One night earlier this week, 29-year old Janese Talton-Jackson was shot to death as she waited outside of a club. The man who shot her couldn’t tolerate her saying ‘no’ and refusing to share her phone number. Every few months stories like these make it into the news cycle, even though related harassment and assaults […]
The Team
Soraya Chemaly
Soraya writes about gender, feminism, and culture for The Huffington Post, RHReality Check, and Alternet, and has appeared on NPR's Talk of the Nation and Sirius XM radio. Her work brings academic feminism into mainstream critiques of pop culture through satire and news analysis. She is interested in how systems of oppression are transmitted to children via media and religious cultures. She has a BA in History from Georgetown University, where she founded the feminist undergraduate journal The New Press. Soraya tweets from @schemaly.
Recent blog posts written by Soraya Chemaly
What Every (Progressive) Boy and Man Should Know
A couple of years ago, the Pew Research Forum surveyed Americans under 30-years old, asking them questions about abortion and, specifically, Roe v Wade. The survey revealed the following: 41% thought Roe v Wade involved the death penalty or the environment, or they could not name the subject matter. 16% thought Roe v Wade was […]
Take the 2016 #ChoreChallenge
Chances are, if you are like most people in the world, you live in a family where chores are done along gender lines and women and girls are spending an average of two hours more on chores per week. Many boys and men feel strongly, anecdotally, that this can’t be right. However, while men are doing more house […]
12 Reasons Gender Matters To Understanding Teenage Sexting “Scandals”
Portions of this post are updated from an article published at Bitch Magazine. In what media is again calling a “sexting scandal,” a community in Colorado is grappling with the fact that hundreds of students have been exchanging “lewd” pictures, using photo vault apps that many parents and administrators were unfamiliar with. Situations like this […]
Why All-Male Minions Really Do Matter for Children
Earlier this week, Margot Mogowan, founder of Reel Girls, a web site dedicated to media equity, wrote a post lambasting the movie Minions for its dullard sensibility and disappointingly routine sexism. Most families taking kids to the movies aren’t giving sexism a second thought, preferring instead to just get out of the summer heat and […]
What Teenage Boys Should Know About Teenage Girls
Among my oldest and best friends are men I became friends with when we were teenagers. For the most part, like teenagers today, we thought of ourselves as equals. We went to the same schools, socialized together, participated in sports meets at the same time, eventually worked in similar jobs and generally assumed that our […]
It’s A Man’s World, Now What?
This post originally appeared in Role/Reboot. Last year, I wrote an article about women standing in lines to use public bathrooms. It wasn’t actually about toilets, but about why holding women to male standards is discriminatory. It must have twisted some people’s knickers in very tight and uncomfortable knots, because it resulted in seriously outraged and indignant responses. What […]
12 Cases: Pew’s Online Harassment Survey Highlights Digital Gender Speech and Safety Gap
This morning, Pew Research released the findings of their most recent report, Online Harassment. This is a timely study, coming fast on the heels of hacked photographs of more than 100 celebrities, this month’s ongoing Gamergate, and this week’s Lewis’ Law Twitter welcome to Monica Lewinsky in the wake of her anti-cyber bullying initiative launch. […]
20 Facts Everyone Should Know About Gender Bias in Movies
A new study, Gender Bias Without Borders, was released by the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media this week. Conducted by Dr. Stacy Smith and a team at USC’s Annenberg School for Communications and Journalism, it looks at 120 films in the 10 most profitable film markets, globally. These films, rated G, PG, or […]