There’s a long,

long history of people shaming women for not living up to some beauty and/or sexual standard, and if you don’t see why it’s problematic for a guy to basically insult a woman he’s about to sleep with, implying that she is not sexually adequate for him.
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"Under the current

‘tyranny of slenderness’ women are forbidden to become large or massive; they must take up as little space as possible. The very contours a woman’s body takes on as she matures - the fuller breasts and rounder hips - have become distasteful. The body by which a woman feels herself judged and which by rigorous discipline she must try to assume is the body of early adolescence, slight and unformed, a body lacking flesh or substance, a body in whose very contours the image of immaturity has been inscribed. The requirement that a woman maintain a smooth and hairless skin carries further the theme of inexperience, for an infantilized face must accompany her infantilized body, a face that never ages or furrows its brow in thought. The face of the ideally feminine woman must never display the marks of character, wisdom and experience that we so admire in men."

Foucault, Femininity, and the Modernization of Patriarchal Power, Sandra Lee Bartky
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i get the

point of that saying but i don’t like it. i don’t approve. because just because someone is naturally thin doesn’t mean she’s not a real woman either. i don’t think your body size makes you a real woman. what bothers me is that the “curvy” women of the world make statements like “real women have curves” and place the same stigmatized notion held to them on skinny women. sounds a little hypocritical to me.
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The Blackwater employee

in question felt so entitled to sex with a woman, that he considered it a job-related expense and a part of "morale welfare" that could be charged to the government. He felt so entitled to sex, he thought you should pay for it.
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Rodarte

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Here’s how it

should go. You don’t have to pick me up, because I live in the Valley and you probably don’t, but we should on a first date meet at a restaurant or whatnot and NOT your house. I should not be in your house on the first date unless your first date is a house party. And it better be a good house party. There not better be any fucking red plastic cups. We’re not 19 anymore. Buy some fucking glasses. BUT THAT’S NOT IMPORTANT RIGHT NOW.

We will meet at a restaurant and it will be a fucking classy joint.

Let me tell you this right now: you will pay for dinner. Yes, I said it. You are a man. I am awoman. I am a hot woman. I am a sexy funny awesome hot woman. I am not paying for dinner. I am not going to split it. I am not going to do any of that shit. I don’t care if this is 2009 and I don’t care that Beyonce is running around in a leotard shouting at us to be proud single ladies: You. Are. Buying. Dinner.

Pretend that the entire date has Camera Obscura as the soundtrack. Is that fuck music? No, it is not fuck music. It is clean and beautiful and adorable. Like our first date.

You are going to kiss me at the end of this date, motherfucker. It is going to be so fucking pure and awesome that I should be able to hear Sixpence None The Richer playing in my head while it’s happening.

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Love story

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Nothing excuses the

shit you said to this woman, the fact that you made her feel unsafe confessing her own rape to her best friend because you were such an awesome feminist.
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Never use an

adverb to modify the verb "said" . . . he admonished gravely. To use an adverb this way (or almost any way) is a mortal sin. The writer is now exposing himself in earnest, using a word that distracts and can interrupt the rhythm of the exchange. I have a character in one of my books tell how she used to write historical romances "full of rape and adverbs".

You can never read your own book with the innocent anticipation that comes with that first delicious page of a new book, because you wrote the thing. You've been backstage. You've seen how the rabbits were smuggled into the hat. Therefore ask a reading friend or two to look at it before you give it to anyone in the publishing business. This friend should not be someone with whom you have a ­romantic relationship, unless you want to break up.

Do spend a few minutes a day working on the cover biog – "He divides his time between Kabul and Tierra del Fuego." But then get back to work.

Never worry about the commercial possibilities of a project. That stuff is for agents and editors to fret over – or not. Conversation with my American publisher. Me: "I'm writing a book so boring, of such limited commercial appeal, that if you publish it, it will probably cost you your job." Publisher: "That's exactly what makes me want to stay in my job."

Never ride a bike with the brakes on. If something is proving too difficult, give up and do something else. Try to live without resort to per­severance. But writing is all about ­perseverance. You've got to stick at it. In my 30s I used to go to the gym even though I hated it. The purpose of ­going to the gym was to postpone the day when I would stop going. That's what writing is to me: a way of ­postponing the day when I won't do it any more, the day when I will sink into a depression so profound it will be indistinguishable from perfect bliss.

Never forget, even your own rules are there to be broken.

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Savage Love February 25, 2010

Math is hard, Representative Elliott, but see if you can't wiggle this into your cranial cavity: 70,771,200 is more—a whole lot more—than 2,565,000. If you really want to protect the sacred sanctity of marriage from the unholy taint of penises wiggling in rectums, Representative Elliott, you need to ban straight marriage first. (We needn't protect marriage from lesbians, of course, as lesbians don't have anuses.)

...

Had I never read your column, I might have assumed my boyfriend was gay or thought he was gross or thought I was gross for liking the idea. Instead, I picked out some panties that looked sweet on him, and we had a wonderful time. Thank you so much!

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BEST column ever.

In other words,

she is not "sexualised" in her eyes; only in ours. Until, that is, we pass it on to her, which is something that "we" – to use the term loosely – do to girls all the time. In a woefully misplaced parody of protection, a girl is constantly warned against risking the attentions of a paedophile – fair enough, as girls are far more at risk than boys – but every time we do it we are also telling her, whether she needs to know it or not, that she is sexually tempting. Ergo: sexual.
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We act as

if the hatred directed at women is something that can be dealt with by a stern talking to, as if the misogyny embedded in our culture is an unruly child rather than systematic oppression. Yes, women today fare better than our foremothers. But the benchmarks so often cited -- the right to vote, working outside the home, laws that make domestic violence illegal -- don't change the reality of women's lives. They don't prevent 1 million women from being raped, female troops from being assaulted or the continued legal discrimination against gay and transgender people. And seriously, are American women really supposed to be satisfied with the most basic rights of representation? Thrilled that our country has deigned to consider us fully human
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Indifference is killing me

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Time to get low, do the tootsie roll

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You left me in the dark

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Cultivate your curves -

they may be dangerous but they won’t be avoided.
Mae West
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Lips of Thomas

I slowly eat 1 kilo of honey with a silver spoon.

I slowly drink 1 liter of red wine out of a crystal glass.

I break the glass with my right hand.

I cut a five pointed star on my stomach with a razor blade.

I violently whip myself until I no longer feel any pain.

I lay down on a cross made of ice blocks.

The heat of a suspended space heater pointed at my stomach
Causes the cut star to bleed.

The rest of my body begins to freeze

I remain on the ice cross for 30 minutes until the audience interrupts the piece by removing the ice blocks from underneath.

Duration: 2 hours 1975

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Am I not

entitled to be cruel? Man desires, woman is desired. That is woman’s entire but decisive advantage.
Leopold Von Sacher-Masoch, Venus in Furs
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Ikea dress

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Tabuba

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<3

Lure him back to bed

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Before you go

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She tied you

to her kitchen chair, she broke your throne and she cut your hair. And from your lips she drew a hallelujah.
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Queen dot kong

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The constant struggle

to achieve “machismo,” or the masculine ideal for men, is kind of like the constant struggle for women to achieve “femininity”—no one can ever fully live up to the expectations set forward by society, and the truth is, there’s really no reason why they should. People are punished for failing to reach arbitrary ideals.
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Alexander McQueen

The Daily Mail is reporting that Alexander McQueen committed suicide. The British paper says the designer was found dead at his flat in London, and is believed to have hung himself. His mother had died a few days earlier. A source at McQueen's office confirmed the suicide, saying, "It is a tragic loss. We are not making a comment at this time out of respect for the McQueen family." Details of his death have not been released yet. McQueen, who was discovered by Isabella Blow, was extremely close to the fashion editor. Blow killed herself in 2007.
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:/

I would like

to trust a guy enough to let him know my fears, insecurities, and emotional trauma associated with vaginal pain, but I just think most wouldn't be understanding enough to be patient with me. The longer I wait the harder it all will be, and sometimes I wish I had been more reckless in my last relationship just to get it over with already.
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Parisian Love, Plan B

This is the original and, I think, wonderful Google ad that ran during the Super Bowl. Selling your product by showing how your product works – without resorting to typical Super Bowl misogynist storylines.
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“Next month, it

will be two years since I’ve had sex,” my friend Monica declared as we walked home from a party one night. “And I haven’t kissed anyone in one year.”
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Nerve Up

And if you

don’t believe me, you’ve never been a married woman who kept her family name. I have had students hold that up as proof of my “sexism.” My own brother told me that he could never marry a woman who kept her name because “everyone would know who ruled that relationship.” Perfect equality - my husband keeps his name and I keep mine – is held as a statement of superiority on my part.
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Last night's love affair is looking vulnerable

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The results were

dramatic. Idle time dropped from 1,400 hours in February 2007 to 1000 hours in February 2008 to just 380 hours in February 2009. Depending on fuel costs, cutting idle time has saved the company thousands of dollars a year—roughly $20,000 during 2008, for example.
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Guitar boat

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Look, I don’t

want to be all “if you only watch one major sporting event per year, perhaps your opinions on the ads running during them are inevitably going to be shallow and trite,” but here’s the deal: the only TV programs men watch (in any great number) are sports. That is not a stereotype: that is a Nielson-certified factoid. What that means is that, if you want to reach a male demographic with a TV ad, the only choice you have is to reach to all of it at once. And that necessarily means that you have to shoot for the lowest common denom-nom-nom-inator. With women, advertisers have the luxury of both assuming they are going to be exposed to multiple media streams (so they can spread out a bunch of subtler ads over disparate programming and go for a cumulative effect) and being able to target women by their rough taste group. And so you can run ads that “make sense” more, in that an ad run during Oprah makes sense for that audience and an ad run during The Rachel Zoe Project makes sense for that audience, which somehow seems less insulting? But with men, you have no such luxuries. Advertisers have to run extremely blatant ads that sacrifice any hope of getting niche demographics by pandering as hard as possible to the largest demographic. Which means basically Dane Cook jokes in ad form.
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The Family Jewels

Your words in my memory are like music to me

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Florence

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Before feelings could reach the page

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I break in

to Tiffany’s at midnight. Do I go for the vault? No. I go for the chandelier. It’s priceless. As I’m taking it down a woman catches me. She tells me to stop. It’s her father’s business. She’s Tiffany. I say no. We make love all night. In the morning the cops come and I escape in one of their uniforms. I tell her to meet me in Mexico, but I go to Canada. I don’t trust her. Besides, I like the cold. Thirty years later, I get a postcard: I have a son, and it’s the chief of police. This is where the story gets interesting. I tell Tiffany to meet me in Paris by the Trocadero. She’s been waiting for me all these years. She’s never taken another lover. I don’t care. I don’t show up. I go to Berlin. That’s where I stashed the chandelier.
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Let me tell

you something, man-to-man. The fact that you or I haven’t beat a woman? That counts for nothing. The fact that you and I have even been so good as to be nice to a woman when it wasn’t strictly called for? That’s not enough to qualify you (or me, or anyone) as a non-arsehole. You know why? Because women get that stuff for free. It’s a matter of course. It’s not something that requires a special effort and a pat on the back for us, every time we do it. “You know what, I have been on the road dozens of times, and I never once deliberately tail-ended someone, and even when someone else blew their horn when they got cut off, I totally agreed with a nod and sympathetic look”. The whole problem that feminism looks at is that the experience of being a woman just isn’t judged as being important or noteworthy. But hey, us guys, look at us, right? We’re nice to people for no reason! Doesn’t that make us great!
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Fleetilya

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There’s pleasure to

be had in dressing up, certainly. But it’s a pleasure that’s best derived from pursuing your own aesthetic, and wearing clothes that feel good on your body, not following some arbitrary and impossible to live up to definition of style.
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If there is

one thing that has proven true throughout human history, it's that people like – scratch that, love – to have sex. It's one of the most natural things a person can do, and pretty soon after hitting puberty our bodies start encouraging us to go forth and multiply (or at least have fun trying). Of course, for a lot of us, the "going forth" part is more desirable than the actual multiplying, and so human beings have also spent centuries trying to separate one from the other. The 20th century brought the birth-control pill and increasing freedoms for women – including the social acceptability of sex before marriage and sex for reasons other than baby-making.
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Media reports said

the father had told relatives he was unhappy that his daughter – one of nine children – had male friends. The grandfather is said to have beaten her for having relations with the opposite sex.
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Prohibition will never

stop sex work – because sex work is an economic strategy for many women, migrants and minorities, because nothing can stop people from trying to improve their lives and because nothing can stop sexual desire. There have been numerous historical attempts to ban, eliminate or control us, but we, the sex workers, are still there, fighting for our freedom.
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Apparently he had

said things along the lines of "I'm too tired right now, let's just go to sleep" and she had continued to proposition him thinking "welll, this will help you sleep better!" My immediate reaction was that there was no way she had coerced or pressured him into sex. After all, he should've just said "No really, I don't want to do this right now" if she kept at it. It was his fault for not stopping the encounter.
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Heartbreakers get their own songs

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If you love

someone, ask him for nothing. Don’t hold him from his destiny. Don’t keep him from going off in search of his own answers. Don’t ask him for commitment. You will know commitment is real when it is something given willingly, and not as something obligatory. Don’t ask him for promises. If you are patient, if you have faith, you will know in your heart when the right time for promises has come. And when that time arrives, then you will see that you have both lost nothing by setting each other free, and have instead gained a richer, fuller life, a wealth of experiences, and a stronger certainty of your desires.

But should he not return to you, then life hasn’t cheated you because no promises were broken. Your bitterness will not last long, and you will feel thankful and blessed that at the very least, this beautiful soul has colored your life, that knowing him has already made life infinitely more meaningful.

By setting a person free, you run a risk of him not returning. But always remember that you found him beautiful precisely because he was free. People are like sunlight. You can feel their warmth, and their glow, but you can’t hold them in your hand and keep them with you forever. People choose to stay. But a choice is made more meaningful when it is made despite so many other options.

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Balmain

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Rebekah Frank

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Jeffrey Campbell

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I left with a feeling

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I was sitting

in the bathroom at work. I do that a lot. It’s like taking a break, so I act like I have to go all the time. My co-workers probably think I have an overactive bladder, but truthfully, I’m not even sure they notice when I’m there, or when I’m not. All I do is listen to my iPod, file files, highlight things, and emboss stickers. I make 12 dollars an hour and work 8:30-4:30, Monday to Friday. I eat my lunch at my desk. I get a lot of paper-cuts. I look out the windows from way up there on the 31st floor and wonder exactly how hard I’d have to hit the windows so that they would break and I could fall through. They’re double paned though, so probably it would take more effort than I can muster. Anyway. I was sitting in the bathroom, checking Twitter, when I get a message from my best friend.
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Brown hair makes her lips more red

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