With Amy Winehouse, Lindsay Lohan, and Britney Spears splashed across tabloid covers, racing toward early graves, it’s easy to think they’re stupid or sick. But there’s something irresistably subversive about women who won’t behave The website “When Will Amy Winehouse Die?” reads like a macabre count-the-jellybeans contest. How many days does a junkie have left […] More »

In choosing Veronica over Betty, Archie Andrews overturns 70 years’ worth of cultural expectations “Just a matter of skill, that’s all!” Archie Andrews’ first words (said as he stood precariously atop his bike) may have seemed spontaneous in 1941, but 70 years have imbued the line with more weight than a supersized chocolate malt. The […] More »

The treatment of Caster Semenya is a disgrace. The 18 year-old South African runner, who is currently the object of “gender verification testing” after winning the world championship 800-meter race in August, has had her most private medical details paraded before the international press in what can only be described as an exceptionally ugly episode […] More »

I’m a fan of the AMC series Mad Men, which premiered its third season last night. The show has always occupied an awkward cultural space, both fetishizing and pathologizing its subjects: meticulously styled and artfully shot, it depicts a glossy, nostalgic vision of the early 1960s in America, but continually undermines that nostalgia, exposing the […] More »

Many ‘men’s rights’ arguments are thinly veiled misogyny. But not all. It’s hard to listen to someone who compares feminism to “the historical rise of Nazism in Germany,” a phrase once written by prominent men’s rights activist David Shackleton. But while the men’s rights movement does have more than its share of extremists, that doesn’t […] More »

The November/December issue of This Magazine features a cover story about the collision of feminism and pornography, an idea the magazine has explored before. In the July/August 1978 issue, Myrna Kostash wrote a cover story titled “Pornography: A Feminist View,” an essay that strongly criticized the pornography then entering the mainstream as being harmful to […] More »

Like many of the contributors to Girls Who Bite Back, I grew up on a steady diet of Saturday morning cartoons, Smurfs and Strawberry Shortcake. When it came to biting back, the only superheroes and ass-kicking role models I had were Wonder Woman, The Bionic Woman and Charlie’s Angels (the small-screen version). Thankfully, things have […] More »

What’s a modern man to do in an age of rapidly changing expectations? The most beleaguered rebel by questioning themselves; others simply blame women. Welcome to the frontier of male disaffection More »