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FAUX REAL THO

Hell is a Teenage Girl: Yellowjackets and the Monstrous Feminine

Yellowjackets is a smart, layered show in which a team of elite high school soccer players survives a plane crash in the deep woods of Ontario in 1996, then follows them today, twenty-five years later, as they continue to piece their lives back together. It plays with a number of genres, including horror, teen dramas…

The Ideological Battlefield of Motherhood

This interview by Anne Helen Petersen with researcher and writer Kathryn Jezer-Morton covers a lot of what makes me cringe whenever I see what makes a good/bad parent debated on social media. With the rise of pop therapy memes, it’s become a regular thing for folks to express and pick apart the many traumas we…

Biking and Feminism: “I belong on the road.”

I’ve been very fortunate that I haven’t had some of the aggressive interactions with drivers and pedestrians that others have had — mine have been limited to cat calling and the traffic incident that inspired my petulant “red dress” campaign. A guy I know wears an American flag jersey on his distance rides, and has…

Girls to the Front

NPR is asked, “Are Tall People Obligated To Stand In The Back At Concerts?” They mostly get it right: The only obligation tall people have in concerts is the same one the rest of us have, to do everything you can to be “good and courteous neighbors.” Frequently, though, that’s not what happens. In the early…

More on the WL Signage Wars

In 2013, I interviewed Peter Bunder and Eddie VanBogaert on the WL signage wars. City government threatened to crack down on local property managers for increasingly putting up larger and larger signage in student neighborhoods that did not adhere to zoning laws, further exacerbating the tensions between local government, the campus neighborhood associations, and landlords. When Granite…

Who’s that girl on Meridian Street?

My neighbors and I were profiled in the Journal & Courier today for our creative attempts to slow traffic on our crash-prone street: The idea came on June 27, as wreckers worked for nearly three hours to pull out a car wedged into the trees in Breschinsky’s yard. No one was hurt in the crash. But…

Hilda the Pin-Up: Chunky but Funky

The allure of Hilda is not that she’s sexually available, but that she is active, curious, adventurous, and unconscious about her zaftig body. She had a full and romantic (if fictional) life, was kind of a goober, and possessed the magnetic, sexy goodwill that comes from living a life of happiness, much like many of…

Pin-Up Queens

In the golden days of pin-ups, some of the best artists were women basing their art off their own bodies and fantasies.

I Wrote a Thing: Banana House

For Think Lafayette, I wrote a quick post outlining the issues with city code, tensions between gov’t officials, city codes, landlords, and homeowners in West Lafayette near Purdue campus. The latest controversy is related to a rental house near campus with a huge banana painted on the side. At issue: the city told the landlords…

Does Baby Einstein Help or Harm Children?

Last time [writing at Feministe in 2007–ed] I wrote a long entry on some of the spurious advertising techniques made to push products on children under the age of five. Since then, a major study was released suggesting that many of the educational videos aimed at very young children not only have limited to no educational…

On Birth and “The Fog”

Mad Men fans have been chattering about Betty’s “dream sequences” in the latest episode, “The Fog,” and at the risk of sounding pedantic I am compelled to clarify at least one thing about Betty’s dreams: They really aren’t dream sequences. Not literally, like Tony Soprano’s, anyway. Let’s do some Childbirth 101: As Betty is depicted, fifty years ago…

Review: 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days

While everyone else coos over the pregnancy romances of “Knocked Up” and “Juno,” I urge you to take a look at “4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days,” a movie that makes today’s pregnancy chic feel crass. There is some speculation that despite rave reviews from critics, 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days was overlooked for an…