“I thought changing something on the outside would change the wrecked ruin of me on the inside. I thought somehow the inside would get a memo from my outside and get into shape. It didn’t, but my hair is the first way I was able to gain autonomy over my body.”
Candidates for U.S. President have been utilizing television ads since 1952 to sell themselves to the American people. And for sixty whole years, they’ve perpetuated these five sexist caricatures of women in campaign ads to do so.
This should keep your brain busy for quite some time.
“Being one of the cool kids is a privilege I never had growing up, especially in school. I was one of the outcasts because I was different. So on Transparent, it’s like the tables have turned.”
“Dating broken white women became a way to reprise a powerlessness that years of sexual abuse and generations of blackphobia had tricked me into believing in. I drowned this feeling of powerlessness in weed and seeking out relationships in which I could engage in yet remain completely hidden from view.”
I come bearing every ounce of truth I could muster about “false rape accusations” and the pitiful rape culture the myth of them exemplifies.
Let’s have a frank, honest discussion about queer and feminist themes in movies about vampires, werewolves, ghosts and centaurs. Also, “Chopper Chicks In Zombietown.”
LGBTQ rights groups are joining activists, allies and former performers in opposing Michfest’s trans-female-exclusionary intention, and if Michfest wants to attract new fans, it needs to listen up.
Culture doesn’t need exploring so much as it needs exploding. We need to destroy things and reconstruct them in our own image, because the people who make our media aren’t going to do it for us. That’s why I want femslash to save the world, and I will not take no for an answer.
I got a taste of something I had never known — shopping in the men’s department afforded my body the opportunity to take up the amount of space it actually takes up.
“He didn’t feel any pain. He died instantly.” That was how she told me that my father was dead. I was 14.
The recent scandal surrounding the disturbing messages leaked from American University’s Epsilon Iota is a national story, and sheds light on a national problem. The response of AU students shows us something, too — how students can organize as a community to force their administrations to take action against campus sexual assault.
“That being said, I’d like to live in a world someday where people don’t automatically assume my body looks and functions a certain way, that makes room for people like me and my experiences.”
“Social skills classes are particularly bad places to learn gender and sexuality lessons because they combine direct instruction with the neurotypical authority of telling us how to act. Socialization groups seem safer, but sometimes, gender and sexuality discrimination still subtly invade them. Where do we go from here? I believe the solution is multi-tiered.”
“It was lasagna night, and as the kitchen got ready to serve dinner, kids checked Facebook at the cyber center, watched cartoon shows with headphones on, and fooled around at the pool table. The things that differentiated this gathering from a high school cafeteria were small: the thin kid wearing a parka inside who came up, bashful, for a full plate of food three times; the kids who wrapped up food in tin foil or took it away with them in to-go containers.”
Autostraddle chatted with Eve Lindley and Ryley Pogensky, two models from “Brothers, Sisters, Sons & Daughters,” about what brought them to the shoot and how it’s keeping them around.
“I hated my body and punished it, and it hated me and punished me back. Is that what happened? That’s the thing about getting sick the way I got sick: nailing it down.”
“Laneia, that was our first official interaction in the world — you seeing a link to my blog on The Planet Boards and wanting to delete it.”
For queer women of color, intersectionality isn’t just a “concept” or a “framework” for theorists to use for mind exercise — it’s a lived experience.
“It’s like you’re so good at your weird, low-cost lifestyle, but you know nothing about the real world.”