I’ve been scouring Flickr a lot lately and after seeing all of the great feminist imagery decided to do a feature here on the blog. I hope you enjoy them and feel free to reply with links to your favorites.
If you are an avid follower of the art world, you’ve no doubt heard the recent talk about how women are looked at as being lesser artists than men. Female artists make up a very small percentage of the art in museums and galleries and, just like almost every other professional field, earn significantly less money than their male counterparts. This is an issue that many women and men in the art community are recognizing and trying to correct. However, at least one critic has opposing views on the topic.
People naturally expect a level of offensive behavior at a comedy show. However, a recent performance by Johnny Vegas crossed the line from offensive to criminal, and most people just sat back and laughed at the victim’s expense.
And right on the heels of all the articles talking about the sexism involved in vegan activism, we have some gross sexism coming from the meat industry. I’m not sure Carol Adam’s book title “The Pornography of Meat” has ever had this literal a representation before. These are some of the sickest images and I can’t even see how omnis would be enticed by them.
As many of you know, I don’t believe we should exclude one cause to promote another. That’s why I’ve been getting increasingly frustrated with the vegan/animal rights/animal welfare communities (I had to throw animal welfare in there because I’m going to be talking about PETA who is definitely not either a vegan or animal rights organization regardless of what they say). Not that the feminist movement does much or even really cares about animal rights as a rule. Most feminists are omnis who I’ve found don’t like to hear that veganism and animal rights is a feminist issue. However, since the feminist movement doesn’t directly counter the animal rights movement strictly to further their own cause, I won’t be saying anymore about that side of things.
First we have Oklahoma representative Sally Kern bashing homosexuals and actually saying they are more a threat to this country than terrorism. Not that I think terrorism is a huge threat to our country, I think it’s mostly fear mongering. But people like rep Kern do believe that terrorism is a major threat so this statement is a bold one coming from her.
Defining the terms: I think it’s important to start by defining the terms I will be using in the article. This helps to avoid confusion, especially for many people who are confused as to what term they should use if they wouldn’t have an abortion themselves but also don’t feel they should place their personal views on others.
Pro-Choice - You are against government regulation of abortions regardless of whether you would have one yourself or not. If you don’t think abortion should be illegal you are pro-choice.
Anti-Choice (aka Pro-Life) - If you are pro-government regulation and believe that roe v/s wade should be overturned you probably refer to yourself as pro-life. However, I personally find the term pro-life to be very loaded, meaning to imply that anyone who is pro-choice is also anti-life, which is usually the farthest thing from the truth. I much prefer the term anti-choice and find it much less loaded since it’s a term used to denote a person who literally wants to take away a woman’s right to choose.
I wrote the following as a response to Jethra Black’s blog post Let’s Talk Torture. BRAIN STORM TIME!!!!. She’s doing a documentary on the way horror films have changed in post-9/11 American culture and asked for feedback on the torture porn trend. However, my comment ended up being too long for the reply form and I also thought it would make a great article to post here.
First I should say that before reading this post, I hadn’t made a connection between the torture porn trend and 9/11 at all. As a feminist who has been following those trends for years, I just took the appearance of torture porn as another sign that the way society views women is on the downfall. Along with the torture porn trend over the past few years, there’s also been a huge trend of rape apologists, the invention of the term “gray rape”, access to safe abortion and birth control has increasingly become scarce and abstinence only education has stripped many young girls of any chance of having a healthy sexual relationship. So my views here on torture porn will be more related to feminism than 9/11.
Another in the “Original Women” series called “Silence is Deadly”. Far too often women have so much to contribute but hold back because they’ve been taught that “polite girls” don’t speak up. The silence is killing us, we all need to learn to use our voices in any way we can. Blogs, zines, art, poetry, music… it doesn’t matter the medium, just make your voices heard!!!
I’m Angie Bowen, the voice here at Voice of Dissent. I’m an artist/designer living in the mountains of Colorado. I’m very passionate about feminism and abolitionist animal rights so you can expect to hear a lot about those two topics. I’m also just starting to study anarchy and Marxism (and still don’t really know which fits with my own beliefs more yet), so you can expect musings on those topics as well. And obviously, since I’m an artist, you can expect to see quite a bit of artwork as well as articles about other artists.
