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Giving Kids the Femenist Advantage

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Being a parent continues to be one of the most difficult challenges I have faced in my life. As parents, we make thousands of decisions for our children and it seems everyone has an opinion to offer. There are books, podcasts, and shows dealing with the technical aspects of parenting; such as diet, potty training, sleep training, behavioural issues, etcetera. Unfortunately there is no handbook outlining how to teach children about underlying societal expectations. The one thing I am certain of is that her father and I want to raise Aurora to be a strong, assertive, indep endent girl. I consider the situations in which I struggled growing up, all the emotions I didn’t understand or circumstances that I felt were unjust, but couldn’t articulate; these are the situations I hope to better prepare my daughter for. Luckily, we have feminism.   Being feminists has allowed her father and me to give our daughter the gift of perspective, the ability to acknowledge and consider the way...
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Go ahead, fetishize me.

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This weeks readings brought a particular music video to mind for me. I had the pleasure of watching this woman perform live last year; her show left me covered in goosebumps and in complete awe! Her name is Sevdaliza. She is an Iranian-Dutch professional athlete with a Master’s degree in communications, who taught herself how to create music. She then wrote, performed, produced and released an album on her own record label. This woman is a force of nature! Her style is dark, provocative, and political; drawing attention to the issues that no one wants to talk about. Her track “Human” and it’s accompanying video are uncomfortably captivating; like you are watching something that you are not supposed to see.  "Human" by Sevdaliza There is so much going on in this video. The black server, with his blind, white eye (a highly visibly disability), is disregarded by the bodyguards. Once inside, the presumably wealthy men he is serving ignore him as he pushes his trolley am...
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From Dots to Lines

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                   In a society so reliant on data, science, and statistics to help us understand the world around us, how is it that we still choose to categorize in people in such a simplistic way when it comes to sex, sexuality and gender? This binary approach to people has become quite outdated.   We seem to understand that giving people binary options to describe themselves, such as: as fat versus thin, short versus tall, rich versus poor would be inadequate. Most people would be uncomfortable choosing one over the other and would likely tell you that they fall somewhere between the two. In fact, we have created all kinds of ways to collect, summarize, and analyze information that is gathered according to a spectrum. So what do we have to gain by sticking to the traditional male versus female categories that are still presented to us everywhere we go? At what point do we ask whether providing only two...
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