Due to patriarchy, our society does not want to acknowledge the frequency and impact of sexual violence directed at boys and men. Because of the misogynist socialization of masculinity, boys are taught to embrace and celebrate their abuse. This leads to years of silent trauma for too many men. Let’s debunk some of these harmful stereotypes and inaccurate myths.

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Asexuality is just now coming onto the horizon as an identity. In the last ten years, there has been a growing awareness that some people don’t experience sexual attraction. Given how our society assumes everyone is and wants to be sexual, it can be confusing for some people to understand how asexual people date. So here are some

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Here’s the thing: Fat-shaming is not about health. And navigating a health issue while being fat (or supporting someone who is) can be a difficult journey. But realize that there is hope and that you deserve to be treated with respect by all health professionals. So how, exactly, can we navigate fat-shaming from health professionals when it’s not the fat’s fault?

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So you’re interested in feminism, but you don’t know how to bring it into your everyday, run-of-the-mill, daily life. Maybe you want to start thinking through a more feminist lens; maybe you just want to learn what the heck slut shaming is. Here with six helpful tips is Erin McKelle! Watch her video to learn how to bring feminism into your everyday life.

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A recent study finds that girls who’ve suffered sexual harassment often see it as “normal stuff” that “just happens” because it’s what “guys do.” Translation: they frame their own experiences of harassment based on cultural notions about what gender and sexuality are — or should be. Sad, then, isn’t it, that those cultural notions are often bullshit.

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Intersex is one of the often-left out categories when the LGBTQIAP alphabet is abbreviated as LGBT. The QUIAP is often ignored completely or briefly covered, but people who have these identities are marginalized not only in society, but also often within LGBTQIAP spaces themselves! Intersex identities exist. And we need to start recognizing them.

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Our daughter is Autistic. With the right accommodations and supports, she can have everything she wants out of life – but there’s a lot to do as parents between now and adulthood. So how do we go about raising a confident young woman in an ableist world? I think that the answer lies at the intersection of supporting feminism and destroying ableism.

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It’s that time of year! Yes, the holidays have come around once again. It’s a chance to catch up with family, eat some delicious food, and show your loved ones how much you appreciate them. But there are some downsides to the holidays – especially when dealing with body shaming and relatives who aren’t very understanding. This can make the holidays hard to navigate.

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Telling the truth is hard. There’s social pressure to see things in certain ways and to tell certain premeditated status-quo enabling truths. Society coerces us into telling a narrative that doesn’t reflect the truths that we know, but rather the truths that society so desperately wants us to believe. But we can do better for ourselves – and for others.

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(Trigger warning: rape.) Like most college freshmen, I drank too much. And one night, I drank too much and was pitched out of a frat house in the dead of winter. I woke up in my lofted bed. My clothing was on the floor, and I felt an invisible miasma of shame engulfing me. And my coping mechanism was to make my rapist my partner, giving purpose and intent to something horrible.

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Society isn’t very nice to vaginas. From a very young age, we’re taught that vaginas are somehow bad or wrong or dirty. But the fact is: Vaginas are the objects of a cultural hate-fest. What if we could fight back against that hate, through sex- and body-positivity, and turn haters into lovers? We can. But first, we have to understand where vagina hate comes from.

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Virginity. It’s something we all know of, something we’ve all talked about. It’s something we, as a culture, obsess over. The idea of your first penis-in-vagina sexual encounter being something significant and life altering (well, for women anyway) may seem like just a tradition, but it’s actually very problematic and even harmful. Here are five reasons why.

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How can I pick what to watch without feeling like I’m condoning all of the sexist hoopla draped all over the majority of videos I might choose? Masturbation isn’t supposed to be this morally fraught, right? If it’s such a hassle, you might say, why not forgo the pornography parade altogether? It’s pretty simple: I like porn. The porn industry, on the other hand, is a whole different beast.

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Some believe that since gay men do not want to be sexually intimate with women, our uninvited touching and groping is benign. In a culture that doesn’t see gay men as “men”, our sexist acts are instead read as “diva worship” or “celebrating women” even when they are acts of objectification, assault, and dehumanization. We must question these assumptions in ourselves and in our communities.

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Society doesn’t want to blame men for making the choice to rape women. It wants to blame women for enabling men to make that choice and usually it succeeds. Rapists very rarely get to accept responsibility for their choice to rape. Even rape victims blame themselves for their rapist’s choice to rape them. So I spent between two or three decades feeling unable to tell anyone in case they wouldn’t believe me. (Trigger warning.)

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