What other people are saying

Responding to the mainstream feminist blogosphere on Feminism FOR REAL on Racialicious

The Smurfette Principle on Sociological Images

Can you pass an 8th grade civics test? on Salon

Seeing through gleaming eyes at Clutch

What are some of the best posts, articles and videos you've encountered this week? Leave links in the comments. Self-promotion encouraged.

Finally, a way to evaluate music for gender biases

As a fan of both music and feminism, I was happy to learn on Jezebel that there is a musical companion to the Bechdel Test, which helps evaluate movies for quality representation of women.



Today on Jezebel, in a post titled "The Willis Test is the new Bechdel Test," writer Irin Carmon introduces readers to The Willis Test, named for a passage in a 1971 essay by the late critic Ellen Willis:

A crude but often revealing method of assessing male bias in lyrics is to take a song written by a man about a woman and reverse the sexes. By this test, a diatribe like [the Rolling Stones'] "Under My Thumb" is not nearly so sexist in its implications as, for example, Cat Stevens' gentle, sympathetic "Wild World"; Jagger's fantasy of sweet revenge could easily be female—in fact, it has a female counterpart, Nancy Sinatra's "Boots" — but it's hard to imagine a woman sadly warning her ex-lover that he's too innocent for the big bad world out there.*