Posts in Opinion
RuPaul's Drag Race Season 14: ADD/ADHD in the Media

Season 14 of RuPaul’s Drag Race has been rightly celebrated for its trans representation. In addition to the series’ laudable trans representation, this latest season has also featured two neurodivergent queens, as Jasmine Kennedie and Orion Story have both revealed (since filming the show) that they have been diagnosed with ADD and ADHD respectively.

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Capitalism, Trends, Economy - A Life Of Never Enough...

Objects are designed to break under consumerism, otherwise no one would bother buying new. And when the waste generated by decades of constant buying, breaking, and binning gets too much, we get another spin. We are not doing enough to fix it. We are not good enough at recycling, or at eating vegan, or at sacrificing the convenience we have been told to desire to solve the overwhelming problems of climate change, of poverty, of war.

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The Paradoxes of Sexual Ethics and Erotic Desire: Consensual vs Non-Consensual BDSM

BDSM is frequently captured as a manifestation of misogyny, and its practice is presented as wholly derivative of patriarchal culture. On social media platforms such as TikTok, or more specifically ‘Kink Tok,’ you might find assertations made by women in comment sections, such as: “call me vanilla, but I don’t find violence sexy,” or “why does nobody like vanilla sex anymore?”

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The Girlbossification of Sex and Relationships

Feminist algorithms on TikTok have sweepingly moved away from meaningful discussions or helpful political praxis anyway, regardless of such internal infiltrations. #Feminist videos now filter through harmful and outdated strands of feminism, which ultimately disguises privilege or which neatly rebrands and repackages misogyny, whilst claiming to be ‘empowering’ women.

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OpinionGuest User
Becoming The Invisible Woman - What I Am Learning About Ageing As I Get Older

A weird thing started happening to me a few years ago, I started to become invisible. It wasn’t everywhere or all of the time - in the private sphere of my life I was still very much solid, visible and three dimensional, but I started to notice it happening occasionally on the public stage, like some sort of glitch. Groups of teens and twenty-somethings would start looking through me as I walked along the street towards them. Or I’d stand waving a tenner at the front of a busy bar for what felt like hours whilst the staff served everyone to either side of me.

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We Can Do More: Evaluating the UK’s Response to Those Fleeing Ukraine

The UK Government’s response to Ukrainians fleeing their country is a conscientious commitment to an ideology piously hostile towards refugees and asylum-seekers. Initially resistant to opening any adequate routes to asylum, the government has resolutely maintained their stance on requiring visas for those escaping Putin’s aggression. Every other country in Europe has waived them.

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OpinionGuest User
Is Travelling a Sign of Privilege?

We live in the age of the Instagram traveller. They have a perfectly curated feed, have most definitely travelled to Cambodia, Thailand and Bali, and often [if they’ve done said travelling in their gap year] come to university laden with experiences from their ‘crazy’ overseas adventures.

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OpinionGuest User
The Transgender Exclusion from the Conversion Therapy Ban Will Have Fatal Consequences

On the evening of Transgender Day of Vibisility, the UK government decided to introduce a conversion therapy ban in England and Wales, but only focused on sexuality rather than gender identity. This means that on Transgender Day of Visibility, our PM took the logical, but equally horrific, next logical steps in what has been a systemic and quick erasure of transgender rights in the country.

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OpinionGuest User
Transgender Day of Visibility: The Lies They Told Me And The Lies I Told Back

All of them had: my parents, my teachers, my friends, my pastor. They had lied to me at school, at church, at home. They had kept that information from me, and used that ignorance against me. They had forced me to pretend for years to be someone I was not. They had made me feel pathetic, trapped, suicidal.

But telling me I was a woman wasn’t the last lie they would tell me, and far from the last one I would believe.

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