Once pivotal to the English canon, Jane Austen has been adapted and readapted for Hollywood and Bollywood – and that kind of popularity comes at a cost.
With the release of Fifty Shades of Grey in cinemas this week, serious questions have been raised about whether the film depicts abuse – including on The Conversation. Some feminist groups have staged…
We can’t talk about “consensual” BDSM without considering the levels of violence against women.
Universal Pictures
This Valentine’s Day, why not ditch the roses and celebrate by watching some sexual violence? That’s a more honest marketing pitch for the Fifty Shades of Grey film. It’s astonishing that, in 2015, sexual…
White Ribbon aims to make women’s safety a man’s issue too, but ambassador Tanveer Ahmed has done damage to the cause.
Courtney Biggs/Newzulu/AAP
Petra Bueskens, Australian College of Applied Psychology
This week “feminist” organisation White Ribbon came into disrepute after one of its ambassadors, psychiatrist and journalist Tanveer Ahmed, wrote an opinion piece in The Australian, suggesting men’s violence…
Fifty Shades of Grey film opens this Valentine’s weekend to much fanfare but, perhaps tellingly, with few press previews in the UK. With one UK cinema chain reporting advance ticket sales worth £1.3m…
How do men feel about the way they are depicted on the covers of romance novels?
Book Thingo
Buttons open to the waist, skin gleaming with sweat, hair tousled, intriguing flashes of curves … men on the covers of classic romance novels, or “bodice rippers”, are objectified in many of the same ways…
Women – and little girls even more so – are desperate to see images and stories that don’t actively oppress them onscreen.
Nadia Meli
Some time ago my then five-year-old goddaughter began insistently and, it must be said, somewhat repetitively humming a few bars that would quickly become one of the world’s most ubiquitous earworms. As…
The reaction to the Ghostbusters 3 cast announcement indicates broader cultural concerns.
Jeff Jackowski
Last week, director Paul Feig announced that the protagonists of Ghostbusters 3 would all be women. While some have heralded the female follow up as a feminist coup, others – including many fans – have…
While Christmas shopping in a local bookshop, a handsome little volume stopped me in my tracks as I was leaving. The dust jacket is midnight blue with a gold-foil constellation slightly obscuring the title…
Claire Wright won the Stella Prize in 2014, the Year of Reading Women Writers, but it’s ok to read her work in 2015.
AAP Image/Dan Himbrechts
When we waved goodbye to 2014, we also farewelled one of my favourite initiatives – The Year of Reading Women. After reading Joanna Russ’ 1983 book How to Suppress Women’s Writing in December 2012, author…
Sport England has launched This Girl Can – an edgy promotional campaign that seeks to inspire women to challenge cultural assumptions about femininity that prevent them engaging in sport and exercise…
One who won’t be put in soumission.
Marcial Guillen/EPA
Michel Houellebecq’s Soumission has been greeted by a predictable mix of anger and uncritical bias toward the author, a typical reception for the most controversial French author of the past two decades…
Lynda Carter as Diana Prince in the New Original Wonder Woman. Her bullet-deflecting bracelets are made from an impervious metal: feminum.
Retrogasm/Flickr
In the epilogue to Jill Lepore’s new book, The Secret History of Wonder Woman, we learn about Wonder Woman’s importance to the American feminist movement of the 1960s and 1970s. Lepore briefly notes Wonder…
Oh, no, wait – it’s the 21st century!
Carl Guderian
It’s official: men are better writers than women. The news came as something of a shock to a hardened feminist such as myself, but a quick survey of prescribed and suggested texts set for senior English…
Annabel Crabb’s The Wife Drought brings to mind another – forgotten – feminist text.
AAP Image/ABC Television
Three years ago Annabel Crabb argued on ABC’s The Drum that a lack of wives is what really holds back women in the Australian workforce. She jokingly suggested that what was needed was a “wife quota…
Honorary (Senior Fellow) School of Culture and Communication University of Melbourne. Editor in Chief, Design and Art of Australia Online, The University of Melbourne