Welcome to the weekly Fairer Disputations round-up: your one-stop shop for the best in sex-realist feminism. This week: Helen Joyce on the limitations of consent, Jeff Shafer on assisted reproduction and the untethered individual, and Naomi Cunningham on sex segregation and peanut butter. Plus: speaking truth to gender, motherhood’s politicization, a women’s college volleyball upheaval, and more!
First, Featured Author Helen Joyce suggests that the consent-based paradigm for sex is unable to hold the weight of a porn-addled society.
Next, a former litigator takes on the question of what legalizing assisted reproductive technologies says about human nature.
Finally, Naomi Cunningham makes a striking analogy between women’s-only spaces and peanut-free dishes.
More Great Reads and Listens:
- The Right to Regret and Other Gender Insanity, Benjamin Boyce with Eliza Mondegreen and Jamie Reed, Calmversations
- College Volleyball’s Spartan Meltdown, Jonathan Kay, Quillette
- My Thoughts on the Politicization of Motherhood, Erica Komisar, The Lost Instinct
- The Great Baby Swap, Leah Libresco Sargeant and Stephanie Murray, Other Feminisms
- Democrats Picked the Wrong Women’s Rights Issue, Madeleine Kearns, The Free Press
Fairer Disputations Recommends:
Philosopher Kathleen Stock makes a feminist case for the importance of biological sex in her must-read book, Material Girls. She provides a critique of gender identity, beginning with a survey of the philosophic views that led to it. Then, she makes the case that biological reality matters, from women-only spaces and healthcare to political organization and data collection.
“Reading the book I felt an intense sense of relief that finally a comprehensive account of gender identity theory was presented and explored with both clarity and depth . . . a clear, concise, easy-to-read account of the issues between sex, gender and feminism . . . an important book, and it is the middle ground who need to read it as it shows how, if we are to live in a world where gender identity trumps biological sex, then it will be women – the physically weaker sex – who lose out.”
-Stella O’Malley, Evening Standard
Want more book recs? We’ve got you.
