For Erica Shiner, 2015 marked the year she first launched herself into the world of feminist activism. That May, she started a petition to stop American rapper Action Bronson from performing at Toronto’s Yonge-Dundas Square for annual music festival North by Northeast, saying his lyrics “[glorify] gang-raping and murdering women.” After gaining more than 40,000 […] More »

I didn’t exactly expect Jurassic World  to be feminist savvy—it’s largely about capitalizing on nostalgia and making a bunch of dinosaurs run around. Dinosaurs, after all, are big bucks: as of July 26 the film has grossed $1,542,568,684 worldwide. They’re also very cool and I’ll admit I saw the movie twice. Even if the franchise […] More »

Feminism is getting sort of cool. Kids’ movies are passing the Bechdel test, Beyonce is writing about gender inequality and fashion designers are citing powerful women as their muse. The sincerity of all of this is questionable, but is the shallowness worth hearing those in the spotlight using the feminist title positively instead of hiding […] More »

“I tried to remember any case in the course of my reading where two women are represented as friends.” -Virginia Woolf There’s a hoary old cliché about male nerds that they’re perennially afraid of women, clamming up whenever one begins to talk, scoffing through their retainer at the thought of one intellectually matching them on […] More »

This falls into the “this is a good thing to know,” as opposed to the “this is definitely good news (!),” category. The Bechdel Test is a quick and dirty way to gauge the sexism of a movie, invented 25 years ago by Alison Bechdel, the cartoonist and writer of Dykes to Watch Out For. A […] More »