We live in a society where love is overly romanticised. Love is most often seen (incorrectly) as everlasting relationships, ‘till death do us part’. There are thousands of books and movies – like Pride and Prejudice – that sell us the dream of ‘happily ever after’, but does happily ever after even exist? Is it just a marketing gimmick? After all, love sells and sells well.
Read MoreIt is these types of questions that could help feminists grapple with over a decades’ old debate: How do we delineate between what is pornographic content filled with sexual menace and what accounts only as sexual fantasy?
Read MoreThere’s a quote from Jeremy Bentham – “Stretching his hand up to reach the stars, too often man forgets the flowers at his feet”. I think that this is true of many of us.
Read MoreWe’ve reached the magic seventh instalment of ‘Sacred England’, our series that seeks out mythology in English places – but what even is mythology, anyway?
Read MoreWomen have always faced judgement, and have had disproportionate emphasis put on their relation to men; labelled as virgins or whores, nurturing mothers or wicked stepmothers, dutiful wives or cheating Jezebels. Heaven forbid we should just be allowed to exist in our own right.
Read MoreAh Naked Attraction – we love it, we hate it… my Nan once confessed she watches it when my Grandad goes to bed.
Read MoreIt’s been about 14 years since we’ve been in touch. Why did we lose touch? I honestly don’t know. We were in our early 20s and had both graduated from separate universities, and were taking tentative steps into whatever came next. Neither of us knew what lay ahead but somehow, on the walk to get there, we moved at different speeds and drifted in different directions. I sent you texts every now and again, on birthdays and when you just popped into my head. But you didn’t respond.
Read MoreThere were 5 people involved in the efforts to save my Dad, one of whom grabbed a snorkel and fins from his barge and went under the boats to try to rescue him putting his own life at risk. Incredible. Truly. It must have been so scary for them to have been witness to the shocking and fast moving drama that unfolded that day
Read MoreStraight Through Processing (STP) is used in almost all industries in the world and is used just as much as the internet. When a person pays for anything using a Credit or Debit card, they are using STP.
Read MoreSeason 14 of RuPaul’s Drag Race has been rightly celebrated for its trans representation. In addition to the series’ laudable trans representation, this latest season has also featured two neurodivergent queens, as Jasmine Kennedie and Orion Story have both revealed (since filming the show) that they have been diagnosed with ADD and ADHD respectively.
Read MoreObjects are designed to break under consumerism, otherwise no one would bother buying new. And when the waste generated by decades of constant buying, breaking, and binning gets too much, we get another spin. We are not doing enough to fix it. We are not good enough at recycling, or at eating vegan, or at sacrificing the convenience we have been told to desire to solve the overwhelming problems of climate change, of poverty, of war.
Read MoreIt is the day of my tahoor, or purification; it is the day that I am to be cut. I am feeling joyous but slightly nervous (and a different feeling I couldn’t quite categorise) about the occasion: the communal ritual which will, in my eyes, make me a woman!
Read MoreIt was only when we started to ease out lockdown that I noticed me declining meetups. It wasn't fuelling me with overwhelming excitement, but rather, fear that there may be food involved. My friends would go out and there would be the spontaneous post of food, and I would think to myself, I bet they are enjoying that ice cream, or that meal that isn't under a certain calorie number.
Read MoreBDSM is frequently captured as a manifestation of misogyny, and its practice is presented as wholly derivative of patriarchal culture. On social media platforms such as TikTok, or more specifically ‘Kink Tok,’ you might find assertations made by women in comment sections, such as: “call me vanilla, but I don’t find violence sexy,” or “why does nobody like vanilla sex anymore?”
Read MoreBefore, I was not a divided person. I took pride in my decisiveness, and my ability to dissect, understand and articulate my own feelings. That was until chronic illness split me down the middle, like a kitchen knife through an overripe avocado.
Read MoreFeminist algorithms on TikTok have sweepingly moved away from meaningful discussions or helpful political praxis anyway, regardless of such internal infiltrations. #Feminist videos now filter through harmful and outdated strands of feminism, which ultimately disguises privilege or which neatly rebrands and repackages misogyny, whilst claiming to be ‘empowering’ women.
Read MoreIt has become a concerning trend that “my anecdote beats your expertise.”
Read MoreDo you remember when we went on a witch-hunt? I spoke of folklore being a huge sub-section of English myth – at least when comparing our tales with different, perhaps more prevalent, mythologies.
Read MoreA weird thing started happening to me a few years ago, I started to become invisible. It wasn’t everywhere or all of the time - in the private sphere of my life I was still very much solid, visible and three dimensional, but I started to notice it happening occasionally on the public stage, like some sort of glitch. Groups of teens and twenty-somethings would start looking through me as I walked along the street towards them. Or I’d stand waving a tenner at the front of a busy bar for what felt like hours whilst the staff served everyone to either side of me.
Read MoreHoneymoon’s first began in 19th century Britain. Newlyweds would travel to visit various relatives who had been unable to attend the wedding, which sounds dreadful and certainly not as relaxing as lying on the beach in the Maldives.
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