Men get to be Animal House while women get Girls Gone Wild. It’s not fair. And it’s about power. It was spring break and I was in New Orleans partying on Bourbon Street when some old dude yelled, “Show me your tits!” from a window above. Plastic gold and yellow beads dangled from his wrist. […]
I’ve always evaluated women on their physical appearance, but I feel guilty about it. Maybe if I was the one subjected to the female gaze, a sense of justice would be restored. “Show us your dick!” “We want to see penis!” I stood on a stage (twice) and gave a bar full of hooting and hollering […]
How can I possibly think about being naked around others, when it’s so difficult to confront my own nudity even when I am by myself? When I was 5 years old, my mother would take me to our local Jewish Community Center to go swimming. Afterward, we’d rush to the locker room for a hot shower before […]
Women are harassed daily for breastfeeding. Some incidents are reported; most aren’t. And many, many women simply don’t breastfeed in public because they know how vulnerable they are to such harassment. By the time my son was a few months old, I became an expert at nursing anywhere, anytime. And let me tell you, my […]
Our emancipation as women is directly connected to our status as equal human beings—not objects. I’ll never forget the first time I saw Jessica Rabbit—no, I’ll never forget the first time I saw her breasts. Voluptuous and bursting out of her sparkling red dress; they were mesmerizing. I knew I had to have a pair. […]
I want to celebrate my beauty and my body and my whole self as I am, not as I wish I were. When my memoir Stripping Down was published in 2012, I thought I would be done with needing to talk about my risqué younger life, which included stripping and nude modeling. I would be […]
It’s 2015, and I’d like to know why we still believe that a woman can’t be both smart and desirable. It’s late January and while navigating a sea of new course syllabi, doctoral applications, and conference research, I haven’t been the best at keeping up with recent news. What little media trickles through the stacks […]
This originally appeared on Eat The Damn Cake. Republished here with permission. Is it really necessary to advertise everyday products using naked women? I’d like to raise my daughter in a world that didn’t force these images down her throat everywhere we look. My husband, Bear, opened his new headphones. “Check it out!” he said […]
