On Friday, I got a wonderful Happy Mother’s Day wish from Fem2.0 in Twitter. Of course, that meant that some random man asked in a mean-spirited tweet whether the wish included “abortive pro-choice mothers of dead babies.” I didn’t respond, because, well, why would you respond to a person who rudely interrupts, willfully chooses to [...]
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
In a Meritocracy, Sexism Is Shocking and Hard to Believe
It’s hard to accept that sexism is alive and well and that it undermines virtually everything we believe about equality, fairness, and justice. “Am I doing an injustice to the female members of this school?” This is the question 16-year old Junius Onome Williams, running in an election for his school’s student body president asked [...]
Why is UConn Mascot a Wolf Rape Meme?
Where do you begin to tackle a culture where a school mascot is a popular rape meme and the campus television station airs a video for an campus safety hot-line that features a “howler monkey bitch” who is “crying rape”? Two days ago, Carolyn Luby, an undergraduate at University of Connecticut published a remarkable open [...]
What Facebook Continues To Tell Us About Violence Against Women
There is a photograph being shared in Facebook of a woman cowering in a corner, eyes downcast, as large man standing in the foreground swings his fist at her head. The caption reads, “Women deserve equal rights. And lefts.”
#SupportTrista: Woman Challenges Facebook Rape Pages and Is Targeted for Rape
What would happen Facebook stopped allowing images like the ones used in this post and characterized them as hate speech? This is a screen capture taken for an article about misogyny in Facebook. When people protest images like these, they often become targets of rape threats. It’s become rote it happens with such regularity. Trista [...]
The Context for Steubenville: 50 Cases of Rape Involving “Impairment”
A reasonable person might think that certain cases of rape would be clear cut and that it would be all but impossible to blame the victim of a crime, especially one with witnesses, photographs and other documentary evidence, for her own assault. But, we don’t live in a world where a reasonable person can think that at [...]
For International Women’s Day Fox News Broadcasted…Breasts!
Some things you just have to laugh at, because, really… I realize that I should not be surprised by this, but even the Fox News anchor haltingly continued her broadcast as the pictures appeared on the screen. As she said words like “Women’s History Month,” “women’s accomplishments in Connecticut,” “Young Women’s Leadership Program,” a constant [...]
#IWD: Educating Girls Is One of The Most Important Things You Can Do Today
Of the estimated 61 million children deprived of basic education globally, 60 percent are girls. But, that’s just the beginning of a dramatic gender gap. According to the Global Campaign for Education: “An additional 100 million girls worldwide that begin primary school do not finish [school]. The numbers are even starker for secondary education, which [...]
Consent and Ending Violence Against Women and Children
Or Why a “Small” Consent Revolution Needs to be a “Big” Consent Revolution The idea of consent, in terms of how we think about sex, sexual abuse, and power, is fairly new and historically radical. Laurie Penny, describing shifting attitudes about these topics, called it a “small revolution,” earlier this week in The New Statesman. [...]
Dear Academy: You are Aging and Sexist, Now What?
Dear Academy, I love the Academy Awards. Along with millions of other people, I wait for the annual ceremony, yell at the screen when I disagree with winners, pick my favorite dresses and cheer for people whose work I’ve had the pleasure of enjoying. Like my parents before me, I fight with my kids about [...]