Why Can’t I Stop Watching ‘Love Island’?
I’m a middle-aged, straight-passing, monogamous feminist desperate to make known my progressive and professional creds. So why am I unashamedly obsessed with Love Island?
feminism
Not Every “Monstrous Bitch” Is a Feminist Victim
Qualities coded as “monstrous” in Eleanor Johnson’s Monstrous Bitch are more interesting than assuming that their monstrosity is itself evidence of patriarchy.
Love Story’s Subjection to the State
For all its couture fashion and bio-pic fluff, Love Story: John F. Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn Bessette is radical in how it echoes Laura Kipnis’ polemic, Against Love.
Alice Coltrane: Conjurer of the Majestic
Andy Beta’s Alice Coltrane biography, Cosmic Music, is an excellent work about this forward-thinking and often misunderstood musician.
M(h)aol’s ‘Something Soft’ Is a Post-#MeToo Gut-Punch
M(h)aol’s Something Soft is a powerful feminist punk album. It highlights the stakes of inhabiting the female body in a world where safety is conditional and fleeting.
When Feminist Anthems Were Volume-Controlled
From an era when protest music rang out across every other frontier, we have only seven feminist songs where the lyrics spoke explicitly to women’s liberation.
Courtney Love Ate My Pasta
If we need an example of someone who embodies strength and vulnerability as non-dual, Courtney Love rules. She will also eat your pasta and not give a fuck.
Hard Ticket to Hawaii’s Accidental Feminism
In his explicitly women-objectifying film, Hard Ticket to Hawaii, Andy Sidaris has accidentally created situations that demand feminist narrative solutions.
Sitcoms Written by Women Are a Funny Thing
The working lives of these women TV writers in the 1950s were very different from the sitcom wives they scripted.
Sophie Gilbert Excavates Millennial Misogyny’s Buildup
Sophie Gilbert’s critique of misogyny in the 1990s and 2000s, Girl on Girl, would be disheartening but for the iconoclastic and subversive feminist artists in pop culture.
Yoko Ono Bio Captures the Primal Scream
The Yoko Ono biography by David Sheff captures the artist’s primal scream but understands that she is a rare specimen who cannot be pinned down or easily classified.
Women in 1990s Rock Music Are Far from Dead
Tanya Pearson’s Pretend We’re Dead is both hopeful and challenging, and proves that the spirit of 1990s women in rock music is still alive and fighting.