273 articles
Bralessness
Bralessness is the practice of not wearing a brassiere, tied to 1960s feminist protest (the 1968 Miss America "Freedom Trash Can" and the bra-burning myth), Rudi Gernreich's transparent "no bra," workplace dress-code law, and recent survey and perception research.
Bro Code
Bro Code: an unwritten rulebook of male-friendship loyalty, popularized by How I Met Your Mother's Barney Stinson (2008 book) and reworked in gender studies by Thomas Keith for sexist bro culture.
Bromance
Bromance: a close, emotionally intimate, nonsexual friendship between men; portmanteau of brother and romance. Popularized in the mid-2000s via films like Superbad; studied as a form of homosociality tied to declining homophobia.
Bronze Age Pervert
Bronze Age Pervert (BAP) is a pseudonymous far-right online influencer and author of the 2018 self-published book Bronze Age Mindset, widely identified with Yale Ph.D. Costin Alamariu and associated with the manosphere and dissident right.
Carceral feminism
Carceral feminism, a term coined by Elizabeth Bernstein, criticizes feminist reliance on police, courts, and prisons against sexual and gendered violence; opposed by abolition feminism associated with Angela Davis and Mimi Kim.
Carl Benjamin
Carl Benjamin, aka Sargon of Akkad, is a British YouTuber and political commentator who rose during Gamergate, stood unsuccessfully for UKIP in the 2019 European elections, and directs the Lotus Eaters podcast.
Chad (slang)
Chad is English internet slang for an attractive, confident, sexually successful "alpha male," born in 1990s Chicago slang and reshaped by the 2013 Chad Thundercock and 2017 Virgin vs. Chad memes.
Christina Hoff Sommers
Christina Hoff Sommers, AEI resident scholar and former Clark University philosophy professor, author of Who Stole Feminism? (1994) and The War Against Boys (2000), equity-feminism advocate and host of The Factual Feminist.
Circle jerk
Circle jerk (circlejerk) is vulgar slang for a group of men masturbating in a circle, and figuratively for a self-congratulatory echo chamber. Documented from 1958 print, figurative by 1972, online via Urban Dictionary 2003 and Reddit's r/circlejerk 2008.
Cisgender
Cisgender (cis): describes people whose gender identity matches their sex assigned at birth; entered circulation in the 1990s, added to the OED in 2015, counterpart to transgender.
Combahee River Collective
Combahee River Collective: Black feminist socialist lesbian organization founded in Boston in 1974, named for Harriet Tubman's 1863 Combahee River raid; its 1977 Statement coined "identity politics" and anticipated intersectionality.
Complementarianism
Complementarianism is a Christian theological view that men and women are equal in worth but have distinct, God-ordained roles, with male headship in home and church. Also called the hierarchical position; opposed to Christian egalitarianism; formalized by CBMW's 1988 Danvers Statement.
Compulsory heterosexuality
Compulsory heterosexuality, from Adrienne Rich's 1980 essay 'Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence' in Signs, is the feminist claim that heterosexuality is an imposed institution, not a natural default, involving male identification and the lesbian continuum.
Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women
CEDAW, the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, is a 1979 UN treaty defining discrimination against women; 189 states parties, monitored by a 23-expert committee, with a 1999 Optional Protocol.
Dad bod
Dad bod (also dadbod) is a slang term for a soft, mildly muscular male physique with a belly, coined in Mackenzie Pearson's viral 2015 Clemson blog post, later studied as a masculinity phenomenon and added to Merriam-Webster in 2025.
Declaration of Sentiments
Declaration of Sentiments: 1848 women's rights statement drafted by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Mary Ann M'Clintock for the Seneca Falls Convention, modeled on the Declaration of Independence, signed by 68 women and 32 men, demanding suffrage and equal rights.
Donna Haraway
Donna Haraway (born 1944, Denver) is an American feminist theorist and biologist, UC Santa Cruz History of Consciousness professor emerita, author of A Cyborg Manifesto (1985) and Situated Knowledges (1988), 2025 Erasmus Prize and Venice Golden Lion recipient.
Dude
Dude, or Dood, is an informal English term of address meaning roughly "guy," first recorded in 1883 as New York City slang for a fashionably dressed man.
Ecofeminism
Ecofeminism, coined by Françoise d'Eaubonne in 1974, is an ideology and movement linking domination of women and degradation of nature through patriarchy and capitalism, with cultural and social strands, key texts by Merchant and Shiva, and ongoing climate justice relevance.
Equal Rights Amendment
The Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), drafted by Alice Paul and introduced in Congress in 1923, is a proposed U.S. constitutional amendment barring sex-based denial of equality of rights; passed by Congress in 1972, it reached only 35 ratifications by its 1982 deadline, and its status remains disputed.
Female education
Female education: schooling of girls and women worldwide. Also called girls' education. Near-global enrolment parity by 2024, but 119–133 million girls out of school, women 63% of illiterate adults, and tertiary enrolment now favors women.
Femen (Фемен)
Femen (Фемен), feminist protest movement founded in Ukraine in 2008 in Khmelnytskyi, known for topless "sextremism" actions with slogans painted on the body against patriarchy, dictatorships, and the sex industry; later based in Paris and criticized for Islamophobia.
Femina Miss India
Femina Miss India is India's national beauty pageant run by Femina magazine since 1964; its winner represents India at Miss World. First winner Meher Castelino; 2026 titleholder Sadhvi Sail.
Feminazi
Feminazi, a blend of feminist and Nazi, is an offensive slur for feminists popularized by Rush Limbaugh in the early 1990s, originally aimed at pro-choice advocates, now common in online antifeminist hate speech.
Femininity
Femininity: the socially constructed set of qualities attributed to women, counterpart of masculinity and distinct from biological sex. Covers performativity theory, historical beauty ideals, measurement inventories, and self-assessment survey data.
Feminism
Feminism is a political movement and intellectual commitment seeking justice for women and the elimination of sexism. Scholars distinguish between feminist ideas and political movements.
Feminism in Australia
Feminism in Australia is the organized movement for women's equality, beginning with colonial suffrage campaigns in the 1880s; white women won the federal vote in 1902, and from the 1970s feminists worked closely with the state.
Feminism in India
Feminism in India, also known as Indian feminism, comprises movements and theories for women's equal rights, rooted in 19th-century social reform against sati and child marriage.
Feminism in New Zealand
Feminism in New Zealand spans from the 1893 Electoral Act, the world's first legal women's suffrage in a self-governing country, to three women Prime Ministers and parliamentary parity reached in 2022.
Feminism in sub-Saharan Africa
Feminism in sub-Saharan Africa comprises the movements and scholarship through which African women have claimed rights and autonomy, on terms largely defined by African women themselves.