Looking through my bookmarks, I noticed many un-blogged articles touching on women's issues.Here are four interesting articles from The Atlantic that you might have missed over the past few months.
Student Debt & Sugar Daddies
Many young people today struggle to pay for their educations and the mounting student debt that often comes with them. One increasingly popular solution for young women appears to be sugar daddies:
"Many of them use SeekingArrangement, which describes itself as "the world’s largest Sugar Daddy dating site." More than 1.4 million students have signed up as members, including nearly 1 million in the U.S., according to the company. The website claims that 42 percent of its members are students, many of whom are incentivized by SeekingArrangement to join; people who sign up with a .edu email address or show proof of enrollment, for example, receive "premium memberships" for free."
Many moons ago, I wrote a post about Women Artists Owning Their Artistry. That post focused on journalism and the media's insistence on talking to women artists about the lucky nature of their success and talent, rather than engaging with the artist's work seriously as they usually do with male artists.
This week I came across another aspect of women artists, and their work still receiving less respect than the work of men. Lena Dunham has been making headlines for throwing shade at Woody Allen during a panel at the Sundance film festival this week. However, if you listen to the actual discussion, Dunham (along with Mindy Kaling, Kristen Wiig and Jenji Kohan) is talking about how the world generally equates female artists and writers with their characters--- assuming that the artist/author shares the foibles, issues, aspirations etc. of their characters--- whereas this happens much less with male artists. Here is the excerpted segment:
Again, rather than engaging with a story or a character as a serious piece of art and creativity in and of itself, people prefer to spend time puzzling out how the character is a window into the neuroticism or hubris of the female author/artist.
This is problematic and sexist because:
It again refuses to take the art seriously, simply because it was created by a female. The same respect, intelligence, experimentalism, and benefit of the doubt afforded to male artists are not extended to the women.
It is a sort of dominance display, attempting to ferret out the vulnerabilities of a woman against her will, and prove that the investigator knows the woman's mind and self better than she.
It is based on the assumption that women are fundamentally crazy (hysterical) or flawed, and a morbid desire to expose this.
