By Catcall Team
Before we get too excited about the new year, we want to take a moment to honor our favorite stories from the past twelve months. It’s hard to narrow the list down, but here’s a roundup that touches the surface. This year we shut down mansplainers, shared AAPI stories, and encouraged people to diversify their feeds. Of course, we wouldn’t be Catcall without sharing our favorite sex toys and other raunchy tales too! Take a look…
Continue reading
By Sophie Oswald
Illustrations by Matthew Vargas
“Men explain things to me, still. And no man has ever apologized for explaining, wrongly, things that I know and they don’t,” Rebecca Solnit remarked in her essay Men Explain Things to Me. While Solnit didn’t specifically use the word “mansplain” in her popular essay, she was one of the first to discuss this phenomenon. Conversations surrounding her essay shortly resulted in the term appearing in a comment section online.
Most women, maybe even all women, have been there. Men have been explaining things in patronizing ways for centuries.
Generally, mansplaining involves a conversation between a man and a woman, but sometimes it can happen between two men or with a man and a non-binary person.
Continue reading
By Nicole Mitchell
Illustration by Katelyn Betz
It’s no secret that the online streaming platform Twitch is made up of mostly men. Featuring a variety of categories including sports, food & drink, travel, gaming, and more, Twitch is a space where everyday people can livestream their lives online for the whole world to see. One of the most popular livestreams is in the gaming category, with streamers like Ninja, Sykkuno, and Trick2g being some of the most well-known Twitch creators.
Streaming or not, the gaming industry has always been a harsh place for women—from inappropriate comments to a complete distrust in their gaming capabilities. In fact, 44% of women in gaming have experienced gender discrimination in the last year, according to a report from esports giant Evil Geniuses. “As someone with an identifiably female voice and name, [harassment] is one of the reasons I refrain from playing online games,” a woman shared in the report. This idea that women are less-than has, unsurprisingly, seeped into the gaming community of Twitch. In fact, only 35% of streamers on the platform consist of women, according to Influencer Marketing Hub.
Continue reading
By Hannah Strader
Venus Libido is one of my absolute favorite Instagram accounts. It’s sex-positive, detailed cartoons of women in everyday, not-so-pretty situations convey the reality of how difficult it can be for women to exist in this “picture-perfect” world.
But one of the account’s recent posts divided women in a way I have never seen before by posing the question, “Is shapewear anti-feminist?”
By Gabrielle Alexa
Originally Published on the I Am Woman Project
Photo by Toa Heftiba
Of the myriad of ways that gender inequality manifests in our daily lives, the orgasm gap is one that doesn’t get enough coverage.
Yes, as if dealing with a gendered pay gap and interpersonal sexism wasn’t enough, we don’t even benefit equally in the bedroom. While one study reports that 39% of straight women are orgasming consistently versus 91% of straight men, and another claims that 57% of straight women are orgasming consistently versus 95% of straight men, the point is that women aren’t orgasming nearly enough. Continue reading
Catcall 