On Easter Monday boys and men visit their women relatives, friends, neighbors, often even if they are not close friends. They usually go in small groups and are "armed" with soda-water siphon and cologne water. The "tour" usually starts early in the morning and lasts all day long. They great girls and women with shorter funny and sometimes a bit blue poems then sprinkle the women. The women must be well-prepared, they treat men with dessert and beverages - and with hand-painted eggs.
At the end of the day women usually wear a dozen of different colognes and sometimes the men have the sun in their eyes from the many cups of beverages.
Thanks to Steve Strassmann for the story tip. Source: A native Hungarian via email
We all know that one of the most crucial ways to be a successful artist is to show ones work. The Women's Center show recently presented “Women’s Center Show for Equality,” where artists of all genders were able to submit work for the exhibit. No work was turned down because the goal of the show was to provide every artist a chance to showcase their art. We received and hung over thirty wonderful examples of graphic work, photography, collage, acrylic, oil and pastels, from Freshmen to Senior students at AIB (Art Institute of Boston). The show was up for a month, but we started with a fun opening with refreshments.
By Jennifer Sherys-Rivet
We feel it is important to provide a space for artists to showcase their work. The event was quite successful. Interested in showing your work in the women’s center? Contact us at womenscenter@lesley.edu!
This event was inspiring to say the least. Jen and I started thinking no one was going to show up from Lesley and the next thing we knew we left for the Commons with a solid group including one guy!
When we arrived there were people swarming with posters, stickers, and free t-shirts that lit up the area with pink spirit. We were told to move to the front and thanks to Rachel (from vagina monologues) we had enough posters to go around and represent how abortion should stay legal.
The rally started and various governors, senators, and planned parenthood representatives spoke their words with gratitude for the mass amounts of people who actively responded. There were several counter-protestors which the majority made sure to silence continuously. The Lesley Women’s Center was a part of something larger than us that day and it will show when the government keeps title 10.
Despite the awesome t-shirts, we got to leave with positive feelings that if we need to come together to defend an issue, it is possible. I would encourage events like this to be openly informed at our school so the students and faculty are aware of the Center’s message.
By Jennifer Bucolo
Planned Parenthood is a national organization dedicated to providing medical care, contraceptives and emergency contraceptives, pregnancy testing and consultation, and accesses to abortions to citizens in our nation, regardless of socioeconomic placement. Planned Parenthood provides alternatives to individuals that do not necessarily have access to these services otherwise. Recent cuts in the Massachusetts budget, were going to take out almost all of the Planned Parenthood funding, making it so these services could not be provided any longer. In support of Planned Parenthood and its accesses to government funding, the Lesley University Women’s center gathered a group together to attend the rally and show their support. The rally was in Boston Commons on Saturday March 19th Click here are some photos from the event:
Here is some video showing some of Lesley students participating in the rally:
Recently we had a movie night at the Women’s Center where we showed the movie by Jean Kilbourne, explores femininity in the media and the destructive deceptive ideas handed to viewers. After the showing, we sat down as a group and discussed what we thought, any feelings the movie gave us and about current issues we feel are serious in the distorted world of the media and body image.
Don't forget: Friday 11 and Saturday 12, will be the performance for the Vagina Monologues.
Here's how to buy tickets:
1. Meal times at White Hall. We have a table set-up! 2. At the Women's Center at White Hall during open hours. 3. At the door. Come up to 15 minutes before!
Here these are folks. We get all sorts of questions for this event, but we still want to consider them and will do our best to answer what we can: Sex Questions 1. How do you apply a condom with your mouth?
2. What is lesbian sex? Seriously.
3. How can I make oral sex less painful on my jaw?
4. How can I convince him to try bondage?
5. How do you make a girl orgasm?
6. Best position ever?
7. What happens if a girl takes Viagra?
8. Does making out with another girl make me a cheater?
9. What are your opinions on Sarah Palin knowing she is against sex education and anything that empowers women?
10. Which is better: water based lube or silicon lube?
11. How do I practice safe sex without getting a UTI the next day?
12. What specifically constitutes lesbian sex?
13. What is this “sex”?
14. What causes morning wood?
15. What is bag piping?
16. Is it true if you don’t use it, you lose it?
17. How does girl on girl work?
18. What are the most preferable holes used for triple and quadruple penetration?
19. How long does sex normally last?
20. He’s too big, what do I do?
21. Can you have sex in the ear? No.
22. Which is better lube or lotion?
23. How do you do sex? What happens if you sex? Baby
24. What parts of the body do you use during sex?
25. How many professors have sex with their students? In the rear?
26. Who is this “sex”? Your mom.
27. I heard Nigel’s cock is 2ft. long? Is that correct?
28. Why do gay men keep asking to touch my breasts?
29. What is a penis?
30. How do you use a condom?
31. Why am I alone?
32. Where’s the shipment of hot foreign men?
33. Does it hurt?
34. Favorite sex song?
35. Health services- How does it work? What goes where? HELP ME!!!
36. Do all guys get boners (“morning wood”) every morning
Come on back! The Lesley faculty and staff writing group is a great time and place to get your work done. Come to a quiet and supportive environment to tackle projects which need your dedicated time. Mark your calendars for Words and Images a workshop by Cassandra Goldwater, MFA on March 3rd.
Don't forget:
We meet every Thursday from 12:30pm to 2pm at the Women's Center in White Hall. We have tea and cocoa, so what could be better?
The Counseling Center is pleased to be offering a group for students who identify as bi-racial or multi-racial. The group will be led by one of our interns, Daphne Nayar, a bi-racial graduate student from the Smith College School for Social Work. The group will be held for three consecutive weeks, starting in February, at a mutually convenient time for the students. A flyer for the group is attached with the contact information. Daphne will be contacting the students who are interested to provide more information. The group will be held in the conference room on the third floor of Doble Hall on the Doble campus in Cambridge. The goal of the group is to create a safe space for the members to explore issues of identity. The group is open to both undergraduate and graduate students.
We would be most appreciative if you would communicate this to any potentially interested students, by posting or distributing the flyer or talking to students and other colleagues for whom it would be relevant. If you have any questions, please contact me at 617-349-8547 or Daphne at the main number for the center 617-349-8545.
Thank you in advance for your efforts to spread the word.
Cynthia Jirak LICSW Associate Director Lesley University Counseling Center
Yes it is quite dreary outside, but we're getting ready here at he Women's Center for a great lineup in our Health and Gender series. Keep an eye out for information around campus for these events:
Love yourself and others Week- Valentines is all about candy for you and those around you. Come by the Women's Center weekly coffee house for some serious affirmation of love (and hot cocoa with marshmallows too)!
Coffee House Monday February 7th at 5pm Women's Center- White Hall
Let's Talk about Sex is back!
Have any questions rattling around in your mind about sex? Then post your questions on FB, twitter them or write them down, anonymously, at one of our question stations. No question is off limits. The purpose of this event is to have questions answered from a set of different perspectives by those in the know. Last year's event was respectful, fun and most of all informative. All genders are welcome. This is a unique opportunity. We promise to get to your questions in writing, post the answers on our blog or FB if you don't want to come in. As always, treats, condoms and other goodies will be available to bring home.
Question Stations: Women's Center (during and after-hours) Student Center main desk
February 10th at 6:30 pm. More details on location later.
The Vagina Monologues- at the Marran Theater February 11&12 at 8pm All proceeds benefit the Rape Crisis Center
Finish off the week with some serious ice-skating and cupcake festivities! Check out what we're doing with alumni relations.
Be Our Valentine!
Join Lesley University Alumni, Students, Faculty and Friends for a Valentine's Day skate on the historic Boston Common Frog Pond! There's nothing quite like soaring across the ice amid the bright lights of Boston in the nation's oldest public park.
3:30 pm State House Reception Nurse's Hall 5:30 pm Skating on Frog Pond
This is a great optant to spend a beautiful evening with your Friends and Family. There will be a pre-reception at the State House Nurse's Hall from 3:30-5:30 pm where light refreshments will be served.
RSVP by February 4th by calling 617.349.8625 or click the link above to register.
Directions: MBTA Red or Green line to Park Street, or use the Boston Common Parking Garage which is located at 1 Charles Street, Boston, MA.
We're delighted to be sponsoring the Vagina Monologues this year, as part of our Health & Gender series for Spring. Rachael Cina has done an outstanding job getting the production together. Mark your calendars! You can come by to the Women's Center to get your tickets. Look out for tables in White Hall as well. Rachael and her crew will be telling you about the performance and selling tickets.
The first annual New England Women's Centers Conference 2010 took place on Friday, Nov. 5th and Saturday, Nov. 6th in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The event was hosted by Harvard College Women's Center in Boylston Hall, Harvard Yard. The conference gave participants an opportunity for networking, cross institutional collaboration, peer support, and professional development. Over sixty of us gathered on Harvard's epic main campus and quickly got down to work.
Gina Helfrich PhD, Assistant Director for HWC, was instrumental in inspiring and mobilizing the steering committee, which included Lesley's Daphne Strassmann, coordinator of the Women's Center.
Friday - Nov. 5th 4:00-5:30pm - Check-in and Welcome Reception 5:30-6:30pm - Roundtable Discussion: Women's Centers Best Practices 6:30-7:30pm - Dinner 7:30-9:30pm - Performance of "We All Will Be Received" and post-show talk-back
The performance was incredibly moving and charged with provocative questions about gender and identity. There was some Elvis, even some Dolly Parton, and great cast and premise to tell a story. No messy endings here. The questions were left open but the story resolved. With the multimedia backdrop of the play was both clever and particularly effective in combining all of the themes of this performance. We will try to bring "We will all be received" to our Lesley campus very soon.
Saturday - Nov. 6th
Before breakfast we got a tour of the Harvard Women's Center. This was a great opportunity to see first-hand how other centers operate. We came away inspired by the great work HWC does. The center does a great job with mentoring programs and community outreach whiting the campus. The center is staffed by 12 interns, a director and an assistant director. The HWC also has volunteers and many on-campus groups use the space for meetings, including the weekends. The space itself is welcoming and warm, which is located on the main campus an affiliated with the student life department of Harvard. We poked around the space while the director, Susan Marine PhD, gave us some important background on the center's history and different incarnations. This was also an important time to ask operational questions about budget, funding, hours and specific events which the center hosts as part of regular programming and also for fund-raising opportunities.
The center frequently showcases artwork of students. The main sitting section is accessible to the kitchen and lounge television area.
Susan Marine shows us a time line which explains the history and different incarnations of the Women's Center in Harvard.
The main kitchen area is open to students during open hours and available for groups to meet and use the space to tailor needs of groups or individuals.
Interns post articles of interest to those who use the center or visit the center on a regular basis.
The main hallway of the center leads to a conference room, the reception desk and offices.
One of the offices
Conference room
Reception area staffed by 12 interns
9:00am-12:00pm - Breakfast, Break-Out Session 1, and Keynote
The Keynote presentation centered around a discussion of inter-generational feminism. Turning on its head the conventional idea of a Keynote speaker, the organizers decided instead to showcase our students. A conversation which directly addressed the recent controversial article American Electra: Feminism's ritual matricide, by Susan Faludi, was the centerpiece of the discussion.
Alice (Ali) Underwood a student intern of the Harvard Women's Center was the first speaker.
Bradley Craig, also a Harvard student intern for the Women's Center continued the discussion.
Bonnie Bryant of Lesley University, Third Wave Feminism club president, and member of the W.C steering committee, wraps up the session. .
Break-Out Session 1
1a. Let’s Talk About Space – Why Women’s Centers and Women’s Studies programs are important to the college environment
1b. Programmatic Focus: Inclusive Communities – Why Women’s Centers are not just for women
12:00-1:00pm - Lunch
As we grabbed lunch and found places to seat, members from the T.O.P (Theological Opportunities Program) Lecture series, sat down with us for in-depth discussion of Waves of Feminism. T.O.P members are long-time feminists, who were in the forefront of the movement.
1:00-3:30pm - Break-Out Sessions 2 and 3
Break-Out Session 2
2a. Reaching Across Campuses – The necessity of collaboration and how we go about doing it
This session was moderated by our own Daphne Strassmann and Dr. Amy Rutstein-Riley. We had a lively and helpful discussion about cross collaboration within our campuses, outside of them with other institutions as well as collaborations with community organizations.
2b. Programmatic Focus: Preventing violence in our communities and how to raise awareness of the problem
Break-Out Session 3
3a. Going for the Green – Best practices for fundraising and connecting/working with donors
3b. Programmatic Focus: Engaging our Communities – getting students active in the local community
3:30-4:30pm - Conclusion
The conclusion intake was also productive. We provided feedback to Gina Helfrich and Susan Marine and talked about different ways in which to keep in touch. We have plans to work in cross collaboration by maintaining a blog to use as a central communication area for centers to use in publicizing events and staying in touch. Lesley's Women's Center and BU's Women's Center volunteered to head this initiative. We also envision the blog as a place to plan for getting together for the upcoming NEWSA conference in April 2011.
Lesley University student Rachael Cina has been working non-stop to present a production of the Vagina Monologues here in Lesley on February 11 &1 2, 2011.
Auditions Sunday 11/4. Choose from 1pm or 7pm time slots. We're meeting at the conference room tucked behind the student center.
You don't need to prepare anything. Just show up. More information or to set up a different time to audition. rcina@lesley.edu
Thanks to Dr. Amy Rustein-Riley for pointing us to this article.(Via Ms. Magazine blog)
Nearly thirty years ago, in a column in the New York Times Magazine, conservative firebrand William F. Buckley waxed nostalgic about his college days at Yale. He imagined a young Yalie today, at the now-coed, gender integrated, university, longing for “a fraternity house that wouldn’t end:” Read more here...
Afraid you can’t hold the door or offer to pay for dinner for fear of insulting a feminist? Fear not, they’re not as scary as they seem. Learn what’s true and what’s a myth in our deconstruction of the modern American Feminist. Read the rest here....
Subjectifiedappealed to me instantly. I admired the sincere delivery of a vital conversation around young women and sex and impressed by director's smooth restraint. When Melissa Tapper Goldman created her film she allowed the women in her documentary voice their stories.
Back in February, I went to the awesome series: Chicks Make Flicks presented by Women in Film & Video New England, and the Program in Women's & Gender Studies at MIT. The room was filled. When the lights came back on hands began shooting up in the air. We all had questions and the director - along with one of the women in the film - took the questions one by one. I was hooked.
Back at the Lesley Women's Center I had just assembled a magnificent panel to lead a discussion and answer questions about sex. Our vision? To become a resource for accurate and honest information about anything that anyone wanted to know about sex. Anything. So as Melissa answered the questions I only thought about bringing the film back to Lesley. During that Q&A her generosity was palpable as she encouraged others in the audience to do the same as she had. Pick up a camera, chase and nurture your passion, look for answers and share the results with the rest of us. A shy young man asked Melissa if young men would speak about sex. Would her documentary project number 2 be the male version of Subjectified? "You go do it!" She told him. "I am serious!" She was. She looked almost ready to continued and added: "Call me and I can talk to you about how I did this."
The film is closely shot and intimate. The conversation is fun and open, but it is also discreet. In the background, Melissa's voice is easy on the ears even when the questions are intimate or venture into areas that even today, with our informal and generous over sharing, could get a bit personal. Truth be told - and it is - the women of Subjectified tell us what we want to know. Melissa Tapper Goldman showcases the voices of the film's subjects and her point of view doesn't stray. Inevitably the audience takes in a narrative of stories that extend beyond sex and these specific women.
The stories the Subjectified women tell, sneak into areas as unique as each woman speaking for Melissa's camera. Some accounts deal with religion, body image, unique desire, experimentation, pregnancy and gender. But today reality and information sharing are omnipresent badges of youth's cultural identity. This is how we live. To read detailed interactions in media and watch 'real' conversations on line happen is, well, the way it is. And in Subjectified the conversations are stripped-down real, not glossy or managed. One doesn't sit in front of the screen and feel as if they are peeping into an embarrassing tale and shouldn't be listening. You don't get that funny pit in the stomach about hearing something you don't want to hear. To be clear in a manner of current speaking. This not over-sharing. In fact a viewer experiences Subjectified like talking comfortably to people you like. So it is easy-listening. Free-flow. These women are real. The stories they tell are real and there is no gimmick. We haven't inadvertently walked into a group-support meeting.
For about three weeks now, Duke University has been on the news, thanks through our friends at Jezebel, and now in traditional news outlets. The 'fuck-list' is all the rage and we, the more grown-ups, educators and parents, are scratching our heads about the significance of the 'hook-up' culture and the influence of alcohol in college campuses around the country, making hooking up and drinking a symbiotic pairing. But back in 1977, as my husband (an MIT grad)reminded me, a similarly infamous list was known on the MIT campus for years. He remembers showing up to his freshman orientation in 1980 where someone handed him a copy of 'Our Bodies Our Selves,' for which I will be eternally grateful. The assumption from a wise future-seeing person was that when you are young and you think about sex, nothing is a sure thing. There are questions. Many of them and some of them will only come into conscious focus when the first sexual experiences begin for young men and women of all ages and genders. So with the utilitarian nature of the search engine available to provide answer to this questions, I quiver. What the return query on a string search that includes the word sex in the Google white box?
Subjectified begins with one question: "Why do girls have sex?" You might have an assumption, a personal opinion, experience, hindsight. You can fill in the blanks and walk away thinking you have got it figured out for yourself, your sister, brother or children. Why do girls have sex? The answers, I promise will enlighten you.
During the Spring, Assistant Professor Amy-Rutstein Riley organized Lesley's first Service Learning course: Girlhood, Identity, and Girl Culture. The course was designed to combine the theory of Girls' Studies with an experiential learning component. Twenty Lesley undergraduates successfully planned, organized and facilitated two girls' groups for middle school girls from Cambridge.
Group 1, Week 2
Lesley students worked with middle school students in small groups to make media collages. The collages reflected positive vs. negative images that are portrayed about women in the media and was a powerful introduction to media literacy for both Lesley students and the young girls. The girls presented their completed media collages to the larger group.
Group 1, Week 4
At the beginning of our discussion on cliques, the girls were asked to write something mean they have said about someone on a poster. Group members were able to talk about cliques and how it was hurtful to be excluded at school. At the end of the session, the girls ripped up the "mean word" poster to demonstrate progress.
Group 1, Week 4
Skits were created and performed by small groups on the topic of bullying. Scenarios were acted out in front of the larger group on issues like spreading rumors and stereotypes. The skits allowed group members to act as a team toward a common goal and generated discussion about bullying.
Group 1, Week 5
Old shoe boxes, magazine clippings, and glitter were used to create Identity Boxes. The outside of the box was designed to reflect how the girls are perceived on the outside, and the inside of the boxes represented their genuine identities.
Celebration, Week 7
The last meeting was dedicated to celebrating the girls and the work that they had done. The event took place at Alumni Hall and an intimate group from Lesley and Cambridge were invited to attend. The girls' artwork was displayed to form a gallery walk. Both Lesley and middle school girls were asked to speak about their experience. Each girl was presented with a book which had pictures and excepts from the girls' groups.
image: www.spiegel.de/images
