In her new book, Who’s Afraid of Gender?, feminist philosopher Judith Butler explains how gender and sex are socially constructed, while fighting critics who see gender as a threat to the social order.
There is also a long history of using paedophilia and ideas about child grooming in homophobic and transphobic ways to oppose the recognition of the civil rights of LGBTIQA people.
History shows there is no magic bullet for solving gang crime. Only an evidence-based approach, coupled with mutually agreed targets and indicators, will start to achieve real change.
Fears that TikTok is “serving up” drug content to impressionable users have prompted calls for all drug content to be censored on the platform. But that would remove useful health advice too.
The QAnon conspiracy movement is the latest in a long line of moral panics that emerge as a response to change. False theories are used to undermine claims to social justice raised by marginalized groups.
Framing cats as responsible for declines in biodiversity is based on faulty scientific logic and fails to account for the real culprit – human activity.
Somewhere between the early Buddhist times and today, worries about game addiction have given way to scientific understanding of the benefits of play, rather than its detriments.
Demands for regulation of media violence reached a fever pitch after RFK’s assassination, and networks scrambled to insert more kid-friendly fare into their lineups. Enter: the Mystery Machine.
Some say the hysteria over screen time echoes parents’ worries that their kids were watching too much TV in the 1980s. But new studies show there’s nothing overblown about parents’ growing concern.
Media-driven panic about drugs can create a perception more people are using the drug than they actually are, and when teens think ‘everyone’ is doing it, they are more likely to want to do it too.
Consensual sex work, like non-commercial sex, mostly happens behind closed doors. Yet stigma toward and ignorance about sex workers makes people panic when we try to talk about reform.
Teaching fear and avoidance of technology may protect people from negative consequences. But it also prevents them from finding, and benefiting from, productive uses of new innovations.