Is nudism clean or dirty?
Judith Levine
All articles by this author
May 5, 2022
We are allowing ourselves to make a consumer rights argument rather than a human rights argument.
You Are Endangered as a Citizen
April 27, 2022
What’s Disgusting? Union-Busting!
A rally at Amazon’s LDJ5 facility
We pedaled in single file, hugging the curb to avoid the trucks. And there was the rally! The spring clothes were bright, the air loud with hip-hop. Some women were selling fruit. Drivers were honking support. The ALU’s logo, three fists thrusting up from an open box, snatched the alienated mojo from the huge boxlike buildings stuffed with billions of smaller boxes and transformed it into solidarity and joy.
November 17, 2020
The Bioeconomics of Covid-19
How, exactly, do we value a human life?
Both the left and the right perceive the need for data rapidly collected, centralized, analyzed, and deployed in preventing and arresting epidemics. But they diverge on how to do it. The left argues that public health, a fundamental public good, can only be accomplished by a well-funded, attentive state. The private sector cannot and does not—or should not—be interested. If health care were free and universally available, it would generate no profit.
September 7, 2020
I can’t help but hope for some other, better New York.
68 Jay St. #405, Part I
Asked how she defined sexual deviance, the therapist in Dallas replied, “Deviance is anything that’s against the law.”
Uncivil Commitment
June 25, 2018
Nights of Rage
1970 is an inauspicious year for a young heterosexual feminist to launch an ambitious career of promiscuity.
The sexual revolution is cresting. Men have been riding it like the perfect wave, with women newly eager yet still reliably abject. Now, however, the women’s movement is riling that perfect wave with confounding currents: both extolling the vast potential of female sexuality (multiple orgasms!) and demanding that men fulfill it, now. To many men feminism is a betrayal, a threat, or a joke; to others it is a challenge. They are excited and wary, aggressive and cowed, all at once.
March 10, 2017
Descent into Liberalism
You’re rooting for Cold War II. The FBI is your BFF.
So far right did politics float that Richard Nixon is now a moderate and Pat Leahy looks like Che Guevara. The furthest-left there is to be is what conservatives call “radical liberal.” This should be an oxymoron, but given the span of the possible, it is not. With political possibility, language too is squeezed.
Kiddie Porn
In the sexual counterrevolution, Ginsberg was the antiporn Gettysburg — the battle that turned the tide.
Once in a while, my parents allow some critically authorized highbrow “erotic” periodical like Eros or Evergreen to breach our doorway. But they draw the line at Playboy, in spite of its long, left-leaning pieces by and about important men like Vladimir Nabokov and James Baldwin. Mom and Dad aren’t prudes, they’re snobs. They consider comics, Mad magazine—even mysteries—degraded forms of literature. What would they think of Man to Man? I don’t have to ask.
