The politics of hair starts early. In fact, it starts when you’re born. It’s why there’s a market for teeny tiny hair clips and baseball caps for newborns. With the exception of pink and blue onesies, it’s the first chance society gets to start the complicated process of indoctrinating us in identities involving gender, race,…
[Trigger warning: rape, sexual assault, sexual abuse] In this week’s Vegas Seven I wrote about Sexual Assault Awareness Month and the good work happening at the Rape Crisis Center. One program in particular, the Enough Abuse Campaign, resonates with me personally as a survivor of sexual abuse. The program is designed to teach adults how…
Could this be the year that the Clark County School District — the nation’s fifth largest — updates its sex education curriculum? A Jan. 11 meeting of the district’s Sex Education Advisory Committee points to that possibility. Then again, we’ve been here before. According to the agenda and backup materials for the Jan. 11 committee…
At the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department “Choose Purity” event on Saturday, girls (and only girls) were treated to such a feast of fear-mongering and baseless scare tactics that it’s hard to believe that the event happened in real life and not as the plot point of a dark comedy in the vein of Election…
There’s been quite the storm brewing between the haves and the have-nots in this country. While it would be easy to point to the stock market crash in 2008 and the simultaneous housing market collapse as convenient epicenters of distopic fusion — best encapsulated in the easy “1 percent” propaganda — this storm has been…
Yesterday progressives held an event to launch an initiative to fix Nevada’s failing education system. At this point being dead last on nearly every single educational ranking system should be reason enough to get real about Nevada’s worst kept secret. But just for kicks, let me give you an overflowing fistful more: Jobs (aka diversifying…
Our friends at ProgressNow Nevada are part of a new initiative to raise the bar on education in Nevada. We can only go up from DEAD LAST — amirite? The press conference later today will be live-streaming, so check it out if you can’t swing by. Here’s the release: For Immediate Release: March 4, 2014…
The big news at the start of the week was about how the national abortion rate is the lowest it has been since the Roe v Wade decision in 1973. The new low rate comes after a 13 percent drop in the abortion rate between 2008 and 2011. Anti-choice activists have trumpeted the news as…
I guess by now it should come as no surprise that Nevada ranks dead last in education. We’ve been at the bottom of the Education Week Quality Counts report since 2010 and not much better before that. That’s the Battle Born State: The nation’s toxic waste dumping ground With one of the nation’s highest suicide…
The alternate headline for this post was, “Environmentalism: The long-view on dismantling oppression.” When I first launched The Sin City Siren seven years ago, one of the issues I wrote about often was environmentalism. After a while I got tired of defending the importance of talking about environmental concerns on a feminist site: Why do…
The Sin City Siren 