The big change in BMI categories was in 1998. On one hand, this graph does account for that (it uses consistent BMI %'s across years—so, looking at people who had BMIs of 30+ in all the years, not people who were categorized as "obese" given the definition in that particular year). On the other hand, as a measure of…

I'd highly recommend Dorothy Roberts' book, Killing the Black Body. It's not exactly light reading, but advocates a concept she calls "reproductive justice": not just protecting women's right to avoid pregnancy and parenthood, but also protecting the rights of women to become mothers if they so choose. A lot of the…

It's not really an either/or situation. Of course it's important for people to know about the effects on families, parents, etc. But if they're making a decision based on what they believe the child's quality of life will be, we owe it to them to give them the best, most honest information to use in making that…

You absolutely should be on Jezebel! Disability rights are so closely tied to rights for women, queer folks, people of color, and basically anyone who wants to exist in this world and be treated like a human being, even if their body or life trajectory doesn't conform to the healthy, productive, (often male) worker…

It is possible to be deeply concerned about disability-based abortion, while also respecting the right of individual women and families to choose whether and when to have a baby.

Listen, amazon, I don't know how else to say this but I agree with you that there is some serious racist crap happening here and it seems that a lot of the people doing that are women. That's important, and I'm glad that folks on here are talking about it. And I was serious when I said someone—maybe you—should write…

I'm pretty sure I said:

The points you and other folks are making on here—that white women are implicated in systems of racist (and classist, ableist, etc.) oppression—is an important one. And there are some important things to be said about the unique ways that women contribute to those systems (in otherwise "feminist" spaces, as employers…

You know, I want to say this is weird... but as a professor, I've gotten some pretty weird excuses from students who plan to be absent. The student who wanted to be excused from an oral presentation because she screamed so loud at a college football game that she lost her voice (her school spirit was laudable, but I…

Bieber may be wearing short pants, but they are not shorts. Wikipedia helpfully reminds me that we have better words for them: culottes, capris, pedal pushers, and clam-diggers. All of which seem like good options when it's this f@%#ing hot.

I'm certainly not the first person to write about this (though I'm flattered you think so); there are a bunch of queer theorists who've written about the relatively conservative (lower-case c) politics of same-sex marriage activism. Essentially, the concern is that we're still unquestioningly accepting the premise…

I wouldn't go so far as to say we should ban religious marriage (any more than we should ban any other religious rite), but it's not a terrible idea to get rid of the special legal status for married couples. And I say this as one half of a gay married couple (though my current state doesn't recognize us as such).

I completely agree that we need to critically assess the cultural contexts in which fantasies about things like rape (probably one of the most common fantasies) are born—if rape culture was less prevalent, if people didn't consume very popular media about the sexiness of aggressiveness, etc., then maybe those…

No one's saying you can't *feel* grossed out, disturbed, etc. by other people's turn-ons, or even that we can't talk critically about those things. I'm just saying that people don't have complete control over what excites them, and that—insofar as fanfic is more like an extension of individuals' fantasies than it is a…

Asexual and sexual people alike could do a lot better with respecting diversity in the amount and type of other people's desires, and that's a feminist issue. Leaders in the mainstream of the asexual visibility/awareness movement have made a point of distinguishing between making it OK for people, asexual or…

People can feel whatever feelings they want to feel. But expressing those feelings in a way that puts down other people's turn-ons because they gross you out is something that people who identify as feminist should think long and hard about.

This isn't my particular kink, so I don't know the fictional universe that well. My point was a more general one—that fanfic is a relatively safe place to explore kinks and turn-ons that we might never actually want to happen in real life, including things that we'd actively politically oppose. That…

The question you posed is a tricky one! On one hand, it's important to have spaces for people to explore their fantasies, especially when those fantasies aren't very visible in mainstream media. On the other hand, when does writing about unsafe, or nonconsensual, or otherwise "bad" sex risk normalizing those…

If there's a depiction of gay sex and someone makes a face and goes "yuck" or mocks it, a lot of people (myself included) would suspect that person was homophobic (or at least, not a very good ally). That doesn't mean all straight allies have to love gay sex, but they should be able to say "Hey, that's not my thing,…

You're right that technically, erotic fanfic is in the public domain and thus fair game for analysis, and it's not without its problems. And I'm an academic, so I'm into analyzing stuff. That said, I'd much prefer to encounter representations of non-consensual sex (or really any kind of sex) in fanfic than in…