International Women's Day snuck up on me this year like a rapist in a dark alley. No time to trim the tree with red and white tampons, or stuff the (support) stockings with Diva Cups and Bitch subscriptions. (I hear Dutch feminists leave their Birkenstocks out by the fireplace instead.) I was too ...
I married a WWII buff. That means the "Hitler Channel" logo is seared into the bottom right corner of our TV screen. I figured after nearly 20 years of this, I knew about every single badass of the Second World War. Men like Leo Major, the partially-blind Canadian soldier who ...
"Martin Luther toy becomes fastest selling Playmobil figurine of all time." Has anyone been keeping an eye on Germany lately? Because I think they"re getting even weirder than usual, and we all know what happened the last time (and the time before that). "The unexpectedly popular ...
What if most Holocaust victims were balancing their karma from ages before, when they were Roman soldiers putting Christians to death ... So said Charles Manson to his followers back in 197… Oh, wait, no: Shirley MacLaine wrote that in her latest memoir, just out this week. Dummy me: I ...
I"m not sure if it's connected with the whole "gates of hell" thing, but you have to credit"if that's quite the right word"the Catholic church for accomplishing the previously unimaginable: Having first made sex bad, they"ve since made it boring. Of the former, surely no ...
We could try to blame Oprah Winfrey, but for once, that wouldn"t be fair. On one episode of her program, who knows how long ago, the emphatically unmarried megastar grew visibly impatient with some young woman in the audience who was whining about wanting to get married. Oprah said something ...
Menstruation is having a moment. I don"t mean the fleshly, goopy one that vexes roughly half the human race. Periods, while remaining annoyingly corporeal, are once again oozing into the conceptual realm too, thanks to a new wave of feminist writers and artists. Why, yes, this IS more of ...
May a lowly white Canadian like me take a little pride in my knowledge of African-American "thangs"? You know what I"m talkin" "bout, Willis: "Good hair" and barbershop culture. "Black Twitter" and World Star Hip Hop. Purple "drank." Family reunions with ...
Hey, did you hear that "Margaret Thatcher wanted to ban sex toys" when she was prime minister? At least, that's what a bunch of headlines blared at the fag end of last year. (I miss you, 2014, by the way. Come back! All is forgiven ...) But that story broke while I was on vacation. ...
Not three years ago, in these very virtual pages, I mourned the extinction of the loony-bin luminary. Bedlam and Bellevue were once bursting with faux Napoleons and ersatz Anastasias. These days, the lunatics"exiled from the few remaining asylums"have taken over the streets. And, as ...
