I’d like to think men have higher standards for themselves in relationships than avoiding a prison sentence. In electronic artist Moby’s recent memoir, Then It Fell Apart, he claims to have dated actor Natalie Portman when she was 20 years old and he was 33. Portman, who clarified that she was actually 18 during their […]
Parents have to strive despite our knowledge that we will fail. Living with this cognitive dissonance is one of the hardest lessons of parenting, and one we can only embrace if we talk about our lives with all the doubt, nuance, and contradiction they actually encompass. Last year, in response to an influx of memoirs […]
I’m not sure there is any single force more detrimental to social progress than the deep and abiding belief that if you didn’t get help, nobody should. On Monday, Presidential hopeful Elizabeth Warren announced a plan to offer relief to more than 95% of Americans with student loan debt, and make public universities tuition-free. Given […]
Your parent friends know we’re boring, trust me, but sometimes we just need someone to look into the delirious tedium of our lives and say, I see you. Since social media took over the world, it’s become inextricable from the way many of us parent – and also from the way we judge each other’s […]
Why shouldn’t we have a say in what kind of care we received during this enormous transition? The first time my partner Charlie gave birth was in a hospital. He wanted a home birth, and we hired a skilled, compassionate midwife, someone who was affirming toward our queer family and Charlie’s identity as a transmasculine […]
Childcare is an accessibility issue. It determines a parent’s – let’s be real, a mother’s – ability to exist in the world and participate in society. Every summer I volunteer for a week at a day camp where girls learn to play music. It’s a beautiful oasis of art and feminism and love and empowerment, […]
If you want to know what bisexuality is like, ask a bisexual person. But if you want to know whether you’re bisexual, don’t ask me or your therapist or Women’s Health. Ask yourself. September is among the most bisexual months, containing as it does two days of great importance to our community: Bisexual Visibility Day […]
We need better options for memorializing impending parenthood than embracing a view of gender that, these days, would be unforgivably sexist in a detergent commercial. I keep waiting for the wane of the “gender reveal party,” one of the most widely-disparaged-on-social-media parenting trends since white people invented adding y’s to names that don’t need them. […]
You know the character traits associated with your sun sign, your Hogwarts house, and your favorite flavor of La Croix, but have you thought about what your menstrual products reveal about your personality? Your period is a time for many things: binge-watching television, catching up on your comfort eating, getting into arguments for reasons you’ll […]
In order to take real action against the stunning array of life-threatening emergencies that have always been part of the fabric of this nation, we must let go of the illusion that any single one of us can defeat them. It’s like standing in the doorway between two rooms, listening to conversations in both. In […]
It’s kind of like telling someone “If you’re hungry, come over for dinner.” It doesn’t matter how generous the offer is, or how sincerely meant, if they don’t have a way of getting to your house in the first place. In the days since the tragic and much-publicized deaths by suicide of Kate Spade and […]
There are, without doubt, millions of people alive today in part because their parents did at one point choose abortion. It might not be the traditional way of celebrating Mother’s Day, but around this time of year I make a habit of taking some time to consider the many ways the United States screws over […]
