Manliness — beautifully captured in the audacious cover to this learned tome.
In our woefully matriarchal (and third-wave feminist/post-structuralist) era, it is rarely regarded as appropriate even to speak of manliness as a meaningful concept, let alone as a virtue (perhaps not even appropriate to speak of virtue — or to say “appropriate”).
Nonetheless, there is, for […]
There’s something to be said for a TV show opening with a bit of music so brief that it’s more a sting than a song yet still works — with one of my favorite examples being the whittled-down, split-second thing they eventually reduced the Malcolm in the Middle open to, as you may have seen: […]
As if it weren’t sexy enough that (1) Joss Whedon’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer character is idolized by third-wave feminists and (2) his upcoming series Dollhouse features some sort of genetically-engineered amnesiac hot-chick secret agents, it appears that (3) some former cast members of the (absolutely fantastic and tragically short-lived) sci-fi series he did in […]
Tonight, as noted yesterday, brings both the monthly Manhattan Project described in my front page’s right margin and the Mac Donald/Novak debate about God at the Harvard Club — but Saturday (Sept. 20) and next Tuesday (Sept. 23) is a whole different kettle of fish.
That’s when sex-obsessed (yet disarmingly mild-mannered and cupcake-baking) writer-editor Rachel Kramer […]
Tracy Quan is a Manhattan-dwelling former prostitute turned Salon columnist and novelist, presumably drawing heavily upon her own experiences in creating the adventures of Nancy Chan, the business-savvy call girl heroine of Diary of a Manhattan Call Girl, Diary of a Married Call Girl, and now Diary of a Jetsetting Call Girl, which I’m happy […]
Having blogged about Barbie yesterday, it’s only fitting that I mention Pamela Anderson today — no, not the fact that she said Sarah Palin should “suck it,” since I’m avoiding commentary on right-left disputes for the next month and a half — but rather the fact that she stripped in front of Ellen DeGeneres, […]
Having taken on the tough targets this week — conservatives, women, gays, prostitutes, Olympic athletes, and Katherine Taylor’s posture — let’s round things out by taking a tough look at girls who like Barbie. Or rather, let’s read this Barbie-positive story about a man unexpectedly catching a prize-winning fish with a toy Barbie fishing rod.
The […]
My friend Katherine Taylor — libertarian, fiction writer, beauty, fashionplate, and recovering slouchy person — has an article in the September issue of Allure (I always figured I’d be in that venue before her, but life is full of surprises) about her battle with bad posture (she looked fine already but is improving nonetheless).
As it […]
My liberal ex is no less patriotic for being left-leaning — and was thus delighted to hear about my parents’ decades-long practice of raising an American flag in the morning and taking it down at sunset (I learned some of the rules of proper flag-handling myself during my stint in the Boy Scouts — including […]
I alluded Monday to the fact that one could crudely carve twentieth-century feminism into three phases that were, in rough chronological order, libertarian, leftist, and more or less post-structuralist (that is, refusing to accept any essentialist definitions). One cool move on the part of that third phase, annoying as its amorphousness can be, was […]
Family Guy, which is now about the only thing I watch (and which may or may not still be the subject of a neat paintings exhibit at New York’s Paley Center for Media — can’t tell from their damn website), had a bit with Superman spying on Lois with his X-ray vision, realizing he’d accidentally […]
Tonight brings the second season of Terminator, which means dainty little Summer Glau beating people up, and in some sense we have Joss Whedon to thank for that, since her main resume item for being dainty but violent before this was his Serenity movie.
That teen-girl-butt-kicker archetype in turn echoes his character Buffy the Vampire Slayer, […]
Some elite thinkers might think that I sully myself by writing with even the tiniest sympathy for figures like McCain, Palin, or Ted Nugent, as in yesterday’s post. And I admit it’s hard to know when to stay above the fray and when to risk looking like a partisan participant in it — and […]
There’s more to the Republican convention than the Republicans’ first-ever female v.p. nominee, but let’s talk about her some more anyway, along with some related topics (fine though McCain’s speech was):
•Katherine Taylor pointed out to me that a writer who, like me, was a recipient of a grant from the Phillips Foundation, helped spark the […]
That headline does not refer to tonight’s birthday girl, Dawn Eden (and note that this month’s Debate at Lolita Bar occurs Sunday, Sept. 28, NOT tonight as it normally would) but rather to tonight’s other conservative female star, Sarah Palin. (But if my birthday party co-organizers were able to follow my suggestion about putting […]
