Via Dana who found it via Kylie, a Facebook note by Harriet Page. I know, not everyone is on Facebook. But that’s where it is!

She introduced it with

This week I wrote a response to the several occasions on which I had been challenged on my feminism by men and women who felt that I was misguided, wrong, aggressive or unhelpful in my responses to what I viewed as sexist behaviour.

Been there. Many times. I can remember heavy sighs back in the early 70s when I pointed out some (to me obvious, indeed blatant) bit of everyday sexism. And of course have been there again just lately, with people who consider themselves feminists nevertheless going into … Read the rest

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Chris Chambers and Kate Clancy point out at the Guardian that pseudoscience and stereotyping won’t solve gender inequality in science, via what they call a “stereotype-enforcing guide to addressing the gender imbalance in science” also published by the Guardian.

Sarah-Jayne Blakemore, a developmental neuroscientist at University College London, points out that finding reliable gender differences in the brain is complicated by individual differences: “There are a lot of girls who are better than boys at maths, for example, and a lot of boys who are better than girls at cooking. Therefore, these generalisations based on gender are unhelpful.”

Two recent books – Cordelia Fine’s Delusions of Gender and Rebecca Jordan-Young’s Brain Storm – rigorously test many assumed sex

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What is “radical feminism”? I see peculiar definitions here and there – or not so much definitions, as ad hoc explanations apparently pulled out of people’s…imaginary reference materials. The definitions or ad hoc explanations are crafted in such a way that they appear to fit feminists the crafters dislike, unless you actually know anything about the feminists in question.

There’s Vacula’s definition for example.

Secular Woman is an organization, launched in June of 2012, which aims to “amplify the voice, presence, and influence of non-religious woman.” I was initially supportive of the organization and helped promote it because I had hoped that this organization would provide a fresh breath of air to the discussion about women’s issues – something much

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Soraya says hell yes she’s a feminist.

Remember the woman who asked Romney about the wage gap?

You know what she got for her efforts?  A good and proper Slutshaming 101 from conservatives who dug up her Facebook page and her Twitter account to reveal that she has in the past used alcohol and maybe suggested her interest in sex. Like Sandra Fluke, she’s a whiny, entitled trollop who should shut up and go home.  Now, Fenton might not have memorized the Slut Manifesto, but she sure as hell knows that a man asking this exact same question would not be treated this way. Just like Jim Lehrer’s weight hasn’t become an Internet discussion point, while Candy

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Laurie Penny and Martin Robbins were chatting about feminism one evening on Twitter. [interjection: I've been there! I've done a good deal of chatting about feminism on Twitter. Some of it with Laurie Penny and Martin Robbins, though not at the same time as far as I recall.] They decided to make it a non-Twitter conversation, with more room to swing the arms. They chose the spacious airy riverview Independent. It’s a very good conversation.

Martin starts by saying that “Feminists are fighting a centuries-old system of power that benefits nobody but the elite.”

Laurie: What you’re talking about is structural violence, and the difficulty people have in understanding that there’s more to sexism than individual men doing individually

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)