Latest
January 31, 2022
Couture | Fiction
Lucie Elven
On the boat back, the sea got very slightly rougher, and a plastic curtain weighed down with chains knocked at the reception desk that separated the lounge from the restaurant. All the rules not to bring pets or your own food had been abandoned in the lounge. Dogs sat on tables and children ran laps, spilling their sandwiches. She thought of the director of the first museum they had visited,...
January 31, 2022
The Girlboss and the Anti-Woke Cool Girl
Jamie Hood
It seemed, for a brief moment — perhaps by virtue of the intensity of energy driving the 2017 #MeToo movement — that the bloated corpse of feminism might be reanimated, given a path forward. That #MeToo was rapidly recalibrated to advocate in the interests of the most privileged and protected within its subordinated class (broadly, victim-survivors of sexual harassment and assault) — not to mention implicit and plainfaced unions with...
January 31, 2022
The Law on Trial
Alexandra Brodsky
I assume that, by next summer, the Supreme Court will have overturned Roe v. Wade. Many states will swiftly outlaw abortion; some already have laws on the books that will be triggered as soon as the Court hands down its decision. I also fear that, within a decade, the Court will rule that abortion is unconstitutional. If it does, even blue states that would like to keep abortion legal will...
January 31, 2022
Pessimistic
Rosemarie Ho
To demand women’s liberation feels bafflingly earnest in an era when there seems to be the tacit agreement among straight, college-educated women that heterosexuality is a failed project from which they cannot escape, despite their best wishes. They can only shack up with men who can either listen, fuck, earn money, caretake, or be emotionally available, but never all five at once. The theorist Asa Seresin calls this “heteropessimism,” a...
January 31, 2022
Editors’ Note | Good Lord
The Editors
A few months ago, The New York Times Book Review published a much-hyped coffee table anthology in celebration of its 125th anniversary. Ten years earlier, the occasion might have prompted unbridled celebration. But this was 2021, and the volume’s introduction takes pains to chronicle the Book Review’s past sins: the sexism, racism, homophobia, and transphobia on display in the output by its mostly white, mostly male, almost exclusively cisgender reviewers....
January 31, 2022
Maternal Bliss
Atossa Araxia Abrahamian
If an alien were to learn about early motherhood in America solely through the media produced by American mothers, she’d reasonably conclude that it is either a blissfully transformative experience punctuated by the occasional diaper blowout, or a series of traumatic indignities redeemed only by social norms that some people call “hormones” and others call “love.” Before I got pregnant, I liked and wanted kids, but expected having them to...
January 31, 2022
Hot or Not
Andrea Long Chu
In January 2020, women began tweeting out selfies under the hashtag #HotGirlsForBernie, posing in bikinis or leaning suggestively towards their phones in low-cut tops. Countering years of baseless claims that Bernie Sanders had a “woman problem” — recall Gloria Steinem’s glib dismissal of his female supporters as merely boy-crazy — his female supporters used the meme to assert a distinctly socialist-feminist line. “if u wanna be hot, just be hot!”...
January 31, 2022
Feminism and Kitsch
Becca Rothfeld
I am the first to admit that contemporary feminism suffers from an optics problem, and I am the first to admit that an optics problem is no trivial matter. Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris Christmas ornaments, crocheted vagina hats, women at the helm of execrable tech companies urging us to “lean in” until we topple into the maw of misinformation: these are just a few of the “cringe” artifacts that...
January 31, 2022
A Defensive Posture
Elisa Gonzalez
For the last few years, I’ve privately called myself a “feminist-nihilist” or “nihilist-feminist,” which is both a bad joke and a halfway lie — if only because “nihilism” doesn’t actually mean what I mean. Nor do I mean apathy or indifference. My relationship to contemporary feminism resembles my youthful allegiance to a Christian god: something that must exist (for reasons that can be more or less defined as “better that...
