Features
Broads On Board (With All Kinds Of Nonsense)
We are Cate Young and Ianthe Metzger, full-time first cousins and part-time friends and we’re so excited to be your substitute Bossy Dames for the week. We are plenty bossy in our real lives, so we think you’ll be more than happy with what we’ve put together for you! Between us, we’ve got a keen interest in pop culture and women’s rights in the most literal way possible. We spend a lot of time thinking and talking about politics but don’t worry, there’s still a Bachelor obsessive between us. This week’s newsletter is chock full of stuff we’re thinking about, obsessing about, and positively drooling over, and we hope you’ll be just as hopelessly devoted to our ridiculous interests as we are. Let’s get to it!
A Celebration Of The Most Iconic Fashion Moments In Black Film Fashion
Ruth E. Carter's historic win for Best Costume Design at this year's Academy Awards for her work on Black Panther was monumentally deserved—and, ahem, long overdue. We wanted to celebrate not only Carter, but also the many iconic moments of fashion in Black films, and so we asked a group of writers, actors, stylists, and costume designers, from Lena Waithe and Deborah Ayorinde to Kris Harring and Marci Rodgers to weigh in on their favorite looks throughout the years.
Farmer Nappy, ‘Hookin Meh’ And a Culture of Entitlement
While the lyrics are entirely about why Nappy won’t leave, no mention is ever made of why he deserves to stay. Both the lyrics and defences of the song note that Nappy’s spouse has not given “any good reason” for the breakup, but this reasoning fails to acknowledge that women (and men!) do not need a “good reason” to end a relationship that no longer fulfils them. Not wanting to be coupled is reason enough to be single. In what universe is it preferable to force an unhappy partner to stay?
Is 'Where Hands Touch' A True Story? The Holocaust Movie Tells A Heartbreaking Tale Of Survival
Where Hands Touch received backlash on social media in February when the trailer first came out, with people accusing the film of “romanticizing” Nazis. And in September, after seeing the film at the 2018 Toronto International Film Festival, some critics like The Muse's Cate Young expressed that it portrayed Lutz too generously. Yet Asante has defended her choice to tell the story of a person of mixed-race during the Holocaust in this way.
We Had Experts Answer Your Questions About #MeToo, How To Be A Good Male Ally, And Consent
The ideal male ally is not coming into feminist spaces but going back to the spaces he occupies and making them feminist. Read the scholarship women have produced instead of asking for a personal education. Share that scholarship with other men. Make your feminist politics known and create firm boundaries that make it clear that casual sexism, misogyny, transphobia, homophobia, and ableism won’t be tolerated. Make very space you are in a space that has space for marginalized people.
13 TFD Readers On How They Actually Kept Their Resolutions From Last Year
I think the biggest lesson I learned from 2017 was that you can make big or small goals but you have to actually commit to making them happen. It’s not wishful thinking. You have to actually take steps to achieve them. Like finding a web designer I could afford or actually pitching the publications where I want bylines.
In Its First Season, The Handmaid’s Tale’s Greatest Failing Is How It Handles Race
While it’s easy to cast people of color in a variety of roles, it’s far harder to meaningfully evoke the ways race affects our lives — The Handmaid’s Tale is a classic example of the problem with settling for diversity that exists out of a desire to be “color-blind.”
Film Twitter Needs More Female Voices
When every story you see, particularly the most expensive and widely appealing ones, are told exclusively through a white male lens, something is fundamentally wrong with our culture. The same can be said about the ways in which we consume and understand that culture. Even the most understanding and erudite of male critics — seriously, we do love you guys — can stumble when it comes to work made by and for women.
Reflect & Resist
The ways in which oppressive institutions are interconnected and perpetuate oppression cannot be examined separately from one another. When we examine issues of oppression in silos, people fall through the cracks and into the margins. We commit to focusing on those cracks and margins. In doing so, we strive to unfurl an umbrella under which individually powerful movements - racial justice, gender justice, disability justice, labor justice, and more - can unite, with a collective emphasis on the people and communities that are so often left behind or treated as an afterthought.
15 Charts For Anyone Trying To Be A Better Adult This Month
This diagram helps break down some of the distinctions that some feminist writers and thinkers consider. It’s from writer Cate Young, who includes much more context and description in her post “This Is What I Mean When I Say White Feminism.”
Sea of Chaos; Island of Frivolity
Catherine Young, a Bitch Media Writing Fellow & culture critic, has been continuously updating a VERY essential thread on how news isn’t neutral, even when journalists are striving to adhere to ethical best practices (and especially when news is breaking).
Why Non-Black People of Color Need To Stop Blaming Black People for Their Erasure
The thing non-Black people of color seem to have a hard time understanding is that black hyper-visibility is not a privilege. Hyper-visibility of black people doesn’t translate into less systemic anti-black racism or more justice for black people.
Are Caribbean Feminisms Trans-Inclusive?
This conversation represents an attempt by participants to process, dialogue, negotiate and learn about trans-inclusive reproductive justice movements. It is perverse to debate into abstraction what are literally matters of life and death for some. It is healthy to admit the need to think in community and for spaces where you can share, learn and grow
The Trouble With Lily Allen's "Hard Out Here"
Here’s an interesting concept! You can make these statements without objectifying black women yourself! According to blogger Cate from BattyMamzelle: “To me, this is the equivalent of putting a television character in blackface in order to “show that blackface is bad.” It’s great that that’s the message you want to send, but you don’t combat the racist act by participating in it.
About This Miley Business...
The blogger BattyMamzelle wrote a post which was also posted on Jezebel that has garnered a ton of attention. Along the lines of our continuing roundtable on race, feminism and digital spaces, she wondered why so many feminists who were defending Cyrus from slut-shaming were missing all the hard-to-miss racial imagery the pop star was playing with.
What Everyone Said About Miley Cyrus's VMA Performance
Yesterday, on cue, the Internet exploded in debate over Miley Cyrus's VMA performance. Others identified the implicit and oft-explicit slut-shaming to be found in many mainstream media responses. Here's our roundup of critical responses.
Bodies, Power & Caribbean Feminists on Lily Allen’s Hard Out There
I put this post together because I was dissatisfied with the way in which Sociological Images chose to report audience responses to the video. I found their approach to be uncritical, apologetic, sympathetic even and extremely weak on the analysis of race and power. After seeking permission I made this “private” conversation among Caribbean feminists a public commentary that goes beyond the Lily Allen video to think about black women’s sexual expression in the face of social relations of power of gender, race, class, among others.