Diaphragm dilemmas
For plenty of women, the only experience they might have had with a diaphragm is watching Samantha from Sex and the City roll up her sleeves and help Carrie out of a tricky situation. That, plus the fact that there are a number of alternative contraceptives readily available for the more squeamish, was likely enough to put the medieval-sounding diaphragm to the bottom of the list of contraceptive choices. But could that be set to change?A (relatively) new device – Caya – isreadying to hit the shelves in the US. While the traditional diaphragm involved a trip to the GP to be fitted, Caya promises a one-size-fits-all approach thanks to its contoured design. As long as it’s inserted correctly, it should have the same effectiveness as the pill. Plus, it’s hormone-free and you don’t need to remember to take it every day. It’s been available in Europe since 2010, but press coverage and awareness has been mounting since news of its US debut.
Ride on Ryan
A groundbreaking advance has been made in the world of skateboarding: the first board designed specifically for girls is available to buy now! If you thought that skateboards came without gendered ergonomics, think again: the gimmicky new girl board comes in – wait for it – the same shape as Ryan Gosling’s silhouette. It even features his face. We had no idea that Gosling made skateboarding friendlier for girls, but skateboard brand Dime MTL clearly know something we don’t.
The app putting women on the map
There’s only one app you need this week and, no, it’s not another weather app, it’s something far more useful – Women on the Map. This ingenious creation will alert users whenever they pass a place where a woman has done something historic.
It was thought up by Spark, an organisation that works with girls aged 13-22 to challenge gender stereotypes in the media, after it realised that women are not being publicly celebrated – with statues and plaques – in the same way men are. Instead of petitioning to get more statues up, Spark decided to use the internet to act as a virtual tour guide, pointing out the places of significance for women’s history. As Spark’s Dana Edell explained to Time:
It connects women’s stories to specific landmarks, so that wherever you are in the world, you could get an alert on your phone saying ‘Hey, did you know that a woman once did a really cool thing right nearby?’
Edell wants to tell the histories of women left out of the school textbooks; so far, Spark has crowdsourced the stories of 119 women in 28 different countries. Anyone can submit the story of a woman they think deserves a place on the map. At the moment, Women on the Map is partnered with Google Field Trip, with a view to being downloadable one day as a standalone app.
‘Sarah Jessica Parker is not a feminist’
Sarah Jessica Parker had internet giddy with snarky glee this week, as she gifted it the headline: “SJP is not a feminist”. Which, as with most of those headlines, is not strictly true. In an interview in this month’s Cosmopolitan, the former Sex and the City star revealed that she considers herself a humanist, rather than a feminist:
As [playwright] Wendy Wasserstein would say, I’m a humanist. I’m enormously appreciative of the work that my mother’s generation did. We are the beneficiaries of a lot of disappointment, heartache, discouragement and misunderstanding. But I see a lot of people trying to sort out their roles. People of colour, gays, lesbians and transgenders who are carving out this space. I’m not spitting in the face or being lazy about what still needs to be done – but I don’t think it’s just women any more. We would be so enormously powerful if it were a humanist movement.
It’s a fair argument, but might SJP might have missed the point a little? Because her desired view of the future certainly sounds feminist:
Equality in pay. Paid sick leave … childcare. If I could guarantee every mother who is working two, three jobs that she had good childcare that didn’t make her anxious all day – people would probably work in more efficient ways.
And it is, of course, wholly possible to be feminist and support the needs and struggles of other minority groups (and vice versa), as well as being kind to humans in general. In fact, to be a feminist you should probably be all of those things.
Backing a winner
Facebook often makes little changes unannounced, but it appears not even the social media network knew about the latest design innovation. You might not have noticed anything’s different either, so subtle is the change, but log into your account and you’ll see something in the top right hand corner that wasn’t there before. That’s right – the Facebook logo of a tiny man and woman shoulder to shoulder now has the woman in front, rather than behind. Facebook designer Caitlyn Winner is responsible for the tweak, stating that she chose to change it because in the original design, the man and the woman were not symmetrical; they were unequal.
She was quite literally in the shadow of the man, she was not in a position to lean in.
Lean In being the title of Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg’s bestselling book on how to be successful at work, Winner was on to, well, a winner. And rather than take her suggestion to top brass, Caitlyn decided to go ahead with the change and just see what happened, expecting it to be removed. Instead, it started appearing across the network, and now it looks like it’s here to stay.
Source: https://www.theguardian.com
