A good way to figure out if you’re on the wrong side of something is to ask yourself if you’re objecting to a literary phenomenon that gets children to sit down and read 900 page novels.

Because patriarchy

As a teenager I worked in a textile museum, and on the tour I would tell a story about how the men who worked in the warehouse full of raw wool back in olden times were famous for their soft hands (wink wink, nudge nudge) because of all the lanolin. You totally wanted a date with those dudes.

The way to address the gender imbalance problem is with gender equity, rather than placing restrictions on women’s access to reproductive health care. Similarly, I’m all for continued improvements and enlightenment re: attitudes toward and resources for people with disabilities. If we have a society where having a…

I suppose these lawmakers are going to also fund a massive expansion of services to help parents of children with special needs, including special education, free therapy regimens (speech, physical, occupational, etc.), specialized child care, respite care, long-term employment plans for adults with disabilities, and…

When people make the whole “this is what happens when you resist arrest” argument, I kinda want to do an experiment on them where I cut off their airway and see how long they can retain their composure and trust that I’m just defending the law of the land.

No kidding. My mother was a child when vaccines started to become available, and she remembers how before that she would lose classmates every year to these diseases. “Lose” = “dead children.” To say nothing of all the people with lifelong scars caused by polio, measles, and so forth. It makes me crazy to see these…

I teach at a university in Texas and have heard from multiple sources that this kind of thing is indeed part of fraternity initiation. In the case of the frat at my institution, the requirement is that you have sex with a woman who is too drunk to give consent, i.e. you have to commit a rape.

"reshooting steaming liaisons" - Isn't the modifier for sex scenes usually "steamy"? "Steaming" has a whole other connotation, unless...oh God no.

This sexist nonsense reminds me of my junior high history textbook, which described Joan of Arc as having a "masculine" appearance, but then assured the reader that according to reports, she had beautiful breasts. Because, you know, at the end of the day, the most important thing about a genius (there's that word!)…

"As an approved service provider, we definitely do not promote a rape culture" - The structure of this sentence is interesting, as it seems their not promoting rape culture is somehow contingent on their being an approved service provider. Slippery bastards.

I'm from Ottawa! You make me wish I were there now.

What with the Ebola virus' arrival in Dallas, Perry had to act fast to retain the title of "Most terrible thing in Texas."

Seriously - these fools will rue the day they messed with Hermione. Harry Potter fans are relentless.

This is great. I recall when I was in college (1990s) my friend came across an ad in a magazine for underwear that would match different skin tones. There were three women in the ad: to the left was was a super-pale redhead wearing the lightest shade, in the middle was woman with slightly darker skin (maybe Latina)…

I'm hoping that a reason for this is that younger women who aren't reading these books have better taste in porn, i.e. if they want to consume sexually explicit material, they know they can do better than Twilight fanfic. I kinda want to send all the women in this study the collected works of Annie Sprinkle.

In my family there is a story we love to tell of a now-deceased mother-in-law who, upon receiving a Christmas card from a male family member (a card that had been purchased, addressed, and mailed by his wife), basically spent the rest of her life talking about what a wonderful man he was for sending a card. So, yeah.

I *love* that her fave type of man is a fictional character.

I, for one, agree with you, and there certainly is a big class and race factor here. I know people who are white and middle class, and whose kids roam around on their bikes in the neighborhood on their own basically all summer. No harm comes to them, and nobody gets arrested. A streetwise 9-year-old will be just fine…

The logic is that women are property - the act that was being avenged was not the crime against the woman, but the fact that the husband had suffered from having his wife "damaged" by the rapist. Therefore, a suitable punishment is for the rapist's sister, a woman under his familial control, to be similarly damaged.…