Bitchfest

In the wake of Sassy and as an alternative to the more staid reporting of Ms., Bitch was launched in the mid-nineties as a Xerox-and-staple zine covering the landscape of popular culture from a feminist perspective. Both unabashed in its love for the guilty pleasures of consumer culture and deeply thoughtful about the way the pop landscape reflects and impacts women's lives, Bitch grew to be a popular, full-scale magazine with a readership that stretched worldwide. Today it stands as a touchstone of hip, young feminist thought, looking with both wit and irreverence at the way pop culture informs feminism—and vice versa—and encouraging readers to think critically about the messages lurking behind our favorite television shows, movies, music, books, blogs, and the like. BITCHFest offers an assortment of the most provocative essays, reporting, rants, and raves from the magazine's first ten years, along with new pieces written especially for the collection. Smart, nuanced, cranky, outrageous, and clear-eyed, the anthology covers everything from a 1996 celebration of pre-scandal Martha Stewart to a more recent critical look at the "gayby boom"; from a time line of black women on sitcoms to an analysis of fat suits as the new blackface; from an attempt to fashion a feminist vulgarity to a reclamation of female virginity. It's a recent history of feminist pop-culture critique and an arrow toward feminism's future.

Feminist Media: From the Second Wave to the Digital Age analyses the relationship between second wave feminist media production and capitalism, as well as identifying the tradition that can be drawn between second wave feminism, Riot Grrrl and feminist blogging today. There has been a recent re-evaluation of the importance of second wave feminist media, demonstrated by the digitization of Spare Rib by the British Library in 2015. However, up until now, research on the magazine has been limited. This book analyses the relationship between Spare Rib and the capitalist publishing industry, comparing it to American feminist magazine Ms. The book argues that it is important to understand the cultural economies of the magazines as this had an impact on the assumed readership of the magazines, therefore having an impact on the issues that were privileged. The second half of the book charts a crucial and often overlooked link between feminist media production in the ‘second wave’ and more contemporary forms of feminist media activism.

Professors and students alike are taking interest in Girls' Studies—the socialization of girls versus boys—and beginning to analyze the impact of media, pop culture, messaging, and more on America's girls. Girls' Studies tackles socialization and gender expectations, body image, and media impact, and gives insight into girl empowerment and how to equip our girls for a brighter future.

Three decades after American women changed their strategy in the battle of the sexes, how do men really feel? About themselves? About feminism? Is it still possible for men to be heroes? Aggressive pursuers of status and dominance--their traditional goals? In this candid dispatch from the front lines of the gender war, journalist Michael Segell delivers some provocative answers. As a columnist for Esquire and an editor at Cosmopoli-tan, Segell began to document a serious disconnect between American men and women, a seemingly unbridgeable divide between what men and women say in public about sexual roles and their very real private thoughts and desires. Women today expect that they will be fulfilled both professionally and personally. But often, Segell found, men are secretly too angry and resentful to woo, or stay married to, women they view as competitors. The result for men: a passive-aggressive approach to women, a historic aversion to intimacy (the euphemistic "lack of commitment"), and a rapidly declining marriage rate. Even, astonishingly, a new mode of payback: sexual withholding. After interviewing disaffected combatants, married and single, on both sides of the ideological divide and tracing the causes of men's pain and confusion, Segell embarked upon a search for the kind of man who can end this sexual stalemate--a man who doesn't retreat from successful women. Over time, a portrait resolved: Both a lover and a fighter, he's tough and competitive yet loving and compassionate, stoic yet emotionally sophisticated, skilled in the bedroom and the boardroom. In short, a standup guy. Deep in an all-male universe--at men's retreats and in locker rooms--Segell limns the evolution of a new masculinity, a model that reaffirms traditional male virtues, the durability of manly friendship, the immutability of the ancient laws of sexual attraction, the delights of marriage and children, and the importance of the bond, however challenging and strained, between fathers and sons. Along the way, he turns his focus upon himself, offering moving accounts of the events and relations that have shaped his own vision of what it means to be a man. Finally, through keen analysis of sexual manners and rhetoric, Segell offers a blueprint, for both sexes, for a détente in the thirty-year gender war. Intelligent, direct, and deeply felt, drawing upon comprehensive research and personal history, Standup Guy will enlighten and inform men and women alike. This is a book about men--Big Men and "rubbish men," athletes and aesthetes, philanthropists and presidential philanderers, babes and bullies, warriors and wimps, ladies' men and louts, and surfers, censorious censors, and CEOs. It's a book about male obsessions--or as my wife puts it, sports and sex. But it's also about the durability of manly friendship; the pure tough heart of little boys; the virtues of dominance and aggression; the utility of emotional constraint; the willfulness of the penis; the calming delights of marriage; and the challenging, often dangerous bond be-tween father and son. It's a book about the immutable laws of sexual attraction, and the persuasive power of a slow hand. It's about the dawning of personal insight, catharsis, and change. --from the Introduction

NATIONAL BOOK AWARD NOMINEE • A wildly original, cross-country novel that subverts a long tradition of family narratives and casts new light on the mythologies—national, individual, and collective—that drive and define us. On the day of their estranged father’s wedding, half sisters Cheyenne and Livy set off to claim their inheritance. It’s been years since the two have seen each other. Cheyenne is newly back in Seattle, crashing with Livy after a failed marriage and a series of personal and professional dead ends. Livy works refinishing boats, her resentment against her freeloading sister growing as she tamps down dreams of fishing off the coast of Alaska. But the promise of a shot at financial security brings the two together to claim what’s theirs. Except, instead of money, what their father gives them is information—a name—which forces them to come to grips with a long-held family secret. In the face of their new reality, the sisters and their adopted brother each set out on journeys that will test their faith in one another, as well as their definitions of freedom. Moving from Seattle’s underground to the docks of the Far North, from the hideaways of the southern swamps to the storied reaches of the Great Offshore Grounds, Vanessa Veselka spins a tale with boundless verve, linguistic vitality, and undeniable tenderness.

It’s early summer, and in a small community on the central Jersey Shore, a black car screeches to a halt outside the Wright Bros grocery. Danny looks up from where he’s working at the carwash to see the driver rifle out of the car and chase a girl rushing into the store. For some reason—fate perhaps or intuition—he decides to cross the lot and investigate. When he meets Mary, there is a great deal Danny doesn’t know, but he certainly knows that he’s been struck. For it’s like the keys to an old car had been dropped into his hands and is about to start the engine that will forever alter the outcome of their lives. Some Place Better Than Here is a gritty, unflinching look at how we define family and come to grips with loss. It’s about growing up in a small town, following your dreams, and mapping out the uneven ground that often lays between love, friendship and sexual awakening.