Sexual assault and harassment are often talked about as isolated events, incidents with discrete timestamps marking a beginning and an end, a blip on the timeline of a woman’s life. Survivors know that it’s not like that at all, that it is actually something that changes the entire…
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An honest and brave conversation about what it means to be a woman is vital to understanding what it means to be a human. Its scope is temporal but its ambition is to discern the essential.
The Good American
This piece started out as a book review of What Happened, Hillary Clinton’s memoir of what it was like to be at the center of what I often hear referred to as “the election,” but which is typically meant as a reference to a whole series of events and…
Wonder(fully complicated) Woman
The history of Wonder Woman is, in many ways, as complex as the history of American feminism. At least, that is the impression I was left with after reading Jill Lepore’s book The Secret History of Wonder Woman in preparation for seeing Patty Jenkins’s film, Wonder Woman. The…
The Familiar Division Of Women In The Handmaid's Tale
The Handmaid’s Tale is set in Gilead, a society created in what used to be New England by a theocratic coup after attacks have eliminated the existing power structure in Washington, D.C. The rest of the country is referred to as “the colonies,” which consists of both farms…
Your new anti-choice, anti-science, and anti-woman HHS
Amidst hazy threats of a government shutdown next September, the revival of the Hydra-like health care bill, confusing (at best) comments about Andrew Jackson and the Civil War, overtures to despotic world leaders, and a "religious liberty" executive order, the appointments of two anti-choice activists to leadership positions in the…
What Mike Pence and Bill O'Reilly Have in Common
Last month’s Washington Post profile of Karen Pence, wife of Vice President Mike Pence, resurrected a comment the VP made to The Hill in 2002 in which he revealed that he does not eat alone with women other than his wife or attend events at which alcohol is served…
Big Little Lies and the Secret World of Women (Some Spoilers)
In high school, I refused to watch the hit TV series The O.C. Based in the titular Orange County, the show follows streetwise teenager Ryan Atwood as he navigates a new life among rich teenagers who look like models. My objection to the series was rooted somewhat in an…
Why Representation Matters
In an effort to consolidate support for the ill-fated American Health Care Act, Mike Pence met with the House Freedom Caucus, a coalition of conservative Republicans, to discuss changes to the bill that was slated to repeal the Affordable Care Act. The meeting precipitated a compromise whereby the new bill…
The Hypocrisy of the AHCA's Planned Parenthood Provision
Since the unveiling of the American Health Care Act, Republicans’ long-promised plan to replace Obamacare, the bill has faced opposition from Democrats, interest groups, doctors’ and nurses’ groups, and even a number of House and Senate Republicans. Criticism of AHCA has been particularly fierce since the Congressional Budget Office released…
Emma Watson's Vanity Fair Photo and the Problem with Prescriptive Feminism
If you had never heard of Emma Watson before now, here are some things you would learn about her by reading this month’s Vanity Fair profile of the actress: she came to fame playing the bookish no-nonsense adolescent witch Hermione in the movies based on the Harry Potter book…
Milo's Noxious Doctrine
On Monday, Simon & Schuster announced it was cancelling publication of Milo Yiannopoulus’s forthcoming book “Dangerous” after a recording emerged Sunday in which Yiannopoulus defended pedophilia. Yiannopoulus, a conservative provocateur and former senior editor for Breitbart News (he resigned Tuesday), has a long history of creating controversy. At Breitbart,…
Pop Music and the Public Woman
When I was five years old, my older sister introduced me to Madonna. At first, I was a reluctant acolyte, having been conscripted into performing a choreographed dance to “Like a Prayer” with her and her best friend for my parents at Christmas. We spent hours rehearsing a number that…
Girls In Between
In the first season of the HBO show Girls, Hannah Horvath, played by Lena Dunham (who also writes and directs the show), is in between. Working an unpaid internship in New York City while pursuing a career as a writer and being supported by her parents, she is somewhere between…
A Journal of the Women's March
January 19 - Two days before the march My poster is ready. It is a bright neon green with ‘no freedom without choice’ on it in black block letters that show off all the doodling I’ve done in my life when I should have been paying attention. On the…
Let's March To Be Heard
Within the study of linguistic pragmatics, speech act theory is a theory of meaning that sees speech as “an action within the framework of social institutions and conventions.” In other words, what we say can't really be separated from our actions, because to speak is to act. And that action…
Michelle Obama: Redefining Role Model
As we near the end of Barack Obama’s presidency, another tenure is also coming to a close. After eight years, Americans will be saying goodbye to our self-described “mom in chief.” Michelle Obama’s journey to the city White House began just as the oldest millennial women were entering…
The Paradoxical Princess
Writing for the New York Times after news broke of Carrie Fisher’s death, A. O. Scott described her iconic role as Princess Leia as “...the foremother of Hermione Granger and Katniss Everdeen and of countless latter day Disney princesses.” Though it is doubtless that the character of Leia pandered…
The Pro-Life Myth (Part 3)
Read Part 1 and Part 2 in The Pro-Life Myth Series. Myths operate at the level of the subconscious. They are stories told over time, in bits and pieces, over and over again. I don’t remember my first baby doll, and I’m not entirely certain when I stopped…
The Pro-Life Myth (Part 2)
Read Part 1 in The Pro-Life Myth Series here. The pro-life myth is a cultural myth. It’s a myth that implies a vague notion of a world in which abortion is either rare or obsolete, and if rare, then only occurring for specific reasons. It’s a myth so…
The Pro-Life Myth (Part 1)
After relocating to the United States from Finland and living in Florida for a stint, my family settled in Middle Georgia when I was eleven years old. There was an intense initial culture shock, despite the fact that my family had lived in Illinois for long enough for me to…