misogyny – Feminism and Religion

November 2025 Report: Under the Clerical Regime, Nowhere Is Safe for Women in Iran, part 1

Moderator’s Note: This post has been brought to you in cooperation with the NCRI women’s committee. NCRI stands for the National Council of Resistance of Iran. You can learn more information as well as see this original article by clicking this link. A description of their Council can be found at the end of this post.

Women Are Killed in Iran with Complete Impunity

November 2025 Report: Under the Clerical Regime, Nowhere Is Safe for Women in Iran

Under the rule of Iran’s misogynistic clerical regime, Iranian women, from childhood to old age, are unsafe in all spaces and circumstances. If they manage to escape the brutality of security forces in the streets, they may still fall victim in their homes to so-called “honor suspicions,” resisting forced marriage, requesting a divorce, or even attempting to defend their own rights. Many of these killings take place in front of children or other family members, feeding a cycle of violence across generations. Among the victims are pregnant women or mothers killed alongside their children.

Monthly November 2025_EN Download

Beatings and torture of women in prisons, firing pellets into the eyes of protesting women, sexual assault in detention centers, and the attacks by morality police patrols enforcing compulsory hijab in public all legitimize and encourage violence against women inside the home and within families.

From the Archives: Careful Criticism: Resisting Hetero-Patriarchy while Resisting Trump by Sara Frykenberg

This was originally posted on May 2, 2017

My students are taking their final exams this week, which means I will be spending the week frantically, but attentively grading in order to make our grade submission deadline next week. End of semester grading is a mountain of careful criticism we educators scale one step at a time, with deliberateness, towards an ultimate goal of student success (if not in our classes, then in the next, or in life, relationships, etc.). Thus, I often find myself returning to the question: what am I hoping to create in what I say and write, and in how I critique?

One of the goals of feminist pedagogies is to help us prevent recreating the domination of kyrio-patriarchy in classroom spaces. While activism is not the same thing as education, and strategies of resistance are different than pedagogy in important ways, the concern for careful critique is warranted in both praxes. What do we create in how we critique, resist, and protest? What do we recreate, wittingly or no? I have found myself concerned with this since the election of Trump, DT (cause I can only write that name so many times), to the presidency. Continue reading “From the Archives: Careful Criticism: Resisting Hetero-Patriarchy while Resisting Trump by Sara Frykenberg”

Seeing Double by Esther Nelson

I’ve often thought that we (in the USA) have been somewhat, albeit reluctantly, willing to discuss and perhaps even change our minds, behavior, policies, and laws when confronted about the long-lived presence of racism in our local and national institutions. However, when it comes to misogyny—not so much.

Shirley Anita Chisholm St. Hill (1924 – 2005), was an American politician who, in 1968, became the first black woman to be elected to Congress. “Chisholm represented a district centered in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, for seven terms from 1969 to 1983. In 1972, she became the first black candidate for a major-party nomination for President of the U.S. and the first woman to run for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination. Throughout her career, she was known for taking ‘a resolute stand against economic, social, and political injustices’ as well as being a strong supporter of black civil rights and women’s rights” (Wikipedia).

Chisholm noted that “…she had faced much more discrimination during her New York legislative career because she was a woman than for her race” (Wikipedia). Why are not more of us aware of Chisholm’s confession?

Resistance Checklist: Do It Loud. Do It Quiet by Karen Tate

Despite what you’re hearing out there, because it’s outdated information just being repeated in the echo chamber, Trump did not win by a landslide. He has no legitimate mandate. As of this writing one percentage point of the population separates how many votes each candidate got in this election and counting has not finished.

Many of us might still be recovering from the election disappointment and we’re trying to find our way forward. Consider this:

“Many of us have been brought up on stories of praying to God the Father to save us, waiting for our prince to come, submitting to the greater wisdom of our husband or priest to guide us. We need to move from this way of being, into our own agency. But we must also recognise that we cannot do it all, nor do it alone, in the martyr mother myth so many of us have learned to embody.
This is not the time for being nice, biting our tongues or not rocking the boat. And yet these are also not times for making enemies or picking fights. Can we find other ways of engaging and challenging, visioning and contributing to transformation? What might these look like?” From Weaving Our Way Beyond Patriarchy – a compendium of over 80 women’s voices, launching today exclusively from Womancraft Publishing. com

Abundant Life Is for Women, Too by Liz Cooledge Jenkins

I lived in East Palo Alto, CA, for two years in my mid-twenties. During the first year, a man was killed down the street from my apartment building, in the parking lot of the building where my friends lived. I walked through that parking lot often, as a shortcut back to my own place from wherever I could find street parking. I didn’t know the man, but I knew people who knew him. His death was both disturbing and tragic. The neighborhood mourned. My friends and I got together and wrote a prayer for our community. The murder changed my experience of living there.

A GOOD HEART by Esther Nelson

In spite of organizations such as “Black Lives Matter” and the three or four waves of feminism over the past century, both racism and misogyny remain stubbornly alive. We’ve made positive strides on both fronts, yet much remains to be done. Curiously enough, I’ve noticed more sensitivity in our current society regarding racism than misogyny. People claiming to be “woke” seem more inclined to be woke to the manifestations of racism—not so much to misogyny.

According to Merriam-Webster, the term woke is about being “aware of and actively attentive to important societal facts and issues (especially issues of racial and social justice).” Merriam-Webster’s second definition of the term is “politically liberal (as in matters of racial and social justice) especially in a way that is considered unreasonable or extreme.”

Men Just “Know Things” by Esther Nelson

One of my Facebook friends, a young woman academic, recently posed a question, inviting discussion. (I’ve abbreviated her post for the sake of space.)

“What is it about white male liberals that just MUST have me buy [into] their ideas when they diverge from mine? I am struck that over the years, I have had a handful of white male liberals make it a mission to convince me that I am WRONG about Hillary. When I say, listen, the case is closed, she cheer led the Iraq war, I am done, [t]hey just cannot handle it.” Continue reading “Men Just “Know Things” by Esther Nelson”

Bake the Damn Cake: Owning Up to and Mitigating Our Traditions’ Trauma Histories by Chris Ash

Christy at the beach

“We have learned that trauma is not just an event
that took place sometime in the past;
it is also the imprint left by that experience
on mind, brain, and body.
This imprint has ongoing consequences
for how the human organism
manages to survive in the present.”
— Bessel A. van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma

While I’m not a trauma therapist, I work in a field in which I regularly support people who have experienced trauma. Sometimes I’m accompanying a recent survivor of assault at the emergency room for a rape kit, speaking warmly, offering compassion, providing distraction. Other times, I’m holding space over the phone while a fifty-something year old survivor tearfully discloses, for the first time in her life, the things done to her during childhood. Recent or old, those experiences shape us and our responses to them, even those that might not serve our health, are efforts to protect ourselves, to avoid pain, and to seek an elusive sense of safety.

“Trauma isn’t what happened to us.
Trauma is what happened inside us as a result of what happened to us.”
— Gabor Mate, in his presentation “Addressing the Long-Term Effects of Childhood Trauma”
during the Healing Trauma Summit

Our attempts to resolve trauma, to escape it, may be labeled dysfunctional and may not, ultimately, serve our highest good. They are, however, the actions of someone who wants to feel secure, who wants to feel loved.

My desire to understand trauma and trauma recovery serves my professional development as well as my personal journey, and learning more about the how trauma relates to the body has proven helpful in both of these areas of my life. I’m not a mental health clinician — I’m a crisis advocate and consent educator. But the process, as I understand it, is something like this: Continue reading “Bake the Damn Cake: Owning Up to and Mitigating Our Traditions’ Trauma Histories by Chris Ash”

Careful Criticism: Resisting Hetero-Patriarchy while Resisting Trump by Sara Frykenberg

One of the goals of feminist pedagogies is to help us prevent recreating the domination of kyrio-patriarchy in classroom spaces. While activism is not the same thing as education, and strategies of resistance are different than pedagogy in important ways, the concern for careful critique is warranted in both praxes. What do we create in how we critique, resist, and protest? What do we recreate, wittingly or no? I have found myself concerned with this since the election of Trump, DT (cause I can only write that name so many times), to the presidency. Continue reading “Careful Criticism: Resisting Hetero-Patriarchy while Resisting Trump by Sara Frykenberg”

Encountering and Countering Self-Disgust by Stephanie N. Arel

In my last post, Trump’s Misogyny – A Case for the Contempt-Oriented Personality, I wrote about disgust, claiming that media diagnosticians failed to identify disgust- contempt as part of Donald Trump’s psychological profile. At the end of the piece, I said that the statement “Make America Great Again” was misogynistic. I maintain this claim but now want to consider disgust a little more closely – particularly when it constitutes self-disgust underlying or complicit in misogyny. Confronting and ameliorating self-disgust provides an entrance into combating misogyny.

Self-disgust interferes with self-love. As a result, self-disgust impedes connection and empathy in human relationships. Self-disgust also attenuates intimacy –self and other directed. Self- disgust manifests in multiple ways – in withdrawal, refusal to engage, self and other directed violence, addictions (including those to negative affect), etc.: the list is a long one. Self-disgust which manifests as hubris motivates the projection of disgust onto others, so that the other becomes the source of disgust; the abject unwanted object present in the self – rejected and discarded –becomes transported, launched to rest on the back of another.

The simple way to describe this mechanism emerges in self-help literature that suggests that the thing that one dislikes most in others is that which one cannot tolerate in oneself. This negatively perceived part of self can also be conceptualized in terms of Carl Jung’s notion of the shadow – the unknown dark side of the personality which we all carry but whose integration into conscious life defines its denseness, or the weight of its impact. The more conscious we are of our shadow, the more we are able to identify that what we recognize as a deficiency in another is actually what we understand as a personal inferiority. Continue reading “Encountering and Countering Self-Disgust by Stephanie N. Arel”