Aging, but Make It Fashion | Racked

The fashion industry’s fascination with older models doesn’t impress me, a 55-year-old woman, very much.

All hail her grace Lauren Hutton, First of Her Name, Queen of ’70s Insouciance, Lady of Flowing Palazzo Pants, and Insignia of Women of a Certain Age.

Born in 1943, Hutton has been modeling for almost 50 years, and these days she’s kind of a poster girl for … something. Body positivity in the septuagenarian set? Fashion diversity? Aging with grace and a low BMI? A canny grab at aging women’s disposable income? Who can say? It’s aging, but make it fashion.

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When It Comes to Women’s Pockets, Size Really Does Matter | The Guardian

Until my jeans pockets are big enough for my phone, keys and purse, I’ll see them as a political rather than just a fashion issue

Broken in and cunningly ripped, my favourite jeans fit loosely. They’re designed to look as if I borrowed them from my guy. Hence their name: “destructed boyfriend jeans”. My jeans may have been cut to ape the lines of men’s denim, but they fail in one major way: the front pockets are only 5.5 inches (14cm) deep – too small for my hands, hardly big enough for my tiny wallet and certainly too snug for my iPhone Plus. My boyfriend jeans have pockets that would make a man laugh.

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There Are a Lot of Problems with Sex Robots | Medium

From body weight and batteries to programming and consent, there’s nothing straightforward about sexbots. But they’re coming anyway.

In a promotional video, robot designer Dr. Sergi Santos runs his finger inside the mouth of his Samantha sexbot. “Uhhh,” she moans. Sergi touches the doll’s hand, and she moans again. “She felt that,” he says, “and she’s actually getting quite horny.” Samantha is not, of course, getting horny. Samantha is a nearly inanimate object, which, by definition, is incapable of horniness — as well as hungriness, loneliness, suspiciousness, and even obliviousness. Samantha feels nothing, even if Santos wants her to.

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The Rub of Rough Sex | Long Reads

Chelsea G. Summers considers the ways in which outwardly ‘progressive’ men like former Attorney General Eric Schneiderman use kink as a cover for abuse.

This is a piece about abuse. This is a piece about kink and a piece about consent. This is a piece about the law. This is a piece about some powerful men whom I’ve never met, and it’s a piece about some nobody men whom I’ve loved. This is a piece about rough sex, about “rough sex,” and about how these two categories overlap and rub each other raw. This is a piece that was hard for me to write and may be hard for you to read. Most of all, this is a piece about why masculinity is fractured, and how women get caught in its cracks.

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Love In a Time of True Crime | Medium

Women are taught to fear the bogeyman. The real threat is closer to home

Last October, I married a Swede. The wedding, which took place the day after the New York Times broke the first Harvey Weinstein assault story, was a Viking whirlwind in a posh Icelandic Airbnb whose claim to fame is that the Biebs once stayed there. The honeymoon was a sun-dappled stay in Portugal. (There were castles. So many castles.) And eight days later, clad in my freshly espoused skin, I found myself smack in the middle of suburban Stockholm legally wedded to a man I didn’t know very well.

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Aging Ghosts in the Skincare Machine | Medium

On expensive skincare and a changing face

Let me start with my skin in the game. In the four months between November 2017 and February 2018, I spent about $520 on skincare products. This number does not include makeup. It does not include shampoo or conditioner. It does not include body lotion. And it is, in all likelihood, a little low. If I pored through every receipt and every debit card transaction, the actual, shameful tally of skincare spending during these four months would hover above $600. Average it out, and that’s $125 a month, more than my $90 Con Edison or Verizon bills, and a little less than a third of my monthly college loan payment, which, at age 55, I’m still paying.

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The Magic Dress Every Stripper, Celebrity, and Disney Princess Owns | Racked

It’s the faintly feral cut-to-there green Versace frock that Jennifer Lopez wore to the VMAs. It’s “that dress” worn by Elizabeth Hurley (also Versace, but black this time and sutured with safety pins). It’s the fragile goth fantasy spun by the nearly naked Rose McGowan. It’s Björk as a sublimely surreal Oscar swan, Michelle Williams in Oscar goddess saffron, and Lupita Nyong'o aloft in her icy Oscar froth. It’s Rihanna in almost every gown she wears, but it’s especially Rihanna resplendent in Guo Pei’s bath of silken gold at the 2015 Met Gala

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How Choice Helped Create the Nation's First Women-Run Abortion Clinic and Changed My Family's History | Glamour

I was about two weeks into my sophomore year at the University of Vermont and about 10 weeks into my first pregnancy when my friend Nancy Early picked me up in her red Fiat Spider and drove me to the Vermont Women’s Health Center on North Avenue in Burlington, Vermont. Nancy held my hand while a woman with a kind manner and a VWHC “Health Advocate” button narrated my abortion, sounding like voiceover for the world’s most compassionate nature documentary. After, I felt tired. I felt relieved. And I felt grateful that my abortion was safe and legal and, oddly, a familial legacy. Today—as the Trump administration defunds Planned Parenthood, states chip away at abortion access, and the U.S. Supreme Court tilts conservative—this legacy feels imperiled.

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The Birth of Vintage | Racked

"If anyone has a divinely seedy raccoon coat lying around the house, riddled by a few heavenly holes and ravishing rips,” Nan Robertson wrote 60 years ago in the New York Times, “now is the time to wear it.” Robertson’s claxon call for wearing 1920s raccoon coats — those giant, shaggy full-length furs that were all the rage for frat boys on pre-Black Tuesday college campuses — feels fresh. Who doesn’t want to wear a seedy coat rendered divine by the passing of time? Fashion’s dime may turn on the new, but vintage clothing springs eternal: All time is the right time for vintage clothing.

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This Is How We Do It | Bookforum

Rereading a British novelist’s ancient sex manual

SEX IS AS OLD AS DIRT, yet every generation claims it anew in the words and tropes of its time. Dr. Alex Comfort’s The Joy of Sex is very much a product of 1972—its subtitle, “A Cordon Bleu Guide to Lovemaking,” is pure ’70s, nodding to the era’s obsession with French food and hippie tenderness. Cracking the spine, you can almost hear the fondue burble in the background; you can almost smell the weed and patchouli. 

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What's Distressing About Distressed Clothing | Racked

To be fair, “Lmao wait one minute” is an apt response to this particular pair of sneakers. A grungy pinky-gray shade reminiscent of worn pointe shoes, these sneakers resemble a Twinkie in that they look not so much made as extruded. They’re scuffed and grimy, and they’ve got these dull burnished silver strips of duct tape wrapped fore and aft; their frayed laces, knotted like lies, promise to snap. Coming from Italian company Golden Goose, the sneakers are brand new. Barneys New York was selling them for $585, believe it or not.

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The Politics of Pockets | Racked

The history of pockets isn’t just sexist, it’s political

Hillary Clinton wore a deceptively simple suit when she took the stage at the Democratic National Convention to accept the party’s nomination for president. Its impeccable tailoring announced Clinton’s authority; its snowy whiteness connected her to the suffragette movement; and, with no designer claiming it, the suit seems to transcend fashion — unnamed, it belonged to every woman. All of these points make Hillary’s white suit a significant garment, but the suit did more than make Clinton look powerful. One omission in Clinton’s suit whispered a long, questionable history, and that is this: It has no pockets.

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Infinite Scroll — Real Life

Bowie’s first dictionary was likely much like my first dictionary — an eight-inch-thick tome. It was big, heavy bitch with thin-skinned pages that stuck to your fingers, covered with a stew of spider-fine print. I’ve grown up, and the dictionary has shrunk. The big, heavy book first became a couple of featherweight CD-ROMs; then the CD-ROMs thinned into weightless internet. This disappearing act is a paradoxical one, for as the dictionary has journeyed from analog to electronic to digital, it both holds more and is easier to use.

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Kik Starter — Real Life

“Do you have Kik?” read the OkCupid message from Odin’s Thirst Trap, a 20-year-old blond living in Stockholm. “It’s what all the kids here use.”

I was traveling to Sweden to write and to get laid, not necessarily in that order. I prepped for my trip by checking the average April temperature, booking an AirBnB in Hornstull (“the Brooklyn of Stockholm”), changing my OkCupid location from New York City to Stockholm, and joining international Tinder. I downloaded an app for the T-Bana, the Stockholm Metro, because it was free.

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Tools of war: Why cannibalism has disappeared but rape hasn’t | Fusion

Every adult—and every astute kid—knows what’s really going on in “Little Red Riding Hood,” and it’s a lot creepier than a wolf sitting at the top of the food chain. Audiences recognize that this fairytale is less concerned with literal predation than it is preoccupied with literal rape. But when the anthropomorphized wolf consumes Grandma and Red, “Little Red Riding Hood” conflates eating and rape in a strangely cannibalistic act.

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The Internet’s Naughtiest Slang Dictionary - The Daily Beast

I interviewed Green about the process of writing dictionaries, what sets Green’s Online Dictionary of Slang apart from its competitors, why age matters, and how a lexicographer’s work is never done. Aside from his work on his multiple slang dictionaries, both in print and online, Green has created a series of timelines that put slang terms for intercourse (“pierce the hogshead,” “Molly Peatley’s jig,” or “poop”), vagina (“ringerangeroo,” “mother of all masons,” “monosyllable”), drunk (“pixilated,” “ramsquaddled,” “bowsie”) and more within a historical context.

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FIfty shades of Shakespeare | New Republic →

In a new memoir, an obsession with the Bard and spanking transforms what it means to live a sensual life.

Put your head on your lover’s chest and you will hear ba-bump, ba-bump, ba-bump. It’s a heartbeat, but it’s also a very specific rhythm—it’s iambic pentameter, the metrical foot made famous by William Shakespeare. Even if you don’t know your trochee from your spondee, you know an iamb. You can’t not know it; iambs are the poetry of your lover’s blood, your mother’s blood, and of your own.

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Sucking the fun out of fellatio | Hazlitt →

It’s a straightforward act, yet it’s a slippery one. “Milkshake,” “skull-fuck,” “hummer,” or “head” all name it; likewise, you might suck a dick—or you might enjoy getting your cock sucked, or both. Opting for delicacy, you might call it “oral” or “fellatio.” But real talk: if we’re going to name the sexual act of giving pleasure to a penis by mouth, chances are we’re going to call it a “blow job.” In the kingdom of sexual slang, “blow job” reigns supreme; it’s the odd sex term that sits nearly unchallenged on its throne.

However ubiquitous, though, “blow job” is hilariously inapt. 

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The Half Dad | Catapult →

The email was proof that my biological father was looking for me.

The day I met the man who would be Dad, we took turns roaring like lions over diner cheeseburgers while my mom watched with an expression that married wonder with apprehension and strangers’ eyes knifed glares at us. It was the summer of 1970; I’d guess it was July, and my mom had been dating him for about two weeks. My family is notoriously bad with dates—my parents celebrated their wedding anniversary on the wrong day for three decades—but I know it was hot, and my dad spent a whole afternoon carrying me on his shoulders around the Shelburne Museum. His back must’ve hurt, but I was seven and unimpressed.

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Horny | Hazlitt →

We know horny. We’ve used it to describe the state of our own bodies and those of others. “You make me so horny,” we might have told someone, and when we said it, we meant it as a compliment. “I’m so horny,” we might have complained, and when we said it, our auditors knew exactly what we were feeling, for they have felt horny too. We grew up with horny. 

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