Herstory

Have you ever taken a selfie? If you're unfamiliar with the term, selfies are when you snap a solo shot of yourself. Selfies have received a lot of hate recently for encouraging vanity. Check out this video to understand why that hate is overblown and how selfies are feminist, body positive, and sex positive. The video also includes nine tips to improve your body image with your selfies.

One should also note that this is not simply a matter of “feminism having won, so just let it all go away.” For the findings also reveal that “total family income is higher when the mother, not the father, is the primary breadwinner.” Thanks, pink collar ghetto, unequal pay, and continuing notions of gender inequality in the workplace. Not to mention all the BS traditional notions of motherhood.

Never mind the facts, however; let’s just get to the million dollar subtext question Liza Donnelly put forth regarding the 37% — the married mothers who have a higher income than their husbands: Can Husbands Handle Being Outearned By Their Wives?

...If you want to dismiss all this as the ramblings of irrelevant talking asshats on Fox (for which I will gently remind you that their rhetoric is often too dangerous to be dismissed), you’ll need to also know about this other study, called In Sickness and In Wealth...

Cupcakes only care about their own orgasms. When you see a woman eating a cupcake, you're basically watching her perform cunnilingus on herself. Small and moist and warm and sweet, a cupcake's sole reason for existence is solitary pleasure. Historically, many symbols of female power or divinity involved fertility and/or reproduction: circles and eggs, Mother Earth and Mother Goose. But modern times call for modern branding, and if you're looking for the shorthand way to label something as being of, for or about the essence of a woman, and you have no pictogram of a vagina handy, by all means, slap a cupcake on it.

Our contributor Jewely Hoxie studies Human Sexuality at the University of California Santa Cruz (read her blog here). She has this to stay about the slut stigma…

How many times have you heard people say, “If she wasn’t such a slut…” or, “She’s kind of a slut, but…” or, “I can’t believe she’s slept with [X number] of people”?

I always interject by pointing out that being a slut is not a bad thing — at least, not in the way I define it, i.e. enthusiastically enjoying your sexuality in ways that are always physically and emotionally safe. There is a big difference between sleeping with ten different guys in one month and taking ten Plan B pills in one month. The former is perfectly fine sluttiness (that I encourage!) while the other has nothing to do with sluttiness and everything to do with being careless and irresponsible. I’ll take the side of sluts any day.

What I have found are films that have empowered and inspired me. Films that feature women I can identify with. Mothers and daughters, single or partnered, younger and older, thinner or plumper. Women who confront culturally imposed sanctions regulating their behavior, and deeply felt issues shaping their lives. Women who reject the speed limits of desire enforced upon women. Women who refuse to be labeled.

Behind these films are educated women with high ideals and intriguing visions. Women who object to the discriminating portrayal of their sex in porn and popular media, and who speak up for women sexually and politically. Some of them stay clear of the “porn” word lest they turn their targeted audience away from their work. Instead they market their films as “adult,” “explicit,” “sensual,” or “erotic.” But others refuse to allow men free rein in defining porn, and therefore claim the “porn” word as a way to subversively change its meaning.

Much is written on the effects of porn and female body image. Some complain fearfully of men who will, upon viewing porn, expect all women to have those bodies; others that women themselves fall into this trap and try to emulate such unrealistic things with their own bodies. Of course, these accusations and reservations aren't only reserved for pornographic materials, but magazines, television, any media.

And while you may think that I'm going to rant about how stupid this is, how silly it is to believe that people will be so affected by these images that they'd let ~ no force ~ them to be their realities, I'm not.