April 3, 2026
Steakhouse royalty, feminist icon, fungible tourism graphic—she deserves a proper title
Today, the poster is rarely, if ever, remembered for its relationship to the Cattle Baron, despite the name printed prominently in the bottom right corner. Instead, in museums and academic papers, Facebook posts and news outlets, it is referred to as a “feminist protest poster” by “anonymous.”
I understand that Betty Friedan is starting a bank
The feminists got headaches and worked so relentlessly that they forgot to eat. They smoked too much and made half-hearted attempts to quit. They sent each other presents — articles of clothing, a copy of the latest pamphlet from the Radicalesbians. They slept with disappointing men and mused about bad sex under capitalism. They expressed adoration for one another. They earnestly poured their hearts into writing and recording songs about housework. They organized community meetings with the mothers of schoolkids and then got bored with the mundane things the mothers wanted.
Feminism has always been divided
The point of all this cataloging — which is less schematic in Lewis’s presentation than my summary suggests — is to help us recognize traces of enemy feminism when we encounter them in the present. And we will encounter them, Lewis argues, because they’re everywhere.
March 5, 2025
The enemy, it seems to me, does not come to us looking for ammunition; this they already have.
February 18, 2025
There are rules to observe if you want to get out of the hospital
Sometime in 1997 Beth Stryker, who was one of Shulamith’s younger friends, sent us the manuscript. Would Semiotext(e) like to publish Shulamith Firestone’s new, second book? I think we said yes right away before even reading it. But when we finally did, I was just blown away by the way that Airless Spaces wasn’t a memoir.
On the exhausted reader
What is the tone of this literary-theoretical tone? Take away anything from reading these books together and it’s their similar vibe: something quietly persistent, invested in its own disinvestments, obsessive rather than obsessed; something that can’t notice without feeling implicated in what’s been noticed and so isn’t prone to anger. Hard as it is to wrap one’s hands around the vaporousness of tone, I’d still risk a label. The tone of the moment, if you take these books as a guide, is a habitual mordancy.
December 21, 2023
Inaction is the coping mechanism of choice
Let me try my hand at one of those conditionals: If Alcott has always been interested in how people bargain with forces bigger than them, then Emergency is about what happens when women bet against themselves; when women use their own autonomy as a bargaining chip in a wager that might gain them some power within a system inherently built against them.
August 4, 2023
A symposium
My mind was racing with questions like, Why is there a transfemme Barbie but no transmasc Ken? Did I just pay $17.50 to witness the spectacle of capital subsuming dissent? Have the filmmakers deliberately cast “Weird Barbie” with an actress who dated Bari Weiss and played “Hallelujah” on the piano while dressed as Hillary Clinton after the 2016 election in order to politically center “weirdness”? Why is there no mention of doll materials designer Jack Ryan and his past employment engineering missiles for Raytheon?
July 19, 2023
They are the real canyon ladies
The vibe was very West Coast: everyone looked like someone I’d played in a Seattle band with a decade ago. Cowboy boots and fleece, a lot of craft beer and sleeve tattoos, #vanlifers with fedoras and rainbow Pendleton blankets, earth-toned knitwear and dusty Chacos (the “pretty” kind with the toe loop), big Indigo Girls energy. I’ve been in New York too long; I don’t own clothes like this anymore.
The book’s great service is to disentangle love from care.
Boundless feeling has to be bound if it is to be encapsulated.
Is nudism clean or dirty?
