The Translation of I Love You

Writes With Pencils

For me, my early childhood didn’t exist before the book Rosalie the Bird Market Turtle was a part of it. The drawings were sketched out in improv jazz riffs of the early sixties. The palette was simple.  Shades of sienna and black line sketches were smudged with charcoal from a Montmartre street artist’s tray and stained with strawberry details, the old-fashioned kind that are red all the way through and smell like jam. The illustrator included all the classic Parisian scenes. The gendarme pointed with authority on a street corner. A waiter in a long, white apron and thin moustache served patrons at a busy sidewalk café. Lovers gazed at each other as they passed a green grocer in a cobbled market street. Vendors sold old books and artists painted along the Seine. And gargoyles perched on the towers of Notre Dame watching the street life below. I was fascinated…

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The Eroticism of Placelessness

Chaucer’s Funny Rape: Addressing a Taboo in Medieval Studies

Rachel E. Moss

[TW: rape, sexual assault, victim-blaming.]

Rape is funny.

That’s the kind of first sentence that might get me some immediate unfollows from impatient readers, but bear with me; I trust if you’ve been reading my work for a while, you’ll know that’s an introduction, not a conclusion. I’ve been thinking about this post on and off since the International Medieval Congress in Leeds this July, but I couldn’t work out how to quite put what I wanted to say into words. I haven’t managed this time, either, but perhaps this may mark a start in a conversation I think we need to have.

Lately in the popular and geek media there has been a great deal of discussion about whether or not it’s ok for comedians to make jokes about rape and whether feminists are too “sensitive” for reacting negatively to said jokes. On the FREEDOM OF SPEECH!!1! side, the…

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7 arguments against war in Iraq and Syria

Tim Holmes

1. It won’t work – and is likely to backfire.

“What’s the harm of bombing them at least for a few weeks and seeing what happens?” muses neoconservative William Kristol. The media debate follows similar lines. Yet in Libya, former MI6 head of counterterrorism Richard Barrett points out, “military intervention without a proper plan to follow up had all sorts of unintended consequences and led to chaos and instability.” “It’s just reaching for a hammer because it is a hammer and it’s to hand,” he adds. Airstrikes “have to have a very clear purpose and objective … I’m not sure we have that”. Instead, we seem to be engaging in “gesture politics”.

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A Tragedy in Song: “Hot Nigga” by Bobby Shmurda

M.B. Watson

About a week ago, as I enjoyed abnormally slow Starbucks Wi-Fi, two young women walked up to my friends and me. They had a question that I did not expect until after it was asked. It was a cultural question composed of so many layers that I doubt they understood. I’m sure they failed to understand ONLY through lack of trying. That one question opened my already ponderous mind to a sea of worrisome thoughts. What was this awful question?

“Hey, can you guys teach us the Shmoney dance?”

Now, before (or after) you chuckle at how ridiculous my predicament was, understand that the song “Hot Nigga” had been on my mind for awhile. Not only because of how catchy it was or how infectious the featured Schmoney dance is. See, the song had plagued my thoughts because I couldn’t help but view it differently that most of the 8,000,000+…

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Former Harvard Sex Blogger: My Ex-Boyfriend Leaking Nude Pictures of Me Changed Who I Am—Forever

GENDER BENDERS

The SisterWives

It is true and obvious that men and woman are different. Most people would say what makes a woman a female and a man a male is the presence of a vagina or a penis. But it isn’t really that easy is it?

Beyond our biology, we are created and develop differently based on our cultural understanding of what it means to be a man or a woman. The complexity of how each individual is nurtured in relation to their nature – such as genetics or other functionally relevant changes that can occur to the genome, which can alter the way genes are expressed – make it difficult to study all the differing sexual manifestations the human race can exhibit. Regardless of what science says about the differences in our basic genetics, how different our brain mass might be, who has more white or gray matter, or how our hormonal…

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Mission Accomplished? Syria, the Antiwar Movement, and the Spirit of Internationalism

In the Moment

Danny Postel

 

The American peace movement has been celebrating what it sees as its victory on Syria. “The U.S. is not bombing Syria, as we certainly would have been if not for a huge mobilization of anti-war pressure on the president and especially on Congress,” writes Phyllis Bennis of the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS). This represents “an extraordinary, unforeseen victory for the global anti-war movement,” she goes on, one that “we should be savoring.” Robert Naiman of the organization Just Foreign Policy vaunts “How We Stopped the U.S. Bombing of Syria”.

This turn of events is “something extraordinary – even historic,” writes my good friend Stephen Kinzer, coming from a different but overlapping perspective. “Never in modern history have Americans been so doubtful about the wisdom of bombing, invading or occupying another country,” writes the author of the classic Overthrow: America’s Century of Regime Change from Hawaii…

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How to teach a young introvert

Violently Inclined: On TV’s Obsession with White Male Violence

girls like giants

Phoebe B.

It turns out the more televised violence you watch, the more fear of crime you develop—even if that fear is not specific to your life, family, neighborhood. Recently, the Annenberg School (USC) released the results of a study on TV violence. The study, as reported by Deadline Hollywood, “confirm[s] the effects of TV on people’s fear, but do not support the idea that people think there is actually more crime in their neighborhood.”

The study’s release was perfectly timed with Emily Nussbaum’s wonderful essay on FX’s television adaptation of Fargo. “How good does a violent drama need to be to make the pain of watching worth it?” Nussbam asks. She concludes, ultimately, that Fargo is not quite good enough to endure the violence it showcases. In a TV landscape where depictions of violence are replicating like zombies on The Walking Dead, Nussbaum’s question and the…

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