Recall the early days of #MeToo: the excitement, the promise, the sense of a tectonic shift reshaping the culture from the roots. There was a time, in the movement’s first fecund months, when powerful men were falling like dominos. It …
How Buffy revamped teen sex
American teenagers were forced to confront a very particular existential terror in 1997. It wasn’t your usual horror film, even though it did star Freddie Prinze, Jr. In Too Soon for Jeff he plays a high school senior who gets …
Is Margaret Atwood a coward?
Margaret Atwood never fancied herself a discourse power broker, but we thrust the role on her anyway. The year was 2016; the election of Donald Trump had sparked a brief, blazing feminist backlash that now feels like something out of …
The power of victims who settle
It’s two years today since the #MeToo movement brought down its biggest monster: on February 24, 2020, Harvey Weinstein was convicted on two of five charges against him, including rape in the third degree.
Weinstein’s guilty verdict remains unusual. Despite …
The cost of sexual liberation
“Women have very little idea of how much men hate them,” wrote Germaine Greer in The Female Eunuch (1970). Last week, a tall, moustachio’d 25-year-old serial shagger in New York City became Exhibit A for this claim – and also …