Welcome to the weekly Fairer Disputations round-up: your one-stop shop for the best in sex-realist feminism. This week: Helen Roy on the right’s woman problem, Julie Bindel on gender as a luxury belief, and an Emily Oster podcast on whether you should have kids. Plus: love in the time of menopause, hoarding friends, 4B as reactionary, and more!
First, Featured Author Helen Roy calls out the misogyny of many men—and women—on the far right, who reduce women’s humanity to their role in reproduction.
Next, Julie Bindel argues that gender is a luxury belief—one which ultimately harms many poor women.
Finally, Emily Oster’s Raising Parents podcast hosted Featured Author Leah Libresco Sargeant as a guest this week, referencing her Fairer Disputations piece, “Why You Should Have More Kids.“
More Great Reads and Listens:
- 4B Is Magnificently Reactionary, Mary Harrington, Mary Harrington
- Love in the Time of Menopause, Valerie Stivers, Compact
- Americans Are Hoarding Their Friends, Faith Hill, The Atlantic
- Resist the Conception Machine, Michael Hanby, First Things
- Beyond “Tradwife,” Part Two, Helen Roy, Roy House in Budapest
- On Transgender Issues, Voters Want Common Sense, Pamela Paul, The New York Times
Fairer Disputations Recommends:
Even back in 2011, Gail Dines was sounding the alarm about the dangers of pornography. Dines’s book, Pornland: How Porn has Hijacked our Sexuality, highlights the striking differences between online pornography and old-school Playboy pornography, makes the case that we must view widespread porn consumption as a public health crisis, and is uniquely aware of the dangers for girls growing up in a porn-saturated culture:
“What many of these young women and girls need to be able to continue resisting the dominant culture is clearly a peer group of like-minded people as well as an ideology that reveals the fabricated, exploitative, and consumerist nature of contemporary femininity. Alternative ideologies such as feminism that critique dominant conceptions of femininity are either caricatured or ignored in mainstream media. Absent such a worldview and a community of like-minded people, many young women speak about feeling isolated and alone in their refusal to conform to the porn culture.”
-Gail Dines, Pornland
