Category / 2017 / Feminism / Food / Miscellaneous / Social Justice / The Politics of Pop Culture
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Lady Gaga and the Sexual Politics of Meat
Consider Lady Gaga’s meat dress from the 2010 MTV Video Music Awards (VMAs): She walked the red carpet in an outfit made entirely from slabs of raw flank steak. Gaga, or her designers, cut out a large circle of meat from the back of the dress, leaving a large circle of her buttocks exposed with…
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Texas vs. Texas: The Senate That Won’t Stop
Dallas is a divided city. It was divided before President Trump was elected. It was divided before President Obama was elected. It was divided before President Kennedy was assassinated. Dallas is a divided city—that much is obvious. Texas, as a whole, is less fractured. In the sweltering red heat of Republican dominance, only a few…
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Art Can Only Imitate Life
“Going to Whole Foods, want me to pick you up anything?” This Tinder message— courtesy of Matt, 21—lit up Victoria’s phone, and we both immediately burst out laughing. I was visiting Victoria in her sunny California hometown, and we’d spent the day playing tourist and gorging on acai bowls. Now exhausted and uncomfortably full, we…
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Being Human
Nolite te Bastardes Carborundorum My senior year of high school, my AP English Literature teacher assigned The Handmaid’s Tale as the very last book we would ever read together. I didn’t expect much. Thirteen years of Catholic education tempered my expectations of what would be read in the classroom—probably a “canonical” classic (written by a…
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The Borders Around Our Own Empathy
When a suicide bomber detonated at an arena concert in Manchester in May 2017, it shook America to its bones. A little more than a week later, when a car bomb exploded at a busy market in Kabul, Afghanistan, America merely shivered. Terrorist attacks are ubiquitous and hard to keep up with, and an individual’s…
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On Wonder Woman
A classmate of mine asked if I would accompany her to see a screening of Wonder Woman. We were studying abroad in Paris, and I was curious as to whether or not the film would be in English. I happily agreed and walked to the theater in anticipation of what I would experience. From the…
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Senator, You’re No Lloyd Bentsen: The Decline and Fall of Political Wit
BY BRETT MEAD The American political system isn’t what it used to be. With Congressional job approval numbers hovering in the teens and a culture in Washington that seems more dysfunctional with every passing day, it’s time to face facts: politicians aren’t funny anymore. So how’d it happen? How did the famous witticisms of politicians…
