Must-Read Links: Jan Hooks, “Consensual” Sex, Eloise IRL + More

Shuttered: The End of Abortion Access in Red America

Irin Carmon’s comprehensive (and blood-boiling) story at MSNBC about just how dire the erosion of our reproductive rights is. Stats, graphics, video, and audio clips drive home the horror. 

 

Dressing Myself for the First Time

DAME contrib Michele Filgate bares all in this piece for Refinery29 about her relationship to clothes and how her closet reveals how she’s come to terms with—and even learned to love—her body.

 

The Real—Slightly Risqué—Story of Eloise on Her 60th Birthday 

At Vanity Fair, Patrick Monahan outlines Eloise’s origins, and gives us a delightful peek into the early life of Kay Thompson, whose outrageous performances at the Plaza’s Persian Room inspired her children’s book alter ego.

 

The Game Is Rigged

“Young feminists have adopted an exuberant, raunchy, confident, righteously unapologetic, slut-walking ideology that sees sex—as long as it’s consensual — as an expression of feminist liberation. The result is a neatly halved sexual universe, in which there is either assault or there is sex positivity. Which means a vast expanse of bad sex—joyless, exploitative encounters that reflect a persistently sexist culture and can be hard to acknowledge without sounding prudish—has gone largely uninterrogated, leaving some young women wondering why they feel so fucked by fucking.” Rebecca Traister brilliantly breaks down the complexities ignored by “consensual” sex at The Cut.

 

The Strange Case of Anna Stubblefield

Daniel Engber’s gripping cover story of this week’s New York Times Magazine, follows Anna Stubblefield, a professor at Rutgers, the severely disabled man she fell in love with, and the highly contested field of “facilitated communication.”

 

This Is What a Rapist Can Look Like, Actually

“I don’t have to be taught to not be a rapist. That much comes naturally to me, as I am sure it does to the overwhelming majority of people you and I know,” wrote university student George Lawlor in a piece for a student news site about why he didn’t want to attend a consent training session. At the New Republic, Jamil Smith explores exactly why his stance is so problematic (with a shoutout to rape culture expert and DAME contrib Kate Harding).

 

The Laughs, Pathos, and Overwhelming Talent of Jan Hooks

Comic genius Jan Hooks, who died last October at 57, was arguably one of SNL’s funniest, most versatile cast members in its 40-year history—and in this profile by Mike Thomas at Grantland, we discover why it is we’ve been missing her long before she lost her life to cancer.

 

History Class and the Fictions About Race in America

When it comes to history, “a growing number of educators are calling for a fundamental shift in how the subject is taught.” And Alia Wong’s piece in The Atlantic will piss you off that it’s taken this long and piss you off even more after reading why.

 

Precious Mettle

We’ve been mesmerized by the sonic eccentricity of multi-hyphenate Joanna Newsom since she first hit the San Francisco indie music scene with her dark fairytale songs and her harp in tow. This New Yorker profile by Kelefa Sanneh is a fittingly fascinating look at the musician’s evolution.