Past list view

I've noticed workshops here and there that aim to empower women by bumping up their money skills. What a rad idea!

Women are making, like, 69 cents to men's dollar and if you haven't heard of the feminization of poverty, well, I guess you probably get the gist of it anyway. Do you think a lot of the roadblocks we encounter as women can be minimized with moolah mastery? Bucks are beasts that everyone has to tame, but do you envision anything specific about the ways that women need to learn about finances? Does this stuff ring true for you?

This is one of those 'personal is political' kind of topics, for sure. I mean, it's seriously individual and hits you where you live but also 'personal' in the sense that it's taboo to discuss one's finances, right? So everybody's gotta be down with respecting each other's privacy, but I say the best reason to bust a taboo is because talking about things makes them less daunting. I think the best policy is 'Feel free to ask, and feel free not to answer.'

P.S. - If anyone has any expertise in this topic, step right up and say so!

Whether you identify as single, coupled/in a relationship, both or neither, I think this should make for an interesting discussion. And for those men who are interested, it would be great to hear about the pressures you face in staying/being single and how they are similar/different from women. This is a fairly easy read comparable to Female Chauvinist Pigs.

E. Kay Trimberger tackles one of the largest social phenomena of our times: the increasing number of single women over 35. Drawing on the diverse personal stories of long-term single women, including herself, Trimberger explodes the idea that fulfillment comes only through finding a soul mate. The new single woman rejects the cultural pressure to couple and unabashedly lives a fulfilling single life, one where she is not on her own, not defined primarily by self-reliance, but by her skills at creating friendships and her ability to link networks of friends into a community. Trimberger's analysis opens up new alternatives for the "good life," and speaks to the anxieties of single women in their twenties and early thirties.

The book's argument that married/coupled women and single women (including bisexuals and lesbians) are not different or in competition, but rather at opposite ends of a continuum that comprises many women in-between is a paradigm-shifting notion - one that ultimately strengthens and enriches both single women and couples. Networks of friends and extended family sustain single women, link them to coupled women and offer security to both.

The Toronto Rape Crisis Centre/Multicultural Women Against Rape is doing its 29th annual Take Back the Night event so let's get out there and yell and take up some space!

If you've never heard of TBTN, here's what it's about: Noone should feel afraid for their safety. So there's this event where we all get out in the night to reclaim our rightful space and make it safer for each other. There's a community fair starting at 5, a rally at 6 and at 8, we march! If you feel you want to express yourself with a good ole-fashioned feminist placard or rock out with some kind of noisemaker, let me assure you this IS the perfect place for it:D

The theme this year is "No More Hiding”. It's about highlighting every woman’s experience of survivorship from the personal to political impacts in our every day lives with a special focus on the experience of all Non-Status (First Nations and Immigrant) women in our communities and the impact of violence while living without status. So that's a little something for you to ruminate over.

Important note: The march is a women-only event but our male friends are welcome to come out and cheer us on from the sidewalk!

***NEW DATE. Sorry folks. I double-booked myself that day so I have moved it to one week later.***
Back by popular demand! This was a book featured at a previous bookclub meeting but when I asked about titles people were interested in, this was the one title the majority was in favour of. I thought i'd try something different this time and go for brunch. Look forward to discussing the book. Please find a description below.

"Meet the Female Chauvinist Pig--the new brand of ""empowered woman"" who wears the Playboy bunny as a talisman, bares all for Girls Gone Wild, pursues casual sex as if it were a sport, and embraces ""raunch culture"" wherever she finds it. If male chauvinist pigs of years past thought of women as pieces of meat, Female Chauvinist Pigs of today are doing them one better, making sex objects of other women--and of themselves. They think they're being brave, they think they're being funny, but in Female Chauvinist Pigs, New York magazine writer Ariel Levy asks if the joke is on them. In her quest to uncover why this is happening, Levy interviews college women who flash for the cameras on spring break and teens raised on Paris Hilton and breast implants. She examines a culture in which every music video seems to feature a stripper on a pole, the memoirs of porn stars are climbing the best-seller lists, Olympic athletes parade their Brazilian bikini waxes in the pages of Playboy, and thongs are marketed to prepubescent girls. Levy meets the high-powered women who create raunch culture--the new oinking women warriors of the corporate and entertainment worlds who eagerly defend their efforts to be ""one of the guys."" And she traces the history of this trend back to conflicts between the women's movement and the sexual revolution long left unresolved. In the tradition of Susan Faludi's Backlash and Naomi Wolf's The Beauty Myth, Levy pulls apart the myth of the Female Chauvinist Pig and argues that what has come to pass for liberating rebellion is actually a kind of limiting conformity. Irresistibly witty and wickedly intelligent, Female Chauvinist Pigs makes the case that the rise of raunch does not represent how far women have come, it only proves how far they have left to go. "