Patricia 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.
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.
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
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.
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.
Tags: feminism, patriarchal conspiracies, penelope cruz, the butter, when multiple things happen involving women we call it feminism, wild, women’s magazines
Thank you for this excellent list because I did not really want to do any work today.
Also #Shondaland forever.
Yeah, unfortunately this could be a *weekly* feature.
Ew.
That seems the most fitting response to most of these. Also “maybe YOU do” and “maybe dare less.”
Ha! Read my mind! “Dare I say it?” NO YOU DO NOT DARE. SIT DOWN.
THE GENTLEMAN IS CORRECT IN SITTING DOWN!
I just spent the last half hour thinking the Penelope Cruz piece was satire, judging by that excerpt. I know that sounds like a joke, but it didn’t even seem like good satire, it seemed kind of heavy-handed.
All of these that I’ve revisited so far have left me feeling very weird and uncomfortable. Sometimes the reason is obvious and sometimes the ickiness is more subtle and harder for even me to put a finger on, which is just a testament to the danger of media I guess.
ugughughghuuhghg I can’t click on it because I’m having flashbacks to that awful Salman Rushdie novel where he spends like 1/3 of it slavering over the Padma Lakshmi stand-in character
(supposed to be a reply to sausagedog)
OMG YESSSSSSS
“Interesting” is a generous word for these moments.
Buhhhhhhhh bad reviews 🙁
(Also, Monster knocked Cheryl Strayed to the ground too, that is, like an easily researchable fact)
Buhhhhhhhh bad reviews 🙁
(Also, Monster knocked Cheryl Strayed to the ground too, that is, like an easily researchable fact)
Reminds me of a Jenny Lewis interview I cam across this summer, from 2013 however. They began the piece like this:
“The first thing my eyes fixated on was her famously red hair. The bangs floating above her eyes turned her hair into the long red curtains of a theater that have been drawn back to give her glittering eyes and award winning smile their chance on stage. A brown detective hat, which seems to be a staple in Lewis’ wardrobe as of late, rested neatly atop her head. She wore bright purple tights that led up to her plum colored dress and she walked over to us with her arm extended. Being fans of Jenny’s for years and feeling a little weak in the knees since we had first laid eyes on the beautiful singer, the entire experience from the get go seemed a little surreal.”
This reads like Twilight fan fiction.
Well, I’m judging you hard enough for the whole world right now, Guy From Esquire Whose Name I Won’t Look Up.
“When multiple things happen involving women we call it feminism”
THIS
"When multiple things happen involving women we call it feminism"
THIS
I had the privilege of hearing Patricia Lockwood give a reading at Hunter College a couple months back. The first audience member to comment was an old, self-satisfied literary-professor-type dude who called her “cute” and then proceeded to tell her he didn’t like her work because he just didn’t understand it. She was SO DEFT in her takedown, she basically said “Well, is it a matter of reading comprehension? Because none of those individual words I just read are above 8th grade level, so if that’s the case just let me know which words you didn’t understand and maybe I can help you with that. Next question?”
I DIED. EVERYONE DIED.
I’d love to get around to bitching about the sexism in the Cruz piece but the bad Hemingway pastiche is even more arresting.
unfortunately this could be a *weekly* feature.
unfortunately this could be a *weekly* feature.