An Incomplete List of Interesting Moments From 2014 Reviews, Profiles, Etc. -The Toast

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patricia-lockwoodPatricia Lockwood’s Crowd Pleasing Poetry

Lockwood is famous—more than thirty thousand people follow her on Twitter—but the source of her fame is almost entirely owing to her tweets and not to her poetry. Even the exception, her most famous poem, “Rape Joke,” could read as a series of exceptional tweets. She’s made for the medium. It rewards her particular talents for compression, provocation, mockery, snark.

Poison Candy

As Carly, a New York power attorney of a certain age (39 or 40), Cameron Diaz spends the first 10 minutes of The Other Woman looking very much like a lady who’s just been fucked.

Review: ‘Liar Temptress Soldier Spy,’ Civil War’s Female Spies by Karen Abbott

At its best her prose is vivid, especially when she writes about battles and the terrible costs they exact, while at its less-than-best it seems (dare I say it?) to have been borrowed from the pages of a women’s magazine.

Dear Nicki Minaj

For a moment there, I felt like I had briefly peered into the deepest recesses of Nicki Minaj’s true inner self, a being that cares how this ratchet s**t affects my kid. I said to myself, “Self, how cool is this? Nicki is already evolving into somebody that my daughter may get to listen to on my watch. Maybe.” I’ve been in the music game a minute now so I know how it goes. So, when I peeped the artwork for your latest single, I wasn’t even shocked, I was just disappointed. The song: “Anaconda.” The art: your booty in a thong. As a man, I can appreciate the virtues of your perfect posterior. The dad guy is not a happy camper, particularly now that his lil’ girl is transitioning into a young lady.

Wild: Reese Witherspoon sends mixed messages in a gorgeous liberation fable

It seems to be Feminism Week in the fall movie season, and given our intense social focus on the nature and limits of female empowerment and women’s sexual agency at the moment, the timing is just about right

The Outsiders

In photographs, Cheryl Strayed looks like a big-bodied woman, but Reese Witherspoon stands barely more than five feet, and when she first tries to pull on her monster pack it forces her to the ground.

Wrought in Rhimes’s Image

When Shonda Rhimes writes her autobiography, it should be called ‘How to Get Away With Being an Angry Black Woman.’

Penelope Cruz is the Sexiest Woman Alive

She is impossibly beautiful. When she walks into a room, men start walking into furniture. Up close, however, she becomes almost hard to look at, like staring into the most unflattering mirror. When we meet strangers, we begin scanning their faces for their strengths and vulnerabilities, for the lights and scars that will tell us something about who they are and the life they have lived. Cruz has no physical flaws, the bent noses and crooked teeth we would normally use as signifiers. Her face contains no secrets, at least not about her. But her face tells you and the room plenty about you. If you want to feel like the world’s most judged man, sit down at a table in a restaurant with the Sexiest Woman Alive.

 

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