Women’s liberation has often been portrayed as a movement intent on encroaching upon or taking power and privilege away from men, as though in some dismal zero-sum game, only one gender at a time coul...
Women are an eternal subject, which is a lot like being subjected, or subjugated, or a subject nation, even. There are comparatively few articles about whether men are happy or why their marriages als...
Why do such bad questions get predictably asked? Maybe part of the problem is that we have learned to ask the wrong questions of ourselves. Our culture is steeped in a kind of pop psychology whose obs...
When we are attracted, we draw near; when we draw near, the sight that attracted us dissolves: the face of the beloved blurs or fractures as one draws near for a kiss, the smooth cone of Mount Fuji be...
When one begins to lose touch with reality, the ill brain latches obsessively and delusionally onto whatever it’s immersed in—the surrounding culture’s illness.
We speak of self-fulfilling prophecies, but any belief that is acted on makes the world in its image. Beliefs matter. And so do the facts behind them. The astonishing gap between common beliefs and ac...
Those who are threatened by marriage equality are, many things suggest, as threatened by the idea of equality between heterosexual couples as same-sex couples. Liberation is a contagious project, spea...
This should remind us that violence is first of all authoritarian. It begins with this premise: I have the right to control you.
There isn't a story to tell, because a relationship is a story you construct together and take up residence in, a story as sheltering as a house. You invent this story of how your destinies were made...
The present rearranges the past. We never tell the story whole because a life isn't a story; it's a whole Milky Way of events and we are forever picking out constellations from it to fit who and where...
So many men murder their partners and former partners that we have well over a thousand homicides of that kind a year—meaning that every three years the death toll tops 9/11’s casualties, though no on...
Resistance is first of all a matter of principle and a way to live, to make yourself one small republic of unconquered spirit. You hope for results, but you don't depend on them.
Reading these stories, it's tempting to think thatthe arts to be learned are those of tracking, hunting,navigating, skills of survival and escape. Even in theeveryday world of the present, an anxiety...
Paul Goodman famously wrote, Suppose you had the revolution you are talking and dreaming about. Suppose your side had won, and you had the kind of society that you wanted. How would you live, you pers...
One whose testimony made a major impact more than a decade ago is Ben Barres, formerly Barbara Barres, a biologist at Stanford University. In 2006, he wrote in the journal Nature about the bias he had...
One day in Auschwitz, the writer Primo Levi recited a canto of Dante’s Inferno to a companion, and the poem about hell reached out from six hundred years before to roll back Levi’s despair and his deh...
Moths and other nocturnal insects navigate by the moon and stars. Those heavenly bodies are useful for them to find their way, even though they never get far from the surface of the earth. But lightbu...
Many heterosexual marriages are childless; many with children break up: they are no guarantee that children will be raised in a house with two parents of two genders. The courts have scoffed at the re...
Love is a constant negotiation, a constant conversation; to love someone is to lay yourself open to rejection and abandonment; love is something you can earn but not extort. It is an arena in which yo...
Like racism, misogyny can never be adequately addressed by its victims alone.