Review: 2015 Fusebox Festival

  One of the more interesting thing about attending festivals is seeing how different performance pieces speak to one another. In their second week, the Fusebox Festival line-up included some interesting offerings at the intersection of performance and technology. Michelle Ellsworth’s performance piece, Preparation for the Obsolescence of the Y Chromosome, is a meditation on a world without […]

Purvi Patel and the Fight for Reproductive Rights

On average, 15-20% of verified pregnancies (a woman who wasn’t trying to get pregnant, missed a period, and took a positive pregnancy test) will end in a miscarriage. That means roughly one in six pregnant women will miscarry. That’s a significant number, but it’s still not something we talk about. And in a culture where […]

50 Shades of Misogyny

I’m getting pretty tired of hearing about 50 Shades of Grey. With the recent film premiere, my Facebook feed has been flooded with articles decrying the series’ content. I had previously been willing to give the book’s nay-sayers the benefit of the doubt. Now, methinks (s)he doth protest too much. Since 50 Shades of Grey started as Twilight fan fiction, […]

Lactate Intolerance

2015 is a bad time to be a worker. Not only is the minimum wage well below a living wage, but corporations seem determined to erode the rights of laborers wherever and however they can, and the government keeps siding with them. In December, the Supreme Court ruled 9-0 in favor of Amazon, saying that […]

Period Talk

Sometimes, despite the best of intentions, we can’t completely rid ourselves of the negative messages we internalize from our native cultures. Even when we know better, even when we’ve done the self-work, even when on a good day we love and accept ourselves, there are still moments which elicit knee-jerk, immediate reactions to stimuli. Moments where […]

Review: Thr3e Zisters at the Salvage Vanguard

Zombie feminist theatre. That’s what Thr3e Zisters, the Salvage Vanguard’s new interpretation of Anton Chekhov’s The Three Sisters, claimed to be. I was intrigued, excited. This, I thought, is a show I must see. As those familiar with the theatre world know, Chekhov adaptations are a dime a dozen. I’ve never been hugely enamored of […]

Tick Tock

I don’t have a maternal instinct. I hardly know how to talk to kids, let alone raise one. Besides that, I have a lot of things I want to do with my life, and children don’t factor into that.

In a lot of ways, having kids is still the default setting for women. But it shouldn’t be. The response to a woman saying she doesn’t want children shouldn’t be a wink and the word “yet.”

It just really gets under my skin. Having some straight, married woman tell me that I’ll probably decide I want children sometime in the next ten years.