Tag: older women
Why I Got Breast-Reduction Surgery
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One day, about two years ago, I looked in the mirror and was shocked to discover that my once-fabulous tits had transmogrified into a bosom. Whereas breasts—those sexy appendages that had gotten me past velvet ropes and bar tabs aplenty in my 20s and 30s—might be
The Real Lesson of ‘The Truman Show’
Truman Burbank, the unwitting star of the world’s most popular TV show, is supposed to be an everyman. The Truman Show is set in an island town, Seahaven, that evokes the prefab conformities of American suburbia. Truman is a brand in a setting that is stridently generic. Since his birth, he has navigated a world manufactured—by Christof, the creator of his show—for lucrative inoffensiveness. Everything around him exists to fulfill the primary mandate of a mass-market TV show: appealing to
The Fall of Roe and the Curse of Forced Motherhood
The uterus has long doubled as a political tool. Summoned as a metaphor—for emptiness, for deficiency, for obligation—it has conflated a body part with womanhood, and used the logic of maternal sacrifice to limit women’s lives. Mental stimulation, some 19th-century doctors argued, could harm their reproductive systems. Exercise could, too. We might laugh, today, at the transparency of such tactical ignorance, but our smugness would be premature. The uterus, idealized into a means of degradation, is precisely what the Supreme
How to Win the Abortion Argument
In May 2016, three women walked into a police station in Derry, Northern Ireland, and gave themselves up. They were unlikely criminals—all born in the 1940s, they arrived wearing warm coats and jeans. But Colette Devlin, Diana King, and Kitty O’Kane were deadly serious about their willingness to spend years in prison. Their offense: These three women had bought abortion pills on the internet.
I wrote about Devlin, King, and O’Kane in my history of feminism, Difficult Women, because
A Climate-Change Anthem for Oceania
I know nothing of the night sky.
This saddens but does not surprise Larry Raigetal, a master navigator who is chewing betel nut beneath a canopy of stars. He is from Lamotrek, an outer island of Yap, in the Federated States of Micronesia. But we are meeting in a canoe house on the neighboring island of Guam, where I call home. As we speak, Raigetal is using his hands to split the horizon into a 32-point star compass. He is