Noah Berlatsky

Action movies don't usually bother much with romance. The trailer for The Transporter: Refueled certainly doesn't. The hero is cool — sexy women, plural, throw themselves at him, or at least stand near him and things blow up; there are fights and revenge and high production values. Romance is, at best, a secondary concern.

"The look on Miley's face during Nicki Minaj's savage, expletive-laden rant says it all," Salon tweeted the day after the VMAs. Less than 140 characters, but still enough to link a black woman to a longstanding racial slur.

The loss of gospel history has meant forgetting how important black women have been to American performance styles.

Banks' "Ice Princess" video shows that it's not only white people who can pick up someone else's culture.

Fifth Harmony is nobody's idea of a roots band.

These covers remind us of the lengthy, rich—but often obscured—history of female songwriters.

Why should prostitution be illegal? And, more specifically why should male prostitution be illegal?

While Atwood's feminist dystopia remains our favorite nightmarish future, Marge Piercy's Woman On The Edge Of Time is far superior.

It's hard to deny the appeal of the masculine ideal, especially when embodied in Jude Law. And yet, it's also a depressing vision.

Their sexuality traps and destroys male innocence, as they grad hold, by the penis- the better to lead him to castration. Make no mistake that castration is greeted with fear, terror, and disgust—but also with glee. Women as super villains allow their characters to be super powerful; a force for evil is at least a force. In a media landscape where women are often rendered secondary, invisible, and passive, the femme fatale, in her icy violence, seizes female agency along with the phallus that she so efficiently cuts off.