fourth floor feminism | sociable speculation

Mary Wollstonecraft Portrait in the NPG At the end of the Eighteenth century Mary Wollstonecraft wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Woman to discuss the rights of women in the public political sphere, via natural and reasonable justice in the private domestic sphere. She supplemented her arguments for women's rights with appeals for social utility; that freed women make for better men. The dichotomies of reason and feeling, of nature and culture, and of private and public were the chains of female servitude to the pleasing of men in her time. Wollstonecraft questioned why equality is equated naturally with women displaying masculine qualities and not men displaying feminine qualities or equating masculine and feminine as the two equal parts of the same indivisible whole. If the reasoning mind is sexless, and humans only divided into differing parts for reproductive purposes and not to divide the power of reason and feeling between the sexes, why must the victim become the abus...

Email forwards are gendered, I propose, in some areas of content. I find that women do not spend the majority of their time forwarding pornographic images to their female friends (unless you count nude sportsman calendars as pornographic), and I would presume that men do not spend the lion’s share of their time on their emails giggling at cute photos of kittens sporting sassy lines about liking their chocolate, coffee and men strong, rich and dark. Lately there have been a spat of ‘Girlfriends and Sisters Week’ emails arriving in my inbox with wry salutes to the sisterhood of women, the tongue-in-cheek comments about discrimination and stereotypes treated with that special kind of humour that women use to blur the sharp edges of the inequalities we encounter in our society. Whether is it is a joke about body image, gynaecological matters, marriage, age, clothes or men, these emails use comedy to do what every minority political group uses comedy for, to get to the punch line first. ...