A dad friend of mine, who’d read my recent piece on making sexual assault in the news a teachable moment for kids, forwarded me the following tweet from Andi Zeisler while I was in the middle of my 11-year-old’s birthday slumber party: The 4th-grade boys coming to my kid’s slumber party tonight are really in […]
A friend recently wrote us about her real world application of some of the advice Lo recently gave in “How to Prevent a Brock: 10 Practical Ways Parents Can Fight Rape Culture.” We couldn’t be more delighted! Raising conscientious kids with agency — especially girls — is possible in small, everyday ways like this: I wanted to […]
Dear Em & Lo, I am a 28 year old man. I am a virgin and want to stay a virgin until I get married. I began masturbating when I was 18, but I’ve been masturbating in my dreams since I was 5 years old. This situation is a real inconvenience. I’m masturbating in my dreams 3 to 4 times a week. […]
To read the Tweets and comments on the Babe.net story about one woman’s horrible night with actor & comedian Aziz Ansari (read it here if you haven’t already), you’d assume there were only two possible, mutually exclusive conclusions to draw: either you believe that Ansari is a sexual assaulter who’s career should be over OR […]
The Power by Naomi Alderman, which won the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction earlier this year in England, has already been hailed as “our era’s ‘Handmaid’s Tale,’” it’s that good. The novel imagines women suddenly having the ability, thanks to environmental pollutants, to emit from their hands electrical charges of varying degrees — from prickly […]
A lot of strides have been made in educating people, especially college students, about consent. Many now understand you have to ask for it throughout a hookup, it must be given enthusiastically and verbally as you go, it can’t be given by people impaired by drugs or alcohol, and it can’t be given by minors. […]
This past weekend, over takeout and then later texts, some friends and I were discussing the Louis C.K. allegations. (Talking about sexual misconduct, assault and rape has become regular cocktail party conversation these days, which is a good thing.) One friend shared the following social media post by the writer Emily Bracken: As a feminist […]
We don’t want special treatment, just equality and justice. On October 19th, 2017, Chief of Staff John Kelly gave a fiercely personal defense of President Trump’s failed attempt at a sympathetic call to the grieving widow of one of the four soldiers recently killed in the Niger ambush. Having lost his own son to combat, […]
Some combination of personality flaw/disorder, power high, and celebrity allowed Harvey Weinstein (and Donald Trump and Bill Cosby and Bill O’Reilly…) to allegedly sexually harass and assault many women for many years with impunity and without remorse. But there’s another factor at work in these cases — one that’s insidious, pervasive and widely permissible: casual […]
There’s no such thing as an “ugly vagina.” Here’s why… Dear Em & Lo, A male acquaintance recently started a conversation about “ugly” vaginas with my friends and me. He said that some vaginas resemble “kebabs” and that a lot of guys are really put off sex when they get a hot girl naked and […]
We once met a woman who claimed (quite proudly, we might add), “I’ve always had dick, so I don’t need to masturbate.” Our eyes bulged, our jaws dropped, our ears began to bleed a little. How could she utter such scandalous words in the 21st century? Women should masturbate! We tried desperately to explain that […]
What a critique of a summer superhero blockbuster might look like in a matriarchal world (inspired by David Edelstein’s sexist review of Wonder Woman): The only grace note in the generally clunky Spider-Man: Homecoming is its star, the five-foot-eight-inch, barely legal, English actor and dancer Tom Holland, who is the perfect blend of teenage day-dreaminess and balls. The 21-year-old […]
A choose your own gender-venture! Our family recently adopted two kittens. We had our pick of the litter, so we figured we’d get a girl and a boy, just like our two kids. They decided to name the girl Rey and the boy Po. (Star Wars fans relax: for whatever reason — let’s call it […]
Last night on Survivor, during a desperate attempt to throw a fellow competitor under the bus to save his own skin at tribal council, Jeff Varner outed Zeke Smith as a transgender man — seemingly forgetting that it wasn’t just six other players cut off from society who’d hear the news, but potentially millions. Zeke had […]
View & share video via YouTube HERE Every year, March 8th is International Women’s Day, a political holiday that honors the struggles, achievements and hopes for women worldwide. Since its first observance in 1908, we’ve come along way, baby! But we’ve got a hell of a long way to go: In 2014 the World […]
There was a time in Bachelor history when fantasy suite sex was never mentioned outright, it was only hinted at. Those hints grew more blunt over the years: cameras were let into the bedrooms of the suites for a bit, mics were left on longer. But in honor of at least the illusion of class, […]
