The Barbie Curse
Can a girl’s first icon of can-do power ever be good enough?
Barbie is the most popular doll in the world, and the most hated....
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Barbie in Herland
Greta Gerwig meets Charlotte Perkins Gilman
What is perhaps most striking in both stories is the discovery that the Real World and Ourland are both barbaric places dominated by murderous men....
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Eau du Easy Mark
An excerpt from Lucky Dogs: A Novel
My natural scent could be called “eau du easy mark,” an odor only vermin can detect, a spicy mélange of paralysis perfume with prior-history-of-abuse essence....
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Excavating Diverse Masculinities with Manuel Betancourt
The film critic reflects on his childhood obsessions with animated heartthrobs, queer-coded villains, and Pedro Almodóvar’s violent men in his first essay collection, The Male Gazed: On Hunks, Heartthrobs, and What Pop Culture Taught Me About (Desiring) Men
When journalist Manuel Betancourt started writing his new essay collection it was simply about the writer’s early fixations, from Disney’s 1997 depiction of Hercules to Mario Lopez’s performance of A. C. Slater in Saved by the Bell. As he continued writing, it became obvious to Betancourt that he was hyper-focused ...
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Walk Like a Loaded Man
An excerpt from The Male Gazed: On Hunks, Heartthrobs, and What Pop Culture Taught Me About (Desiring) Men
Unlike the more straightforward concept of horniness (whose own mythic visual iconography is rife for analysis), thirst is more visceral, a physiological need....
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The Courage of E. Jean Carroll
Telling one person you were raped is hard; telling a nation is heroic
It would be foolish to tell anyone not to be afraid of Donald Trump, and it would be foolish not to fear the consequences of being widely known as a person who has been raped....
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Am I a Heteropessimist?
Four years since we learned the word, what does heteropessimism look like today?
Evidently, I am far from alone in the befuddlement I feel about my heterosexual relationship, nor am I the only one noticing the fact that, even though so many of us feel similarly, heteropessimism (and its attendant inaction) persists. ...
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Racialized Redemptive Labor and Sex Work
An excerpt from Elena Shih’s probing book
Commercial sex in Bangkok, broadcast through tourist networks, now links the city in many minds with human trafficking—following the global tendency to conflate all sex commerce with sex trafficking. ...
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Blurring the Line between Sex and Art
A conversation with Sophia Giovannitti about misled feminism, desiring objectification, and what is sacred under capitalism
I think that outlawing sex work is a form of social control, and then the way that it becomes entrenched or ratified is by stoking fear in people about what sex work means and what it indicates. ...
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Why Women Are Still Second-Class Citizens in the United States
As Women’s History Month begins, let’s start with the present
Without access to affordable, safe, child care, women have less access to work. Period....
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An Ambitious Woman after the End of Ambition
When you don’t shift with the vibe
Ambition has always been a squicky term when applied to women....
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Beyond Pro-Choice/Pro-Life Binaries
An excerpt of Repealed: Ireland’s Unfinished Fight for Reproductive Rights
Abortion became illegal in Ireland in 1861 as part of the United Kingdom and Great Britain’s Offences Against the Person Act. But while abortion might not have been talked about much in the late 1800s and early 1900s, it was happening. ...
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