To someone unfamiliar with sex work, and the constant existential threats sex workers face, being a sex worker might seem like being part of an aspirational cool-girls' club. "Everything cool gets co-opted, and whores have always been the coolest people in the room," said Jacq the Stripper. Strippers working the pole or posing with stacks of cash on Instagram look cool, because strippers are cool, but co-opting sex work as a personal brand without actually being one isn't. "If you take our rhetoric, our style, and our organizing strategies without showing us actual support—and, yes, I mean money—you are part of the problem."
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Bradley was one of her friends. He belonged to a group of boys who I only ever saw together. One of them had a credit card. At some point after we met, they used it to pay to see me naked on the internet. On that day or soon after, Bradley told his friends that he was going to have sex with me. “He wants to fuck you,” one of them said. This was the way things were. If a boy said he wanted to fuck you, you were supposed to feel flattered.
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Butch/femme is a subculture with no strict rulebook, though there are commonalities within the expression of each identity. Butch women often embody what we traditionally regard as masculinity, wearing short hair, loose clothing, trousers and shorts -- think Orange Is The New Black’s Lea DeLaria or Lena Waithe. Femme women tend to embrace femininity; dresses and skirts, make-up and perfume -- more along the lines of Portia de Rossi or, if you’re into Glee, Santana Lopez.

Despite misconceptions, being femme is not about trying to ‘pass’ as straight. In fact it's far from it. In donning femininity at least partially for the gaze of other women, femmes are able to reclaim a kind of womanhood that’s too often automatically equated with heterosexuality. Similarly, the rejection of feminine gender norms by butches is intrinsically radical: it empowers lesbians to renounce patriarchal standards of beauty, giving them relative freedom to present in whichever way they feel most comfortable.
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A 2,554-word essay that aims to explore how to survive a patriarchal capitalist system that forces publications run by young(ish) women—even seemingly wildly successful ones, with robust communities that mourn these losses loudly and vocally—to shut down in spite of their popularity, completely ignored three publications that might have, each in their own way, answered a piece of the thesis question. This article was not the first to completely ignore lesbian and queer women's media when pondering women's websites; it was one in a large compilation of disappointments, as yet another feminist writer I admire did not acknowledge the work queer women's websites do.
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The nature of fandom seems to have morphed in the past decade. In the old days of sci-fi conventions and Bobby Sherman fan clubs, fandom was a subculture reserved for the very young or the very obsessed—or, in the case of the Grateful Dead, the very stoned. As fantasy and comic-book franchises have taken over the entertainment industry, nerd culture has become mainstream. Now that couch potatoes have social media, they have risen up and become active, opinionated participants. As a result, movie studios and TV showrunners have to cater to subsets of diehard devotees, who expect to have a say in how their favorite properties are handled.
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We live in a society where female ways of being are still commonly viewed as second-best, where too much feminine energy can be an obstacle to being taken seriously, where women are expected to conform to stereotypically male communication patterns and expectations in order to have a career and real power. Too often it’s a choice between embracing who you really are and getting what you want in life.
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An entire section of the rules was devoted to censoring depictions of homosexuality. “Intimate activities (holding hands, touching, kissing) between homosexual lovers” were censored, as were “reports of homosexual groups, including news, characters, music, tv show, pictures”. Similarly blocked was content about “protecting rights of homosexuals (parade, slogan, etc.)” and “promotion of homosexuality”.
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The U.S. and UK governments are expected to sign a treaty in October that will force social media platforms based in either of the countries to “disclose encrypted messages from suspected terrorists, paedophiles and other serious criminals” to police in the other, according to the Times of London.

Comment tu peux transmettre le contenu de messages chiffrés que tu n'es pas sensé pouvoir déchiffrer ? 🤔

Oops.
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C'est toujours triste de voir un rêve s'évaporer à tout jamais comme ça.
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Oh no!
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It’s a survival mechanism, especially as someone with depression and anxiety, to try to ignore and normalize the dehumanizing experiences I have to move through in order to live. If I were to allow myself to be bothered by quotidian microaggressions and invalidations and othering, I’d maybe never leave the house.
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Some writers map their sentences metrically, marking the stressed and unstressed syllables with scansion marks as if notating a musical score. Some even work out the stresses before they fill in the words. The rest of us just have a foggy sense that a sentence needs an extra beat. But we still know that a sentence is not just what it says but how it says it.
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The notion that novelists should be solitary creators has long been deeply ingrained. More than twenty years ago, a group of Italian men set out to debunk that idea.
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La nomination de Tristan Nitot servira d'abord à redorer le blason de Qwant dans la presse et les médias, mais également à éliminer de la direction de l'entreprise la seule personne susceptible d'essayer de pouvoir tenir tête à Léandri.

« Nitot est tout sauf un administratif ou un opérationnel : c'est un speaker, hors sol et totalement sous la coupe de Léandri. Son rôle : danser devant les journalistes, nu s'il le faut. »
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Here, Dugan and Fabbre share portraits and words from 12 of the 88 people they connected with along the way.
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There are plenty of well-documented reasons to distrust Instagram — the platform where one is never not branding, never not making Facebook money, never not giving Facebook one’s data — but most unnerving are the ways in which it has led me to distrust myself. After countless adventures through the black hole, my propensity to share, perform, and entertain has melded with a desire far more cynical: to be liked, quantifiably, for an idealized version of myself, at a rate not possible even ten years ago.
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The key to understanding why a self-proclaimed radical feminist group would side with conservatives arguing for the right to force cisgender women into skirts at work is to understand who TERFs are and what they’ve been up to for the past 50 years.
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Je crois que les réseaux sociaux nous ont niquées. On doit pas être cablées pour s'exprimer constamment devant des milliers de personnes qui s'expriment elles aussi constamment par milliers devant nous. C'est trop de pression pour notre cervelle.
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Dating. Am I good at it? What qualifies as good at it? For me, dating was always about the effort. I put effort into my dates under the (gargantuanly misguided) notion that effort nets result. I do my hair and makeup, pull a lewk, and put on my optimism and positivity panties before walking out the door. I ask thoughtful questions and come prepared with morsels of information gleaned from their profiles so as to ensure my dates never feels void of conversation topic or connection. I put my best effort forward, because I believe — sorry, believed — dating is an activity worth the effort.
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Direct communication is the best because when you clearly voice the truth about what you’re thinking and how you’re feeling, you maximize the likelihood of being understood.
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