Dear Dana is a bi-weekly advice column for humans who engage in romantic relationships. Please send your dilemmas, issues, conundrums, assumptions, conflicts, anxieties, worriments, obstacles, complications, predicaments, queries, questions, and any other synonyms for “problems” to deardana@rolereboot.org. Dear Dana, My male co-worker was recently promoted and now he’s my boss. Since taking the position, his whole […]
“I believe in the saying, ‘If we have to live through it, you should have to hear it,” Evan Rachel Wood told Congress on Tuesday. Last Tuesday, Westworld actress Evan Rachel Wood took a flight to Washington D.C. Being a longtime fan of hers, I was happy to pass the Capitol on my morning walk […]
It may be the only way to get them to listen. With so many conversations about sexual harassment and abuse taking place in public and in private, it can get exhausting for feminists to have to re-articulate the same points over and over. In such conversations, those who are fearful of the wave of #MeToo […]
People can change, I learned, but sometimes they don’t change enough. I’ve never written at length about the ongoing sexual harassment and abuse that polluted two years of my life. Shards of that story have made into a column here and there, most notably my review of Big Little Lies and my post-election blast of […]
Maybe Clinton wasn’t just a woman who failed other women. Maybe a woman, at some point, had failed her, too. Many of us have been disappointed by women. Girlfriends who didn’t keep your confidence or, maybe worse, judged you for whatever it was you shared with them. Moms that let abuse happen. Or worse, moms who […]
#MeToo started as an outcry of anger and anguish. But retributive justice swiftly followed. I. Bring It On Like many female authors digging for material in the darker recesses of personal history, I’ve written about my experience of sexual assault. And that of my sister, meaning my actual blood sibling. And that of my sisters […]
We not only survived: we thrived, in spite of. I spent the last remaining days of 2017 with my family. At times, catching up looked more like taking inventory of what we’ve been through over the years, both collectively and alone. Remember that time the Christmas tree went sailing out the door? And the time he […]
No one expects Ansari to be a mind reader. No one is. But the only reason not to ask a woman for her consent before initiating sex is because you’re afraid she’ll say no. Like most of the internet, I read Grace’s story about Aziz Ansari over the weekend. My Twitter feed was full of […]
The commonality of sexual harassment is not because all men are bad, but because of the culture in which we raise boys to become men. The past three months have been a whirlwind of reckoning in nearly every sphere and industry, from Hollywood to Washington, D.C., and every place in between. Sexual harassment and assault—topics […]
Before anyone comes forward with an allegation, mild or serious, they know there’s a risk they will be scrutinized, humiliated, or simply disbelieved. In the wake of the Hollywood accusations of sexual harassment and assault, a question went around, accompanied by varying degrees of judgement: Why didn’t these women speak out before now? Why, in […]
Plenty of women in your life are now being empowered to call you out. Be prepared. For the past month, most of the women in your life have been triggered or worse. No, make that for the past year, exacerbated by the waves of news now hitting us about issues we already knew existed — […]
I can’t, for the life of me, understand why people would think that anyone would want attention for being a victim of sex crimes. Most of us know by now about the recent news stories regarding men in positions of power abusing their jobs, money, and connections to sexually harass and assault women. If you […]
