Noah Berlatsky

"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.

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.

This doesn't mean that the outcomes of domestic violence are always equal; men tend to be bigger and stronger than women, and therefore are more likely to cause serious harm, even in situations where violence is reciprocal. Still, the fact that women are frequently perpetrators of violence in domestic situations substantially undermines the typical story of domestic abuse—and helps to show just how harmful that story is.

To understand this debate, it's important to consider historical context.

Genre boundaries are conscious of race—and, in the case of rock, conscious of gender too.

Hating sex workers—and treating them as things—can get you money.

Talking about race can get you into a lot of trouble . . . especially if you don't have a lot of class power or status.

With the death of Leonard Nimoy, it's a good moment to pay tribute to (and question) his most famous character.

Country music is an overwhelmingly heterosexual endeavor. The LGBTQ community certainly listen to, and perform, country, but in terms of lyrical content and themes, country has been focused on male-female romantic love.

In the U.S., anti-Semitism is universally condemned. This means that, effectively, anti-Semitism doesn't exist.