Update

Hey people- apologies for abruptly disappearing. My computer died suddenly about a week ago and is currently in the shop. Unfortunately I hadn’t elevated it enough and a lot of dirt and dust were getting into it, which has caused some damage to the motherboard. I’m waiting to hear back as to whether it’s worth [...]

See you next week

I’ve got some terrible cold/flu thing that’s going around and it’s making it quite hard to concentrate. I’ll hopefully be able to post something useful next week. Fight the good fight until then

Why Sex Education Works

So, as a follow up to the previous post showing that comprehensive sex education actually reduces how much sex teens have, I thought I’d go into my analysis of why sex education actually has this effect.
Teens aren’t mindless. Many of them know, at least from talking amongst themselves, that sex feels good. If you don’t [...]

Why Hollywood still needs more heroes

Randall Monroe over at XKCD has a wonderful blag post illustrating yet another example of male privilege.
Here’s the quick rundown:
There were about 110 movies with a male lead and 5 with a female lead. Of the second-billed females, nearly all are written as love interests of the first-billed man. There were over sixty movies in [...]

Gay Rights are Straight Rights

One fact that always seems to be overlooked in the debate over gay rights is that it actually impacts the rights of straight couples, too. Laws that reform the way we view couples to include gay rights- such as our own Civil Unions bill- have generally also extended new rights to straight couples. Not only [...]

Win a Divorce?

Campbell Live did a story on an Australian magazine that offers a competition to “win a divorce”, including a Playstation and a cleaner. Said story isn’t on their site yet. (I’ll retroactively link it when it is)
I wonder if these guys spent as much time building their relationships as they did trying to avoid them, [...]

Australia catching up…

Australia is set to have its first female governor general. It’s great to see Australia catching up to the idea that women should hold high government offices, and Quentin Bryce looks like a woman I could definitely get behind for the job.
Not only a law graduate and one of the first female lawyers in Queensland, [...]

Dompost: Magazines are faking fatter models

So, the story isn’t on Stuff yet, but the Dom Post has a wonderful story in today’s paper about how criticism is causing the fashion industry to have to change its ways.
It’s using the same image manipulation techniques it uses to clean up its models’ minor imperfections to make them look like they’re a more [...]

Sex education and teen pregnancy

So, last night the issue of permissive attitudes to sex came up in discussion in the comments. A very frequent objection to sex education came up- that it is too permissive of sex, and thus encourages teenage pregnancy.
Fortunately for us, recently the Journal of Adolescent Health released a study on this very matter. Because I [...]

Privilege, Sexist Privilege, and Counter-Privilege

So, having tipped my hat on this post in the comments, I should really get around to publishing it. Feminists use the term “privilege” to describe the advantages men have over women because of sexist attitudes that dominate society. It can also be generalised to apply to any such advantage- there’s male privilege, white privilege, [...]