All Posts Tagged as 'Feminism'

Chrissie Hynde has slammed scantily-dressed feminists saying ''if you walk around looking like a sex worker you will probably be treated like one''.

Black Lives Matter activist Shaun King said that it is permissible to tear down the statues of Jesus Christ that show him with European features because they support white supremacy.

"Yes, I think the statues of the white European they claim is Jesus should also come down. They are a form of white supremacy. Always have been," King tweeted on Monday.

"In the Bible, when the family of Jesus wanted to hide, and blend in, guess where they went? EGYPT! Not Denmark. Tear them down," he added.

"Yes. All murals and stained glass windows of white Jesus, and his European mother, and their white friends should also come down," he explained in a second tweet.

The sexy and rather political halftime performance by Jennifer Lopez and Shakira at Sunday’s Super Bowl, featuring revealing costumes, pole dancing, and a condemnation of Donald Trump’s immigration policies, is drawing both praise and criticism, with some of the leading critics coming from the religious right.

One of the most vocal is Franklin Graham, head of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association (and a reliably anti-LGBTQ voice). In a Facebook post, Graham dubbed the show “sexual exploitation” — even though he has forgiven Trump for his admitted exploitation of women — and he took its sponsor, Pepsi, and the NFL to task.

“I don’t expect the world to act like the church, but our country has had a sense of moral decency on prime time television in order to protect children,” Graham wrote. “We see that disappearing before our eyes. It was demonstrated tonight in the Pepsi Super Bowl Halftime Show — with millions of children watching. This exhibition was Pepsi showing young girls that sexual exploitation of women is okay. With the exploitation of women on the rise worldwide, instead of lowering the standard, we as a society should be raising it. I’m disappointed in Pepsi and the NFL.”

Religious groups are often at the forefront of upholding gender as predetermined and loaded with a set of immutable obligations. Seemingly in response to pressure to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment in Utah, the Church of Latter-Day Saints this month produced a statement regarding Mormons and feminism that echoes Schlafly’s concerns about upholding gender roles:

“Gender is an important part of who we are?—both before, during, and after this life. Men and women are equal?—one is not superior to the other. They are also different, with different roles within a family.”

What the statement doesn’t say is that these “different roles” in a religious context are generally that of executive and manager, with men as head of the family, overseeing all executive decisions, and women as coordinators, taking on the work of implementing those plans on a day-to-day basis. Anyone who has ever worked in an office understands that those roles are not equal and recognize this language as the same a CEO uses when insisting that every employee is valuable. What the boss isn’t saying is that some employees are absolutely more valuable than others and the entire corporate system is built around a hierarchy in which respect very often only flows upward. Erasing gender lines differentiating those in charge from those taking orders overthrows the entire system, and even criticism insisting that women are already equal and don’t really need these protections reads as fearful of what happens to the hierarchy if we remove dividers we’ve created between the roles of women and the roles of men.

Who killed the sex symbol?

It's no mystery that in the era of #MeToo, the rules of combat have changed on the sexual battlefield. Women will no longer tolerate condescending or degrading treatment that was once business as usual in the workplace or dating arena. But in this long overdue push-back against sexual coercion and exploitation, has something valuable been lost?

The sex symbol was arguably Hollywood's most brilliant artifact, propelling the young movie industry to world impact from the moment that Theda Bara flashed her coiled-snake brassiere in Cleopatra (1917). Sex was great box office. With its impudent populism, Hollywood crashed through stuffy proprieties lingering from the Victorian age and stationed itself at the bold forefront of the modern liberalization of sex. Movies were in sync with the radical new spirit of American women, who won the right to vote in 1920 and kicked up their heels throughout the flapper decade of the Roaring Twenties.

The great sex symbols of Hollywood were manufactured beings, engineered by trial and error, with the mass audience as their ultimate judge and jury. Decade by decade, the movie industry rediscovered primal archetypes that have animated myths around the world since the Stone Age. Major male sex symbols like Clark Gable, Cary Grant and Sidney Poitier have a mesmerizing natural authority onscreen, a supranormal power of personality and density of being that transcend their roles. Like their antecedents in ancient hero sagas, they inhabit and explore physical space, whose frustrations and dangers they endure but ultimately defeat.

The female sex symbol, however, commands emotional or psychological space. Her sensual beauty is an alluring mirage, hypnotizing and sometimes paralyzing. Never entirely present, she is attuned to another reality, an extrasensory dimension to which we have no access. There is an unsettling aura of the uncanny around the major female sex symbols, who channel shadowy powers above or below the social realm.

Activists in Evansville, Ind., caught a school board member on video appearing to dismiss their concerns about safety for LGBTQ kids.

This week, ten members of the Tri-State Alliance — a social service and educational organization serving LGBTQ communities in southeastern Illinois, southwestern Indiana, and western Kentucky — attended a board meeting of the Evansville-Vanderburgh County School Corporation to ask for greater protections for queer students.

After the meeting, the activists confronted school board members, according to posts on the group’s Facebook page.

The Tri-State Alliance says board member Ann Ennis claimed there was no support on the board for addressing suicide concerns among trans students.

On a video posted to the group’s Facebook page, Tri-State Alliance President Wally Paynter can be heard calling Ennis transphobic.

Joanna Williams was raised a feminist. But these days, she hesitates to identify as one.

The author and academic thinks today's feminism "lost the plot somewhere along the line," describing it as a "white middle class feminism."

"[It] seems intent upon telling women that they are victims, that they are vulnerable, that they need special protections," she says. "For me, feminism was always about fighting for liberation."

A group of women are taking their mission to “free the nipple” all the way to the US Supreme Court, a report said.

The trio of New Hampshire women are asking the nation’s highest court to strike down a ban on women appearing topless in public in the city of Laconia, arguing the ordinance violates the constitution by treating men and women differently, NBC News reported.

The legal fight began in 2016, when Ginger Pierro was arrested at a Laconia beach for performing yoga while topless