Below is a letter I’ve sent to Lynne Featherstone, challenging the Government’s extension of anonymity to alleged rapists. Ms. Featherstone is a Lib Dem junior minister in the Home Office with a portfolio to tackle inequality. I thought I’d post the letter rather than write the same points out in article form, and was wondering what other people thought about the policy.
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Category: General (Page 22 of 27)
To follow from earlier discussion of Lady Gaga, this lecture gives probably the best account I’ve heard about why I should be excited to live in the Gaga era. The discussion of Gaga herself comes in the last 3 minutes or so, but there’s some fascinating points made on gender-revolution in the middle, and the bit at the start about
“When you see something and you know this is feminism, but you don’t know why.”
…is just awesome. Continue reading
One of the first steps in fighting oppression is to acknowledge its presence within the institutions we are a part of, yet far too often injustice is outsourced and framed as something that other people do. Racism in our society is distilled down to groups like the BNP, whose ideologies and practices are so indisputably racist- and whose membership is so easy to “other”- that it is not a painful process to identify and publicly disown them as racist. Similarly, the media and mainstream politics finds it easy to locate sexism in “othered” communities such as those which promote practices which clearly hurt women- so-called honour killings, forced marriage and female genital mutilation. While it is important to locate and fight against such examples of oppression, I believe that it is unhelpful and counterproductive to be content with simply declaiming the uncontroversially sexist. Continue reading
There’s an issue which often bothers me slightly. Why do some things that are compelling to me, and to many of my friends, simply fail to engage the interest of many people?
I could be referring to any number of things- questioning body presentation norms, challenging institutional sexism, wondering how to confront problematic gender roles in personal life, offensive gym advertisements, gender binaries, the problematicness of capitalism, actively engaging with climate change… Continue reading