273 articles
Nilza Iraci
Nilza Iraci is a Brazilian Black feminist, a founding member of Geledés – Instituto da Mulher Negra, nominated for the 2005 Nobel Peace Prize campaign.
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.
Nísia Floresta
Nísia Floresta was the pseudonym of Dionísia Gonçalves Pinto (1810–1885), a Brazilian educator, poet, travel writer, and feminist generally identified as the pioneer of feminism in Brazil.
Noof Al Maadeed
Noof Al Maadeed (نوف المعاضيد), Qatari women's rights defender who fled to the UK in 2019, campaigned against male guardianship, returned to Qatar in 2021, and has not spoken publicly since March 2023.
NotAllMen
#NotAllMen is a Twitter hashtag, first used in 2009, by which men object to perceived generalizations about male violence; it rose in 2014 after the UCSB shooting, prompting the counter-hashtag #YesAllWomen, and resurged in 2021 after Sarah Everard's murder.
Notes on Being a Man
Notes on Being a Man (2025) by Scott Galloway, NYU professor and Pivot podcast cohost, is a Simon & Schuster memoir-advice book proposing a protect, provide, procreate code of masculinity and surplus value for boys and men in crisis.
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.
Patriarchy
Patriarchy: a social system of male dominance over women, central concept in feminist theory (Millett, Firestone, Hartmann), with private-to-public forms, critiques, and intersectionality shift.
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.
Pray the Devil Back to Hell
Pray the Devil Back to Hell is a 2008 American documentary directed by Gini Reticker and produced by Abigail Disney, about the Liberian women's peace movement.
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.
Rebecca Walker
Rebecca Walker (born 1969), American writer and activist, daughter of Alice Walker; coined "third wave" feminism in her 1992 Ms. article "Becoming the Third Wave" and co-founded the Third Wave Fund; author of Black, White, and Jewish.
Reem Alsalem
Reem Alsalem, Jordanian UN Special Rapporteur on violence against women and girls since 1 August 2021; former UNHCR official; known for climate-crisis, sex-based-violence and mothers reports and gender-identity controversies.
Religious views on female genital mutilation
Religious views on female genital mutilation, also known as Khifaḍ, cover the stances of Islam, Christianity, and Judaism toward the practice. No religious text condones it, yet many communities see it as a religious requirement.
Riot grrrl
Riot grrrl, an underground feminist punk movement and music style from the early 1990s Pacific Northwest and Washington, D.C., tied to third-wave feminism, Bikini Kill, Bratmobile, zines, and the Riot Grrrl Manifesto.
Role
Role (social role): the expected behavior attached to a social position or status in sociology and social psychology. Also gender roles, role theory, social role theory (Eagly, Wood). Defined by Banton and Merton, learned via socialization, and measurably shaping labor-market outcomes.
Rosie the Riveter
Rosie the Riveter, born from a 1942 Evans and Loeb song and tied to Norman Rockwell's Saturday Evening Post cover and Miller's "We Can Do It!" Westinghouse poster, symbolizes American women war workers of World War II, later reclaimed as a feminist icon.
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.
Sealioning
Sealioning is a trolling and harassment tactic of relentless, superficially polite demands for evidence, coined from David Malki's 2014 Wondermark comic "The Terrible Sea Lion" and named during GamerGate; it exhausts targets and undermines their authority.
Second-wave feminism
Second-wave feminism, the women's movement of the 1960s to early 1980s following first-wave suffragism, addressed workplace equality, reproductive rights, and domestic life. Key figures include Friedan, Steinem, Beauvoir, and Black feminist critics.
Self-Made Man (book)
Self-Made Man (2006) is Norah Vincent's immersion-journalism memoir of 18 months living as a man, "Ned," joining a bowling league, dating, and infiltrating a monastery; a New York Times bestseller from Viking.
Sex differences in psychology
Sex differences in psychology: average male-female differences in cognition, personality, and behavior. Meta-analyses (Hyde 2005; Zell 2015) find most effects small, average d = 0.21, with context-dependent exceptions.
Sex segregation
Sex segregation is the separation of people by sex in workplaces, schools, facilities, and public life. Also called gender segregation, it spans occupational segregation (Reskin, Charles), sex-separated restrooms, single-sex schooling, and sport, with divergent legal treatment in US and UK law.
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.