Doll Power
Where do thoughts of death lead?
Barbie is forever denied the awkward self-consciousness that makes possible both ambition and disappointment. ...
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What Does It Mean to Be “Authentic”?
Skye C. Cleary chats with Luis Jaramillo about her new book on Simone de Beauvoir’s philosophy-from-life method
Finding your “authentic self” is often taken to mean: “Let’s turn inward and look for the blueprint that’s going to tell us what decisions we should make and that will make us happy.” But Beauvoir argued that we’re humans who are always growing, always changing....
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QAnon as a Byproduct of a Broken America
Alienation, anxiety, and religion
QAnon is a conspiracy theory alleging that the current president of the United States, Donald Trump, is battling an organized and criminal deep state—which also happens to be a Satan-worshipping cabal of pedophiles engaged in sex-trafficking—and that this battle is moving towards an apocalyptic showdown in which our president will ...
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Feminists Say
Gagging on rape
Last year the journal Studies in Gender and Sexuality published a panel called "The ontology of the rape joke," organized around a performance by Vanessa Place of her piece, "Rape joke." The panel included responses from Jamieson Webster, Jeff Dolven, Gayle Salamon, Kyoo Lee, Katie Gentile, and Virginia Goldner, and ended with ...
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Reading The Second Sex in the Age of #MeToo
Where are we coming from, and where do we go?
In the firestorm of debates about the implications of #MeToo, feminist activists and commentators have found themselves circling around the definitions of a handful of essential terms: rape, harassment, assault, consent. We have seen the word “pleasure” disentangled, and the word “inappropriate” expanded. We have discussed power and victimhood, empowerment ...
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