Activism
Sims Like the Real Thing
The Sims is a game that consists of little more than creating characters and pushing them through the day, making sure they eat, sleep, stay clean, make friends, advance in a career, and buy stuff. The bodily functions are tedious and the rest is everything I hate about life in a capitalist society... Read more »
The Accidental Jock
I’m not an athlete. I’ve always disliked team sports, with their conformist, vaguely fascist associations. While as a child I longed to be a tree-climbing tomboy, I had to admit a preference for tea parties, dress-up, and long afternoons at the library.
Then one summer night, three... Read more »
Ode to Joystick
How can you not love Ms. Pac-Man, a woman for whom power pellets, peaches, and pretzels constitute a steady diet?
This is how I feel about her now, but my love for the little yellow gal with the red bow began when I wore bows myself—when I was around 11.
Each summer, my mom would drag me to... Read more »
We Were Here, We Were Maybe Queer: New Historical Biographies Tell Us to Get Used to It
Four score and seven years ago, our forefathers—and most infamous tyrants—were getting down with other men. Or so some folks would like us to believe. Historians and posthumous biographers have of late been venturing into the relatively uncharted territory of sexual historiography, exhuming some... Read more »
Dumb & Getting Dumber: Sideways, Spongebob, and the New Masculinity
In 2004, every corner of popular culture was populated by men in crisis, and I don't just mean George Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, and Dick Cheney. We had men in trouble, men in triumph, men in uniform, men on the cross, men in squarepants; men being men with other men, talking about masculinity—what it... Read more »
Five Conversations About One Thing - Joe Kelly
Years ago, Joe Kelly noticed a Maidenform ad reading “Inner beauty only goes so far” on the side of a city bus, and was horrified to imagine one of his young daughters as the subject of it. As one of the founders, with wife Nancy Gruver, of New Moon: The Magazine for Girls and Their Dreams, an... Read more »
Love Guns, Tight Pants, and Big Sticks: Who Put the Cock in Rock?
cock rock: To some, the term conjures up images of rock gods in white jumpsuits, long hair haloed by a rainbow of lights, fans waving their Bics in unison as an immaculate guitar solo screams out from a tower of amps. To others, it evokes backstage legends of drugs and debauchery, the triumph of... Read more »
Kiss Me, I'm a Fashionable Bigot: Cashing In on Misguided Irony
Two years ago, the preppy mall staple Abercrombie & Fitch released a line of t-shirts that paired early 1900s–style caricatures of Chinese men (complete with coolie hats, big grins, and slanted eyes) with slogans like “Wong Brothers Laundry Service—Two Wongs Can Make It White” and “... Read more »
Suburban Blight: The Battle of <em>The Stepford Wives</em>
A film studies professor once told me that everything you need to know about a movie is revealed in the first five minutes. This is particularly true of The Stepford Wives.
In the opening scene of Bryan Forbes's 1975 original, Joanna Eberhart (Katharine Ross) takes a long,... Read more »
Fan/tastic Voyage: A Journey Into the Wide, Wild World of Slash Fan Fiction
A journey into the origins of slash fanfiction.
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