How did video games go from being completely gender-neutral to being the centerpiece of a male-dominated, often misogynistic subculture?
Polygon’s Tracy Lien investigates in a fascinating history of the industry’s relationship to gender.
It’s interesting whether you’re into video games or not—though, as the article points out, if you play Bejeweled, Angry Birds, or even Windows Solitaire, you may be more into video games than you think.
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When I was coming up, my household owned just two videos, which I watched in perpetual rotation: the musical The Wiz, and Eddie Murphy’s 1983 stand-up act Delirious.
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As I look toward the East River and my teenage summers, I sometimes see my old body continuing on without me, living the slow-and-steady life I’d planned for so carefully and not this spectacular mess I’ve come, I think, to prefer.
...moreGuernica has a lengthy excerpt up from White Girls, the genre-warping new collection of cultural criticism, personal memoir, and who knows what else by the New Yorker‘s Hilton Als.
It’s complex, challenging, and completely, enthrallingly beautiful, so it’s impossible to choose just one quote to represent it, but here’s an attempt:
...moreWe were something dark and unforeseen: two colored gentlemen who moved through the largely white social world we inhabited in New York (the world where art and fashion and journalism converged) who did not exploit each other or our obvious physical traits…for political sympathy or social gain.
1. Pretend it’s okay that your birth certificate labels you as female. You know perfectly well you’re not.
...moreWhite people clamoring to up their cred by appropriating nonwhite culture do so hoping to be rewarded for choices that are falsely seen as inherent in people of color.
In an essay on cultural appropriation for the New Inquiry, Ayesha Siddiqi dissects “the awkward sexism of white supremacy” and what we really mean when we say “white girl.”
It might rearrange your whole way of thinking about certain intersections of race and gender.
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What would it look like to slut shame a middle-aged, heterosexual man? The Anthony Weiner scandal is giving us a clue.
...moreWell, George Eliot is Mary Ann Evans. She chose a male pen name, believing that using her own name would not allow her to be taken seriously as a writer.
Over on Thought Catalog, s.e. smith writes about using a gender-neutral name and how perceived gender affects writers’ reception.
...moreCertainly, women are no better suited for monogamy than men are. That, I think, is clear. It seems possible, if you look at some of the data, that women are even less well-suited for monogamy than men.
Salon‘s Tracy Clark-Flory interviews Daniel Bergner about What Do Women Want?
...moreIn lieu of a “Funny Women” column today, please read all of Reductress, a new satirical women’s web magazine like The Onion that “tells the stories of real women, written by real women, for other real women who like to read about women.” At last, a news magazine that “that empower[s] women with feminine ideas, feminine emotions, and feminine products.”
Reductress “parodies woman-focused marketing and the consumer identity built around it, taking on the perk and patronizing tone that saturates online media today.
...moreWith the recent announcements of two male gay professional athletes, there has been a general feeling of widening acceptance for the LGBT community.
But, just as the election of a black president does not mean the end of racism, these two cases of acceptance do not mean the end of homophobia.
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I guess that’s what the dream wants: for me to know that the worst kind of man, the man I was scared of becoming, doesn’t frighten me any more.
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“Women are bitches,” says a young man as he sits down. Apparently a woman at the bar wouldn’t give him her number. He’s talking to the man sitting on his left in spite of the fact that I am sitting two feet to his right and at the same table.
...moreAs Elissa Bassist’s recent Funny Women column “The Next Great American Woman’s Novel” reminded us, books by women tend to get treated a little…differently from books by men.
What would it look like if male authors’ novels were treated like Bassist’s hypothetical feminine masterpiece All the Single Ladies Just Wanna Have Fun?
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A lot of women people (as opposed to men people, or just “people”) are upset that Wikipedia editors have created a subcategory for “American Women Novelists.” But I’m not.
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As I held the passport in my hand, I realized that both marriage and gender have a life beyond my own. Somewhere, my citizenship gender had been on file. Somewhere, a record of me existed that over-ruled my daily existence. Here, I was a man. There, I had been female.
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There is a total silence in the West on India’s culture of dissenting women in the face of severe patriarchy and authoritarianism. It doesn’t quite fit, does it, into the dichotomy carved out for Indian women by Americans and the British…
...moreDid you enjoy your weekend? Revisit it with a look at our weekend Rumpus features.
Didn’t enjoy your weekend? We have just the thing to cheer you up: weekend Rumpus features.
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I was not surprised to see that a large number of reviews took issue not with the writing or the plot or the structure, but with the main character’s sexuality; but even I was startled by the vitriol of many of them, the insistence that a story about a girl who fucks cannot be a story with any value at all.
...moreFor decades now, sympathetic portrayals of trans people in the media have usually made use of the same phrase: “a man trapped in a woman’s body” (or vice versa).
Though it may help some cis people start to understand the basic concept of trans-ness, it’s not always very accurate.
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I haven’t been getting along very well with women lately. I don’t like admitting this. To admit this is, I have been told, is to admit that I don’t like myself. That I have a problem with myself.
What’s wrong with you?
...moreFeminist theorist Judith Butler criticizes gender as something culturally constructed while “sex is just as culturally constructed as gender.” According to Butler, the distinction between sex and gender turns out to be no distinction at all.
In Anne G. Sabo’s essay, “When My Husband Came Out as a Woman,” Sabo reveals the struggles and mixed emotions she experiences as her husband makes the transition to become her soon-to-be wife.
...moreBefore social media, people spread ideas with postcards.
Collectors Weekly features an article of the double-edged sword variety. Lisa Hicks provides a selection of Suffrage-era postcards (both pro and against), but her accompanying essay is a far cry from a casual discussion of turn-of-the-century illustration and rhetoric.
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“It” is the overlap between homeless and trans. Oh, did you have a body? When you’re trans and homeless, this is really what the “for customers only” restrooms sign say, below their cheerily simplified depictions of “men” and “women”. Did you have a body? Did you think you could eat, shit, live?
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If masculinity could be defined by a quick Google search or a drive down a billboard-studded highway, then a “real man” is a paradox, captured crudely at the uneasy intersections of faith, love, public service announcements, politics, and advertising.
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When I see this video of eleven-year-old me, I burn inside. Maybe I should take it easy on myself, but I see a fumbling, painfully awkward girl supporting a politician whose influence still buttresses today’s anti-feminist conservatives
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We are not ashamed of our bodies – we are not afraid of them. We will celebrate their tremendous power. We will dance in honor of them, in churches or on the steps of Capitol Buildings or in front of cameras.
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In a bar, with friends, listening to a man I’ve admired for years saying this: “Enough with the sob stories, ladies. We get it. If I hear one more story about some fucked up sad violent shit that happened to you, I’m going to walk.
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I run so I can inhabit my own body. I run so that in moments like these, when my lack of power in this world becomes more violently apparent, I can feel the strength of my own body, enough to ignore provocations, enough to know alone that I could destroy both of those men if I wanted.
...moreIn writing about the “complexities of desire, objectification and fetishization,” Vivienne Chen gives the Rumpus some love.
Chen quotes Rumpus editor Stephen Elliott — who argues that “there is no bad reason to love a person”– and also links to “Dear Sugar #89: The Thing That Turns You On.”
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