patriarchy

The kitchen is filling up. It was deserted for a while but they’re drifting in now, in growing numbers, their faces blank with shock or denial. They’re looking for a cup of tea and a Jaffa cake. The cupboards, however, are bare. Someone finds an empty biscuit packet. A few crumbs spill onto the clear, […]

I recently saw a Facebook meme that showed four teenage girls taking a selfie. Paraphrasing Winston Churchill’s epic cry during the Battle of Britain in 1940, the caption read: “Never in history has a generation taken so many photographs of itself achieving so little.” The flood of selfies on social media suggests that those creating […]

Figures released by the Statistics Bureau of Japan reveal that the country’s population is declining. The 2010 census returned a figure of 128 million inhabitants. Five years later it fell by a million. Declining population While this may not sound like much of a drop, it reflects a long-term decrease in the birth rate. As […]

Ca-ching! Multiplex cash registers around the world are still sizzling hot from the record-breaking box office performance of The Force Awakens, episode seven of the long-running Star Wars saga. Star Wars Inside darkened theatres, a whole new generation of children—the film is rated PG-13 in the US—thrills to J.J. Abrams’ revitalising take on the tired tropes […]

Videos from Papua New Guinea reportedly showing women accused of witchcraft being tortured have recently appeared on social media. These videos—taken by people participating in the abuses—are commonly shared among Papua New Guinean students who approve of these trials, which have long been a feature of the social landscape of this rugged island nation. Papua […]

“Makes Saturday is better with some #underboob”, runs a Facebook post from drunkenstepfatherdotcom. But for Thai actress and model @saramalakul, tagged in the said post, Saturday (or whatever day of the week it is when the Thai police arrest her) may not be better. For, in the latest Asian aversion to the depraved Western tendency […]

Agence France-Presse—who can be trusted on such matters—advise that two American sisters were arrested at the Angkor Wat temple complex after “they lowered their pants and took pictures of their buttocks”. Lindsey Adams, 22, and Leslie Adams, 20, follow in the still-warm footsteps of three Frenchmen who were recently deported for the same crime and […]

Once upon a time there was a far-away land called Sweden, where circa 1998 there were 2,500 prostitutes gainfully employed keeping the Big Bad Wolf in a post-coital stupor. To reduce sex trafficking, a law was passed criminalising the Big Bad Wolf for buying sex. Swedish prostitution laws A dozen years later the number of […]

In an incendiary article in Foreign Policy magazine titled Why Do They Hate Us? [link no longer works] Mona Eltahawy lays bare the “pulsating heart of misogyny in the Middle East” with a catalogue of politically or culturally sanctioned sexual abuses against Arab women. From the Egyptian criminal code to the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Report to […]