Noah Berlatsky

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

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

Iin a passionate Facebook thread last week, children's author Meg Rosoff rejected the idea that there are "too few books for marginalized young people," as librarian Edith Edi Campbell had suggested.

With the prospect of another Bush/Clinton presidential contest looming as ominously as Donald Trump's hairpiece, the word "dynasty" seems to be frothing off of many a pundit's keyboard. "Clinton, Bush struggle to shed dynasty labels," a Washington Post headline declared.

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.

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.

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.

"I believe that, in order to address these problems, we need to first understand how we got here."

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

"Childbearing [is] barbaric and pregnancy should be abolished," wrote radical feminist theorist Shulamith Firestone in The Dialectic of Sex.