How do you rehabilitate your love for art works based on expired and inhuman social values— and why bother?
Elif Batuman and many other smart whippersnappers had thoughts about literature this week, and they’re all right here.
I didn’t want to go to brunch with my friends. I didn’t want to go to the grocery store to get milk. I didn’t want to Skype with my grandmother. I didn’t want to have sex with the woman who looks at me like she’s the east and I’m the sun.
It wasn’t just what the messages said that chipped away at me; it was the fact that they existed at all. My entire professional writing career has been about making the world better and brighter and warmer for queer women. Queer women don’t call each other fugly dykes! Or maybe they do.
It wasn’t that riot grrrl was born out of punk. It was more like riot set punk on fire and rose screaming out of its ashes. Riot wasn’t about punk like feminism isn’t about men. It didn’t happen because we hated men, it happened because we loved ourselves and knew the kind of world we deserved. What riot wanted couldn’t be contained. And that was the point, wasn’t it? That women and grrrls didn’t have to accept a world built by men. Women didn’t have to adhere to men’s standards of beauty or power or worth. We didn’t have to have conversations using their vocabulary.
I was studying Ann Hutchinson, who stood up for women’s rights. Almost everyone who chose a boy, on their poster they had pictures of different dollar bills or coins with their person on it. So I noticed, why don’t women have coins or dollar bills with their faces on it? … I just came home from school and said, ‘I need to write to the president.‘
For Bessie Smith to be so boldly queer as a celebrity and especially a woman of color in the early 20th century was powerful. To celebrate her for everything she was now – every last drop of her boisterous, promiscuous, defiant person – could still change everything.
I recognize that I’m supposed to celebrate Mo’ne Davis’ character and applaud for her being so generous. To be clear, I’m mega proud of Davis. She’s an absolute superstar in my book. I love it when Black girls win. And she is winning. But as both a scholar and a former Black girl, I know that Black women’s prodigious capacity for empathy comes with a cost. Davis’ pain matters here. Not Casselberry’s. Too often Black women and Black girls on their way to becoming Black women are taught that everyone else’s pain matters more than our own. Too often we teach Black girls that they have to lose to win. Mo’ne, a consummate athlete, knows better than that.
Also.Also.Also: Matriarchal Feminism, Defining Authenticity, and Other Stories You’ll Fcking Love
Also.Also.Also: Matriarchal Feminism, Defining Authenticity, and Other Stories You’ll Fcking Love
feature image via shutterstock!
Are you loving this new Daily Fix / News Fix / AAA situation?? I believe you are. Just a few more days of this spring break and my wily children will be back in their classrooms and I’ll be back to being the only person in my house and I WILL TYPE NEXT FRIDAY’S AAA IN THE NUDE you can’t stop me. No one can stop me.
Queer as in F*ck You+ Well Shonda Rhimesjust…
It’s suddenly snowing on the evening of International Sex Workers’ Day, which feels punishingly appropriate. I look like so many women I’ve scoffed at for their impractical footwear choices in the dead of a New York winter: arms mechanically fanned out to maintain balance in my short, stompy strides. I’ll be damned if I wasn’t going to make at least a feeble attempt at heels to observe the occasion. I’m on my way to the historic $PREAD magazine’s anthology launch.
This is a playlist for those times when you need a chorus of outrageously, outlandishly confident lady-types in your ears. I use it as my ‘fake it ’til you make it’ pump up music. Because fuck modesty, y’all.
When someone talks about ‘porn’ they probably have a specific vision in mind, and that vision may not match someone else’s. Here is a fact: you cannot possibly imagine all porn. Whatever you envisage when you think of the word, it is not representative. No porn is representative of ‘all porn,’ not even the sort of porn we might call ‘mainstream.’ Porn is bigger, and has more potential, than any of that.
Is the future of porn feminist? What is porn, anyway. Find out.
I like to approach my own trauma through laughter… What was interesting was that the natural impulse to want to laugh about it, and laugh with other people about it, was really hard to do. It was almost impossible to find somebody to laugh with! Because they were often so traumatized by hearing that I was a survivor that they totally shut down from laughing… Like faking tears when I talked to people, when I wasn’t sad! I just knew they would be able to hear my story better if I looked really sad.
‘You removed the part of me that makes me feel good while having sex?’ I asked. Our Bodies Ourselves, and some of the Internet articles I’d read, gave me the confidence to say this last part. At sixteen, I thought I knew exactly what had been taken away from me, even if I wouldn’t have any idea what this really meant for another five years.
'I didn’t have a choice,’ said my mother. 'It happened to me too.’