Posted inLifestyle

Policing women’s erotic choices

Sex sells. This is not breaking news. From medieval monks doodling erotic drawings in the margins of their illuminated manuscripts to naughty Victorians printing salacious postcards, the urge to celebrate sex in art and literature is nothing new. It is also not new for women to want a slice of the erotic market for themselves. […]

Posted inLifestyle

Putting our fiction on the map

South Africa has long had a fine international reputation for literary fiction. Nadine Gordimer and JM Coetzee have both won the Nobel Prize for literature. Coetzee has won the Booker Prize twice. Andre Brink has won a slew of international awards. And those are just the names that come immediately to mind. What we have […]

Posted inGeneralLifestyle

Are paper books the horse and carriage of the 21st century?

There has been a lot of hand-wringing and soul-searching in the book world about the challenges posed by e-books. There is also the separate, but related, matter of the massive, loss-leader discounting that book-store chains practise routinely. Cheap books and e-books are apparently threatening civilisation as we know it. They are certainly causing the demise […]

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Rape is not a slogan on a T-shirt

When I was a student at Rhodes University I belonged to the Women’s Movement, an organisation that was intended to advance the rights of women students on campus and generally spread the feminist agenda. We were supposed to campaign for things like improved security for women on campus, and to protest against dimwitted and archaic […]