Search Results for: abortion

Preparing for a Post-Roe America

Ralph Grunewald / Getty

Laura Barcella | Longreads | February 2019 | 13 minutes (3,517 words)

The 46th anniversary of Roe v. Wade just occurred on January 22 — but the days of relatively uncomplicated American abortion access are, most likely, numbered. In fact, author Robin Marty believes it’s not a matter of if Roe will be overturned, it’s a matter of when.

For more than ten years, the Minneapolis-based freelance reporter and author of the new book Handbook for a Post-Roe America has been diligently chronicling the twists and turns of both the pro-choice and anti-abortion movements. Ever since Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy announced his resignation, Marty — like many other pro-choice Americans — has been waiting for the proverbial pro-life shoe to drop. Losing Kennedy, the swing voter on a number of major abortion rulings, and gaining Brett Kavanaugh — a long-time pro-life ally — seems to all but ensure the end of Roe, as well as the downfall of abortion being considered a constitutional right.

Indeed, several weeks after Marty and I spoke in late January, Kavanaugh voted with a minority of Justices to overturn recent Court precedent in favor of a law that sought to impose a new form of undue burden on abortion-seekers in Louisiana. The Cut called Kavanaugh’s dissenting opinion something verging on gaslighting. In it, he postulates that perhaps the undue burden — abortion providers being required to gain admitting privileges at local hospitals — could simply be met, when of course providers have already been trying to gain admitting privileges for years. The Court ultimately blocked the implementation of the law, but only because the conservative Chief Justice, John Roberts, voted with the liberals. The margin of safety has grown vanishingly thin.

Let’s consider what that means. If Roe were overturned, it wouldn’t necessarily make it impossible for a pregnant person to obtain an abortion, but it would potentially make an already challenging process even more daunting. As it stands, obtaining an abortion is already far from affordable or convenient for many women, even in blue states with a plethora of clinics. Despite Roe’s current status, and despite the fact that statistically, most Americans believe in a woman’s right to choose, abortion care is still often portrayed as a privilege instead of a right — or as a miserable “worst-case” scenario rather than a straightforward medical procedure. Read more…

The Classroom Origins of Toxic Masculinity

KC Noland / Youtube, Saul Loeb / Getty

Soraya Roberts | Longreads | January 2019 | 8 minutes (1,974 words)

Covington Catholic High School, St. Michael’s College School, Georgetown Preparatory School. All three are Catholic, mostly white, mostly rich, all-boys, and all three have recently made the news. At Covington, student Nick Sandmann went viral after a video emerged showing him, surrounded by a bunch of white classmates in the same glaring MAGA hats fresh off the same anti-abortion rally, mocking Native American Indigenous Peoples March attendee Nathan Phillips. At St. Mike’s school — Canadian, suggesting we may be less nice than we are similar — several students were charged after a video appeared on social media in which their fellow classmates were assaulted, one with a broomstick. Eight boys were eventually expelled after several incidents were investigated, all, according to reports, involving football and basketball players. Georgetown Prep, meanwhile, made the news when Christine Blasey Ford accused U.S. Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh of assaulting her when they were teenagers while fellow Georgetown student Mark Judge watched. “Indelible in the hippocampus is the laughter,” she said. The quote reverberated across social media once again after the Covington video went viral.

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‘She changed my heart. And that changed my mind.’

Photo by Barry King/WireImage

At 33, Tabitha Blankenbiller believed she didn’t want any children, until — unexpectedly — she became pregnant. In this essay at Salon, Blankenbiller considers how the simple existence of her unborn child changed her perspective on motherhood and life, causing her to reconsider choices and beliefs, only to discover that just when she’d decided that this particular lemon would make great lemonade, sometimes life decides for you.

Think of how many passages you breach in a day. The driver’s door to your car. The turnstile of your favorite park. The impatient elevators of your building. The generous slide of the grocery store’s glass. Out of the bedroom, into the living room. One side of the tunnel, out the other. Hundreds of transitions switching backdrops, edging us forward in the routine, the occasional fresh adventure.

One in ten thousand will bookend us. We will pass through as one thing and emerge another. It will mark our Before and After. That day at work, I entered the single stall private bathroom as a drama queen clutching her pearls over a period missing for a scant blip of a week to take a test she’d managed to skip for an entire adult lifetime of Match.com horror stories and marriage and college, and then grad school bad jobs and dream vacations, first essay published and first book released, canning and handwriting and Thai cooking lessons, 40 pounds up and down five times over.

I peed on the stick, then set it on the counter while I played a game of Disney Emoji Blitz on my phone. The timer cut in for my three minutes, and I tilted the test toward me to discover the faintest line severing the woman I knew into another.

This was impossible. I took a picture in a haze and sent it to my best friend Charlotte, a parent of two.

Holy shit yeah, that is pregnant, she confirmed.

We weave hypotheticals of our lives, speaking over one another to announce what we’d do if it were us. We make lists, connections, promises. For 33 years I ran the simulation in my head of that improbable second line, and decided each time, without fail, that I did not want a child. I believed they were too expensive. I believed my life was already fulfilling and content. I believed that not all women should be mothers. I believed that the capacity and consumption of our species is unsustainable on this planet, and that some flavor of doom is inevitable. I believed that abortion is healthcare, a procedure that does not require an explanation to receive. I believed that a zygote is not a person, and a four-week-old clump of cells is a precursor to human life.

All of these convictions are still accurate. I stand by each one.

But there is the question, what would you do, and there is what happens when a sudden, impending new reality forks your life in two. Our hearts are a vast trove of too many secret reactions and desires to discover in a lifetime. And what I realized about myself is this: that I cannot name a time I have been happier than standing in our backyard gripping the back of the patio chair, demanding that Matt needed to listen to me.

“We have to keep it. I love her already.”

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They Wanted Her Body

A family member shows pictures of slain fashion model Qandeel Baloch, July 22, 2016. Associated Press.

Rafia Zakaria | Longreads | December 2018 | 13 minutes (3,450 words)

It happened in July, amid the sweltering summer heat of the plains of Punjab, Pakistan’s largest province. It was one of those days when sweat flows in streams, the beads of depleted moisture dripping down backs and armpits and foreheads as people walk and talk and complain about the heat as if it were a newcomer among them.

The murdered woman was Qandeel Baloch, a 26-year-old Pakistani YouTube sensation, whose risqué videos, laden with erotic subtext, had so angered her brother that he strangled her to death. The deed was done late on the night of July 15th. It was late in the morning of the 16th when the first reporter from Pakistan’s rapacious 24-hour news media arrived in the neighborhood.

That journalist was Arif Nizami. After receiving an anonymous tip, he raced to the area and demanded of passersby that he be taken to the “Karachi Hotel.” “This is Karachi-Hotel,” some sympathetic soul finally told him, “the whole neighborhood is Karachi-Hotel.” The comic absurdity of this moment, while an apt metaphor for a country bewildered by looking at itself — especially in the new ways made possible by the internet, ways at which Qandeel Baloch excelled — is a contrast to the tragic scenes that were to follow, all painstakingly recreated in Pakistani journalist Sanam Maher’s book The Sensational Life and Death of Qandeel Baloch. The book tells an extraordinary story: Qandeel Baloch’s internet fame was built almost entirely from suggestive innuendo-laden videos, shot and shared late at night when millions of Pakistani men go online in search of sexual satisfaction. Qandeel knew that this audience was out there, and in speaking directly to them she captured their erotic imagination.

Tragically for Qandeel Baloch, what Pakistani men love to love in private, they love to excoriate in public. Sexual fantasies, or the women who are part of them, must be shamed with the same ferocity with which their bodies are lusted after. It was this truth which led to Qandeel’s death that summer day, a grisly mix of rage and misogyny ending with her brother’s hands around her neck. In the hours after Arif Nizami arrived at the scene, a sweaty mob of media men crowded before the door of the house where Qandeel lay dead, her body already swollen from heat and decay as the temperature rose. The male gaze, lust-laden in life, had turned voyeuristic in death, the journalists, most of them men, clamoring and pushing and shoving to get a shot of her corpse. Read more…

Thank You for Not Being Afraid, Pat Maginnis

Photo by Charlotte Cooper via Flickr (CC BY 2.0)

You’ve almost certainly heard of Betty Friedan, and probably also of Margaret Sanger. But what about Pat Maginnis? If you don’t know about the outspoken, angry, pioneering abortion rights activist and health educator, Lili Loofbourow’s excellent profile at Slate is a good starting point.

When Maginnis launched her leaflet campaign, she chose a location that would maximize her ability to confront a medical community she saw as at best patronizing to women and at worst exploitative and controlling. The state Board of Medical Examiners had gathered at the University of San Francisco to discuss the implementation of hospital committees that would determine whether women could receive abortions. As the mostly male board debated the circumstances under which women could be forced to give birth, Maginnis was outside handing out information on how to abort without the help of the doctors within. She was shocked at how unseriously the board took their mandate. She told the Berkeley Barb that when she’d handed some board members a leaflet titled “Are you Pregnant?” with abortion information on it, they “twittered like a bunch of schoolgirls.”

This, she felt, was the collective effect of the laws and ordinances that made even talking about abortion illegal: The entire concept had become untouchable, a boogeyman. “The word abortion was taboo,” she says. “And I thought: That’s crazy. People won’t talk about abortion! They’re afraid to. I’m going to talk about abortion! ABORTION!” she yelled. “Women weren’t talking about it. They were afraid to talk about it.”

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Longreads Best of 2018: All of Our No. 1 Story Picks

All through December, we’ll be featuring Longreads’ Best of 2018. Here’s a list of every story that was chosen as No. 1 in our weekly Top 5 email.

If you like these, you can sign up to receive our weekly email every Friday. Read more…

My So-Called Media: How the Publishing Industry Sells Out Young Women

Sipapre, AP / Getty / Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Soraya Roberts | Longreads | December 2018 | 10 minutes (2,554 words)

On November 30th, Tavi Gevinson published her last ever editor’s letter at Rookie. The 22-year-old started the site when she was just 15, and in the intervening years it had spawned a pastel-hued community of girlhood, which, if not always sparkly, was always honest. The letter spanned six pages, 5707 words. In Longreads terms, that’s 20 minutes, 20 minutes of Gevinson agonizing over the site she loved so much, the site that was so good, that was now bigger than her, that she couldn’t figure out how to save. “Rookie had been founded, in part, as a response to feeling constantly marketed to in almost all forms of media,” she wrote, “to being seen as a consumer rather than a reader or person.”

The market had won, but Gevinson was fighting to the death. It was hard to read. You could sense her torturing herself. And she was. Because in truth there was nothing Gevinson could have done, because the failure of Rookie was not about her, or even about the poor state of media as a whole. It was about what it has always been about, which is that as much power as women have online — as strong as their voices are, as good as their work is, as valuable as it is to women, especially young women — its intrinsic worth is something capitalism, dominated by men, feels no obligation to understand. This is what ultimately killed Rookie. And The Hairpin. And The Toast. And maybe even Lenny Letter too.

***

In her first ever editor’s letter, Tavi Gevinson explained that she wasn’t interested in the “average teenage girl,” or even in finding out who that was or whether Rookie appealed to her. “It seems that entire industries are based on answering these very questions,” she wrote. “Who is the typical teenage girl? What does she want? (And, a lot of the time, How can we get her allowance?)” She claimed not to have the answer but provided it anyway by not asking the question: by not inquiring, like other young women’s publications, whether her readers would like some lipstick or maybe some blush with that. Instead, Rookie existed in a state of flux, a mood board of art and writing and photography on popular culture and fashion and politics and, just, the reality of being a girl. In an interview with NPR in 2011, Gevinson noted the hypocrisy of other teen magazines’ feminist gestures: “they say something really simple about how you should love your body and be confident or whatever, but then in the actual magazine, there will still be stuff that maybe doesn’t really make you love your body.”

Writer Hazel Cills emailed Gevinson when she was 17 to ask if she could join Rookie. In her eulogy for the site, published in Jezebel, Cills described the magazine’s novel concept: “unlike Teen Vogue or Seventeen, we were overwhelmingly staffed with actual teenagers, and were free to write about our realities as if they were the stuff of serious journalism.” Lena Singer, who was in her 30s when she worked as Rookie’s managing editor, thinks the publication deserves some credit for the fact that adults are now more willing to defer to adolescents than they were when it launched. “Part of my role as an editor there was to help protect the idea — and I still believe it — that the world doesn’t need another adult’s opinion about teen spaces, online or elsewhere,” she says. “Teens say what needs to be known about that.” And when they didn’t have the answers, they chose which adults to consult with video features like “Ask a Grown Man,” where celebrities like Thom Yorke answered readers’ questions. The column would have been familiar to Sassy aficionados, particularly fans of its “Dear Boy” series which had guys like Beck offering advice. Which made sense, because Sassy was basically the OG Rookie.

Named by the 13-year-old daughter of one of the heads of its publishing company, Fairfax, Sassy arrived in 1988 and was the first American magazine that actually spoke the language of adolescence. Teen publications dated back to 1944, the year Seventeen launched, but Sassy was different. “The wink-wink, exasperated, bemused tone was completely unlike the vaguely disguised parental voice of Seventeen,” write Kara Jesella and Marisa Meltzer in How Sassy Changed My Life: A Love Letter to the Greatest Teen Magazine. And unlike Teen or YM, it did not make guys the goal and girls the competition — if it had a goal at all, it was to be smart (and preferably not a conservative). Sassy was launched as the U.S. iteration of the Australian magazine Dolly — they originally shared a publisher — and presented itself as the big sister telling you everything you needed to know about celebrity, fashion, and beauty but also drugs, sex, and politics. “The teen magazines here were like Good Housekeeping for teen-agers,” Dolly co-founder Sandra Yates told the New York Times in 1988, adding, “I’m going to prove that you can run a business with feminist principles and make money.”

So she hired Jane Pratt, an associate editor at Teenage magazine, who matched her polka dot skirt with work boots, who donated to a pro-choice organization. Pratt “cast” writers like Dolly did, then went further to reinforce their personalities by publishing more photos and encouraging them to write in the first person, with plenty of self-reference, culminating in a sort of reality TV show-slash-blog before either of those things existed. Sassy became ground zero for indie music coverage thanks largely to Christina Kelly, a fan of Slaves of New York author Tama Janowitz who wrote the way teenagers talk. “I don’t know how to say where my voice came from,” she says. “It was just there.” Like the other writers on staff, she offered a proto-Jezebel take on pop culture, a new form of postmodern love-hate criticism.

At its peak, Sassy, which had one of the most successful women’s magazine launches ever (per Jesella and Meltzer), attracted 800,000 readers. But this was the era of the feminist backlash, where politicians were doubling down on good old American family values. The writers and editors at Sassy weren’t activists, per se, but they were the children of second wavers, they went to universities with women’s departments, they knew about the patriarchy. “Sassy was like a Trojan horse,” wrote Jesella and Meltzer, “reaching girls who weren’t necessarily looking for a feminist message.” Realizing that adolescents were more sexually active, receiving letters about the shame around it, Sassy made it a priority to provide realistic accounts of sex without the moralism. They covered homosexuality, abortion, and even abuse, and were the first teen magazine in America to advertise condoms.

In response, right-wing religious groups petitioned to boycott Sassy‘s advertisers; within several months the magazine lost nearly nearly 20 percent of its advertising. After several changes in ownership, including the removal of Sandra Yates and a squarer mandate, the oxymoronic conservative Sassy eventually folded into Teen magazine in 1997, the alternative press devoured once again by the mainstream.

But Sassy left behind a community. A form of analog social media, the magazine united writers with readers, but also readers with each other. Sassy even had its readers conceptualize an issue in 1990 — the “first-ever reader-produced issue of a consumer magazine” — the same year Andi Zeisler secured an internship at Sassy with a hand-illustrated envelope and the straightforward line, “I want to be your intern.” Six years later, she co-created her own magazine, Bitch, a cross between Sassy and Ms. It had the same sort of intimate community where, Zeisler explains, “there’s somehow a collective feeling of ownership that you don’t have with something like Bustle.”

Bustle, a digital media company for millennial women, is often cited as the counter-example to indie sites like Sassy, Bitch, and Rookie. It has more than 50 million monthly uniques (Bustle alone boasts 37 million) and is run by a man named Bryan Goldberg, who upon its 2013 launch wrote, with a straight face, “Maybe we need a destination that is powered by the young women who currently occupy the bottom floors at major publishing houses.” While Sassy had to struggle to be profitable and sustainable in an ad-based and legacy driven industry, now corporate entities like Bustle manspread sites like Rookie into non-existence. “The one thing that has stayed the same,” says Zeisler, “is the fact that alternative presentations of media by and for girls and young women is really overlooked as a cultural force.”

***

Tavi Gevinson was born the year Sassy died, but Lena Dunham arrived just in time. Recalling her predecessor, she described her feminist newsletter, Lenny Letter, which launched in 2015 as “a big sister to young radical women on the Internet.” Delivered to your inbox, Lenny, backed by Hearst, mimicked the intimacy of magazines past, the ones that existed outside Twitter and the comments section. It included an advice column and interviews (the first was with Hillary Clinton) as well as personal essays touching on various sociopolitcal issues. It was more activist than Sassy, more earnest than ironic, more 20-something than adolescent. It even had a Rookie alum, Laia Garcia, as its deputy editor. Lenny’s third issue launched it into mainstream consciousness when Jennifer Lawrence wrote an essay about pay disparity in Hollywood, which provoked an industry-wide conversation. Then three years after launch and without warning, on October 19, a final letter by Dunham and co-creator Jenni Konner claimed “there’s no one reason for our closure” and shut down.

Lenny’s demise came nine months after that of another site that had a loyal female-driven community: The Hairpin. Founded in 2010 by Edith Zimmerman under The Awl umbrella, the site that had also published writing by Lenny editor-at-large Doreen St. Félix claimed “a natural end” — the same words The Awl used for its closure. NPR’s Glen Weldon suggested more specific reasons for their termination: the decline in ad revenue online, the sites’ unwillingness to compromise, their independence. “The Awl and The Hairpin were breeding grounds for new writers — like The National Lampoon in the ‘70s, Spy Magazine in the ‘80s, Sassy in the ‘90s and McSweeney’s in the aughts,” he explained, adding, “Invariably they would find, waiting for them, a comparatively small, but loyal, sympathetic and (mostly) supportive readership.”

Two years before this, a similar site, The Toast, founded by former Hairpinners Nicole Cliffe and Daniel Ortberg, also closed. The publication was created in 2013 to be an intersectional space for women to write basically whatever they fancied. They even invited Rookie to contribute. The Toast published multiple features a day, stating, “we think there’s value in posting things that we’ve invested time and energy on, even if it comes at the expense of ‘You won’t believe this story about the thing you saw on Twitter and have already believed’ link roundups.” In a lengthy message posted in May 2016, Ortberg broke down the financial circumstances that left them weighing their options. “Most of them would have necessitated turning The Toast into something we didn’t like, or continuing to work ourselves into the ground forever,” Ortberg wrote, adding, “The only regret I have is that Bustle will outlive us and I will never be able to icily reject a million-dollar check from Bryan Goldberg, but that’s pretty much it.”

It says everything about the American media industry that Bustle, a site with an owner who mansplained women’s sites to women, a site which acquired the social justice-oriented publication Mic only after it had laid off almost its entire staff, has outlived the ones that are actually powered by women. If you look closely, you will see that the majority of women’s sites that continue to exist — from SheKnows to Refinery29 — have men in charge. Even HelloGiggles, which was created by three women, is owned by the male-run Meredith Corporation. That means that, fundamentally, these publications are in the hands of a gender that does not historically believe in the inherent value of women’s media. Women, including young women, are valuable as consumers, but if their interests cannot be monetized, they are worthless. Yet the same year The Toast closed, Lauren Duca wrote a Sassy-style essay, “Donald Trump Is Gaslighting America,” in Teen Vogue which dominated the news and garnered 1.4 million unique visitors. “Teen girls are so much smarter than anyone gives them credit for,” Phillip Picardi, Teen Vogue’s digital editorial director, reminded us. “We’ve seen an immense resonance of political coverage with our audience.” Seventeen and ELLE have also capitalized on wokeness, their spon-con sharing real estate with social justice reporting, blurring the boundaries between protesting and shopping. “The inner workings of those places are not about feminism,” says Zeisler. “They’re about selling feminism and empowerment as a brand and that’s very different from what you would find at Rookie or at The Toast or The Hairpin.”

It seems fitting that a new print teen magazine launched last year called Teen Boss. On the fact that it had no ads, Jia Tolentino side-eyed in The New Yorker, “unless, of course, it’s all advertising — sponsored content promoting “Shark Tank” and JoJo Siwa (both appear in each of the first three issues) and also the monetizable self.”

***

Teen girls are the “giant piggybank of capitalism,” says Zeisler, and it’s an apt metaphor. Their value is their purchasing power and they are sacrificed, smashed to pieces, to get to it. When Ariana Grande obliterates every sales record known to man, man still asks why she is on the cover of BuzzFeed. Man never seems to ask, however, why sports — literal games — are on the cover of anything. This is the world in which Rookie and Lenny Letter and The Hairpin and The Toast attempt to survive, in which all that is left when they don’t are floating communities of women, because the industry refuses to make room. As Gevinson wrote, “that next iteration of what Rookie stands for — the Rookie spirit, if you will — is already living on in you.” As Dunham wrote, “Lenny IS you: every politician, every journalist, every activist, every illustrator, every athlete who shared her words here.” As The Hairpin wrote, “We hope when you look back on what we did here together it makes you proud and not a little delighted.” As Cliffe and Ortberg wrote, “The Toast was never just a chance for people to tune in to The Mallory and Nicole Show, it was also a true community and it will be missed.”

These publications did not die by their own hand. Zeisler notes that to this day, she sees people tweeting about missing The Toast. These sites died because their inherent value did not translate into monetary value in a capitalist system run by men who only know how to monetize women by selling them out. As bright and as hungry as young women are today, they are entering a world designed to shut them down. And the future looks bleak. “If media as an industry doesn’t figure out how to value [independent sites for young women] in a way that really reflects and respects the work that goes into them,” says Zeisler, “we’re just going to have a million fucking Bustles.”

* * *

Soraya Roberts is a culture columnist at Longreads.

A Mysterious Crack Appears: Past Trauma and Future Doom Meet in “Friday Black”

A sinkhole opened up in Philadelphia on Monday, January 9, 2017. Matt Rourke / AP

Alana Mohamed | Longreads | November 2018 | 11 minutes (2,988 words)

There is a certain genre of viral news story that we recycle every so often: odd activity on the earth’s seemingly stable surface that, while probably having a reasonable explanation, is reported on with breathless excitement when its cause is still unknown. “Mysterious Crack Appears In Mexico,” one headline shouts. “Mysterious crack appears in Wyoming landscape”; “A giant crack in Kenya opens up, but what’s causing it?”; “Splitsville: 2-Mile-Long Crack Opens in Arizona Desert”; “The White House lawn has developed a mysterious sinkhole that’s ‘growing larger by the day.’”

The follow-up stories (“Giant Wyoming Crack Explained”; “Let it sink in: The White House sinkhole is no more”) rarely gain the same traction. The mystery offers a chance to surrender control, an increasingly tantalizing option in a world algorithmically engineered to offer us the appearance of optimized choice. We choose, momentarily, to believe in something bottomless and chaotic. Read more…

Karina Longworth on the Women Caught in Howard Hughes’ Hollywood Web of Gossip

Ginger Rogers and Katharine Hepburn in "Stage Door" (1937), Getty / Howard Hughes, Associated Press / Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Rae Nudson | Longreads | November 2018 | 13 minutes (3,545 words)

 

Listening to Karina Longworth’s conspiratorial drawl on her podcast “You Must Remember This” feels like you’re about to hear some really great gossip at a party. It’s my favorite podcast, partly because I love stories about old Hollywood, which she studiously researches and shares, featuring legendary figures like Clara Bow, Marilyn Monroe, and John Wayne. But mostly I love it because of the way Longworth critically views each of her sources and dissects old studio narratives to discover the story closest to the truth.

Her new book, Seduction: Sex, Lies, and Stardom in Howard Hughes’s Hollywood, takes that sharp critical thinking and applies it to pilot turned filmmaker turned hermit Howard Hughes and the women he groomed and abused during his lifetime. Step by step, Longworth illustrates how Hughes created and maintained his millionaire playboy image, often at the expense of the careers and well-being of the long line of women he used to prop up his lifestyle. Hughes’ actions are sometimes so horrifying it sounds like an urban legend, told to would-be starlets to warn them of the horrors of men and Hollywood.

Hughes basically held women hostage, stealing years of their lives and careers by keeping would-be actresses off the screen and in his debt. He kept a staff of people to spy on and manipulate young women, like Billie Dove, Ginger Rogers, and countless others. He held meetings with censors where he calculated just how much of Jane Russell’s breasts he’d be able to show on screen in the film The Outlaw. One woman, a 19-year-old named Rene Rosseau, attempted suicide a few months after arriving in Hollywood, saying that Hughes keeping her from working was partly to blame. She survived, but her career didn’t. Read more…

Remembering Ntozake Shange

Ntozake Shange (right) in a scene from her play For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow is Enuf, a seven woman ensemble that was nominated for a Tony Award in 1977.

Ntozake Shange, whose choreopoem for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf ran on Broadway for 742 shows between 1976 and 1978, making her the second Black woman to have her work performed on Broadway, died on October 27 at age 70. (The first was Lorraine Hansberry with “A Raisin in the Sun,” in 1959.) Besides her canonical play for colored girls, Shange was the author of more than a dozen other plays, four novels, five children’s books, and several collections of poetry. She’d suffered a long illness, but released a new collection of poems  just last fall, and had been working on another new book and performing spoken word around the United States in recent months.

Shange was raised in an upper middle class household in New Jersey and St. Louis where luminaries like W.E.B. DuBois and Miles Davis encircled the family. She took degrees from Barnard and USC. In a 2010 piece for The New Yorker about the feature film adaptation of for colored girls produced by Tyler Perry, Hilton Als said seeing the show  in 1977 was an introduction to a familiar yet dazzling “world of unimpeachable cool.” It showed seven different Black women on a stage dancing, singing, and speaking a language that was determinedly itself and not at all stilted by pressure to be polite or respectable. In Shange’s words, it made, “drama of our lives,” and showed future artists who were queer, female, and / or people of color that the stuff of their specific worlds was good enough material to create from.

Shange’s death produced an outpouring on the internet, and it’s a loss that marks a shift. The access and visibility of queer and female people of color in mainstream media is something we can very well nearly take for granted, and the reckonings around sexual misconduct in the public sphere owe much to the space Black women like Shange, who in for colored girls and other works “explor[ed] the various trials that black women often confronted, from rape and abortion to domestic violence and child abuse,” opened up in the ’70s.

we are compelled to examine these giants in order to give ourselves what we think they gave the worlds they lived in

Ntozake Shange, from the forward to three pieces (spell #7, a photograph: lovers in motion, and boogie woogie landscapes) 

More on Shange: