The women break into song. They start off slow, with a dubiously tonal “Let There Be Peace on Earth,” but hit their stride with “Ain’t Gonna Study War No More.” After a few verses, it turns into a call-and-response with the crowd. “Sing with us!” calls Paula, a commanding brunette with a “No Drones” shirt. The colorfully striped banner the women hold reads “RAGING GRANNIES” in large black lettering.
It is profoundly disturbing to imply that adopted kids should feel lucky to be alive, which is exactly how it felt every time my grandmother (or religion teacher, or other various and sundry well-intentioned commenters) spouted off some iteration of “your birthmother chose life.”
Last year, a couple in Florida – presumably hoping to distinguish their $45,000 adoption crowdfunding campaign from others like it – came up with a gimmick they referred to as the “Baby Draft”: If you donated, you could vote for your favorite football team, and the adopted child would be raised as a fan of whichever team got the most votes.
It always surprises me how little people can get away with knowing about sex workers. I had a client once who assumed I had children to support, and was scandalized when I confessed I didn’t. “You’re just one of these selfish women,” he told me, “these selfish women who want to move to a beach somewhere with a pair of massive fake tits and live off the interest.”
In June of this year, writer Tamara Winfrey Harris released The Sisters Are Alright: Changing The Broken Narrative of Black Women in America. According to The Washington Post, Harris writes “specifically of black women, and taking care to avoid conflating the black male experience with the definition of the black experience, period.” In this pivotal cultural moment when black men’s lives are often the focal point of the Black Lives Matter movement, Harris’ work…
The first Republican Presidential debate for the 2016 presidential campaign aired while Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton, a musical about the life of Alexander Hamilton, celebrated its opening night on Broadway. While Bobby Jindal declared that “immigration without assimilation is invasion,” an opening night audience watched a musical about the Founding Fathers that rests on an ideal explicitly stated in the first act: "Immigrants / We get the job done." Hamilton opens with the same lines that…
First, have a modeling career. During your candidacy and after you take office, the press will thoroughly cover your physical appearance. They might compare your body to all sorts of fruits. This kind of scrutiny may distract the public from your main purpose of making political change. To get used to hearing all the negative comments about your figure, spend anywhere from three to twenty years of your life working as a professional model. Your looks…
The children are fed first. Do not think of getting in line until the last offspring under 10 has left their soggy, half-eaten plate on the counter above the trash can. You will not receive The Look this year, you won’t. The children. Are fed. First. There is no alcohol. Do not go into the garage to the blue cooler where you will not find a selection of PBR, Coors, and Keystone from nobody knows…
One hundred percent the best part of rococo art is that it looks like someone sat down François Boucher and Jean-Honoré Fragonard and explained the basic tenets of Marxism to them in oh, 30 seconds, before giving them the command of "Paint the opposite of that, for the rest of your lives." Do you know what rococo art is, exclusively? It's professional shepherds and shepherdesses wearing gorgeous silk gowns in inappropriate settings, sexily falling asleep…
Hi. I'm poor. By any standard you wish to measure I am among the ducat-deprived. I'm also white, though, and was born and raised in the US, so mine is a qualified poverty, one that includes electricity and running water (at least most of the time; ten-day outages were common in my rural childhood), and access to lots of financial patch-kits. These days I even have a savings account. My clothes are second-hand and fit…
