Magazine
House of Pain: The latest blow to the Violence Against Women Act
This article went to press in January 2013. A February 2013 update is at the bottom.
2012 marked the year that violence against women became a partisan issue. The Violence Against Women Act, passed in 1994, was the first comprehensive federal effort to combat such violence. The landmark law... Read more »
Forty Years in the Hustle: A Q&A with Margo St. James
During the fever pitch of the 1970s sexual revolution, Margo St. James, the flamboyant matriarch of the national prostitutes'-rights movement, burst out of San Francisco's bohemian scene with an infectious enthusiasm for her cause: to make prostitution “palatable for the public.”
On Mother... Read more »
It Was a Dark and Snowy Night: How heroes became heroines in Nordic noir fiction
Illustration by Zejian Shen.
Film noir used to be personified by the lone detective in a trench coat, chain smoking in rain-dotted lamplight. But 70 years after The Maltese Falcon flew into Tinseltown, that hero has been replaced. Now, standing in that same lamplight, smacking gum in the same misty... Read more »
Wide Stance: Marianne Wex's timeless exploration of gender and space.
We've all seen it. The guy on the subway or bus who reclines into his seat and luxuriously spreads his legs as if no one else were there. In fact, there's a woman on either side of him, and both of them twist and tuck their legs away, bunch their handbags into their laps, squeeze their arms... Read more »
Co-opting the Coop: What's the real cost of homesteading's new hipness?
The last several years have seen an explosion in urban homesteading. According to the American Community Gardening Association, there are currently more than 18,000 community gardens throughout the United States and Canada.
This figure alone speaks to the number of people interested in moving... Read more »
Family Practice: A Q&A with Victoria Law and China Martens
Whether you organize at national conferences or around the kitchen table, you should pick up the new anthology Don't Leave Your Friends Behind: Concrete Ways to Support Families in Social Justice Movements and Communities (PM Press). Seven years in the making, this book is full of tales,... Read more »
Navy Steals: The military's new interest in STEM education
Although women make up about half of the United States workforce, they represent just 24 percent of careers in STEM fields (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics). In order to correct this, major nonprofit groups have been organizing STEM enrichment camps for middle- and high-school... Read more »
Game Changer: Why Gaming Culture Allows Abuse... and How We Can Stop It
You're a Bolshevik feminist jewess that hates white people… and you expect to be taken seriously when you're “critique-ing” video games? Fucking ovendodger.
Like water through a bursting dam, the deluge came first in pinprick spouts and then rushed through in a pitiless... Read more »
Pinned Down: Is Pinterest as girly as the media paints it? And if so, who cares?
In February 2012, media outlets took quite an interest in the budding social network Pinterest, and female users were at the center of nearly every story. Mashable declared that “Pinterest's female audience is changing social marketing”; Time's Techland blog asserted that “Men Are from... Read more »
Annals of Junk Science: G-Spotting
On April 25, the online edition of the Journal of Sexual Medicine ran an article by cosmetic gynecologist Adam Ostrzenski, MD, who reported that he had teased a “blue grape-like” sac out of a dead woman's vagina. This was proof, he claimed, of the “anatomic existence” of the G-spot, the elusive... Read more »
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