@PrisonCulture on Twitter started the #myfeminismlookslike hashtag this morning and many women are sharing images of what makes them think of feminism. She tweeted: “In honor of Queen Bey’s visual album, I was thinking of what #myfeminismlookslike. So I am going to share my visual album. Join in…”

I write…a lot. I have over 700 essays here alone. But I love images too. Photographer here. And making this collage has revitalized my spirit in such a way I cannot even describe. And yes, Beyoncé is included in my perception of womanism, empowerment, inner and outer beauty, of contradictions, of humanity. And her new album BEYONCÉ truly speaks to me in a way similar to how The Electric Lady by Janelle Monae does. Music is a part of womanism for me. It teaches and it heals. And both Janelle and Bey are here. As are our foremothers. And ancestors. And contemporaries. And academics. And this isn’t an exhaustive collage. Just a taste of BLACK WOMAN EXCELLENCE. I couldn’t fit every photo even if I wanted to but they reside in my heart no less; all those not shown here reside in my heart.

I just needed a few photos to keep my fist raised and to flick my hair to. That’s all.

A Voice for Men doubles down: how dishwashers, TV dinners, and marital rape laws are rendering women obsolete. Also, the apocalypse.



We met new A Voice for Men writer Clint Carpentier earlier this week, when we took a look at a recent post of his waxing nostalgic about the good old days before marital rape laws, when wives couldn’t say “no” to their husbands and expect the law to take this no any more seriously than a husband intent on rape.

In a second posting, he’s doubled down on the whole marital rape thing and incorporated into a vast and fantastical vision of the past and future of humankind that bears so little resemblance to reality that it’s worth quoting in detail as a sort of case study in Men Going Their Own Way delusions.


Carpentier, clearly a Man Going His Own Way From Reality, begins with a brief and erroneous survey of human prehistory that he seems to have picked up at the University of His Own Ass:

The concept of marriage is relatively new to the human species, but was based on the ancient contract emotionally agreed upon by our primitive ancestors when they discovered that due to their big brains, their offspring were born less mature by necessity than other, less intelligent species; this contract promoted the exchange of three C’s (cooking, cleaning, and copulation) from the female, and three P’s from the male (protection, provision, and progeny).

So not only is Carpentier returning to his notion that compulsory copulation is proper wifely duty, but he apparently thinks that the prehistoric “wife” sat around the cave all day eating neolithic bon bons while her husband marched off to hunt mammoths for her — or perhaps commuted by foot-powered car to his job as a Brontosaurus crane operator at Slate Rock and Gravel Company.

Honored ladies of the symposium, I thank you for your invitation to speak today. I shall begin my address with no further overtures. The male of the species is perhaps more to be pitied than censured, as it is his physical inability to complete a normal, healthy menstrual cycle that is the root cause of so many of his woeful ailments.

As scientists have discovered, it is the unhealthy retention of aged or “angry” blood (generally more than 2 to 3 months old) that leads to so much of the liver agitation and spinal rage that plague our modern society. The average woman, capable of storing and regularly releasing this blood through the act of menstruation, keeps herself in constant and excellent health, and should be commended for so doing [Pause for applause].

The reason that men — poor things — commit so many murders as a sex is likely due to their failure to slough off this overabundance of old blood through the regular act of menstruation (which not only clears the body of bad blood but also the mind of anti-vitamins, as scientists have so recently and effectively demonstrated). The average male body is so overstuffed with a surfeit of old blood that he may swell as much as six feet tall, which is a height both unnecessary and grotesque for human purposes. This male blood, which is generally unable to be regularly flushed out through the womb, must find some sort of outlet, lest it tumefy and cause the man to burst (a not uncommon sight, I am told, in parts of rural Germany), which I believe is what leads to knife fights and stabbings among men. This makeshift replacement for remedy is exceedingly dangerous, but it does perform the necessary –sometimes life-saving — act of bloodletting.

It has been noted anecdotally, though not yet in a laboratory setting, that many of these men display considerably more rational and intelligent brain-power after these impromptu pseudo-menstruations. Many of you, I know, have told me stories of your own husbands behaving nearly as prudently as yourselves for days after cutting themselves accidentally in the kitchen or coming to blows outside of a public house. It remains to be seen, therefore, whether we as a group can seize upon a more regulated and humane system of replicating the effects of menstruation in our poor masculine counterparts. Imagine how improved our society might be if someday we could teach men to menstruate blood from their own wombs! [Pause for laughter.]

“20/20? keeps delaying the episode of their show dealing with the extensive, grassroots campaign to harass women, particularly feminists, online until they quit in terror and frustration. (Well, I assume that’s the imagined goal, though most anti-feminist harassers are men who get a lot of pleasure out of the direct act of berating and scaring women, so their campaign is really self-rewarding.) Luckily for us, Jaclyn Friedman decided to go ahead and publish a piece on so-called “men’s rights activists”—we really need to come up with a more accurate name, as they are neither concerned with men’s rights* nor with activism—at the American Prospect anyway. Read the whole thing. It kicks ass.

She made me consider a point in this that I had never really thought much about before. As anyone who has dealt with MRAs knows, the short list of “men’s issues” they have cobbled together to justify their existence is mostly shit they don’t give two fucks about. Men’s higher death rate in wars and from crime, men’s higher death rate on the job, sexual violence against men, and men’s higher suicide rate are all issues that are important, but represent to MRAs one thing and one thing only: A chance to deflect and derail discussions about feminist issues. They don’t do shit to actually address these issues. They often distort them deliberately, hiding some of the relevant contextual factors that would make it clear that what they call “men’s issues” are often labor issues, results of racial discrimination, and yes, feminist issues—particularly sexual violence, which affects both men and women but is nonetheless enacted primarily by men as an expression of masculine power.

Anyway, Jaclyn makes the point that because MRAs co-opt these very real issues but don’t actually care very much about them, they “are happy to abandon men and boys to real danger when it suits their hate campaign against women”. Because of this, the noise they make blaming all these issues on women means that it is now harder for people who actually give a fuck to find resources.


Every man who visits a men’s rights site concerned about male victims of rape is a man who’ll be told that women are the problem and will be offered no practical solutions, a man who won’t be connected with direct services for survivors if he needs them, a man who still doesn’t know about Just Detention International, which works to end prison rape, or Service Women’s Action Network, which is taking the lead to end sexual violence in the U.S. military for both men and women. Every man who comes to them concerned about the high rates of on-the-job fatalities for men is a man taught to blame women but who is never encouraged to support or join unions. Every man who comes to them concerned about the male suicide rate is a man who won’t be encouraged to help out with the life-saving work The Samaritans do every day.

The overanalysis of the first lady's expression speaks volumes about America's expectations of black women

Not even President Obama is above taking a selfie in the least appropriate selfie-taking venue possible. While attending a memorial service for Nelson Mandela in South Africa, Obama posed with British Prime Minister David Cameron and Danish Prime Minister Helle Thorning Schmidt. It is probably a bit tacky for these world leaders to pose and preen together, but they are only human. We are all helpless when we have such photographic power in the palms of our hands.

In the already widely circulated image, Michelle Obama is sitting to the president’s left, staring into the distance. In two other images, the first lady looks in the president’s direction as he speaks with the Danish prime minister and then looks straight ahead.

The media (and everyone else) have reacted, trying to frame Michelle Obama as “angry” or “disapproving” when maybe she wasn’t even paying attention to her husband being silly with his world leader friends.

At the Washington Post: “The first lady looks stern — dare we say disapproving? — throughout.”

In the New York Daily News Michelle Obama “sat at a distance, as if in disapproval of the digital display.”

Someone at Business Insider quipped, “That stare can kill.”

The headline at The Huffington Post boldly declares “Michelle Obama is having none of it.”

Over at D.C. political blog Wonkette, “Michelle Obama Pissed, Y’all.”

On and on the punditry goes, ascribing very specific, historically racialized narratives to what Michelle Obama is thinking and feeling in one candid moment.

Setting aside how sad it is that this story is even being reported as a “story,” we have no possible way of knowing why Michelle Obama isn’t grinning and posing and presenting herself the way people apparently expect her to at a memorial service for one of the most beloved world leaders of our time. Has it gone unnoticed that in these images, she’s the one person acting like she’s at a memorial service?