Pacific Standard July-August 2013 Cover

Inside India’s Perna Caste, Where Women Are Routinely Prostituted by Their In-Laws

June 17, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
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NEW DELHI — On a recent sunny day before the monsoons began, a thin woman settled to the floor in the cool shade of a nondescript apartment building in Dharampura, where a Perna community lives on the outskirts of Delhi. Rani is not normally awake in the afternoon; the Perna practice a form of inter-generational sex work, which is a strangely polite way of saying that women here expect to be prostituted by their husbands. Rani’s daily routine rarely changes: she “goes for prostitution” around 2:00 a.m., taking an auto-rickshaw with other Perna women to public places. “Anywhere ... Read More

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Application for Employment (Women)

June 10, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
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Weight: 120. Height: 5’6 ½”. “Married? How long?” The options on the “Application for Employment (Women),” are: “Single, Engaged, Separated, Widowed, Divorced.” Another question asks “Number of Dependents and Relationship?” On this line, on Lynn Ferrin’s 1961 application to be an editor at a magazine published by the automobile club, someone in the employment office wrote, in red pencil, “No steady.” On the “Supplement to the Application for Employment,” under the line for “Appearance: Posture, Dress, Neatness, Cleanliness, Physique” someone has described ... Read More

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Real Men Don’t

May 31, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
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One of the banes of male existence is the continued struggle for authenticity. Like, it appears that I'm a real man, but human existence is possibly an illusion, right, so how can I be so sure? How can you be so sure? Real man? Man, I just don't know. Luckily, there are things like this article, which contains the following two sentences: "Men have become lazy pussies. I don’t even want to use the word pussy because it brings to mind women, who nowadays have much more character than men." And this (actually hilarious and awesome) video made for Brazilian soccer star Neymar, titled "Real Men ... Read More

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In Australia You Can Now Be a Woman, a Man—or Neither

May 31, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
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A few hours ago a court in Australia eliminated gender as a binary proposition. The New South Wales court of appeals rejected a lower court's ruling that Australians must check either "male" or "female" on official documents requesting their gender. The ruling centered on the case of Norrie, a Sydney resident who does not use a last name. Today's Sydney Morning Herald reports that Norrie had sought the right to identify as neither male nor female in official records. The high court decision allows Norrie to respond "sex not specified." The ruling is being described this morning as legal ... Read More

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Groundbreaking News: Women Like Sex

May 8, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
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Hold onto your codpieces, y'all. You're not gonna believe the news coming out of Australia. I am currently shivering in a corner, feebly pecking away at a keyboard with my mouth, trying to finish up this post while I attempt to process all of this. Here is the lede: It's a myth that men want sex and women want relationships, says a Sydney professor, as a long-simmering gender spat reaches Australia. I am dead—and there's still more: It is not true that men are focused only on sex and women only want relationships, she says. But. But. But. But. But how could she know? Richters, an ... Read More

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Girl Scouts Add ‘Game Developer’ Badge, Video Games Still Sexist

April 18, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
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The Girl Scouts of Greater Los Angeles and Women in Games International are teaming up to create a new badge for girl scouts: video game development. From Girl Gamer: “Our ultimate goal is to create a STEM-aligned video game badge for the Girl Scouts of the United States of America,” said Amy Allison, vice president at WIGI. “Creating this badge will get young girls excited in technology and science and let them know that they, too, can have a career in the video game industry.” "STEM" stands for "science, technology, engineering, and mathematics," an area in which the Girl Scouts ... Read More

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How Etsy Got Over Middle-School-Cafeteria Syndrome

February 8, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment

http://youtu.be/w4LExVkv4Pw Kellan Elliot-McCrea, the CTO of Etsy, recently shared the anecdote below at a private seminar held by a leading venture capital firm for its portfolio companies. (For the un-initiated, Etsy is a wildly popular online craft marketplace with over 15 million users—80 percent female—and, until recently, a 4.5 percent-female engineering staff.) Etsy also had a substantial “boys versus girls” dynamic, where engineers (mostly male) sat on one side and the women on the other... It was a broken system that required changes on both sides of the house. Not a ... Read More

More like this: Culture & Society, The 101
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How Evolution Explains High-Heeled Shoes

January 2, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
(PHOTO: SHUTTERSTOCK)

Fashions in dress come and go, but a peculiar one has stayed in style for many generations, and shows no sign of fading away. It’s the high-heeled shoe, which first became a fashion statement in 16th-century France, and has been a part of the modern woman’s wardrobe since the mid-19th century. Ask a woman why she endures the awkwardness and discomfort, and she’ll probably respond, “They make me look, and feel, more attractive.” Newly published research suggests this perception is accurate, but perhaps not for the reason you’d expect. It’s not the artificially increased ... Read More

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Women Spend More Time (and Have More Friends) on Facebook

October 18, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment

The founders of Facebook proudly announced a few weeks ago that the social networking site now has one billion regular users. A mind-boggling statistic, to be sure. But how, exactly, are people using the site, and what is it providing them? Recently published research suggests there may be different answers to that question for men and women. Knox College psychologist Francis McAndrew surveyed 1,026 Facebook users ranging from age 18 to 79 (the mean age was 30) and living in 54 different nations (although the largest group by far was from the U.S.). The social networkers answered a ... Read More

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For Greater Gender Equality, Introduce Yourself Online

September 20, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment

We increasingly exchange information in bursts of written text online. In the Journal of Language and Social Psychology, two University of Toronto psychologists report this technology-driven shift may be altering the content of our communications, in both welcome and less-welcome ways. One hundred and twenty-two undergrads were paired into male-female couples and instructed to spend a half-hour getting to know one another, either via an Internet chat or face-to-face discussion. Online, the often-documented gender difference in communication styles—in which women tend to be more ... Read More

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