Don't get us wrong, we like Banksy just fine. We followed his every move last year as he turned the entire city of New York into an outdoor exhibition. There are many reasons to love the anonymous street art king, from his social crusades to his innovative use of the internet as gallery space. He's just far from the only street artist to be utilizing these tools, even on a massive scale, reports Huffingtonpost.



Last month The Guardian covered Bambi, a woman street artist they dubbed "the female Banksy." However, after looking at Bambi's portfolio, comprised mostly of renderings of celebrities like Kim Kardashian, Amy Winehouse and Cara Delevingne, we have to say, we can do better. Just because Bambi sounds (sort of) like Banksy, doesn't mean she's the automatic heir to the street art throne.

On that note, allow us to introduce 10 badass female artists we'd choose over Banksy any day.

He prescribed a medicine to help me with my symptoms. I can't remember the name, but I know it belonged to a class of medicines called Alpha Blockers.

“One thing about this medicine,” the doctor said as he typed the prescription into the computer. “There's a chance it can cause retrograde ejaculation.”

“Um...what?” I asked. I obviously knew what ejaculation meant but “retrograde” could've meant anything.

“Dry orgasms. No seminal fluid,” he said. In more specific terms, retrograde ejaculation is when semen gets sent into the bladder rather than out into a sock, condom, or, if you're lucky, a crevasse belonging to your significant other.

I was weirded out but he said there was only a chance, right? So that meant there was a chance it didn't cause retrograde ejaculation.

This pathetic bit of self delusion lasted until my first jerk-off session on the medicine. I felt the familiar build-up of pleasure and tension (I call it plension) and then... nothing. Not only was there no semen, there was no electric rush, no hip-bucking, and no release.

Today's dads are clueless, incompetent, emotionless buffoons who don't know their asses from their elbows when it comes to childcare, right? Wrong. Dead wrong. The overwhelming majority of us (yes, I said, the overwhelming majority) are smart, loving, and just plain awesome men who put our families first. Don't believe me? Check out this compilation of photos taken directly from the Daddy Doin' Work Instagram feed. Contrary to what you'll find in mainstream media, this diverse group of dads perfectly illustrates what life is really like for fathers all over the world.

Western culture has a nasty obsession with the murder of women. The more brutal the death, the more the fascination grows. I would like to tell you that I'm above all this and that I reject the torture of ladies as entertainment, but — as my late night Google history will show you — I'd be lying.

Of all the killers who've preyed on women, few have captured imaginations (mine included) in the same way as Jack the Ripper, the murderer who likely killed five women in London's Whitechapel district in 1888. Jack, who was never caught, has been the inspiration for countless books, television shows and movies and there are people out there still dedicated to unearthing his identity. (Recently, a man announced that he solved the case, although many have their doubts on whether or not he actually did.)

Salivating over the details of the Jack the Ripper mystery is sinister for obvious reasons (we're exalting a man who slit people's throats and cut up their bodies as a hobby), but it's also, as New Republic writer Katie Engelhart points out, damn anti-feminist.

In her piece Our Jack the Ripper Obsession Is Misogynist, Engelhart writes:

The Ripper industry...involves very little respect, and plenty of irreverence. This is an entertainment enterprise, pure and simply. Murder is stripped of its context; victims are stripped of their dignity. And if the murders hadn't happened so very long ago, we would probably be very repulsed that a Ripper industry exists at all. Semi-professional "Ripperologists" (most of them male; see Ripperology magazine) pontificate at length about who Jack was—and why he killed. But we hear little of the victims and their exacting lives. Jack's ubiquity has veiled his crimes in myth. He now stands within a Gothic literary tradition more than a historical one: rubbing fictional shoulders with the likes of Sweeney Todd, Sherlock Holmes, Dr. Jekyll, and Mr. Hyde.

And then there's the glib treatment of the story's violent sexual component. While there is no evidence that Jack raped his victims, he did give several of them crude hysterectomies. In one case, he walked off with a victim's uterus. But Ripper mythology reinforces a sense that these women had it coming. The victims were all pushers of the "four-penny knee trembler"—prostitutes. Today's Ripper tour guides give us all the titillating details. In this, the tour guides are not unlike Victorian-era journalists, who emphasized how "depraved"—and, thus, perhaps, deserving of their fate—the victims were.

Part of a new series “He for She” – inspired by UN Women and heforshe.org

As a writer about women’s issues in business and life, I’ve tackled many topics that discuss what hinders women from advancing to equality – in the domestic arena, the global economy, and in political and business life and leadership. It’s a vast topic — complex, rich and multifaceted — with many factors and influences that defy easy quantification or understanding.

But one thing is easy to see: Equality of women cannot progress without involvement of — and collaboration with — men.

Last June I attended a global women’s conference called S.H.E Summit founded by Claudia Chan – and to me, the most riveting discussion of the two days emerged from the “He for She” panel – featuring Nigel Barker, Gary Barker, and Simon Isaacs, exploring new ways to encourage men’s support of women’s growth worldwide.


I caught up with Claudia recently, and asked her to share more about what she’s learned from her male colleagues on how to involve men successfully in the women’s equality movement. Claudia is the founder and CEO of S.H.E. Globl Media Inc., the multi-platform women’s empowerment media company behind the annual S.H.E. Summit conference, and a women’s leadership expert and social entrepreneur focused on unlocking women’s leadership potential.

Responding to the call to “carry the weight together,” fellow students helped Emma Sulkowicz, the Columbia senior who is lugging her mattress everywhere while her rapist remains on campus, carry it from the courtyard to her class yesterday.

The collective carry was organized by students and alumni who want ”to help Emma carry the weight of the physical mattress, give her and other survivors of sexual assault in our community a powerful symbol of our support and solidarity, and show the administration that we stand united in demanding better policies designed to end sexual violence and rape culture on campus.”

As Alexandra wrote, the idea of “carrying the weight together” holds much symbolic resonance — not just as a way of lightening the burden on survivors but also by highlighting the collective sacrifice required to eliminate it. “If we all helped carry the weight of injustice, we could not bear it,” she wrote. “And so we would finally stop tolerating what we’ve been content to force others to carry alone.” And it makes a damn powerful visual too.

Here’s a sure-fire way to know that you hate women: when an incident of intimate partner violence in which a man knocks a woman unconscious gains national attention and every question or comment you think to make has to do with her behavior, you really hate women. Like, despise.

There is no other explanation. There is no “I need all the facts.” There is no excuse. You hate women. Own it.

Now, you probably don’t believe you hate women. You probably honestly think you’re being an objective observer whose only interest is the truth. You are delusional.

We have this problem in our discourse around the most important challenges we face where we feel we have to be “fair to both sides.” But sometimes, one of those sides is subjugation and oppression. If you’re OK with legitimizing that side in the interest of “fairness,” you’re essentially saying you’re OK with oppression as a part of the human condition. That’s some hateful shit.

Violence against women doesn’t deserve a “fair” hearing. There should be no justifications offered, no rationalizing, no equivocating. Violence against women should be intolerable. But every time we are called upon to collectively denounce that violence, there’s a section of the choir that starts singing from a different set of sheet music.

“Well, I don’t believe he should have hit her, but she also shouldn’t have…”

“Hitting women is wrong, but if you’re going to step to a man like a man…”

“She has a responsibility to her family…”

“She stayed with him, so obviously she’s condoning that behavior…”

“It’s none of our business what happens between…”

“What did she expect?”

Hate. It’s all hate. Because if you can look at the history of women being beaten and battered into silence and second-class citizenship, and still ask if they are at all to blame for the violence visited upon them, there’s nothing else to call that.

Hyper-sexualizing Women Leads to Self-Objectification — More Destructive and Prevalent than Society Admits


Two recent studies reveal that overtly sexual images of women influence not only the way men see women but worse still, the way women value – or devalue — themselves, as if their worth is connected only to their physical appearance and the pleasure they can offer. Is it any wonder that when Chris Brown got public grief for his treatment of Rihanna, girls were actually blogging about how “he could beat them up anytime.”

That Rihanna, or any woman, would return for the possibility of more of the same treatment is something passing understanding.

Eric Dolan of Raw Story reported that Rachel M. Calogero of the U.K.’s University of Kent just published a study in Psychological Science showing that “self-objectification is a self-perspective that many women adopt as a primary consequence of regular encounters of sexual objectification.” She asks:

“… Why do we seem to compulsively objectify girls and women, at seemingly younger and younger ages, in this culture?” I think there are multiple and converging forces at play with respect to objectification. What
we do know is that the evidence for the objectification of women across a variety of media and interpersonal sources is overwhelming and that it brings harm to both women and men. Keep in mind that sexual objectification includes a range of encounters from less to more extreme. It is not just checking out women or sexualized media portrayals of women, but sexual harassment and violence as well.”

Violent words lead to violent actions, or at least make them seem more acceptable. A study released in Psychological Science in May, 2012 revealed that both men and women see images of sexy women’s bodies as objects, while they see sexy-looking men as people. *(Hat Tip to blogger TerryS for sharing this study.)

Calogero also studied “the relationship between self-objectification and social activism.” She found “that women who were primed to evaluate themselves based on their appearance and sexual desirability had a decreased motivation to challenge gender-based inequalities and injustices.”

“Self-objectification has been causally linked to a number of negative physical, mental, and behavioral health outcomes in girls and women, and even some men,” demonstrating that “self-objectification is connected to women’s motivation to challenge the status quo.”

Shieldmaidens are not a myth! A recent archaeological discovery has shattered the stereotype of exclusively male Viking warriors sailing out to war while their long-suffering wives wait at home with baby Vikings. (We knew it! We always knew it.) Plus, some other findings are challenging that whole “rape and pillage” thing, too.

Researchers at the University of Western Australia decided to revamp the way they studied Viking remains. Previously, researchers had misidentified skeletons as male simply because they were buried with their swords and shields. (Female remains were identified by their oval brooches, and not much else.) By studying osteological signs of gender within the bones themselves, researchers discovered that approximately half of the remains were actually female warriors, given a proper burial with their weapons.

It’s been so difficult for people to envision women’s historical contributions as solely getting married and dying in childbirth, but you can’t argue with numbers—and fifty/fifty is pretty damn good. The presence of female warriors also has researchers now wondering just how accurate the stereotypes of raping and pillaging actually are:

Women may have accompanied male Vikings in those early invasions of England, in much greater numbers than scholars earlier supposed, (Researcher) McLeod concludes. Rather than the ravaging rovers of legend, the Vikings arrived as marriage-minded colonists.

In many ways, this discovery is well-timed with the recent uproar over Thor becoming a title for both sexes instead of an exclusively male name. Fingers crossed this means that pop culture could start including more female warriors than just Sif and Lagertha (from The History Channel’s Vikings, above). Just so long as they’re not wearing boob plate armor.