In the first years of the war, most feminists in all the belligerent countries affirmed that motherhood was a form of national service. “We will be the mothers that the fatherland needs!” wrote the German socialist Henriette Furth in 1915. Women’s groups of all shades of opinion greatly expanded their charitable work for maternal and […]
День: 07.11.2015
Sexual Behavior: Curiosity and Responsibility
Toddlers are not yet aware of the idea of sexuality or genital sexual relations. Like infants, toddlers and young children engage in many behaviors that involve exploring their bodies and doing things that feel good. Both girls and boys engage in self-stimulation. Over 70% of mothers in one study reported that their children under age […]
Feminist Solidarity and Communicative Thinking
To even suggest that there is a feminist conception of solidarity might seem presumptuous. Therefore I will first consider what “feminist solidarity” might mean. Feminism is an unprecedented social, political, economic, and cultural movement in its scope and ambitions. It is not geographical, ethnic, racial, national, class, religious, sexually-oriented, or physiological by identity, and its […]
Acknowledge a Complaint and Find Something to Agree With
Perhaps if you allow yourself to be open to a complaint, you will see a basis for it. Suppose that your partner feels angry about your busy schedule and complains that you are not devoting enough time to the relationship. Maybe you think he or she is overreacting or forgetting all the time you have […]
Whose body is the female body?
Two years ago I was assigning seminar tasks to a group of graduate students in Gender Studies. One of the articles on my agenda bore a provocative title Whose pussy is this? A feminist comment from Hooks’ book entitled Talking hack,—Think — ingfeminist, thinking black (1989). The article as I had anticipated stimulated a lot […]
Receiving Complaints
Delivering complaints to a partner is difficult; likewise, receiving complaints from someone you love can be an emotionally rending experience. However, people involved in an intimate, loving relationship inevitably need to register complaints on occasion. How you respond to a complaint can significantly affect not only your partner’s inclination to openly share concerns in the […]
ONLINE DISABILITY IDENTITY
“Models of disability provide a framework for understanding the way in which people with impairments experience disability. They also provide a reference for society as laws, regulations and structures are developed that impact on the lives of disabled people. There are two main models that have influenced modern thinking about disability: the medical model and […]
Ailments of the Scrotum
As long ago as the nineteenth century it was known that certain medicines could damage the testicles. Felix Roubaud, a famous French physician, described how in treating tuberculosis with iodine vapours he had observed four cases of progressive sexual impotence. He found ‘a marked wasting of the testicles’. Saltpetre was also found to be harmful, […]
ONLINE GENDER IDENTITY
The notion that online identity can be more fluid than “real life” identity is pervasive in the literature and takes into account the different ways in which attributes of identity including gender, age, religion, cultural heritage, etc., manifest in online as opposed to physical settings (Bowker & Tuffin, 2007; Whitley, 1997; Suler, 2002; Nowak & […]
Psychosexual Development: What It Means to Be a Girl or Boy
In early childhood, children begin serious exploration of their bodies. It is during this period that children are usually toilet trained, and they go through a period of intense interest in their genitals and bodily wastes. They begin to ask the first, basic questions about sex, usually about why boys and girls have different genitals […]