. The CVs were identical, apart from the name. Yet strangely, the male Dr. Miller was perceived (by both male and female reviewers) to have better research, teaching, and service experience than the luckless female Dr. Miller. Overall, about three-quarters of the psychologists thought that Dr. Brian was hirable, while only just under half had the same confidence in Dr. Karen. The same researchers also sent out applications for the position of tenured professor, again identical but for the male and female name at the top. This time, the application was so strong that most of the raters thought that tenure was deserved, regardless of sex. However, the endorsement of Karen’s application was four times more likely to be accompanied by cautionary caveats scrawled in the margins of the questionnaire: such as, ‘I would need to see evidence that she had gotten these grants and publications on her own’ and ‘We would have to see her job talk.’"

Cordelia Fine, Delusions of Gender: How Our Minds, Society, and Neurosexism Create Difference (via cockchomp)

THIS IS REALLY FUCKING IMPORTANT AND INCREDIBLE 

(via beloquacious)

Oh hey, just in case you think academia is a haven of progressivism and open-mindedness. Women also have a much harder time obtaining tenure if they are trying to raise a family, while men who have children are more likely to be awarded it.

When I was in graduate school, I attended a “Junior Women Scholars and the Profession’-type mini conference, at which one of the senior scholars told us that, if we wanted to have kids, it was better to do it while we were finishing our degrees. Because then you could prove you were able to handle a baby + research and it would be better to take a semester off as a grad student than a semester off as junior faculty. 

All of this is despite the fact that, in the US, hiring committees are not legally allowed to take into account your family status. They aren’t even allowed to ask if you’re married, if you have kids, or what your plans are for kids in the future. It usually comes up somewhat awkwardly during campus visits, where they have to disclose benefits and how the tenure process works.

Like most of the rest of the US, universities and colleges tend to lag woefully behind the rest of the world in offering women choices other than “rock” or “hard place,” and also do not accord men time off for paternity leave, thus ensuring that academic women have to shoulder the weight of those choices. So yay, institutionalized sexism!

(via theletteraesc)

(via worthmuchmorethantruth)

seppin:

An Iranian channel ran a story about how a certain kind of martial arts is enjoying increasing popularity among Iranian women. This means that a) Iranian women have rights, b) Iranian women can access the public sphere, c) Iranian women participate in organized, public sports, and d) an Iranian government news channel has no problem with any of this.

Faced with these facts, the Western media panicked: some news agencies resorted to the stereotype of Iranian women as veiled, militant fanatics; others opted for infantilizing portrayals of suffering women using martial arts as their only escape. Can you imagine any self-respecting Western reporter writing a story that explained, unprovoked, the popularity of karate among girls in suburban Los Angeles by citing America’s high rates of sexual assault? Additionally, few bothered to mention that recently it has been Western sports organizations that have prevented Iranian women from playing, for example in 2011 forcing the Iranian women’s soccer team to forfeit hope of reaching the Olympics because they wore sports hijabs on the field.

Narratives of weak or militant Iranian women are not just dishonest; they also fuel a political narrative whereby Islamism is equated with backwardness and the ability of women to reconcile Islamic ideals with feminist goals is entirely obfuscated. Both Western conservatives and many secular feminists often participate in this obfuscation, effectively trying to either hide Iranian women’s successes in order to demonize Iran or by ignoring the ideologies of liberation they have formulated in order to preserve the status of secular feminism as the only path to women’s liberation.

Read the entire article. You can follow ajammc on tumblr here. 

(via worthmuchmorethantruth)

"Our culture has accepted 2 huge lies. The first is, if you disagree with someone’s lifestyle, you must fear or hate them. The second is that to love someone means you agree with everything they believe or do. Both are nonsense. You don’t have to compromise convictions to be compassionate."

Rick Warren (via faithful-flockstar)

(via jenifromthebloc)

Shay Mitchell - Elle Canada Magazine (July 2013)

(via moneyinthebananastand)

(Source: sandandglass, via moneyinthebananastand)

Shay Mitchell at the Paley Center Event (June 10th)

(via moneyinthebananastand)

The more I rewatch this show, the more I realize I am Robin. The number of times I’ve said to my guy friends, “Don’t say that to a woman. Ever,” cannot be counted. Recently it’s been over the use of the word “lady.” Protip, it should not be used as an adjective, like “lady writer.” Harrumph. Or when guys say they’re going to tell a girl something misogynistic I just say, “Yeah…let me how that goes for you.”

(Source: beepboopboopbeep, via shimozu)

(Source: zachillios, via shimozu)