Can a model’s monobrow help women embrace body hair?

When the model Sophia Hadjipanteli accidentally tinted her blond eyebrows black, she decided to show off her non-normative body hair, rather than reach for the wax strips. It has worked wonders for her career.
[S]he is an example of how female body hair in the mainstream is still confined to gimmick and novelty, only acceptable if your appearance conforms to beauty standards in every other respect.
Truly hairy women do not have the option of making peace with a peach-fuzz of leg hair; they would be laughed at if they did not rise to the gruelling, expensive task of hair removal.
I now realise that the white girl vanguard is not helping hairier women to feel normal and desirable in their natural state. All body hair is equal, but some body hair is more equal than other body hair. Excuse me if I don’t rejoice in Hadjipanteli’s popularity; it is just that natural hairiness will not be reclaimed until it is reclaimed for all women.
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2018/apr/09/can-model-monobrow-help-women-embrace-body-hair-sophia-hadjipanteli?

How Feminists in China Are Using Emoji to Avoid Censorship | WIRED

Shortly after the close of this year’s International Women’s Day, China’s Twitter-like service Sina Weibo shut down Feminist Voices. With 180,000 followers, the group’s social media account was one of the most important advocacy channels for spreading information about women’s issues in China, but in an instant, it was gone. A few hours later, the private messaging app WeChat also shuttered an account for the group. The official reasons for the closures were vague, simply that the accounts had posted content that violated regulations, but the subtext was clear: the country’s highly-monitored media was trying to silence women’s advocates.
Days after it went dark, images appeared online of a group of masked women holding a symbolic funeral for the death of Feminist Voices. Yet the group’s founder Lu Pin (now based in the US) wrote on Twitter that she viewed the ritual not as a funeral, but as a “fantastic carnival,” signifying a rebirth, and she pledged to “reclaim the account by every legal avenue.”
“Keeping the movement going will be challenging, but these feminists are tenacious and extremely determined. The Chinese government can’t wipe out the women’s movement in this era of global connectivity.”
https://www.wired.com/story/china-feminism-emoji-censorship/

Eva Cox: #MeToo is yet to shift the power imbalances that would bring gender equality

[T]he torrents of anger and complaints from #MeToo raise issues of whether gender powers have really been redefined, both locally and in most Western countries. Have we really made the essential cultural shifts that ensure women are no longer the “second sex”, living in worlds devised, defined and controlled by men? . . .
The current debate is just further evidence we failed to make the necessary power shifts. And macho male resistance to women’s power may also be increasing.
Basic assumptions about gender roles still create beliefs about being an acceptable boy (stand up for yourself) or girl (be nice and read people’s feelings). These offer surefire paths to toxic masculinity and passive femininity.
Given all of that, my concern is that #MeToo and related expressions of anger are failing to fix causes that increase macho-driven gender power imbalances. This means we need real, practical solutions to bridge the gender divide and stop supporting toxic masculinity.
https://theconversation.com/metoo-is-not-enough-it-has-yet-to-shift-the-power-imbalances-that-would-bring-about-gender-equality-92108
https://womensagenda.com.au/latest/eva-cox-metoo-is-yet-to-shift-the-power-imbalances-that-would-bring-gender-equality/

Dear boys: If you want gender parity, it's not enough to show support once a year

I’m frustrated by the way our schools (specifically all-boys schools) celebrate International Women’s Day, because it doesn’t make a difference to the problems we continue to face as women. The display of support for feminism is temporary, and often superficial. The way schools mark IWD conditions boys to think that caring about feminism for one day a year means that they’re off the hook and free to go back to ignoring the problems for the remaining 364.
In many cases, the same boys who take part in these annual demonstrations of supporting feminism at their schools are the very same ones who call my friends and me whores, sluts, bitches, and skanks. The boys who are called “brave” and “courageous” by teachers because they showed up to eat purple cupcakes at an afternoon tea on IWD are the same boys who harass us repeatedly online for naked pictures and whistle at us when we’re waiting at the train station. But this doesn’t seem to matter: as long as those boys pay lip service to women and girls publicly on this one day of the year, any level of actual engagement with feminism and its aims is optional and, frankly, unlikely.
These token displays of feminism do more harm than good for the movement in the long term. Over the course of my high school life, I’ve seen more and more of my male peers dismiss feminism as irrelevant. Our society has conditioned them to think they only need to have a superficial level of awareness about gender equality issues, rather than actually taking part in making change. And as these boys grow into men, we see their interest in feminism dissolve further and further, until the very word is regarded as a dirty one.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/mar/09/dear-boys-if-you-want-gender-parity-its-not-enough-to-show-support-once-a-year?

Quiz! Do women suck? Or is it the world?

Happy International Women’s Day! According to Australia’s Human Rights Commission, women make up 50.2% of Australia’s population. That means that women get 50.2% of everything, right?
My womanly obsession with facts is why I’ve put together this fun quiz! So many women find themselves suspecting – merely on the basis of instinct, observation or just plain lived experience – that even in pretty Australia something seems desperately out of whack in regards to the statistical social, political and economic experience of women to men. So my IWD gift to you, my femme cadre, is something rare and precious you’ll never receive in an argument with a beer-garden misogynist; hard data that proves gender disadvantage is not only intersectional, but true!
In the feminist spirit of gender amity and inclusion I’ve even included some answers just for “men’s rights activists” to tick, to spare them the effort of typing the very same things into the comment section after the quiz
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/mar/08/quiz-do-women-suck-or-is-it-the-world?

gender and minecraft: console-ing passions

Playing Minecraft as a pacifist vegetarian is technically possible, but the game design generally rewards those players who murder animals for meat (e.g., meat staves off starvation longer than vegetables and bread)—put another way, players are rewarded for treating the landscape and everything on it as a resource ripe for harvesting by way of punching, stabbing, shooting, etc.
In the process of overcoming enemies and colonizing the land, the player character is elevated in their heroic status on the frontier. The land and trophy items that a player collects—diamond armor, Ghast tears, enchanted weapons, etc.—further serve to symbolize power, progress, and accomplishment.
In privileging Minecraft players who assimilate with the player character—as a weapon-wielding, diamond-mining, meat-eating machine—game designers at Mojang marginalize players who want to find other ways of surviving, community building, and playing with mobs that don’t align with a colonial paradigm.
https://feministgames.wordpress.com/2014/04/13/gender-and-minecraft-console-ing-passions-2014/

One Billion Rising Sydney – One Billion Rising Revolution

flyer

On Valentine’s Day, Sydney feminists, activists, unionists and community members will join thousands of their counterparts around the world for ONE BILLION RISING, the biggest global mass action to end violence against women. The Sydney event will take place at Hyde Park (South, near Pool of Reflection) on 14 February 2018, 5 pm. In Sydney, a group of grassroots organisations (Asian Women at Work Inc, GABRIELA, Immigrant Women’s Speakout Association, We Can Be Sheroes, Women’s March, UnionsNSW, United Against Domestic Violence, etc) will host this year’s One Billion Rising.

https://www.onebillionrising.org/events/one-billion-rising-sydney-3/

The problem with women eating crunchy chips?

And I dare say that the ‘crunch’ chips make when you’re eating them is not high on the list of key grievances affecting women in 2018. Nor is the fact that flavour gets stuck to fingers as you’re attempting to dive down to collect those last few broken chips at the bottom of a pack.

But PepsiCo, parent company of Doritos, has felt the need to deny it will be releasing “female-friendly” chip product following a global backlash to CEO Indra Nooyi’s comments on the Freakonomics podcast that women eat and enjoy chips differently to men, and that female-friendly chip packaging could be on its way, with the company getting ready to “launch a bunch” of such products soon.

According to Nooyi, women are looking for snacks with a “low crunch” sound, that we can enjoy with less flavour sticking to our fingers, and in packaging that can fit in our purses.

https://womensagenda.com.au/latest/problem-women-eating-crunchy-chips/

That’s patriarchy: how female sexual liberation led to male sexual entitlement

The right for women to escape the passive sexual role obliged of them by culture – the imperative to do so in the cause of women’s liberation – is at the heart of Greer’s demands in her 1970 manifesto, The Female Eunuch.

In Australia, married women could not apply for passports without their husband’s approval until 1983. Britain did not make marital rape illegal until 1991.

But what has happened in the intervening decades is that sexual freedom has become another realm of women’s experience for patriarchy to conquer. As soon as older feminists had won sexual liberation, patriarchy reframed it as sexual availability for men.

The flipside to the destigmatisation of sex for women has been a sense of patriarchal entitlement to sex with women, which is why the painful conversation about consent in our new era of “freedom” must be confronted. One in 10 women, as opposed to one in 70 men, report they’ve been coerced into sex, the vast majority by an intimate partner.

And ubiquitous female sexualisation has manifested a reality in which young women find themselves in unwittingly sexualised situations all the time. Young women are right to feel that destigmatised sex has enhanced their traditional patriarchal status as sex objects, not liberated them from it.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/feb/02/thats-patriarchy-how-female-sexual-liberation-led-to-male-sexual-entitlement?

‘We need to be braver’ — women challenge ‘gender identity’ and the silencing of feminist discourse

Women who challenge discourse around “gender identity” have been largely isolated on the front lines for the past decade.

Sheila Jeffreys argues, in her talk, that “transgenderism is an invention that is socially and politically constructed,” and that, rather than being innate, exists in direct connection to the forces of power that exist in a heteropatriarchal society.

Jeffreys connects the notion of “gender identity” to American neoliberalism in that it is, of course, a very individualistic notion, but also in the way that it connects to capitalism and the cash cow that transgenderism is for Big Pharma, gender identity therapists and clinics, and cosmetic surgeons. It seems odd to discuss gender identity outside the context of capitalism, considering the way “identity” and “expression” is so connected, in modern society, to consumerism.

In fact, Jeffreys suggests feminists drop the term “gender” entirely. She says instead, “We need to talk about sex class or sex caste” as “gender” has become meaningless and conflated with biological sex.

As feminists, what we really are doing is working towards an end to gender — a thing that was invented and imposed in order to naturalize the sex class hierarchy that positions men as dominant and women as subordinate

http://www.feministcurrent.com/2016/09/27/need-braver-feminists-challenge-silencing/