Hello, what's this?

Whether you’re a feminist or a fangirl or you just like to learn, these six “Tropes vs Women” episodes of Feminist Frequency are absolutely fascinating. Host Anita Sarkeesian makes sure you’ll never look at entertainment the same way. 

Watch:

• The Manic Pixie Dream Girl
• Women in Refrigerators
• The Smurfette Principle
• The Evil Demon Seductress
• The Mystical Pregnancy
• The Straw Feminist

These are all really interesting. 

(via egadsy)

whatkindofday:

I’ve decided I’m now essentially on strike when it comes to women’s shoes. I’m going to sit out the entire world of chick footwear until designers make some that it’s possible to walk in, for more than an hour, with the easy gait of Gene Kelly about to break into a routine, with no day-long pain afterwards. I fully realise my demands viz footwear are wholly a minority interest at the moment – who knows how long the after-effects of Sex and the City’s decade-long Blahnik-wank will continue to rumble through society – but I’m pretty determined about this. After all, I’ve seen those pictures of Victoria Beckham’s bare, bebunioned feet. I don’t want toes that look like thalidomide pasties. If I’m going to spunk £500 on a pair of designer shoes, it’s going to be a pair that I can a) dance to Bad Romance in, and b) will allow me to run away from a murderer, should one suddenly decide to give chase. That’s the minimum I ask from my footwear. To be able to dance in it, and for it not to get me murdered.

Caitlin Moran, How to be a Woman

Oh Ms Moran you talk so much sense! Women and men everywhere should read this book. 

(via fuckyeahcaitlinmoran)

fuckyeahcaitlinmoran:

From the photographer’s website.

Oh there’s a fyCaitlinMoran, she’s the reason I always buy The Saturday Times and I’ve just preordered her new book!

(via tiltwithlips)

andyisreadingbooks:

shakepaper:

lipstick-feminists:

kungfucarrie:

prettykooky:

Those books are really worth reading. They completely changed the way I saw myself and the world.

So, I decided to make this montage and suggest them to you guys.

Surprisingly, I’ve only read The Bell Jar (for school) and the Feminine Mystique. The others remain on my ever-growing list of “books I should really some day”.

I’ve read all of these :D

As much as I love the Beauty Myth and the Second Sex, this is so second wave, white and heterosexual. Where’s bell hooks, Chandra Mohanty, Trinh T. Minh Ha, Audre Lourde, Judith Butler, Eve Sedgwick, Judith Halberstam, Elizabeth Grosz etc.? I find it very problematic that these books continue to be represented as being the foundational feminist texts. Well, feminism just isn’t about gendered oppression, because gendered oppression intersects with race, class, ability, sexuality etc. The perpetuation of these texts as “the” feminist texts (without looking at how specific they are), has the effect of universalizing women’s experiences as white, middle class, and heterosexual (while effectively displacing the experiences of other women). We experience gender oppression in very different ways, so that should be acknowledged and we should expand our readings to include other women’s voices. I’m sorry if I’m being an asshole about this, but this is an unacceptable “life changing feminist books list.” Maybe you should be specific about who they are actually life changing for, and realize that by not including books by queer women, or women of colour for example, you’re re-privileging whiteness, heterosexuality, and middle-classness as the centre, when we should be attempting to dismantle all forms of hierarchy.

I think it’s splendidly hypocritical to write a long rant about how elitist these books suggestions are and then to give a list of books that are more representative for feminism made out entirely of writers who either emigrated to the US or where born there thus deeming all feminist writers who are not part of the Anglophile sphere as not worth reading.

Thought I’d add some of the early feminist too, for me I came across people like Aphra Behn, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Margaret Fuller (even Charlotte Bronte!) first due to the structure of my Eng. Lit. degree (we started in Old English Anglo-Saxon and worked our way up!). It’s interesting to read these in relation to people like Woolf and de Beauvoir and see how feminism developed over such a long period of time and how even in the 60s the same kind of issues where being addressed as in the Eighteenth Century.

Also I just discovered the female writers of the nineteenth century fin-de-siecle, like Sarah Grand and George Egerton: they wrote some very interesting women (the ‘new woman’ novel etc.) Elaine Showalter (every English student’s favourite contemporary American 70s feminist after Gilbert and Gubar!) has an anthology called “Daughters of Decadence”, a collection of short-stories that are a very interesting read if you’re interested in the lead up to feminist thinking in the Modern period. 

I think the most helpful thing that I learnt at uni about feminism is that really there are feminisms (plural):  Woolf’s feminism is quite different to say Helene Cixcous’s or Judith Butler’s but that doesn’t diminish either text. There’s room for everyone :)

Essentially my three-year English degree is just so I can write this kind of thing on tumblr. Yay!