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Every Woman Her Own Bodyguard

"A Lesson In the Art of Womanly Self-Defense," 1906 (Museum of the City of New York/Byron Collection/Getty Images)

Wendy L. Rouse | Her Own Hero | NYU Press | August 2017 | 16 minutes (3,900 words)

On a spring evening in 1909, Wilma Berger decided to go for a short walk after work. Twenty-year-old Berger, an American-born white woman and the daughter of a prominent local doctor, was studying to be a nurse at the Henrotin Hospital in downtown Chicago. As she walked along Ontario Street and approached Lake Michigan, she suddenly felt a piercing pain from a blow to her head. In the next instant, a stranger’s arm reached around her neck and pulled her to the ground. Just as she came to her senses and prepared to stand up, a man sat on top of her, pinning her firmly down. The attacker clenched her throat with a choking grip with one hand and used his other hand to cover her mouth to prevent her from screaming. At first, Berger panicked, but then she decided to relax and wait for her opportunity. As soon as she saw her chance, she caught hold of the man’s arm, pulled him toward her, and sent him flying through the air with a jiu-jitsu move. Berger immediately fled to safety, knowing she had successfully fought back against a violent surprise attack. The publicity surrounding the incident vaulted Berger to local celebrity status as newspapers praised her mental prowess and physical skill in fighting off the assailant. Read more…

10 Outstanding Short Stories to Read in 2018

Author Han Kang
Author Han Kang (Roberto Ricciuti / Contributor / Getty Images)

For years, the #longreads hashtag on Twitter has been filled with great story recommendations from people around the world. Pravesh Bhardwaj is a longtime contributor — throughout the year he posts his favorite short stories, and then in January we’re lucky enough to get a list of his favorites to enjoy in the year ahead.  Read more…

Smell, Memory

Chanel N°5. Illustrations by Tamara Shopsin

By Rachel Syme

Racquet and Longreads | January 2018 | 11 minutes (2,800 words)

Our latest feature is a new story by Rachel Syme and produced in partnership with Racquet magazine.

Tennis, to me, smells like chlorine and white sage and tuna fish. I grew up in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where the courts always wheeze dust when you walk on them and the dry heat shimmers off the net in the middle of summer. Our family belonged to a tennis club, but not the kind with rolling hills and security gates—instead, our courts were somewhat dumpy and gray, down near the university area filled with tattoo parlors and ratty cafés that seemed progressive in the ’90s for their hummus-forward menus. The club was made mostly of cement and gravel and funnel cakes, and its pro shop featured six-packs of tube socks and fresh cylinders of key-lime-colored balls and not much else. It may very well be fancier now, but my family stopped paying dues two decades ago.

We moved to the base of the mountains when I was 13, and my father now plays tennis every day at High Point, a gym filled primarily with active seniors and women doing Zumba. When he does go downtown to play, he meets my brother at one of the college courts near the hospital, where my brother spends most nights sewing throats back together as a resident in facial surgery. My father, who also cuts people open for a living, started playing a lot more tennis when my brother became a doctor; it is how they communicate wordlessly about what bloody traumas they’ve seen during the day. I imagine hitting something really hard back and forth is useful in this regard. Read more…

How Are There Still Beauty Pageants When Feminists Have Been Protesting Them for 50 Years?

A protest against the Miss America Pageant on the boardwalk at Atlantic City, 1969. (Santi Visalli Inc./Archive Photos/Getty Images)

Progress can sometimes be infuriatingly slow. Take the continued existence of beauty pageants. For most of my adult life, I’ve tried to forget they exist. It’s not quite as easy to do that now that the President of the United States is someone who once owned three pageants, and we’re often reminded that he allegedly sexually harassed contestants. Still, I find the perpetuation of this anachronistic tradition hard to believe, especially when you consider that feminists have been protesting them for 50 years.

In the January issue of Smithsonian, Bad Feminist author Roxane Gay writes about one of the earlier protests, when radical feminists from New York descended on Atlantic City in 1968, to protest the Miss American Pageant. The article appears in the wake of a recent sexist email scandal that has led to new management of that pageant — the #MeToo moment having its effect on Miss America, but not enough of one to shut down the whole enterprise.

Gay reports on the sexist and racist history of the pageant — for which only white women were initially eligible as contestants — and of the 1968 protest.

The 1968 uprising was conceived by a radical feminist named Carol Hanisch, who popularized the phrase, “The personal is political.” Disrupting the beauty contest, she thought, in the summer of that year, “just might be the way to bring the fledgling Women’s Liberation Movement into the public arena.”

She also puts the protest into greater context, shedding light on its lasting impact.

While the 1968 protests may not have done much to change the nature of the Miss America pageant, they did introduce feminism into the mainstream consciousness and expand the national conversation about the rights and liberation of women. The first wave of feminism, which focused on suffrage, began in the late 19th century. Many historians now credit the ’68 protest as the beginning of feminism’s broader second wave.

Read the story

Fifty Years Ago, Protesters Took on the Miss America Pageant and Electrified the Feminist Movement

Longreads Pick

In the wake of a sexist email scandal that has led to new management of the Miss America Pageant, Bad Feminist author Roxane Gay reports on 1968 protests by radical feminists against all that the pageant stands for.

Author: Roxane Gay
Source: Smithsonian
Published: Jan 1, 2018
Length: 6 minutes (1,646 words)

The Digital Age Won’t Kill Paper

Historians of early print culture have long noticed a peculiar phenomenon: Not only had the invention of print not destroyed handwriting, it actually generated the need for more of it. The vast majority of printed matter hasn’t been novels and newspapers; it’s forms, certificates, and other types of ephemera that call for information — dates, signatures, place names — to be entered by hand. Paper seems to be going through a similar dynamic: as David J. Unger points out in The Guardian after attending a paper-industry convention, the stuff you order on Amazon still requires lots and lots of paper packaging, and your smartphone can do many things, but wiping your nose isn’t one of them. Read more…

What to Do With a Man Who Has a Story, and a Gun

Mint Images - Paul Edmondson / Getty

Lisa Romeo | Longreads | January 2018 | 11 minutes (2,767 words)

My boyfriend said it with such confidence, such nonchalance. “Don’t worry. You’re safe in here, and I’ll be back in an hour.”

He shut the bedroom door behind him as he left, and I heard his key in the padlock on the other side — the one he’d installed to keep out his drunk or stoned apartment-mates who kept “borrowing” his cigars, raiding his mini-fridge, and hitting on me.

I was a freshman at an expensive upstate New York college, majoring in journalism, and I’d fallen hard for this guy the first week of September. Though I was young for college — I wouldn’t turn 18 until later that fall — people had always said about me, “She’s so mature, so level-headed,” compliments I shirked away from, instead longing to be a little less sensible, a little more wild. In high school, I had mostly dated self-assured, brainy guys, predictable guys, often Italian and Catholic guys, guys who, if they were girls, would have been me.

I was done with all that, I thought. I wanted something different, someone different.

This guy was short, wiry, pale, certainly older — returning to college at 24 — and also German, Protestant, and had definitely not finished at the top of his high school class. Different, but not a bad guy, not a mean guy, not a guy I couldn’t bring home.

And he wasn’t a guy. He was a man.

A man with a past. A story.

Read more…

The More We Disrupt, The More Things Are Exactly The Same

Photo by Daniel Benavides (CC BY 2.0), viaWikimedia Commons

Vanity Fair published an excerpt from Emily Chang‘s forthcoming book, Brotopia: Breaking Up the Boys’ Club of Silicon Valley. TL;DR: they have a lot of sex and drug parties at which they disrupt conventional morality by… replicating conventional sexist, heteronormative behaviors.

They don’t necessarily see themselves as predatory. When they look in the mirror, they see individuals setting a new paradigm of behavior by pushing the boundaries of social mores and values. “What’s making this possible is the same progressiveness and open-mindedness that allows us to be creative and disruptive about ideas,” Founder X told me. When I asked him about Jane Doe’s experience, he said, “This is a private party where powerful people want to get together and there are a lot of women and a lot of people who are fucked up. At any party, there can be a situation where people cross the line. Somebody fucked up, somebody crossed the line, but that’s not an indictment on the cuddle puddle; that’s an indictment on crossing the line. Doesn’t that happen everywhere?” It’s worth asking, however, if these sexual adventurers are so progressive, why do these parties seem to lean so heavily toward male-heterosexual fantasies? Women are often expected to be involved in threesomes that include other women; male gay and bisexual behavior is conspicuously absent. “Oddly, it’s completely unthinkable that guys would be bisexual or curious,” says one V.C. who attends and is married (I’ll call him Married V.C.). “It’s a total double standard.” In other words, at these parties men don’t make out with other men. And, outside of the new types of drugs, these stories might have come out of the Playboy Mansion circa 1972.

Be forewarned, these grown adult people liberally use the phrases “cuddle puddle” and “founder hounder,” and you’ll want to budget some time to scream into a pillow and then take a shower after you finish reading.

Read the excerpt

My Daughter Died, But I’m Still Mothering Her

neo8iam via Pexels

Jacqueline Dooley | Longreads | January 2018 | 20 minutes (5,067words)

In July 2016, when we got the results of my 15-year-old daughter’s CT scan, my friend Babs introduced me to a new term: “anticipatory grief.” The scan showed that tumors in Ana’s lungs were noticeably larger than they’d been three months earlier, and masses in her abdomen had multiplied. Having been through this eight years earlier with her then 16-year-old son, Killian, Babs recognized that what we were dealing with wasn’t just a bad scan. It was a turning point in Ana’s disease — the Inflammatory Myofibroblastic Tumor, a rare form of pediatric cancer, she’d been diagnosed with four years earlier.

Medicinenet.com defines anticipatory grief as “the normal mourning that occurs when a patient or family is expecting a death.” As if there was anything normal about preparing to mourn my child’s death.

I didn’t like the term. I wasn’t ready to start grieving.

Babs suggested I reach out to a local hospice organization. I recoiled at the thought. Ana looked and felt good. I was sure her oncologist would find a drug to slow her progression until some miracle of modern medicine revealed a cure. It seemed impossible that Ana would die. I had no frame of reference or spiritual foundation for the enormity of that kind of loss.

Ana’s oncologist switched her to a new medication, but made it clear that this likely would only slow things down. Although it was disappointing, we still had hope. Ana glowed with health, at least outwardly. Maybe this new treatment would work better than the others had. Maybe.

Read more…

The Other People in Springfield

Photo by Alonzo via Flickr (CC BY 2.0)

Imran Siddiquee | Longreads | December 2017 | 15 minutes (3,638 words)

When I was 2 years old, my family moved from Winnipeg, Manitoba to Springfield, Illinois. My parents had come to Canada as graduate students in the early 1980s to attend the University of Manitoba, thousands of miles from their homes in Bangladesh. They were raising me and my two older sisters there when my dad received a job offer to teach economics at a small university in the middle of Illinois. So in 1987, they traveled across another border, embarking on a journey to becoming not only Americans, but Springfielders.

It was just a coincidence that soon after we had settled in the Land of Lincoln, around the same time I started at Carl Sandburg Elementary School, another family, much more famous than us, would move into a place called Springfield. Suddenly the name of our town would become synonymous with some larger American story, or at the very least, the absurdities of American culture.

***

The Simpsons debuted in 1989 when I was 5 years old, less than a year after my baby brother was born in Springfield. I recall my parents being wary of any of us watching this strange cartoon with its adult humor and reputation for vulgarity. But by the time I was in fourth grade I had managed to record a couple episodes on VHS, and my brother and I would occasionally watch life unfold in the fantasy Springfield in between chapters of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

By then The Simpsons was a global phenomenon, and regardless of whether you watched the show or not, its influence was pervasive. There were the enviable “Cowabunga” t-shirts at the mall, the ubiquitous TV ads featuring Homer being Homer, and the persistent echo of “D’Oh” and “Don’t have a cow, man” on the school playground. Lots of little boys wanted to be Bart and I was no exception, repeating risqué lines from a show I didn’t really understand. Even when we would visit family in Bangladesh, I remember people asking me about that strange-looking family from Springfield. Is that what’s it’s really like there?

But of course, in the real Springfield, in its classrooms and shopping malls, football games and state fairs, we were the strange-looking ones. And in truth, I was never going to be as rebellious as Bart, or be allowed to complete that journey across the border which my parents had set out on in the 80s. Because, when it came down to it, I was already someone else in the imaginary Springfield, the imaginary America.

As Hari Kondabolu explains in his new documentary The Problem With Apu, my family and I had been assigned a role by white culture — the foreign, strange, Apu Nahasapeemapetilon — as people like us had been assigned many times before, and would continue to be assigned many times after. On those same playgrounds, kids would soon ask me to do the famous accent or to nod my head from side-to-side like Apu did. I would learn that in order for white people to remain in their roles — people whose bumbling inadequacy never quite moves them from the center of American life — they needed me and my family to remain in the Kwik-e-Mart.

Read more…