For all the hate, vitriol, subtle and overt racism that was aimed at this man over the last eight years, did he not handle it with uncommon grace and dignity? I never asked President Obama to be a perfect President, such a thing is an impossibility. But he played the long game, never panicked, never showed fluster,…

I want to be friends with the Obamas.

As great as "Senior Year" Obama is, I love "Dad" Obama the most

Jesus. Why are there so many fucking scumbags abusing children and women? For real, this is nuts. I was having a conversation with a bunch of men at my office and they were talking about crazy women making false rape allegations. I advised that false allegations are rare and that the vast majority of rape victims have …

Our curmudgeonly old boy passed unexpectedly last night. We came home to our door wide open and still locked. Nothing was taken but somehow (strong winds yesterday perhaps) our door was wide open when we got home. We found our cats and got them inside safely. Our pup however was not so fortunate. I found him lying in…

I have often said, when the time comes for my pets and others’ to leave us, that the only consolation is that life gets so much easier. It doesn’t make us miss them less, or have loved them less. I understand the relief. They enrich our lives while they’re with us, and they free us when they leave us. It’s possible to…

I feel you. That connection is powerful and intoxicating. Thing is in community college I developed a huge crush on Intro to Lit professor like way worse because I was now 19 and I got to spend lots of time talking with him out of the classroom and even after the end of the semester. However no matter how much I threw…

Yes. As much as I WISH that my ex’s shitty behavior didn’t show poorly on me, it totally did. Mostly, it was people asking why the fuck I was putting up with it, when I am by most standards pretty normal/sane/not prone to randomly flipping tables when shit doesn’t go my way. Which would make me want to defend him...…

I think Kim is in control more than Kanye thinks. I think she smiles and allows him to carryout his antics, but I think she might be slowly backing away with a smile because his issues are really starting to surface. One hundred percent that Kim has husband #n in the wings. However, whatever gets them publicity is…

As a woman that is also married to a fucking moron I suggest Kim embrace the ideas that she isn’t responsible for anybody’s actions but her own and that what other people think about her is none of her business. I mean, she won’t but I’ve put it out there.

I have to say I was more offended on her behalf than Taylor’s re that Taylor Swift lyric. Your husband publicly declaring he may still have sex with a younger skinny blonde chick? Not cool. Kim seems to be putting up with a lot of shit from Kanye.

It really is a hard thing to judge people historically using current social standards. As Solnit points out, in the 70's in California, both men and women lacked the vocabulary to express (and even imagine) a way to mark predatory behavior as predatory. We all imagine we would know better if we were plunged into…

I was 14 in 1994, puberty was a sudden transformation, and suddenly there were all these men... like, overnight I went from an awkward, invisible, book-reading person who did a lot of secret listening when adults were talking to figure things out about the world, to having an awful lot of male attention in the world.

T…

I had a similar experience. I was precocious as hell from the age of 12 onward. Additionally, I was the eldest child in a family ravaged by the severe mental illness of a younger sibling. The result was that my parents poured most of their time and attention in dealing with the crisis of the actual minute with my…

But what if, years later, you still saw the behavior as flattering and ultimately harmless?

I would have, too. I know, at 13-14 years old I would have fucked any number of my celebrity crushes. I do think that sometimes we forget that teenage girls are sexual beings that chose to willingly engage in sexual behaviors. The issue then becomes whether 1) a 13-15 year old is mature enough to willingly consent and…

This sums up, in a very intricate nutshell, all of the ambivalence surrounding the movie Diary of a Teenage Girl. Anything that happened in the 70's in San Francisco, especially in artistic/hippie/boho communities needs to be considered an outlier, for all of the reasons you mentioned. Girls in their mid-teens don’t…

I was 13-14 in the late 90s and a lot like you: I developed early, boys my age made fun of me, the only male (outside of my dad) who ever gave me any positive attention was my 7th grade English teacher, who was 27 at the time. He and I exchanged letters over the summer, I shared all my writing with him and I continued…

I feel like “Bowie nostalgia” ends at “Labyrinth”—and, for a lot of older millennials, that’s the extent of their exposure to him. Younger millennials weren’t born yet, though, so don’t really feel anything for him. From the perspective of most critics, Bowie’s golden era of music ended at “Scary Monsters,” which is…

This is very well written. My feelings on this are complicated, but my instinct is that women should get to own their sexual history, whether its morally problematic or not. If Maddox says she’s okay with it, I believe her. If she had said she was raped, I also believe her.