The Sydney Feminists

“You’ll understand when you have children.” “What will the class call you when you change your name?”   I’m twenty-six, in a long-term relationship, engaged to get married next year, childless, in a profession centred on children and in constant contact with mothers. Needless to say, I hear the above very frequently. And every time I hear it, I get the same unpleasant feeling. For years I’ve not quite known why. They’re innocent enough queries, simple enough statements, made without snark or nastiness. Following a familiar conversation last week that I walked away from feeling familiarly annoyed and twisted, I finally put my finger on the exact word that causes this reaction in me every time: when . In German, when and if are the same word ( wenn ) and are easily mixed up without context, but in meaning we can all agree that they are worlds apart. We use when for something that is going to happen . We use if for something that is undecided. Being a woma...

Pregnancy is an exciting time; your body changes and you get to experience a tiny human begin to grow and develop inside of you. Arguably one of the most important times during pregnancy is the opportunity to find out the gender of your bub. Boy or girl? Pink or blue?  It turns out these pre-conceived ideas about gender are doing serious long-term damage to your child, and you might not even realise you are doing it. Gender appropriation starts early and does more damage than most parents realise. Gender socialisation refers to the ways in which we are taught what is thought to be gender appropriate norms. Gender policing refers to ways in which gender deviants are brought back into line through the devaluation of actions and attitudes which do not adhere or conform to what we consider to be “gender appropriate”. It may seem harmless at first. You dress your newborn daughter in pink booties and jumpsuit and then you graduate to a pink tutu at her first ballet lesson....

What Is Self-Objectification? We live in a society where girls and women’s bodies are under constant scrutiny and evaluation by others; a society wherein from a very early age, girls consistently receive societal  messages that their appearance and their body plays a fundamental role in determining their worth and value as a person. A direct consequence of this objectification culture is that girls and women internalize these messages, and consequently start to experience their own bodies as objects and view their physical appearance from a third-person perspective. This process is called self-objectification, and it manifests most commonly in body surveillance, which is habitual body checking and monitoring from the perspective of an observer. Self-objectification has been studied extensively with a focus on its maladaptive effects upon female mental health. According to  PhD researcher Caroline Heldman, the average woman engages in body monitoring ever...

When Fifty Shades of Grey began flying off bookshelves across the world, it was popularly championed as a leap forward in popular culture for erotic content marketed to women. Thousands of articles critiqued its merits and its problems. Now the franchise has come back in the form of a film marketed as a guilty pleasure for women to indulge in and has made millions and millions at the box office. With that being said, let us look at some of the frightening implications that such a narrative has on our society. On the surface, Christian Grey is portrayed to be in possession of the largest amount of social capital possible. He is self made, rich, successful, handsome, charismatic, independent and strong. Which is why it is such a shock that he would choose a woman as plain as Ana. In the shadow of this wealth however, it is of course  made fairly clear that Christian Grey is emotionally detached and has a desire to punish women who look like his mother due to unresolved issues...

There is a fair amount of emphasis placed on achieving individual perfection in this life we have together. The pressure comes in lots of fun and exciting forms- from the Cat-calling tradie on the street to the crushing and paralysing effects of silent and ubiquitous judgement of an intangible patriarchal reign over our society. "What format of built up scrutiny will be bestowed upon me today??" I yell excitedly into the mirror of a morning before skipping triumphantly out the door.  Usually it just looks like this Such a joy. You can’t be everything that another person has decided is good and right in the world, because it is their vision of their ultimate self multiplying and dividing like a virus. Albeit sometimes a rather beautiful, sparkly and warm virus, it is still the idealised vision of another. That is why with Feminism, there is no one correct way of being a feminist. In any subculture or community, there are going to be a set of ideals ...