“...the Platonic nerd is invariably male. The stereotype is flexible to incorporate women and girls on an individual basis, but few people conjure up the image of a woman when they think about nerds.” Feminist blog Pandagon reviews two books about nerdiness and geekery, Jason Tocci addresses the question of why female involvement in geek culture seems to call for a special explanation, and two feminist geeks set out in search of an egalitarian future.
posted by velvet winter on Jun 26, 2009 - 141 comments

A Prison Nightmare. On June 23, 2009, the National Prison Rape Commission released its final Report and proposed Standards to prevent, detect, respond to and monitor sexual abuse of incarcerated or detained individuals throughout the United States. More prisoners reported abuse by staff than abuse by other prisoners.
posted by Non Prosequitur on Jun 25, 2009 - 132 comments

To date, focus of most research into Domestic Violence has been on instances of violence against women by men based on the arguably sexist premise that it is more prevalent than instances of violence by women against men. However numerous books and studies have contradicted this premise, showing that men and women suffer domestic abuse in similar and sometimes equal rates. Despite this, preconceived ideas of gender roles still lead many to believe it would be virtually impossible for a woman to physically abuse a man, an attitude which Men's Rights advocates say often leads to many battered men hiding in shame, fearful of being ridiculed, or even prosecuted. [more inside]
posted by Effigy2000 on Jun 22, 2009 - 190 comments

The portable urinating device for women (via)
posted by Brandon Blatcher on Jun 4, 2009 - 94 comments

Isaac Asimov on how to be a dirty old man.
posted by Artw on Jun 3, 2009 - 67 comments

"May God close your horable museum." Because I can't believe this has never been the subject of a full post here before, although it keeps popping up in comments: The Museum of Menstruation and Women's Health. The inimitable Harry Finley has assembled a dizzying and oddly comprehensive site. It may be a bit much to take in one go (dilute, dilute, OK?), but you might dip in at: menstrual slapping; patent medicines; facts of life booklets; the Little Doozee; pre-twentieth century menstrual products and practices; Lysol douching, yay and nay; or the tour of the museum inside Harry's house (now closed). Also: cats, because Harry likes cats.
posted by maudlin on May 27, 2009 - 27 comments

Marvel think that not enough of their readers are female. So they decided to hook them in in a way that girls understand.
posted by mippy on May 27, 2009 - 160 comments

Chances are, if you live in a cosmopolitan urban centre, you'll have noticed how young muslimahs are growing ever more adventurous in their fashion choices. But taking the veil is no simple matter: the aspiring hijabi will need tips on how to tie her headscarf, as well as ideas on how to stay covered up and stylish all year round. Modesty is clearly no barrier to urban cool, as Elenany's see-them-want-them graphic-print dresses prove, although this year, certain trends are off limits. (previously)
posted by Elizabeth the Thirteenth on May 23, 2009 - 95 comments

When President Obama says he's looking for a judge with the "quality of empathy" to replace retiring Supreme Court Justice David Souter, is it code for a female judge? In the two decades since Bertha Wilson famously asked Will Women Judges Really Make A Difference? (mms), the answer has come back as a resounding yes (studies: 1 (pdf), 2) -- and no (studies: 1 (pdf), 2). But either way, is choosing judges based on supposed gender qualities ever a good idea?
posted by hayvac on May 21, 2009 - 64 comments

Q: You like chocolate? You are a person who likes the chocolate finger that we are currently testing?
A: Yes! I am! I like chocolate!
Q: You like chocolate! In fact, you are a person who likes chocolate as much as a company likes money!
A: YES I LIKE CHOCOLATE AS IF IT WERE MY PROFESSION!! TELL ME MORE ABOUT IT!
Q: YOU ENJOY THIS FLING YOU SEXY CONSUMER. [more inside]
posted by Brandon Blatcher on May 17, 2009 - 90 comments

The SF Signal Mind Meld feature poses science fiction related questions to a number of SF luminaries and the scientist, science writer or blogger. Subjects have included the best women writers in SF, taboo topics in SF, underated authors and the most controversial SF novels of the past and present. The also cover lighter topics, such the role of media tie-ins, how Battlestar Galactica could have ended better (bonus Geoff Ryman) and the realistic (or otherwise) use of science on TV SF shows.
posted by Artw on May 6, 2009 - 17 comments

Kenyan women call to mind Greek comedy, though perhaps they have other reasons to take a week off...
posted by mdn on Apr 30, 2009 - 17 comments

Once dismissed as "the Anna Kournikova of chess" for marketing her glamour, Alexandra Kosteniuk is now the Women's World Champion. (previously) [more inside]
posted by Joe Beese on Apr 29, 2009 - 103 comments

Man fell from the garden of Eden, and he planted the Garden of Herbal Evil, to justify Brutal Myths against women. Fortunately women have the Blissful Garden of Herbal Good to bind the evil herbs. (possibly NSFW, contains line drawings of genitals.) [more inside]
posted by fontophilic on Apr 28, 2009 - 32 comments

Women in Photography — WIPNYC presents a solo exhibition of work from select photographers every couple weeks so viewers can discover and enjoy the work of female artists. [some nsfw images]
posted by netbros on Apr 28, 2009 - 4 comments

"Hot Cougar Sex!" Since the term was first coined, "cougar" has become something of a cultural phenomenon: it's been applied to Samantha on "Sex and the City" and actress Demi Moore, and sometimes shares territory with that other recently-ubiquitous label for sexualized older women: MILFs. Some women have embraced the term as empowering, but as a new reality show debuts, others show why it's less than appealing.
posted by ocherdraco on Apr 16, 2009 - 182 comments

Graffiti Project in Kenya Slums — more than a year after he took the original pictures, French photo artist JR has returned to Kibera, Kenya. He was reunited with the women who had accepted to be part of his WOMEN project at the end of 2007 (previously). 2000 square meters of Kibera slum rooftops have been covered with photos of their eyes and faces. Most of the women will have their own photos on their own rooftop and the material used is water resistant so that the photo itself will protect the fragile houses in the heavy rain season. They are on view from the railway line that passes above them, and will be visible for Google Earth. (via Africa.Visual_Media)
posted by netbros on Apr 8, 2009 - 11 comments

Sheril Kirshenbaum's brilliant ranting about sexism in science. Contains many links within that continue the discussion. Thankfully, sexism has gone down significantly in recent years. At the same time, it still exists in some amount - even a small handful of Nobel Laureates have acted sexist (or other -ist - Watson?). (For my part, I'm glad that I haven't encountered any sexism myself in neuroscience.)
posted by kldickson on Mar 30, 2009 - 128 comments

Extravagant Crowd - Carl Van Vechten’s Portraits of Women and Photos of African Americans. Previous post by ND¢: Creative Americans: Portraits by Carl Van Vechten 1932-1964. Also, public domain works from Wikimedia Commons. [more inside]
posted by madamjujujive on Mar 22, 2009 - 3 comments

Sixteen states already have laws [PDF] related to abortion ultrasounds . Eleven more states have recently introduced bills that demand that a woman who wants an abortion be forced to look at the ultrasound, while a doctor describes what she is seeing. All of these bills are because the legislators believe that adoption is the only choice a woman should make. This essay, On Living Pro-Lifer's Choice for Women, explores the difficulties faced by birth mothers who choose that path.
posted by dejah420 on Mar 17, 2009 - 505 comments

"Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. This determines not only most relations between men and women but also the relation of women to themselves." Also: male gaze on the Gender Ads Project. Laura Mulvey's original 1975 essay on Male Gaze in cinema.
posted by Optimus Chyme on Mar 12, 2009 - 248 comments

In 2001, the United Nations Security Council passed Resolution 1325 on Women's Role on Peace-Building and Security, calling for increased participation by women in conflict resolution and peace negotiations. Eight years later, "in terms of signing the peace documents and being at the peace table and involved in the peace-making operations, 1.3 percent of all the signatures in the world on these peacekeeping documents have been rendered by women." (Stephen Lewis, former UN special envoy), and as of 2007, women constituted only 1% of peacekeeping military personnel. Could increasing women's participation also help reduce sexual exploitation and abuse by UN peacekeepers?
posted by terranova on Mar 3, 2009 - 5 comments

BABIES’ skulls dashed against rocks; attempts to twist off the heads of toddlers. Girls, their mothers and grandmothers (and sometimes male relatives too) raped at knife- or gunpoint, the weapons then used to inflict mutilation. Women hauled off to camps or just tied to trees and gang-raped. Thousands of children, some as young as nine, snatched or recruited by armed gangs (or regular forces) and made into drug-crazed killers, the girls among them often serially abused or taken by commanders as “wives”. Such are the horrors reported from some recent conflict zones... [more inside]
posted by kliuless on Feb 21, 2009 - 41 comments

"A wildly flamboyant funk diva with few equals even three decades after her debut, Betty Davis combined the gritty emotional realism of Tina Turner, the futurist fashion sense of David Bowie, and the trendsetting flair of Miles Davis, her husband for a year. ... she turned Miles on to Jimi Hendrix and Sly Stone (providing the spark that led to his musical reinvention on In a Silent Way and Bitches Brew), then proved her own talents with a trio of sizzling mid-'70s solo LPs." - All Music Guide (many links nsfw-ish)
posted by Joe Beese on Feb 17, 2009 - 22 comments

Lille Mand - Eight year old Mathis writes an essay for school entitled, "How to Understand Women." (via Neatorama) (It will be slow to load. Also, there is brief shower nudity so NSFW)
posted by caddis on Feb 13, 2009 - 14 comments

Some gals like gay (male) porn [mildly NSFW]. But there's not much agreement on how or why. [more inside]
posted by LMGM on Feb 3, 2009 - 83 comments

Most wives are Mad at Dad. "We're mad that having children has turned our lives upside down much more than theirs. We're mad that these guys, who can manage businesses or keep track of thousands of pieces of sports trivia, can be clueless when it comes to what our kids are eating and what supplies they need for school. And more than anything else, we're mad that they get more time to themselves than we do."
posted by Xurando on Jan 29, 2009 - 199 comments

What do women want? A post-feminist look at female desire.
posted by desjardins on Jan 23, 2009 - 149 comments

Billionaires have more grandchildren through their sons than through their daughters, because the status advantage is more reproductively valuable to the sons. Therefore, it would be adaptive for the mothers of their children to bear more sons than daughters. But surely that can't be; mothers can't control the sex of their children. Oh but so it is: billionaires have 60% male children. [more inside]
posted by grobstein on Jan 17, 2009 - 69 comments

"Well behaved women rarely make history," said Laurel Thatcher Ulrich. Scandalous Women brings you the lives, loves, and sexual adventures of some of the most fascinating women who rocked the world. Like Olimpia Maidalchini who managed to achieve something that no woman ever has, for the 11 years of her brother-in-law Innocent X's reign as pope, Olimpia was the real power at the Vatican; or Elizabeth Armistead, wife of a cabinet minister, courtesan to many. Read the bios and follow the tales of nearly a hundred women of scandalous pursuit from Mata Hari to Typhoid Mary.
posted by netbros on Jan 16, 2009 - 14 comments

"At an age at which I should be putting on a wedding dress, I am asking for someone's eyes to be dripped with acid,"

Four years ago, a spurned suitor poured a bucket of sulfuric acid over [Ameneh Bahrami's] head, leaving her blind and disfigured. Late last month, an Iranian court ordered that five drops of the same chemical be placed in each of her attacker's eyes, acceding to Bahrami's demand that he be punished according to a principle in Islamic jurisprudence that allows a victim to seek retribution for a crime. The sentence has not yet been carried out.

I, for one, welcome our new loner female, tool-using dolphin overlords. [more inside]
posted by kliuless on Dec 27, 2008 - 40 comments

I regard myself as a woman who has seen much of life. Belle Starr, also known as the Bandit Queen, was a well-educated "spoiled, rich girl" who grew up to prefer the company of outlaws. Her unconventional life inspired song lyrics [1, 2, 3, 4], movies [1, 2, 3], even manga [1, 2].
posted by amyms on Dec 27, 2008 - 9 comments

"Pretty girls are like cars that need a lot of oil." Alex Graven, 9, has had How to Talk to Girls, the runaway hit of the Soaring Hawk Elementary School book fair, picked up by HarperCollins. How do you spot these oil-guzzling cars? ""It is easy to spot pretty girls," Alex writes, "because they have big earrings, fancy dresses and all the jewelry." [more inside]
posted by WCityMike on Dec 3, 2008 - 100 comments

What Girls Want - A series of vampire novels illuminates the complexities of female adolescent desire. (via) [more inside]
posted by kliuless on Dec 1, 2008 - 226 comments

Kay S. Hymowitz strikes again. Previously, she wrote an article positing that "that too many single young males (SYMs) were lingering in a hormonal limbo between adolescence and adulthood, shunning marriage and children, and whiling away their leisure hours with South Park reruns, marathon sessions of World of Warcraft, and Maxim lists of the ten best movie fart scenes."
Now she has a new thesis: That angry, disenfranchised single young men use "Darwinist" philosophy to justify "resistance to settling down" and "unsentimental promiscuity". [via]
posted by shotgunbooty on Nov 17, 2008 - 164 comments

Team Lioness is the name given to a group of female soliders, (and the documentary about them) who were some of the first women in modern American warfare to engage in frontline combat — something that is officially forbidden by the military. "The female support soliders were assigned to the 1st Engineer Battalion and they were recruited to accompany Marine units during raids. Originally, the female soldiers were there to search and detain any women they came upon and to guard the unit's Arabic interpreter. Over time, however, as the situation in Ramadi deteriorated, the Marine units transitioned into a more offensive role, baiting insurgents into firefights in order to draw them out. Until officers higher up the chain got spooked over the possibility of a female soldier killed in combat and quietly disbanded the unit, members of Team Lioness were often right in the thick of things, including some of the fiercest urban firefights of the Iraq War."
posted by nooneyouknow on Nov 14, 2008 - 22 comments

The America We Never Seem to Talk About. Brenda Ann Kenneally captures the female working poor and culture of incarceration in Troy, N.Y., where the presidential race has little resonance.
posted by chunking express on Nov 4, 2008 - 53 comments

It's hardly the case today (unless you live in Iran), but once upon a time, all computer programmers were female. While the (male) engineers who built ENIAC, the world's first modern computer, became famous and lauded, the six women who actually programmed ENIAC have been largely overlooked. Now a team of researchers and programmers is trying to raise money to tell the story of these pioneering women in a new documentary, before it's too late. [more inside]
posted by Asparagirl on Oct 23, 2008 - 25 comments

October 18, 1997, Liz Heaston becomes the first woman to score points in a college football game (NAIA), kicking for Willamette in their victory over Linfield College. August 30, 2001, Ashley Martin kicks three extra points for Jacksonville State University, helping them in their 72-10 defeat of Cumberland, and becoming the first woman to score points in a Division 1 game. August 30, 2003, Katie Hnida becomes the face of women in college football when she scores two extra points in New Mexico's victory over Texas State University. She received harassment and (alleged) assault from her former teammates at Colorado University before becoming the first woman to core points in a Division 1-A game, as well as the first to suit up for a bowl game. Five years later, Kacy Stuart, a 14-year-old High School Freshman who can kick 50-yard Field Goals, is facing opposition for suiting up for the New Creation Center Crusaders, first from the league, and now from the other teams...
posted by Navelgazer on Oct 22, 2008 - 41 comments

"Far away from the Taliban insurgency, in this most peaceful corner of Afghanistan, a quiet revolution is gaining pace. Women are driving cars — a rarity in Afghanistan — working in public offices and police stations, and sitting on local councils. There is even a female governor, the first and only one in Afghanistan." Carlotta Gall writes about promising developments in Bamian. (NY Times; print version.)
posted by languagehat on Oct 7, 2008 - 19 comments

Pickering and the Female Computers. In 1881, Edward Pickering, the director of the Harvard College Observatory, became so impatient with a male lab assistant’s work that he famously declared his maid could do a better job. Rather than take offense, his 24-year-old maid, Williamina Fleming, instead took him up on the offer. She ended up working at the Observatory for the next 30 years, supervising the tedious work of cataloging photographic plates, but also discovering variable stars and novae, helping to develop a classification system—and, perhaps even more importantly, hiring nearly 40 female assistants, many of whom went on to have distinguished scientific careers. [more inside]
posted by mothershock on Sep 20, 2008 - 27 comments

Tomorrow is Talk Like a Pirate Day. In honor of that, lift your voices and talk like a woman pirate, mateys! Piracy may have mainly been a boyzone, but the high seas saw a number of female captains and crew members as well, sometimes the subjects of fanciful stories and fetishes (possibly NSFW). [more inside]
posted by notashroom on Sep 18, 2008 - 88 comments

Video evidence of Slovakia's 82-0 slaughter of Bulgaria in the women's ice hockey Olympic qualifier.
posted by chunking express on Sep 15, 2008 - 44 comments

Why aren't men and women becoming more alike? A husband and a stay-at-home wife in a patriarchal Botswanan clan seem to be more alike than a working couple in Denmark or France. The more Venus and Mars have equal rights and similar jobs, the more their personalities seem to diverge. International Sexuality Description Project findings.
posted by desjardins on Sep 9, 2008 - 45 comments

Female Single Combat Club [nsfw]. An extensive site about women fighters around the world and in history. In English and Russian. Previously.
posted by nickyskye on Aug 27, 2008 - 27 comments

English, Motherduffers—do you speak it?
posted by emelenjr on Aug 27, 2008 - 34 comments

In the wake of some pretty nasty harassment directed towards women at San Diego Comic-Con, Rachel Edidin from the Inside Out blog at Girl Wonder has established a means of constructively dealing with the problem: the Con Anti-Harassment Project. [more inside]
posted by bitter-girl.com on Aug 26, 2008 - 444 comments

"Women and children, first," is a familiar cultural refrain, with its popular roots in the gallant sacrifice made by the male contingent aboard the doomed Titanic. Their sacrifice has inspired poetry, sculpture, male social clubs, and, of course, cinema. Yet, this sacrifice of near-mythic scale was in some respects a myth, with survival statistics skewing well in favor of men of higher social and economic class than children (and, to a lesser extent, women) of lower status.
posted by Blazecock Pileon on Aug 25, 2008 - 70 comments

Every hour a woman in the Russian Federation dies at the hand of a relative, her partner or former partner. Russian judge rules sexual harassment okay as it ensures humans breed. Domestic violence: Russian women speak out. NPR: Domestic Violence A Silent Crisis In Russia.
posted by agregoli on Aug 11, 2008 - 32 comments