Dear Madame X, I seem to be only attracted to men who are macho assholes. I like them at first but after a while I can’t stand it. Why does this keep happening? Macho Man Lover Dear Macho Man Lover, Macho men have a lot of attractive qualities mixed in with the unattractive ones. All ...
There’s not much that hasn’t been said about Alexander Trocchi’s treatment of women, real and literary. I read Young Adam through gritted teeth as a much younger woman, and again when it became a film in 2003. The film was, in my opinion, better than the novel in the sense that it effectively contrasted human ...
After the publication of his fourth and most successful novel The Slap, which was turned into a TV miniseries in Australia and kicked off the 2012 Edinburgh International Book Festival, Christos Tsiolkas complained of the poverty of criticism of the sex in his book. I agreed. The novel itself is written in eight parts, telling ...
It was one of those headlines that makes you look twice. I questioned my own powers of comprehension as I read over the words referring to a case that went before the British justice system: “Woman fails to quash conviction for falsely retracting rape claim.” A woman was convicted for falsely retracting a rape claim? ...
It’s a strange thing for me to love Charles Bukowsky, renowned hater of women. And yet from the first time I read his notorious 1978 semi-autobiographical novel Women, I did. It’s a chronicle of abuse and misery. Bukowsky’s character Henry Chinaski is a self-aware, utterly unromantic alcoholic who has cold sexual encounters with women. Chinaski ...
Jay-Z has vowed to stop calling women bitches and degrading them in his song lyrics after the birth of his baby daughter. In a poem he wrote to the young Blue Ivy he writes: “Before I got in the game, made a change, and got rich/I didn’t think hard about using the word bitch/I rapped, I flipped ...
With the Shafia honour killings case ongoing in Canadian courts, it’s important to look at why women take part in abusing, or even killing, other women. Tooba Yahya, accused with her son, Hamed Shafia, and husband, Mohammad Shafia, of the murder of her three teenage daughters and husband’s ex-wife, is becoming a familiar face. Yahya ...
A public inquiry in the UK looking at media ethics has begun to look into sexism in the press. The focus is on sexism in tabloid journalism. There’s no doubt that sex – and sexism – sells papers. From a daily picture of a topless teenager on page three in one British tabloid paper (The ...
Misogynistic hashtag of the day can only be #ItsOnlyOkToHitAGirlIf. I first spotted it yesterday, when @VandalLiza tweeted: #ItsOnlyOkToHitAGirlIf is currently a hashtag topic. This is disgusting. Have a word with yourselves you ignorant twats. I investigated further, and noticed a tweet from @B_Shantell, another like-minded person: Did I really just see #ItsOnlyOkToHitAGirlIf on my timeline? ...
Mordecai Richler has a talent for shovelling trouble. His 1973 collection of essays of the same name contains a heavy shovel full of the author’s renowned criticism of his own country and close-to-the-bone commentary on the Jewish-Canadian experience, along with commentary on culture and the life of a writer. The style is less academic and ...
The latest film in the American Pie series, American Reunion, contains a shocking scene – male full-frontal nudity including...
Dear Madame X, I have just started seeing this girl. She seems great, but she recently told me she...
Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved arrived in my hands via a public library, when I was a broke teenager with...
My attention was drawn this week to an article about the reaction at a Canadian university to proposals to...
Airport security. Bloody nuisance. Also a conspiracy designed to subjugate women. Allow me to elaborate. Despite flying quite a...
The Cannes film festival has kicked off this week with controversy over the lack of films made by women...
Dear Madame X, I seem to be only attracted to men who are macho assholes. I like them at...
When A Clockwork Orange was published in 1962, the term sexualized violence wasn’t in use. The distinction between sexualized...
