Feminism

The burkini ban and the dangers of political polarization

As everybody knows, last month France started enforcing an extremely controversial ban against the so called ā€œburkiniā€. The ban was eventually overturned, but the debate is still very much alive. In the age of social media, when we all live in echo chambersĀ Ā¹, I still havenā€™t had a chance to talk to a person who is actually in favor of the burkini ban. But the mere mention that ā€œitā€™s hypocritical to display so much outrage towards this and then turn a blind eye to the culture of forced modesty in Muslim communities around the worldā€ or that ā€œI can understand why this ban appeals to the massesā€ is already enough to trigger some progressive liberals and turn them into paranoid anti-Islamophobia police (or, asĀ Maajid NawazĀ would call them,Ā regressive leftists).Read More »The burkini ban and the dangers of political polarization

7 Fallacies That Undermine Antifeminism

As a feminist IĀ am often confronted, especially online, by self-declared antifeministsĀ who passionatelyĀ denounce the ideology resorting to all manner ofĀ creative accusations. ButĀ is there any basis for so vehemently attacking feminism? With the occasion of the women’s month, IĀ present the most common fallacies that compromiseĀ the antifeministĀ discourse.

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Why Django Girls?

In February and March this year Django GirlsĀ will be organizing free Django workshops for women in cities all over the world. As a Python/Django developer and feminist myself, I naturally applied as a coach. What for some may seem like a great initiative, however, is attacked by others asĀ aĀ grossĀ display of hypocrisy and misandristĀ double-standard.Ā In this article I hopeĀ to explain why supporting such events doesn’t imply you hate men or seek to overthrow patriarchy andĀ install aĀ regime of female supremacy.Read More »Why Django Girls?

Gender quotas

The subject of gender quotas was trending in Brazil a few months ago and I wroteĀ about it in Portuguese. Now that the same topicĀ has sprungĀ in Romania, it’s timeĀ to writeĀ an English version. As should be no surprise, there’s a strong backlash against the idea of quotas and affirmative action in general. TheĀ anti-quota arguments areĀ typically the same: that this type of approach is “anti-democratic”, “unjust”, “discriminatory”, “unequal”, etc. Although I agree that this is not an ideal solution, these arguments hardly sustain themselves. It may even be that there are legitimate reasonsĀ for us to be skeptical about quotas and affirmative action, but the aforementioned onesĀ are certainly not in this category, and I’ll explain why.

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