Revisiting the Sensual, Highbrow Advice of The Joy of Sex
The best sex, by far, is the sort that leaves you thinking about it the next day, too embarrassed to tell anyone else what happened, but interested enough to ask for more of the same the next time. Sex can be an intellectual pursuit but the best sex leaves intellect behind, instead toeing the line of vulgarity, of…
Women, Race, and Memory: An Excerpt From Toni Morrison's New Book, The Source of Self-Regard
Toni Morrison first delivered “Women, Race, and Memory” at Queens College, Queens, New York, May 8, 1989. The Source of Self-Regard is out now.
The Settler Fantasies Woven Into the Prairie Dresses
Laura Ingalls Wilder’s classic novels, based on her childhood in the late 1860s and 1870s in Minnesota’s Big Woods and on land belonging to the Osage nation in Kansas, are full of admiring descriptions of femininity on the American frontier: dresses, braids, pies, and babies. Laura’s beloved Ma, Wilder writes in a…
The Appalachian Women’s Rights Organization and The Lost Promises of Feminism
“One woman alone can’t do anything,” activist Eula Hall declared at the inaugural meeting of the Appalachian Women’s Rights Organization. The group had met for the first time at the Mud Creek Clinic in Floyd County, in February 1975. The regional magazine and media outlet for social movement news, Mountain Life &…
This 1748 Erotic Novel Sure Can Describe a Dick!
After being discovered in a cigarette box, a copy of the British erotic novel Fanny Hill dating from 1880 will go to auction next week. The book by John Cleland is, according to the BBC, “the first example of ‘pornographic prose’ in English,” which is notable! More notable to me, however, is that it utterly delights…
Here's More Proof That Women Made Illuminated Manuscripts Too
When a group of historians were looking at the teeth of medieval skeletons for remnants of plant microremains, they discovered a bit of lapis luzuli wedged between the teeth of a 45 to 60-year-old woman who was buried at a monastery circa A.D. 997 to 1162. And that’s weird, considering how expensive lapis luzuli was…
A Year of Women's Truths and Men's Pettiness
In the Los Angeles movie theater where I saw Mary Queen of Scots, the woman sitting next to me gasped every time John Knox, played by David Tennant, called Mary a whore. Which is to say, there were times during the film where I had to check and see that she wasn’t hyperventilating because Tennant-as-Knox popped up…
Get Ready for Great Gatsby Fan Fiction in 2021
In 1998, Congress passed the Copyright Term Extension Act, which—like its name implies—extended the copyright of works published between 1922 and 1978 by an additional 20 years, from 75 years to 95 years. On Tuesday, January 1, that extension period runs out, and works from Marcel Proust, Agatha Christie, Edith…
In 1981, the IVF and Anti-Abortion Movements Collided
On December 28th, 1981, Elizabeth Jordan Carr was born to Judith and Roger Carr in Virginia’s Norfolk General Hospital, making her the first baby conceived via in vitro fertilization in the United States. A week later, the New York Times reported, the family was released from the hospital to return home to Boston.