Woman
Story Stream
The Little Mermaid is Disney Propaganda June 06, 2023
One of the musical highlights of the original, animated Little Mermaid is a scene in which Ariel, newly human, tries to get Prince Eric to kiss her. If he doesn’t, she’ll turn back into a mermaid, but because Ariel has lost her voice, her main job is...
Look What Taylor Made Us Do June 05, 2023
There was a moment, about twenty-five minutes into Taylor Swift’s first Eras Tour show, in Glendale, Arizona, when fans began to realize that the concert was much grander than they had anticipated. In the lead-up to opening night, there had been a lo...
Your Favorite Writers Aren't "Brave" June 05, 2023
Recently, I was scrolling Twitter and saw someone post something like “I’m attracted to [some hot button culture war issue] because you can lose your livelihood for speaking out on it.” This was a writer who had done well for himself taking the anti-...
Patricia Highsmith’s Diaries June 05, 2023
“And here is my diary, containing the body—the painfullest feeling is that of your own feebleness.” This is one of the early entries Patricia Highsmith made in her diary. She was a woman of many paradoxes and contradictions, as is shown in a recent d...
Hannah Gadsby Embarrasses the Brooklyn Museum June 02, 2023
If you studied art history or another of the humanities in the 1990s or 2000s — say, if you are around the age of the Australian comic Hannah Gadsby, 45 — you may remember the word “problematic” from your long-ago seminar days. Back then it was a vog...
Searching for Meg White June 02, 2023
"Meg really doesn’t think she feels up for any interviews. She never liked them.” This message is conveyed to me thirdhand, via the guy who ran the small Detroit label that put out the first White Stripes seven-inches back in 1998, who has spoken wit...
The Role Reversal of R.F. Kuang’s 'Yellowface' June 01, 2023
The Asian American literary canon has always consisted of works about Asian authors’ insecurities around white people. The Joy Luck Club author and Asian American literature’s fairy godmother Amy Tan once wrote a nonfiction story titled “Fish Cheeks....
How Therapists Became Social Justice Warriors May 18, 2023
Lily Cooney was fully committed to social justice. In the wake of George Floyd’s death, the now-26-year-old writing tutor marched proudly in Black Lives Matters protests through the streets of Portland, Oregon. But the culture in which she was steepe...
The Joy of Sulk May 18, 2023
Homer’s Iliad opens with some epic ancient Greek sulking. Agamemnon, leader of the Greeks, is forced to return Chryseis, the woman he won as a prize following a battle at Troy. Annoyed, he seizes Briseis, the woman-trophy of Achilles, the Greeks’ sta...
At Chloë’s Closet Sale May 18, 2023
In the high noon heat of the big hot sun, the intersection of Broadway and Lafayette was an ouroboros. A snake eating its own tail, a snake that was not a snake at all but actually a line of mostly women—who were nearly all young and definitely all w...
The Party Is Cancelled May 18, 2023
Every month, more than two hundred people from the media, academia, and other intellectual circles are invited to a private hangout in New York City, which is known as the Gathering of Thought Criminals. There are two rules. The first is that you hav...
Joanna Hogg’s Women May 16, 2023
IN EXHIBITION, JOANNA HOGG’S ACCOUNT of a marriage between two middle-aged artists, a woman named D and a man named H live in a house partitioned by walls that look like Rothko paintings. In this austere, idiosyncratic place, the two of them make art...
Amy Sherman-Palladino's Natalist Streak May 16, 2023
Something strange is happening in The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel. The current and final season of the Prime Video hit opened with the revelation that Mei, the girlfriend of the titular comedienne’s ex-husband Joel, aborted their baby. Mei’s news is met wi...
Shakespeare Was Shakespeare May 15, 2023
Here are some things we know about William Shakespeare. He was born in April of 1564 in Stratford-upon-Avon. His father, John, was a leatherworker who held several municipal offices in their hometown, including burgess, alderman, and high bailiff. Wi...
Jealous Laughter May 12, 2023
A friend of mine used to joke that women writers discovered friendship in 2015, when the last volume of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Quartet came out. I laughed, but I knew what he meant. It is easy to think of men who navigated the literary world tog...
The Three Principles of Reactionary Feminism May 09, 2023
One of the things I discovered when writing Feminism Against Progress is that it’s much easier to make a critique than to suggest what to do about it. When you start suggesting policies, someone is bound to hate it. In the end I gave up trying to ple...
The Mayor of Fells Point May 08, 2023
My mainstay was an IBM Selectric typewriter. Soon after I moved to Baltimore, my Selectric broke down: I could not fix it and these were expensive to have repaired. I went to bed that night repeating, “I must have a typewriter!” A knock at my door ea...
Murakami in the Movies May 05, 2023
For enthusiasts of Haruki Murakami, last month brought two major events in two different countries. One is the publication, in Japan, of his latest novel, “Machi to Sono Futashika na Kabe” (“The City and Its Uncertain Walls”). The other is the releas...
Insight at First Sight May 05, 2023
Imagine that you are an accomplished young woman, walking into a campus coffee shop toward the end of your senior year. Your eye catches a cute guy sitting across the room, talking to his friends. You smile inwardly, then get down to studying.After a...
Is Annie Ernaux the Most Brutally Honest Writer Alive? May 04, 2023
Perhaps with no clearer motive than F. Scott Fitzgerald’s observation that “France has the only two things toward which we drift as we grow older — intelligence and good manners,” we packed up our possessions during the last dark days of one December...
If One Woman Told the Truth about Her Life May 03, 2023
Sometime in 1969, my grandmother tried to decapitate her good friend Ella Winter. My father was there; I know that. I imagine him wearing the blue corduroy suit he wore at his wedding; I’m sure he didn’t. I imagine him humiliated.Muriel Rukeyser, so ...
Beauty at the Food Court May 02, 2023
It is hard to picture the late Portuguese master José Saramago at the mall, or the very British J.G. Ballard for that matter. Yet both writers alighted briefly on that synthetic terrain and made it their own; Saramago in his 2000 novel “The Cave,” wh...
One Life as Paris April 27, 2023
Mogul-heiress-reality television star’s mononymous Paris: The Memoir dropped last month into a cultural landscape thoroughly cratered with tell-alls from woman celebrities of a similar vintage....
The Manliness of Screwball Comedy April 26, 2023
There’s something about Cary Grant that will always evoke charm, elegance, and intensity. Yet it’s also because of his humor that Grant solidified a persona. He was a man of many contradictions, always trying to reconcile one aspect of himself with a...
There’s More to Corsets Than Meets the Eye April 26, 2023
There’s a scene in the recent film Corsage in which Vicky Krieps, playing the melancholy anorexic Empress Elisabeth of Austria, indulges in an outburst at her maid. As part of the arduous process of getting dressed, she must be encased in an impossib...
