Marriage is a delicate thing to rant about, because hey – it’s pretty popular. I would love to meet someone and just fall into a perfect and permanent relationship with them, never growing bored or taking them for granted, and vice versa. I just don’t believe it works that way for many people. That’s why […]
Combine insecurity with abundant opportunity, the prevailing wisdom goes, and every man’s a cheater … right? For the past two weeks, every day has brought a new article analyzing the seemingly perennial question of why men cheat. The sad saga of Anthony Weiner serves as the latest catalyst for all this punditry. Blame it on […]
There’s something that still fascinates people about the Playboy mansion and Hugh Hefner. Despite the magazine’s falling circulation numbers (which, with an internet is full of free porn, seems like a forgone conclusion) and rumors about the mansion being sold to pay off Playboy’s debts, coverage of the goings-on of Hefner and his buxom blondes […]
American ideas about “real men” are contradictory and impossible to live up to. So stop trying! You’ve almost certainly heard feminist rants about impossible cultural ideals of femininity: how standards of femininity are so narrow and rigid they’re literally unattainable; how, to avoid being seen as unfeminine, women are expected to navigate an increasingly narrow […]
This article originally appeared on Hypervocal. Who teaches men to be men? I was recently thinking about this question when I stumbled upon a brilliantly funny article by Tom Chiarella in this week’s Esquire called What is a Man? In the article, Tom writes about the time he decided to strip himself of behaviors associated with being a […]
As Susan Faludi demonstrated in “Backlash,” attitudes about gender and sexuality tend to be cyclical. Women’s success in the workplace, especially, has a tendency to create anti-feminist backlashes. As Faludi documented, the 80s backlash in response to the normalization of professional work for women took shape in demands that women embrace more feminine-submissive behaviors and […]
I’m not judging individual politicians. I’m judging a trend. Clinton. Sanford. Lee. Ensign. Vitter. Straus-Kahn. Weiner. Example after example of men in power not just cheating but abusing their powerful positions in sexual relationships with structurally less-powerful women — and then trading on their trust and credibility with the public to try and cover up […]
This week, the press is abuzz with the news of the latest celebrity wedding, in which a beautiful commoner comes into the spotlight to marry a charming man from a large, powerful family. I’m talking, of course, about Bella Swan and Edward Cullen, the main characters in this fall’s new Twilight film, Breaking Dawn. Although […]
