Sometimes your past returns in the strangest of ways, as happened to me when today’s article from TomDispatch regular Rebecca Gordon first crossed my doorstep. As you’ll see, its subject would not be one on which this almost 75-year-old guy would consider himself to have the slightest expertise: women discovering their bodies in complex ways... Read More

I’ll never forget the first time I saw my own menstrual period start. I was seated on the floor in a circle of women, legs bent in front of me, soles facing each other, a mirror resting on my feet. The flashlight directed at the mirror illuminated my vagina, which was held open by a... Read More

First, for the record, let me tell you my story about another of those perversely creepy Hollywood predators, a sort of cut-rate Harvey Weinstein: the screenwriter and film director James Toback. As I read now of women he preyed upon year after year, I feel the rage that’s bubbled in the back of my brain... Read More

Sometimes I wonder what school I went to. I mean, I know perfectly well. I attended a place I never wanted to go: Yale. But when I was 17 years old, my parents -- and a familial urge to be upwardly mobile -- more than overwhelmed my personal and private desire to go elsewhere. So,... Read More

Almost 80, I’ve been stunned and bewildered by the ever-expanding list of sexually predatory males, from movie mogul Harvey Weinstein to former New Republic editor Leon Wieseltier to comedian Louis C.K. And it’s triggered a list of questions for me: Who raised these louts? How did they give themselves permission to harass and assault women... Read More

Starting with Fox News anchor Bill O’Reilly and film producer Harvey Weinstein, they’ve fallen like so many dominoes in the glare of publicity and grim public testimony from the women (and, in a few cases, men) they mistreated -- all those predators, gropers, sexual abusers of Hollywood, TV, the news, magazines, comedy, and politics, including... Read More

Back in 1992, a certain New York real estate mogul told a reporter from New York magazine that you have to treat women “like shit.” That was a perfect summary of his philosophy, but it may be an even better descriptor for the way many women treat themselves -- or, rather, how they’re treated by... Read More

Women make up more than half the population of the United States, about 51%. We women are 55% of college students and we take more degrees than men. About 44 million of us between the ages of 15 and 50 have children, but only 5 million or so are stay-at-home moms. That’s because we go... Read More

[The following passages are excerpted from Eduardo Galeano’s bookChildren of the Days: A Calendar of Human History, just out in paperback (Nation Books).] The Shoe (January 15) In 1919 Rosa Luxemburg, the revolutionary, was murdered in Berlin. Her killers bludgeoned her with rifle blows and tossed her into the waters of a canal. Along the... Read More

What do the prime minister of India, retired National Football League punter Chris Kluwe, and superstar comedian Aziz Ansari have in common? It’s not that they’ve all walked into a bar, though Ansari could probably figure out the punch line to that joke. They’ve all spoken up for feminism this year, part of an unprecedented... Read More

In my experience, when it comes to women, young men lie to each other in grotesque ways and those lies are foundational to what, at least in my youth, was men’s culture. My own learning curve on this was uncomfortable indeed and I’ve never forgotten it. In the early 1960s, I went to Yale, an... Read More

I still don't know why Sallie and I bothered to go to that party in the forest slope above Aspen. The people were all older than us and dull in a distinguished way, old enough that we, at forty-ish, passed as the occasion's young ladies. The house was great -- if you like Ralph Lauren-style... Read More

One evening over dinner, I began to joke, as I often had before, about writing an essay called “Men Explain Things to Me.” Every writer has a stable of ideas that never make it to the racetrack, and I’d been trotting this pony out recreationally every once in a while. My houseguest, the brilliant theorist... Read More

Where was the NSA? That's the question former State Department whistleblower Peter Van Buren recently asked at his We Meant Well blog -- and it couldn’t be a smarter one. After all, the Isla Vista killer, Elliot Rodgers, made both his own sense of disturbance and his urge for “retribution” against women quite public before... Read More

Here are two figures, and given how anyone who has been sexually assaulted is likely to feel about the experience, they have to be low-end estimates: the latest Pentagon numbers indicate that about 26,000 men and women (but mainly women) in the U.S. military “were sexually assaulted in 2011, up from 19,000 in 2010”; and... Read More

In December, and again in February, at the Google Bus blockades in San Francisco, one thing struck me forcefully: the technology corporation employees waiting for their buses were all staring so intently at their phones that they apparently didn’t notice the unusual things going on around them until their buses were surrounded. Sometimes I feel... Read More