It’s Monday. Here we are again.
Here’s a story about gay oil field workers in North Dakota.
My one and only liaison in the oil fields of western North Dakota was with a 23-year-old truck driver. Like most such encounters in the oil patch, ours originated on Grindr, the mobile hookup app for gay, bisexual, and curious men. He sent me a photo, and we traded some biographical details. A few hours later, he was in my room at the Williston Super 8.
After our rendezvous, as the November night air dipped below ten degrees, we took shelter in his car to smoke cigarettes. I was only going to be in the state for 48 more hours, but we made tentative plans to go shooting the next day. I was less interested in exercising my Second Amendment rights for the first time than in extending our easy fling. He just needed to see whether he could get off work that day—no small task for someone accustomed to 16-hour shifts, six days a week.
What do we do with abandoned prisons, though?
At a former prison in the Bronx, the metal bars, steel doors, and other remnants of the building’s carceral past will soon be torn down. Corrections officials have announced today that the Bronx’s Fulton Correctional Facility is being transformed from a minimum security prison into a reentry center for newly released inmates, marking the first time that a prison is being reused in such a way. Fulton has sat empty since 2011, when Governor Andrew Cuomo announced a slew of prison closures to help the state save money. Thirteen state prisons have since been closed.
This should be obvious but don’t steam your vagina.
Racism, man.
Sexism, man.
Jessie Kahnweiler has made a dark short film called Meet My Rapist where the artist is working through her own experience of sexual trauma.
I want to take this class.
At Elle, we hear from a feminist what it is really like to be feminist and sexually submissive.
Two years ago I reconnected with a former lover. We’d had a wonderful sex life, which included rough sex, but had never called it D/s (Dominant/submissive). We were living a few states away from each other and e-mailing, and his dirty talk took on a dominant tone. He said, “I want you to come into the room and stand over here and do what I tell you.” It was like a light bulb going off for me. My jaw dropped. I couldn’t speak for several hours afterward. I thought: That’s exactly what I want.
Ace Hotel is always doing really interesting projects with writers.
Do you need some financial diet tips? There’s a site for that.
Jynne Dilling Martin went to Antarctica and then wrote lovely poems about the experience. That book, We Mammals in Hospitable Times, is out this month.
On the place of emotion in discourse.
