Gender

Standards of Care

Sun, 31 May 2026 15:00:45 -0400

The reason Black women were used to develop the field of gynecology was because they were no more than property. They weren’t seen as people; they were just seen as things. The controlling of Black women’s bodies started with chattel slavery, but it continues today.

Practicing

Thu, 30 Apr 2026 11:00:00 -0400

Taking piano lessons, learning to speak Russian, seeking enlightenment

Four of Cups

Tue, 31 Mar 2026 10:00:00 -0400

Maybe it was a mistake choosing such a solemn and contemplative place. Raising your voice above a whisper feels like an intrusion. The entrance branches into different rooms, leading you through multiple cultures and eras. You can move through time, follow the various paths available to you. You pick a direction and go.

Indecision

Sat, 28 Feb 2026 12:00:00 -0500

“Whether you go up the ladder or down it,” / says the Tao, “your position is shaky.”

Nicknames

Sat, 31 Jan 2026 12:00:00 -0500

Get to know Boxcar Betty, Stick Dick, Lali, and the Cajun Asian

Love Language

Sat, 31 Jan 2026 12:00:00 -0500

I read somewhere that most men receive flowers / for the first time at their funeral. So I filled a vase / in your apartment with puckered roses

A Thousand Words

Sat, 31 Jan 2026 12:00:00 -0500

A Thousand Words features photography so rich with narrative that it tells a story all on its own.

I Always Wanted a Wife

Wed, 31 Dec 2025 12:00:00 -0500

I didn’t mean to / eat your berries, he’d sing after eating / all the blackberries I’d been saving / for breakfast, and I couldn’t be mad then / because he’d made me laugh.

Graffiti

Tue, 30 Sep 2025 12:00:00 -0400

A tag on a dumpster, poetry in an outhouse, Viking runes in an underground tomb

Tips

Thu, 31 Jul 2025 12:00:00 -0400

Waiting tables at a diner, playing in a wedding band, giving massages at the Phallus Palace

Opportunity Knocked

dgmlewis@gmail.com — Thu, 31 Jul 2025 12:00:00 -0400

A lot of the Biden administration’s pitch was “In ten years, we promise you you’re going to have a job.” Most people can’t afford to have that long-term view.

Under Construction

mcdermon@gmail.com — Fri, 30 May 2025 12:00:14 -0400

McDermon: In my day-to-day life I’ve definitely seen gender stereotyping that has excluded girls from certain realms, but I don’t feel like I’ve seen similar evidence of men and boys being excluded or oppressed. What is it I’m missing?

Reeves: I completely agree that the problems facing men are not largely about exclusion or oppression. That’s why I find the term “men’s rights” so unhelpful. It’s basically an oxymoron. The reason fewer men are attending college today is not the same reason why women were attending college in lower numbers at the beginning of the seventies. Women were not encouraged to go to college. In fact, women were intentionally discouraged, and in many cases legally excluded, from certain spaces. That’s by and large just not true for boys and men. We have two similar-looking gender gaps with very different causes.

Where I think the debate goes wrong sometimes is when people look at these disadvantages for men and boys and try to find a villain or an oppressor. They’ll claim the “feminist woke takeover of institutions” is causing men’s problems. That’s just horseshit, and it distracts us from structural issues.

Sunbeams

Fri, 30 May 2025 12:00:00 -0400

How we talk about masculinity might be just as important, if not more so, than what we say. The very idea that there is a strict set of rules needs to be chucked away. The future of masculinity is a plethora of masculinities.

Grayson Perry

Become a Friend of The Sun

Fri, 30 May 2025 12:00:00 -0400

My dad and I joke that reading The Sun is a family tradition, passed down through generations. Dad received his first gift subscription in the 1980s from his mom, whom I called Gan. Gan was the family matriarch, full of strong opinions on everything from the Reagan-infused politics of the day to the best way to brew a cup of tea.

Old Souls

Sat, 30 Nov 2024 12:00:00 -0500

Askey: This is perhaps an ontological question, but do you think James Huston became James Leininger, or is there some other entity—some consciousness, some soul—that was once James Huston and is now James Leininger?

Tucker: The latter much more than the former, I think. We can only speculate, but to my mind there may well be this larger self that has different lifetimes. It’s a core that continues, though the people it inhabits are different. I use the analogy of actors in movies. When you see Jimmy Stewart in a movie, it’s undeniably Jimmy Stewart, and yet he can play very different characters.

Penumbra

Mon, 30 Sep 2024 12:00:00 -0400

If Roe was created in the liminal space of the penumbra, Dobbs is the total eclipse that makes all go dark.

Mind the Gap

mcdermon@gmail.com — Mon, 30 Sep 2024 12:00:00 -0400

The lion’s share of Gen Z organizing on the Left is being done by young women, because they care passionately about the issues. I think there’s less of that drive among young men. Instead there’s a sense of rootlessness. We’ll have to see whether that actually translates into conservative voting behavior or support for certain policies.

Uniforms

Thu, 30 May 2024 00:00:00 -0400

For a job at Burger King, a prison in North Carolina, a girls’ school in Iran

Home Sick

Thu, 30 May 2024 00:00:00 -0400

Once we start to recognize that most of us will, at some point, have to step out of our professional role to provide care, then we have to transform how we’re running our economies. At the moment, our economies are relying on these hidden tragedies that befall women behind closed doors. All to keep the wheels of industry turning.

Loving a Sport That Doesn’t Always Love Me Back

marisacrane12@gmail.com — Thu, 29 Feb 2024 05:05:00 -0500

I’ve always enjoyed pickup: the sudden poetry of it, the immediate bond and intimacy among strangers. . . . It’s all guts and very little glory—yet there is some glory, even if only a handful of spectators are watching. One OHHHHHHH, after you cross someone so hard they fall on their ass, can make you hold your head high for the rest of the week.

Is This Desire?

Thu, 29 Feb 2024 05:00:00 -0500

Being honest or open about your Pornhub habits is not the same as telling someone, “I’ve just seen Call My Agent! on Netflix. I think you’d like it.” Part of the reason for that is that most people don’t spend terribly long on Pornhub.

Drama

Wed, 31 Jan 2024 05:00:00 -0500

A high-school play, a support group, a catechism class

Macho Baby

Sun, 31 Dec 2023 05:05:00 -0500

I know that what we call hate is sometimes love that was pushed under a rock, love deprived of light and water. “Tell me to what you pay attention,” writes the philosopher José Ortega y Gasset in his book Man and Crisis, “and I will tell you who you are.” How much love is putrefying inside boys this very moment, starved for nourishment?

Portrait Of US

Fri, 30 Jun 2023 04:00:00 -0400

Monica Jane Frisell and Adam Scher have been traveling the U.S. in their “nomadic photo ark” . . . . attempting to find evidence of what we share by making large-format portraits of Americans from different states and recording short audio interviews with them.

The Strong, Silent Type

Tue, 28 Feb 2023 05:00:00 -0500

Risak: How is the “masculine body” defined?

Siegel: In the U.S. we typically see a mesomorphic ideal: lean, muscular, and with a low body-fat percentage. This is persistent across the U.S. and common in LGBTQ+ communities in particular. Sexual-minority men are at elevated risk for eating disorders due in part to the lean ideal being perpetuated in their communities.

Sunbeams

Tue, 28 Feb 2023 05:00:00 -0500

The feminine in the man is the sugar in the whiskey. The masculine in the woman is the yeast in the bread. Without these ingredients the result is flat, without tang or flavor.

Edna Ferber

The Beetle King

Sun, 31 Jul 2022 04:05:00 -0400

My chest, which was beginning to grow round in the wrong places, had to be hidden under a T-shirt no matter how hot or sweaty I became. Out in the desert I had to squat behind the cover of creosote bushes to pee. At home in my family’s Airstream I was my parents’ youngest daughter, but up in the paloverde I felt like one of the boys.

Falling Behind

Tue, 31 May 2022 04:00:00 -0400

In terms of security and a sense that you can count on a certain career path in life if you do your part — that’s over for most people. You’re on your own.

Life, Without Imitation

Thu, 28 Oct 2021 04:05:00 -0400

Some nights, when medication and meditation have failed to put me to sleep, I think of the relatives who abandoned my family to become white people.

Beat The Old Lady Out

Thu, 25 Mar 2021 04:15:00 -0400

I couldn’t see the loaves in her oven, but I could smell them. They smelled like the perfect weight of blankets on a winter night; like the loving and attentive parents I thought I deserved; like the solution to every natty problem that might crop up in life.