When I was 19 and I read the part of “Tracee” on The Sopranos, I immediately knew I would play her, and I knew I wanted to play her because there was something about her story that I understood so well and wanted to do justice to. I had never seen The Sopranos, but I knew it was a gangster show with plenty of violence and misogyny. Tracee was a young mother, stripping at the
I have always been interested in politics. I grew up the daughter of an attorney and elementary school principal. My grandmother was one of the first women to graduate from the University of Wisconsin Law School, where she met her husband, my grandfather. My great-grandfather was a judge. My uncle was a state representative. I knew all my life I wanted to be an attorney, but I also always kept politics on the radar. I
Years ago, a friend told me she’d kissed a girl. My first reaction? “Jealous!!!” Wait, where did that come from? A little personal reflection later, I concluded that having an experience with a woman like she had was something I was quite curious about. I had occasionally fantasized about it since my late teens, but never thought much of it. I had always accepted those thoughts as totally OK, but never contemplated action. Over the
I did not have an orgasm until I was twenty-three years old. Looking back, do I regret the orgasm-less decade I experienced until that time? YES. YES I FUCKING DO. So, this used to be my deepest and most shameful secret, one that only my closest and oldest friends knew. But you know what?? Like a lot of shameful female secrets, it’s not even that unusual!! There are studies and medical institutes that indicate that
I’m a straight, white, male, Brooklynite attorney in his early thirties. I was raised by two avowed feminists in an affluent Philadelphia suburb. I studied at elite universities and always took pride in representing progressive viewpoints to my friends and classmates. I tangle with conservatives on social media. I donate to Planned Parenthood. I worked the polls for Hillary. I am, to be sure, a pure embodiment of the self-satisfied limousine liberalism that the right
Awareness as an Instrument of Love and Justice in a Transforming World The human brain developed two valuable tactics in pursuit of our survival: awareness and intellect.[1] First came awareness; the brain was an input center for information collected by the senses. Later came intellect. This tactic labeled the incoming information and categorized it, allowing for complex data connection.[2] Throughout history, much emphasis has been put on sharpening human intellect. We socialize children in school
When you are in your twenties, not famous, and somewhat ordinary, and you tell people you’ve written a memoir, very often you get the response, “you’re too young to write a memoir!” It’s annoying, and insulting, but it’s par for the course. Plus, it helps you build tough skin. First of all, memoir isn’t autobiography. It’s not a lifelong chronicle. A memoir is a snapshot, a moment of a life lived through and realized. When
I knew that starting graduate school would change my lifestyle, but I never predicted I’d be spending a Sunday evening standing with my legs open over a man’s face, aiming my urine into his mouth. But here I was, a queer women’s studies major and sex-critical feminist who wrote countless undergrad papers critiquing the commodification of women’s bodies, doing sex work. How the hell did that happen? Before last year, I usually viewed sex workers
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In A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf makes a startling claim about woman, writing that “she pervades poetry from cover to cover; she is all but absent from history.” Examining the shelves of history, Woolf finds them empty of female voices, a fact with which she struggles to grapple in her text. When we as women in the twenty-first century peer back into History – that is, our canonical understanding of history – it
I sit in my cozy living room, the sun shining through the windows, the smell of freshly baked birthday cake taking up the whole house, Adele playing in the background, and the round of my pregnant belly gently rising and falling as if in beat to the music. My healthy and happy 3.5 year old daughter and supportive and loving husband are outside enjoying the fresh air in our safe and beautiful neighborhood on this
