feminism

Let's just start with her individualism.

A historian recalls the women’s movement’s forgotten work for working mothers.

Tracing sexual politics and women’s rage in the Trump era.

Alice B. Lloyd on the politically loaded sci-fi thriller ‘Vox’—which wants very much to be ‘The Handmaid’s Tale 2.0.’

We’ve read some dumb and substandard political pieces in our day—we may even have generated some—but a June 10 piece in the Washington Post is a strong contender for Dumbest Op-Ed Ever Written. The article, by Suzanna Danuta Walters—according to her byline a “professor of sociology and director of…

Once upon a time, before the advent of Google and WebMD, medical information was dispensed by medical professionals in doctor’s offices. These were dark times, at least if you believe fans of the infamous “women’s health bible,” Our Bodies, Ourselves.

Tracking the rise and fall of Rose McGowan’s sheroism (and I have for months) certainly adds color to anyone’s comprehensive reading of the modern women’s movement. But now, in a recent podcast, McGowan has opened up about being a movement outsider and revealed herself to be genderqueer. “I don't…

For anyone counting #MeToo casualties with a wary eye, one of 2018’s first will have stood out. On January 13, in a lengthy exposé published on a website for college-age women, a 23-year-old photographer charged comic Aziz Ansari with the crime of being a bad date. The pseudonymous “Grace”…

It might come to the surprise of the average woman who has been bombarded with inspirational corporate hashtags and ads for #girlpower T-shirts that what we now know as “International Women’s Day,” started as an anti-capitalist protest: The first National Women’s Day took place February 28, 1908,…

Today on the Daily Standard Podcast, reporter Andrew Egger and staff writer Alice Lloyd discuss whether President Trump will follow through on his proposed tariff plan and how the Oscars fit fish people into intersectional feminism.

The Southern Poverty Law Center is at it again. In a report on “Male Supremacy,” an ideology that the group says “advocates for the subjugation of women,” it included American Enterprise Institute scholar Christina Hoff Sommers, calling her someone “who gives mainstream and respectable face to some…

In Brave, a book she was writing even before Harvey Weinstein’s reckoning kicked off last fall, actress and activist Rose McGowan tells her life’s story as a series of brain-washings: “Here’s the thing about cults,” she begins, “I see them everywhere.”

For Rose McGowan, it was only a matter of time. She’s an ice-cold operator who’ll verbally shiv with military precision anyone who crosses her. She’d have to be, to survive the hellhole of Hollywood hypocrisy with her sanity mostly intact. It was only a matter of time, then, before she’d turn on…

We’ve all seen parking places designated for the handicapped and for expectant mothers, but leave it to China to take that trend to a new and controversial level.

I’m a former English professor, so I’m familiar with the jargon literary theorists often use—aporia, hermeneutics, deconstruction, and the French différance, a favorite word of the impenetrable Jacques Derrida—but in a recent book review I came upon an academic-sounding word that I had never seen…

How China infiltrated the U.S. classroom. Over at POLITICO, our own Ethan Epstein has a good look at how China has used soft power to exert influence with American students via funding "Confucius Institutes."

As 2017 goes the way of the Titanic, it’s time to survey the lexical flotsam and jetsam bobbing in its wake. Which arcana drifted to the surface this year, much to our puzzlement? Which new coinages made it to the life rafts and can expect to keep afloat? Which flared brightly and then fizzled,…

Can there be such a thing as a “pro-life feminist”? The question gained new currency just as the Trump presidency began, when Women’s March organizers dropped the New Wave Feminists, a Texas-based group led by libertarian-leaning pro-lifer Destiny Herndon-De La Rosa, as partners—because the…

Meet Scott Yenor.

The Scrapbook will leave it to others to comment on the propriety—or lack thereof—of the meeting Donald Trump Jr. arranged with Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya. But we will note an odd feature of the defense the president’s son made for himself last week.

I stuffed notebook paper into my dress sleeves and got praised for being a “shero” on Twitter.

David Edelstein is one of the better-known film critics in the country. He's been a critic for decades and is currently the chief film critic for New York magazine, as well as the film critic for NPR's Fresh Air and CBS's Sunday Morning. Like everyone else in his position, he recently wrote a…

The weirdest thing about Hulu's much-discussed serialization of Margaret Atwood's 1985 novel The Handmaid's Tale is the Handmaid's Tale cosplay industry.

"Don't try to divide us," said Gloria Steinem, the reigning queen of second-wave feminism, now 81, who first rose to fame for going undercover as a Playboy bunny. She'd come to help rally a crowd reportedly surpassing 500,000 women, male allies, and acquiescent children—all of whom find a common…

The New York Times reports on the death of Phyllis Schlafly:

What's weirder, praising Donald Trump's feminism or denouncing first-female-presidential nominee (it's historic, haven't you heard?) Hillary Clinton's anti-feminist ways? Moreover, when both presidential nominees are evidently "gender neutral" in their self-serving blind ambition, who really cares?

Rainy day fun in the gauzy summers of my youth often meant endless games of Clue. Nobody wanted to play as Mrs. White—Mrs. Peacock, Miss Scarlet, Professor Plum, Mr. Green and Colonel Mustard are the more colorful characters. So if a glut of older kids joined us at the board, I got stuck in the…

Only one eco-feminist (yep, that's a thing) came with the full force of ideology to an event on Capitol Hill Wednesday afternoon called "Gender Equality and Energy Access"—and of the handful of private and public sector panelists, she was the one speaking for the White House.

The defense spending authorization bill passed the Senate with an amendment tacked on that would extend mandatory draft registration to women—and some feminists aren't having it. You'd think a gender-inclusive Selective Service would be a coup for feminist groups still clinging to the Equal Rights…

Reviews and News:

Here are hot tips to help (1) libertarian and conservative students, (2) idealistic liberal female students, and (3) idealistic liberal male students navigate the bizarre world of safe spaces, othering, microaggressions, trigger warnings, alarming victimization statistics, and all the other…

Alexander Hamilton can’t get no respect. First, he gets born with at least four strikes against him---in the British West Indies, not exactly the hub of the universe; poor, illegitimate, dead-beat dad, and mother dead when he was eleven; then he blunders into the first great sex scandal of the…

One reason to look forward to Friday is that "Ammo Grrrll" always graces us with some "Thoughts From the Ammo Line" over at Power Line.

At last, a little good news from the academy. Oberlin College has a sense of humor -- or at least its choir does. I don’t know that the subversive (by Oberlin standards!) song they've perormed has a title, but it might well be “Please Don’t Put Me In the Real World.”

A prominent Pakistani-born women's rights activist is asking presidential candidates, including Hillary Clinton, to pledge not to accept donations from foreign nations that oppress women. Raheel Raza, the Canadian journalist behind the documentary film Honor Diaries, is requesting all the…

Christina Sommers says it’s time to pull the trigger on trigger warnings and treat even the once-traumatized as adults.

Hillary Clinton has reportedly leased office space in Brooklyn on Wednesday for what is likely to be a campaign for president. The Democrat supposedly signed the lease sometime in the last few days, and according to regulations Clinton must file with the Federal Election Commission within 15 days…

The Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue is out. The gender police are not amused. The Factual Feminist explains the theory of the “male gaze.”

After the Factual Feminist spoke at Yale last month, the Yale Women’s Center pronounced her views “potentially dangerous” and “xenophobic.” Yikes! See if you agree:

In spite of his own mostly impressive educational pedigree, President Obama has always harbored an anti-intellectual (or, to be generous, anti-academic) streak. Whether insulting art history in a failed appeal to "Real 'Muricans," or developing a philistine "College Scorecard," which reduces the…

Watch Christina Hoff Sommers puncture the balloon of some seeking to enlist the police to root out “street harassment.”

The Factual Feminist warns that a “little army of junior assistant deans and harassment apparatchiks are quietly repealing the free speech protections of the First Amendment.”

Christina Hoff Sommers, of Factual Feminist fame, continues to expose the feminist establishment’s war on truth. This jaunty five-minute video takes on the endlessly recycled pseudo-fact of the 23-cent wage gap between men and women. Watch it below:

Meet the Press moderator Chuck Todd said last night on the Charlie Rose Show that if Hillary Clinton were running to be the second woman president of the United States -- and not the first -- "she would not even be considered a frontrunner."  

Harvard's Harvey Mansfield wrote on feminism and the universities for THE WEEKLY STANDARD a few months ago ("Feminism and Its Discontents: ‘Rape culture’ at Harvard"). If you'd like to hear more deep and provocative analysis from Mansfield of some of the consequences of feminism, here's your…

Feminism is in control of America’s colleges and universities, where its principles at least are held as dogmas unquestioned and unopposed. Yet in what should be a paradise with those principles at work, women speak of a “rape culture” that sounds like the patriarchal hell we thought we’d left…

This is a story about campus sexual harassment, involving a female graduate student in philosophy and a prominent male philosophy professor at an Ivy League university. Except that the alleged events didn’t take place on a campus or anywhere near one. Nor did the alleged events meet any legal…

Why would the leading textbook on domestic violence law persist in publishing a fantasy? Watch the Factual Feminist debunk the sinister legend of the “rule of thumb” -- the claim that English common law countenanced wife-beating as long as the stick a husband used was no thicker than his thumb.

This week the Factual Feminist takes on the “rape culture” panic that is riling college campuses with help from the media, radical feminists, and too many politicians. Just as in the shameful panic over alleged child abuse at day care centers that sent innocent people to prison in the 1980s, false…

Boys are languishing in school--but "gender equity" in education means programs for girls. The Factual Feminist is concerned about all our children, boys as well as girls. Watch here:

No one has done more than American Enterprise Institute scholar Christina Hoff Sommers to watchdog the perennially unreliable claims of activist feminism. Ever since her Who Stole Feminism: How Women Have Betrayed Women (1994), Sommers, a former professor of philosophy, has been performing the…

Partly because I’m a guy, partly because my professor insisted on holding our Feminism and Culture class at 8 a.m., making it impossible for me to attend, I find myself now, decades later, far behind the curve of gender empowerment. The curve is shifting heavily to the distaff side. Can I still say…

THE WEEKLY STANDARD podcast with Matthew Continetti on his cover story, The Double Bind. Hosted by Michael Graham.

The death of Helen Gurley Brown two days ago has given every obituary writer a shot at disproving the adage de mortuis nil nisi bonum. The New York Times cracked, "She was 90, but parts of her were considerably younger"—alluding to Brown's pathological addiction to plastic surgery during her…

The National Organization for Women, a feminist group, announced a new initiative: "Enough Rush," a campaign against radio host Rush Limbaugh. The effort is designed to reignite the short-lived furor over apparently disparaging jokes Limbaugh made on his show earlier this year about feminist…

Over at Washington Monthly, Kathleen Geier writes about how The Ethicist columnist at the New York Times magazine is promoting an essay contest where readers argue that it is, in fact, ethical to continue eating meat. Only it seems that Geier is not amused about who is judging the contest:

Cambridge, Mass.

Today is Equal Pay Day, which supposedly "symbolizes how far into 2011 women must work to earn what men earned in 2010." But in today's Wall Street Journal, Carrie Lukas explains the disparity between average wages for men and women in economic terms: