The Longreads Blog

Meet the Honey Badgers: The Women For Men’s Rights

“Truth is stranger than fiction,” wrote Mark Twain, and he’s not wrong. Case in point: the coterie of outspoken women who believe men’s rights are being trampled. They call themselves the Honey Badger Brigade, and they have podcasts, conventions and vlogs. At Marie Claire, Jen Ortiz interviews these rabid defenders of men and subtly refutes their every point in her investigation:

Just over a year ago, some of these women assembled in a hall at the Veterans of Foreign Wars outpost in St. Clair Shores, Michigan, a suburb of Detroit, as part of an inaugural international conference on human rights. (They were supposed to meet at the DoubleTree by Hilton hotel in Downtown Detroit, but plans changed last-minute because of reported threats by critics.) It was the first-annual International Conference on Men’s Issues. “It was really fantastic for all of us to be in the same room together,” says Janet Bloomfield, 36, one of the most prominent female faces of the men’s rights movement. “The idea that the movement is comprised of a lot of angry white men who can’t get laid is just simply not true—there were so many women!”

Bloomfield, a former bank productivity analyst, juggles being a stay-at-home mom of three “deep in the woods in Northern Ontario” with her work as a writer and unofficial MRA spokesperson. She grew up on a farm, in a family organized by traditional gender roles, where she “could never buy that this was oppression or bad.” A difficult relationship with her mother showed her that women are human—in other words, a woman has the capability to be just as terrible (or presumably, as not-terrible) as a man. Three years ago, she began her blog as a sort of inside joke with a close friend, but it quickly landed her in the manosphere with her take-no-prisoners style of writing about gender and culture. See: “The moment I knew feminism was a crock of shit.”

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Who Is Justin Trudeau? Four Stories About Canada’s Next Prime Minister

While we Americans were busy debating the latest in Joe Biden’s will-he-or-won’t-he status and trying to keep track of just how many Republicans are still in the race, Canada went ahead and elected* their next Prime Minister. So who is the soon-to-be resident of 24 Sussex?

Justin Trudeau, the leader of Canada’s Liberal Party, is a boxer, a self-described feminist, and a former high school teacher. He’s also “young, handsome, [and] charismatic,” according to The New York Times. He’ll be the second-youngest Prime Minister in Canadian history and the very first to follow a parent into office (his father was former Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau, making him the scion of Canada’s only political dynasty). But those are just the headlines; together, these four stories help paint a richer picture of the man who will soon lead our northern neighbors. Read more…

Postscript: A Secret Society Shuts Its Doors

What happened inside the Latitude Society? In September, we featured a Longreads Original by Rick Paulas, “‘We Value Experience,’” which told the story of artist/entrepreneur Jeff Hull and his group’s attempts to build a sustainable “secret society” in the Bay Area. Paulas has shared the following postscript on what happened after his story about the group went public.

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Five days after my article went up at Longreads (“’We Value Experience’: Can A Secret Society Become a Business?”, 9/24/15), visitors to The Latitude’s website were met with the following prompt:

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I’d Like My Hornet Larvae Extra Crispy, Please

Photo by Alpha, Flickr

Cricket flour is here, now what do we do with it? In Lucky Peach magazine, Michael Snyder writes about the many ways people in the Indian state of Nagaland cook their local insects. Your garden species will differ, but Snyder’s article, paired with Jennifer Billock’s “Are Insects the Future of Food?,” provides practical food for thought for a planet whose appetite for animal protein might soon outstrip its ability to produce it. Chocolate covered ants were a novelty. There’s no more time to play gross-out. So fire up the skillet and butter the grasshoppers, people. It’s cricket burger time:

The best hornet larvae don’t turn up until November, I’m told, but even in early September, when the larvae are smaller, they’re a delicacy. In the market, they’re sold not by weight but by the stack: big rounds of cardboard-like hive, half the cells squirming with plump, cream-colored pupae, the rest covered with a fine white sheath that, peeled back, reveals larvae in different stages of gestation. The whole thing has a sort of creepy science-fiction vibe—it looks like a hornet factory, which is just what it is—especially when you remove the white, papery layer to find near-adults clambering out of their cells and attempting to stretch their immature wings. Though I was assured that even these wouldn’t be big enough yet to sting, the whole endeavor felt much like a high-stakes, edible game of whack-a-mole.

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ABC Family’s Conservative Christian Roots

Photo: ABC Family

Writing for The New Republic, Jacqui Shine recently looked at the long, strange history of the Disney-owned television network ABC Family, which will be renamed “Freeform” in January 2016. The network may feature progressive content like The Fosters, which has garnered GLAAD awards and acclaim for its portrayal of an interracial, same-sex couple, but its also had difficulty shaking its conservative Christian image:

This name-change marks a decisive effort to finally shed the neoconservative Christian ethos that has dogged the channel’s branding, however mildly, since Fox bought the network from Pat Robertson in 1998. Yes, that Pat Robertson. In the ABC Family constellation, the televangelist may be the Foster family’s strangest bedfellow. He has maintained a hold on the network’s identity through two sales, and, however vigorous Freeform’s rebranding, he’ll continue to lurk in the background.

Robertson founded the network, then called CBN Satellite Service, in 1977. CBN’s flagship program was The 700 Club, a five-day-a-week program already in production for 11 years; it began as a nightly religious variety show—it’s where Jim and Tammy Faye Baker got their start—but has gradually evolved into a newsmagazine style talk show. Over the next two decades, under Robertson’s ownership and his son’s direction, the network dropped most of the explicitly religious content and evolved into The Family Channel. Even then, the network struggled with its core identity. Like a weird mash-up of competitors Nick at Nite and the Game Show Network, The Family Channel broadcast wholesome syndicated series like Ozzie and Harriet and Barney Miller and tepid originals like Big Brother Jake and parenting game show (not joking) Wait ‘til You Have Kids!!

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Get to Know the National Book Award Finalists for Nonfiction

The National Book Awards, presented by the National Book Foundation, “celebrate the best of American literature, to expand its audience, and to enhance the cultural value of great writing in America.” There are four categories: fiction, nonfiction, “young people’s literature,” and poetry. Several of this year’s nominees have been featured on Longreads before (see: Ta-Nehisi Coates, Adam Johnson, Noelle Stevenson), and this reading list features the five nonfiction nominees. The winner will be announced on November 18, 2015.

1. The Radical: Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me

“The Hard Truths of Ta-Nehisi Coates.” (Benjamin Wallace-Wells, New York Magazine, July 2015)

“Letter to My Son,” in The Atlantic, adapted from Between the World and Me

You must struggle to truly remember this past. You must resist the common urge toward the comforting narrative of divine law, toward fairy tales that imply some irrepressible justice. The enslaved were not bricks in your road, and their lives were not chapters in your redemptive history. They were people turned to fuel for the American machine. Enslavement was not destined to end, and it is wrong to claim our present circumstance—no matter how improved—as the redemption for the lives of people who never asked for the posthumous, untouchable glory of dying for their children.

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Midwesterners Do Things Differently in the Driftless

Although it felt better to raise cattle that weren’t drugged up, economically it was hard to rationalize the decision. Sales barns in the Midwest feed into the industrial agricultural system and make no distinction between grass-fed beef and doped up beef. A farmer just pulls his trailer up to the sales barn, drops the cattle off, and the buyers—huge conglomerates like Hormel, Tyson Foods, or Swift—establish the price for that day. Farmers found themselves between a rock and a hard place. Many opted to cut back on hormones and make up the extra cash in town working a full time job.

The key to sustaining an organic, traditional farming operation is to link the small farms of the Driftless with nearby big city markets. Jamie’s man on the ground in cities of the Midwest is Todd Moore, a veteran of Chicago’s punk-rock kitchens and Milwaukee’s best French restaurants. He runs sales and operations for Jefferson Twp., which means he is in a lot of restaurants, speaking with a lot of chefs, passing out a lot of sample slabs of grass-fed beef and pork.

Sascha Matuszak, writing in Roads & Kingdoms about the distinct geological, agricultural and socio-political identity of the Driftless, a four-state region within the American Midwest that was not scoured by glaciers, and where small-scale farming thrives.

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The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Image via The Intercept.

Below, our favorite stories of the week. Kindle users, you can also get them as a Readlist.

Sign up to receive this list free every Friday in your inbox.

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Maggie Nelson on Explaining the Spectrum of Transgender Identity

Earlier this week, for National Coming Out Day, comic actor Julie Novak performed her “one-person show,” “America’s Next Top: One Top’s Take on Life, Love, Tools and Boxes,” off-Broadway at the United Solo Festival. The show offers a funny, eye-opening take on something that has been a source of pain and discomfort, mostly in her early life: her identity as a “gender variant.” Neither all woman nor all man, Novak sometimes jokes that she is a “Sir? Ma’am? Sir?” as one confused dude at Ponderosa Steak House addressed her one evening when she was in her twenties. Novak’s piece brought to mind Maggie Nelson’s meditation on the spectrum of “trans” gender identities, her partner Harry Dodge’s included, in her excellent memoir, The Argonauts:

How to explain—“trans” may work well enough as shorthand, but the quickly developing mainstream narrative it evokes (“born in the wrong body,” necessitating an orthopedic pilgrimage between two fixed destinations) is useless for some—but partially or even profoundly useful for others? That for some, “transitioning” may mean leaving one gender entirely behind, while for others—like Harry, who is happy to identify as a butch on T—it doesn’t? How to explain, in a culture frantic for resolution, that sometimes the shit stays messy?…

…How to explain that for some, or for some at some times, this irresolution is OK—desirable, even (e.g., “gender hackers”)—whereas for others, or for others at some times, it stays a source of conflict or grief. How does one get across the fact that the best way to find out how people feel about their gender or their sexuality—or anything else, really—is to listen to what they tell you, and to treat them accordingly, without shellacking over their version of reality with yours.

You can also read a full excerpt from Nelson’s book here on Longreads.

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How Liberal Can a Liberal Arts College Be?

Can a liberal arts college foster a culture of experimentation and personal growth while also ensuring the safety of its students? Connecticut’s Wesleyan University has long had a reputation for progressive students and politics (“Keep Wesleyan Weird” is a common refrain on campus), but after a headline-grabbing drug debacle this spring, the community finds itself grappling with the boundaries of freedom on campus. Writing for Rolling Stone, Emily Greenhouse reconstructs the events leading up to the Molly-induced hospitalization of twelve students and the subsequent drug busts while also asking broader questions about what it means to be a progressive institution:

Of course, encouraging a culture of personal experimentation is not always compatible with the age limits (and legal liabilities) present at a residential college. In the wake of the hospitalizations, law enforcement, with help from the university, launched a speedy investigation. When students learned the extent of the school’s cooperation, many felt rattled, even hurt. It was bad enough to know classmates and friends were suffering in hospital beds; for many, it was worse still to see their peers arrested on charges of drug dealing, and promptly dismissed from the school. How could a university ostensibly dedicated to fostering personal growth suddenly crack down?

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The university is back in session for a new academic year. Last month, freshmen students enjoyed gender-bending festivities, cross-cultural dancing and Italian ices. President Roth gave the first State of the School address. But as the arrested former students prepare for their day in court — and as colleges across the country struggle with controversies over sexual assault, racism, binge-drinking and drug use — a central question looms: When students at an educational institution that prizes experimentation want to experiment with risky behavior, how liberal can a liberal-arts college be?

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