“The trauma of watching racist and sexist moments, and reliving them on my timeline with various captions attached, didn’t feel good; it magnified the sociopolitical anxieties of everyday life.”–Rawiya Kamier on what was wrong with MTV’s 2015 Video Music Awards
“The truth is too ugly for a general audience. I didn’t want to see a depiction of me getting beat up, just like I didn’t want to see a depiction of Dre beating up Michel’le, his one-time girlfriend…But what should have been addressed is that it occurred.”–Dee Barnes wrote a must-read essay regarding Straight Outta Compton’s revisionist history
“Maybe, we’ll just say maybe, for women who came up in rock in an era when there weren’t a lot of women in it, they just thought they really had to act tough. And they’ve carried that with them. And I have no idea whether she really is that tough. If she is, good for her. But you can’t expect everyone to be that way.”–The Runaways’ Jackie Fox responds to the Pretenders’ Chrissie Hynde’s victim blaming comments
“After she told me she wasn’t a boy, I spent the better part of a year trying to convince her that she was probably just a boy who liked ‘girl stuff,’ and that she could be any kind of boy she wanted to be. I filled our world with examples of boys who liked princesses and men who wore pink, but to no avail. It just wasn’t enough for her to have access to girl stuff and be allowed to ‘act like a girl.’ It went deeper than that. The day she finally convinced me was when I asked her, ‘Do you still want to be a girl?’ and she said, ‘No, Mama, I still am a girl.’–From an interview with the creator of the blog, GENDER MOM and the podcast, “How to be a Girl”
“The lengths to which immigrant families have gone to hide the way we feed ourselves break my heart.”–Ruth Tam on the cultural appropriation of food
“I find Beyonce to be one hell of a feminist, because she boldly claims her feminism, and when she’s out of the public eye she does all kinds of useful, intersectional things. Look at her housing initiatives in Houston. That’s amazing work…We take Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie more seriously because she has intellectual credibility, grace and a sense of gravitas about her.”–Roxane Gay on how nothing is perfectly feminist
“…mostly what you do as a writer is make choices. Sometimes you make the wrong choice and you go back and make another choice that’s better. Thinking of writing in this way maintains a feeling of agency and spirit of experiment..–Sara Jaffe being interviewed about her debut novel, Dryland
“The ‘golden age’ films are not separate from the politics of the time that produced them: In Snow White, the heroine’s categorical passivity is the source of her virtue; in 1941’s Dumbo, raucous black crows speak in jive; and in 1959’s Sleeping Beauty, the supposed heroine utters 263 words of dialogue…”
“‘This is the actual moon they used in the movie.’ and other genius fibs were part of what made Erin Markey‘s Annie walking tours sell out almost immediately.
Lena Dunham and Jenni Konner have released a second preview of their LENNY newsletter. This issue celebrates women writing fiction and features “an original short story from Dunham, an excerpt from Rebecca Dinerstein’s new novel, The Sunlit Night, and a brand-new work from Jenny Zhang.”
Looking for a new parody Twitter account to follow? Sitnexto Kim Davis is it.
What did we miss this week? Let us know in the comments! <3
