60 articles
Masturbate-a-thon
Masturbate-a-thon, also called wank-a-thon, a charity event where participants masturbate for pledges. Originated 1995 in San Francisco via Good Vibrations' Masturbation Month; London's first UK event was 5 August 2006, filmed for Channel 4's Wank Week.
Misogynoir
Misogynoir is the anti-Black racist misogyny directed at Black women, a term coined by Moya Bailey in 2008, a portmanteau of misogyny and noir, added to Merriam-Webster in 2023.
Nipple clamp
Nipple clamp: a pressure device placed on the nipple or areola for consensual erotic and BDSM sensation play. Types include adjustable screw, clover, magnetic, weighted, and suction clamps; removal is more intense than application.
Olive Morris
Olive Elaine Morris (1952–1979), Jamaican-born British activist in Brixton; British Black Panthers member, co-founder of the Brixton Black Women's Group and OWAAD, squatter at 121 Railton Road, died of non-Hodgkin lymphoma at 27.
Postcolonial feminism
Postcolonial feminism analyzes how colonialism and global power shape gender oppression. Key figures: Chandra Talpade Mohanty ("Under Western Eyes"), Gayatri Spivak, María Lugones. Distinguished by critiques of Western feminism's "Third World Woman" and links to decolonial feminism.
Pretty privilege
Pretty privilege, studied academically as the beauty premium or lookism, is the systematic economic and social advantage of physically attractive people: roughly 20 percent higher earnings, promotion advantage, and task-dependent hiring bias driven partly by statistical discrimination.
Queer heterosexuality
Queer heterosexuality (queer straight): a queer theory concept for heterosexual identities that subvert heteronormative norms of gender and monogamy, developed by Schlichter and Heasley, and contested for co-optation.
Queer theory
Queer theory: interdisciplinary framework treating sex, gender, sexuality, and identity as constructed and performative; coined by Teresa de Lauretis in 1990; founded on Butler's Gender Trouble and Sedgwick's Epistemology of the Closet; focuses on normativity, not identity categories.
Radical feminism
Radical feminism, also called radfem, is a second-wave feminist tendency identifying patriarchy as the root of women's oppression and seeking fundamental social restructuring; it arose from the 1960s women's liberation movement and popularized "the personal is political."
Rape fantasy
Rape fantasy: a sexual fantasy of forced sex. 31–57% of women report such fantasies, 9–17% frequently; also discussed in feminist sex wars, pornography research, and ethics of fictional depiction.
SCUM Manifesto
SCUM Manifesto, by Valerie Solanas (Society for Cutting Up Men), is a 1967 self-published radical feminist tract calling for eliminating the male sex; it gained notoriety after Solanas shot Andy Warhol in 1968.
Sex work
Sex work is the exchange of sexual services, performances, or products for material compensation, including pornography. Also called prostitution by critics, it spans four legal models (criminalization, Nordic, legalization, decriminalization), has a rights movement dating to COYOTE in 1973, and gained full labor rights in Belgium in 2024.
Sex-positive feminism
Sex-positive feminism, also called pro-sex or sex-radical feminism, is a current arising in the early 1980s during the feminist sex wars; it affirms sexual pleasure and opposes legal or social control of consensual adult sexual activity, conflicting with anti-pornography feminism.
Sex-positive movement
Sex-positive movement: also sex-positive or pro-sex feminism, a current treating consensual sexuality and pleasure as healthy, arising in the 1980s feminist sex wars against anti-pornography feminism, later shaping HIV prevention, sex education, and sexology.
Sexual objectification
Sexual objectification: treating a person as a body or body parts, central to feminist theory (Nussbaum's seven features; MacKinnon, Dworkin) and objectification theory (Fredrickson & Roberts 1997), covering self-objectification, body surveillance, mental health outcomes, and philosophical debate.
Shulamith Firestone
Shulamith Firestone (1945–2012), Canadian-born radical feminist, founded Chicago Radical Women, New York Radical Women, Redstockings, and New York Radical Feminists, and wrote The Dialectic of Sex (1970) and Airless Spaces (1998).
Silvia Federici
Silvia Federici (born 1942, Parma) is an Italian feminist scholar and Wages for Housework co-founder, professor emerita at Hofstra University, author of Caliban and the Witch (2004), which links witch-hunts to capitalist primitive accumulation.
Slut
Slut is an offensive English word for a woman thought to have many sexual partners, first attested c. 1400 meaning an untidy woman; central to slut-shaming, the sexual double standard, and SlutWalk reclamation.
Slut-shaming
Slut-shaming, also called slut bashing, is the stigmatization of women and girls for actual or perceived sexual behavior or appearance. Key facts: sexual double standard, 50% of girls affected, SlutWalk protest movement.
Socialist feminism
Socialist feminism, a 1970s feminist current combining Marxist and radical feminism, explains women's oppression through capitalism and patriarchy together, via concepts like capitalist patriarchy, dual systems theory, and social reproduction theory.
Standpoint theory
Standpoint theory is a family of epistemological positions that emerged in the 1970s. It claims that marginalized perspectives are epistemically advantaged and that research should begin with their lives.
Susan Carland
Susan Carland (Susan Janet Carland), Australian sociologist of religion at Monash University, author of Fighting Hislam (2016), converted to Islam at 19, studies Muslim women, feminism, and Islamophobia, and is married to Waleed Aly.
TERF (acronym)
TERF, trans-exclusionary radical feminist, is an acronym coined in 2008 by blogger Viv Smythe as a neutral label, now widely considered offensive, for feminists who exclude trans women; also a telomere protein and military terrain flight.
The personal is political
Feminist slogan and 1970 Carol Hanisch essay holding that private experiences such as housework, sexuality, and child care are political; rooted in consciousness-raising, contested across feminist waves.
Topfreedom
Topfreedom is the movement for women's right to go bare-chested in public where men may, also called topfree equality or Free the Nipple. Key facts: New York legalized it in 1992, Ontario in 1996, GoTopless founded 2007.
Val Plumwood
Val Plumwood (1939–2008), Australian ecofeminist philosopher, also published as Val Routley; critiqued human/nature dualism and rationalism in Feminism and the Mastery of Nature and Environmental Culture; survived a 1985 Kakadu crocodile attack.
Valerie Solanas
Valerie Solanas (1936-1988), American writer, author of the self-published SCUM Manifesto (1967) and founder of the one-member Society for Cutting Up Men; shot and critically wounded Andy Warhol on June 3, 1968.
Womanism
Womanism: feminist framework centering women of color, especially Black women, coined by Alice Walker in late-1970s fiction and her 1983 In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens; distinct from mainstream feminism and Black feminism, later expanded into womanist theology and Africana womanism.
Women's erotica
Women's erotica: sexually explicit material centered on women's desire and pleasure, defined against pornography by Longino and Steinem, rooted in the feminist sex wars, now spanning fiction, audio, and feminist pornography.
Yoni massage
Yoni massage is a tantric-style sensual bodywork focused on the vulva (Sanskrit yoni), aimed at body awareness and relaxation rather than sex; the technique is a 20th-century neo-Tantric development by figures like Joseph Kramer, not an ancient lineage, and is unaccredited and often outside licensed massage practice.