Femme Fatale

I’m not at all surprised that an old, wealthy, powerful, and disgusting white man such as Harvey Weinstein would use his power and privilege to sexually harass and sexually assault over 50 women. But I am particularly disgusted by how he got away with this for decades. Weinstein was not discreet. He was not subtle. He didn’t care that everyone knew. This was Hollywood’s “open secret.”

The reason for his indiscretion is simple. He knew that his behavior would be tolerated. And up until very recently, he was right—he would sexually harass and assault women, and suffer absolutely no consequences. Matt Damon knew. Ben Affleck knew. Brad Pitt knew. Quentin Tarantino knew. Seth MacFarlane knew. It stands to reason that hundreds of other men in the industry, who have remained strangely silent, also knew. And they all did nothing.

As a society, we tolerate this behavior wherever it manifests. We all know a Harvey Weinstein. We all know that guy who takes things a little too far, who makes the women around him feel slightly uncomfortable and icky. And we still hang out with him, we still go to parties with him, we still consider him our friend.

She’s not like other girls. She’s an ethereal, fun-loving, free-spirited, and wide-eyed Zooey Deschanel-esque creature. She laughs when there is no joke, and dances when there is no music. She talks about sea horses and stars, but doesn’t know what a football is. She capitalizes the letters in the middle of words. She plays the ukulele. She has a bizarre name like “Alaska” or “Stargirl” that she chose for herself.

But of course, she’s also almost always white, thin, able-bodied, heterosexual, and conventionally beautiful—therefore making her strange behaviors seem “quirky” and “cute” rather than off-putting and disturbing. She’s every single girl in a John Green novel. She is a girl who “loved mysteries so much that she became one.” She “embodies the Great Perhaps.” She is the “faintest scent of a cactus flower, the flitting shadow of an elf owl.” She is “bendable light.”

She is a mystery, an enigma. We never see her inner workings or learn too much about her. We never understand her emotions, her motivations, her fears, and her reasons for doing the eccentric things that she does. But we do know what effect she has on the people around her—especially the shy male protagonist who falls madly in love with her. He will begin as a boy, lost and confused about who he is, ready to lead a conventional and boring life—ready to go “to Duke in the fall, then go to med school, and become an oncologist, and obviously get married and have kids by thirty.” But by the end of the book or film, he will emerge as a man, his eyes opened to the infinite possibilities before him.

We all know a bitcoin bro. Also called the tech bro or the brogrammer, they can be found trading bitcoin, or some other form of cryptocurrency, and providing regular—and often unsolicited—updates on how much money they’re making. They write long-winded Facebook statuses on entrepreneurship, the power of positivity, and motivation. They idolize Elon Musk, share countless posts about SpaceX, and drool over the prospect of colonizing Mars one day. They love virtual reality, augmented reality, any reality where the Scarlett Johansson-voiced artificial intelligence from “Her” is real. They are constantly forming startups that seek to “disrupt” an industry, or that seek to be “like Uber, but for [groceries/toothbrushes/lint rollers].”

And these are almost always men, working with colleagues or co-founders who are also men, who all pride themselves on being bros who just want to “bro down and crush some code.” Being a bitcoin bro isn’t just defined by your occupation or hobby; it’s a lifestyle, an image, an aesthetic. And this aesthetic is overwhelmingly characterized by a desire to exclude women. Beneath their inspirational TEDtalks and their grand ideas of creating a better future for humanity lies a deep-rooted disdain for women and subconscious belief in male superiority.

This sentiment was rendered most explicitly in the anti-diversity memo that circulated around Google, where a male Google employee claimed that women are underrepresented in tech because, “the abilities of men and women differ in part due to biological causes.” But this was by no means an isolated incident. Sexism is rampant in the tech industry, and it shows in the numbers. A whopping 27 percent of women cited toxic workplace culture as a primary reason for leaving their job in the tech industry. As a result, major companies such as Google, Twitter, Facebook, and Microsoft have massive gender disparities, with women making up less than 20 percent of employees in tech roles.

What exactly makes a woman “wife material”—someone who is worthy of a man’s lifelong love and commitment? This topic recently came up in a Facebook group of which I’m a member. A woman who was talking to a man she met online posed this question to the group of fellow women: Even though she was extremely sexually attracted to him, should she abstain from having sex with him in order to show that she’s worthy of being his girlfriend, or perhaps even his wife one day?

Many women jumped to answer her question, advising her to wait anywhere from three dates to “as long as you can.” These answers are not unfamiliar to me. Growing up, I had received similar advice from television shows, magazines, and even other women. I was told to wait three dates—or better, five, or even better, eight—before having sex with a man. I was told to make him wait as long as you can, because if you have sex with him too soon, he will lose all respect for you. After all, “why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free?”

One woman in the Facebook group commented that, based on how long a woman waits to have sex with a man, he will put her in one of three categories: one night stand, friend with benefits, or wife material. So, she advised the original poster: If you truly want him to see you as wife material, you have to tease him. Make him work for it. Dangle a carrot in front of his eyes. Hold out for as long as you can, and make him chase you.

We talk a lot about female objectification in the media—how women are constantly sexualized, objectified, and used as nothing more than aesthetically pleasing and sexually arousing props in advertisements, music videos, and movies. The dehumanizing effects of this imagery have been well-documented, with extensive research demonstrating that objectification leads to depression, anxiety, body shame, sexual dysfunction, and eating disorders among women.

Objectification of women’s bodies, however, is nothing new. Throughout history, much of visual art has been about appreciating female beauty and the female form. Less than 4 percent of the artists in the Modern Art section of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art are women, but 76 percent of the nudes are female. From the Venus de Milo to the Mona Lisa, women are overwhelmingly the objects, not the subjects, of art. Imagery is catered to the male gaze. Women are not meant to do the looking; they are meant to be looked at.

But when I was watching Charli XCX’s self-directed music video for her latest song “Boys,” I felt something distinctly unfamiliar stir within me. As I watched Connor Franta seductively brush his lips with his thumb and Brendon Urie gaze sensually at me as he lay among rose petals, I realized that this piece of art was specifically designed for me, a heterosexual woman.

I don’t keep up with the Kardashians. But millions of people around the world do. Whether you like it or not, what the Kardashians say and do leaves an imprint on our society, and shapes our cultural consciousness.

On Wednesday, July 5, Rob Kardashian posted a series of extremely disturbing photos on his personal Instagram page. He posted naked photos of his ex-girlfriend, Blac Chyna, and accused her of cheating on him. It took Instagram 20 minutes to take down the explicit photos. By that time, it was too late. The whole world had seen.

To be clear, this is not an example of “showing receipts.” If Rob had really wanted to “show receipts” proving that Blac Chyna was cheating on him, he simply would have leaked screenshots of her infidelity. In the Internet era, this is the preferred method of exposing someone who has wronged you. This is what Kim Kardashian did to Taylor Swift to prove that she was lying about her conversation with Kanye West, and this is what Tizita Balemly did to Kylie Jenner to prove that Jenner was stealing the indie artist’s fashion designs.

People tell me that I am two very different people on social media. There’s the Nian on Facebook who posts links to her feminist Crimson articles, starts fights with strangers in the comments section, and yells at misogynists. Then there’s the Nian on Instagram, who posts photos of herself in swimsuits at exotic locales, exchanges sweet pleasantries with strangers in the comments section, and—apparently—perpetuates misogyny by “objectifying herself” and appealing to the male gaze.

For a long time, I knew—or I thought I knew—that the two identities were irreconcilable. I was told that my Instagram account was not only apolitical, but actively anti-feminist. I was “contributing to my own objectification,” I was not “helping the cause,” and I was “giving feminism a bad name.” Articles about feminist Instagram users would showcase women who skateboarded and rode motorbikes and wrote code. These were the “women who lift you up,” as opposed to the Instagram models posing in their swimsuits, who “drag you down.”

And yet, I still considered myself a feminist in my everyday life. I still wrote articles and started fights, both online and in real life, about rape culture or toxic masculinity. There seemed to exist a vast logical disconnect. The same men who argued with me and called me “man-hater” or “feminazi” on Facebook would like my photos on Instagram, write comments about how beautiful I looked, and direct message me to ask me out on dates. People disliked me for what I said, but liked me for how I looked.

In the past, I have criticized some feminists for being too moderate, too conciliatory towards men. I have criticized white feminists like Emma Watson for promoting the idea that gender inequality only exists because women haven’t extended a “formal invitation” to men—and not because men benefit immensely from gender inequality. And I still believe that feminism should, at its core, be a revolutionary, intersectional, and unapologetic movement.

But being a feminist, even a watered-down feminist, comes with repercussions. Even Emma Watson’s conciliatory HeForShe speech, where she spends most of the time talking about all the ways in which men are oppressed, triggered intense backlash. Users on the online message board 4chan threatened to leak Emma Watson’s nude photographs in retaliation for her speech. Even though Emma Watson explicitly said things like “men don’t have the benefits of equality either,” her speech was considered threatening and offensive enough to provoke men to punish her.

Speaking out about gender inequality, even in the most conciliatory and moderate manner, is risky. But even the refusal to speak about sexism is dangerous. Gamer and actor Felicia Day made her first public statement about Gamergate, a group of anonymous people on the Internet, many of whom are presumably men, who have made it their life’s mission to harass women and female gamers online.

In my last article, I wrote about how men benefit from male privilege. I wrote about how men, on a structural level, benefit from a system that establishes male dominance at the expense of women. I wrote, in no uncertain terms, that men are and will always be oppressors.

These statements proved to be extremely controversial. Men, especially those who consider themselves feminists, were angry that I called them oppressors. They invoked the “not all men” argument, and brought up all the ways in which they have supported women’s rights. Many men seemed to consider my statements a personal attack, and became defensive. If all men are oppressors, then what were they supposed to do? Was there nothing that men could do right? Was I simply advocating for male genocide?

This controversy, I believe, stems from a fundamental misunderstanding of what privilege and oppression mean. Privilege is the idea that society grants unearned benefits to people because of certain aspects of their identity. And, on the flip side, there is oppression—the idea that society disadvantages people because of certain aspects of their identity. Privileged people, therefore, benefit at the expense of oppressed people.

Recently, Saturday Night Live produced a skit called “Girl at a Bar” where a woman sitting alone at a bar is repeatedly approached by self-proclaimed feminist men—“not gross guys trying to hit on you or anything”—who make it clear, through their pussyhats and their feminist T-shirts, that they are not one of those “skeazy guys” at a bar. However, after successfully convincing the woman of their feminist credentials, these men use the opportunity make a sexual advance. And when she gently rebuffs their advances, these men become angry, calling her a “bitch” and complaining that “it’s not fair.”

This is the “woke misogynist” that Nona Willis Aronowitz wrote about. This is the self-proclaimed feminist man who proudly attends the Women’s March and reads Judith Butler and casually throws around terms like “gender performativity,” but who also harasses, talks over, belittles, and sexually assaults women.

This is the man who prides himself on his progressive politics, who puts anti-Trump and Support Orlando filters on his Facebook profile pictures, but who then calls Tomi Lahren a “useless bimbo” and “whore” on the Occupy Democrats Facebook page.

The selfie is a popular phenomenon where people use their smartphones to take photos of themselves. Even though people of all genders can and regularly do take selfies, selfie culture is culturally dominated by women. The Chainsmoker’s hit song “#Selfie” was voiced by a woman, stock photos of selfies mainly depict women, and the face of selfie culture—the “queen of selfies”—is Kim Kardashian. A study even found that the average 16-25 year old woman spends over five hours a week taking selfies.

However, selfies are also the subject of much ridicule and criticism. Multiple articles have concluded that people who take more selfies are more likely to be narcissistic and psychopathic. Other articles have extrapolated that selfie-takers are vain. And many people seem to agree that selfies are a “manifestation of society’s obsession with looks and its ever-narcissistic embrace.” Selfie culture, according to some people, threatens the very moral fabric of society—destroying marriages and ruining friendships.

It’s not a surprise that selfie culture, which is dominated by women, is also criticized for being shallow and foolish at best, destructive and dangerous at worst. Anything that is popular among women, especially young women, is immediately devalued and ridiculed in society. It is only natural that this misogynistic disapproval of all things feminine would spread to taking selfies as well.

On Saturday, Jan. 21, millions of people took to the streets for the Women’s March on Washington to protest against President Donald Trump and his bigotry. Women’s Marches were also organized in cities across the United States and in other countries, making it the biggest one-day protest in United States history. Millions of people from all around the world came together to fight for equality and justice.

And yet, something doesn’t feel quite right.

Many of the marchers wore pink “pussyhats,” donned pink vagina costumes, carried the signs that depicted uteruses holding up middle fingers or saying things like “Pussies Against Fascism”, and also held posters that said things like “Bow to My Magical Vagina,” “Vaginas Brought You Into the World, Vaginas Will Vote You Out,” “Leave it to the Beavers,” and “Viva la Vulva.”

We love making fun of the basic bitch. She is so easy to ridicule—after all, she wears leggings and Uggs, listens to Taylor Swift, drinks pumpkin spice lattes, enjoys shopping at Sephora, and has Pinterest boards filled with fitness routines and bedroom decorating ideas. She seeks contentment in pumpkin patches, colorful stationery, home decor, and inspirational quotes about inner beauty and tranquility juxtaposed against images of beaches and sunsets. Can you imagine? She probably even scrapbooks.

And the basic bitch is always a woman. It is not a coincidence that there is no male equivalent to the basic bitch. The term “f**kboy,” a commonly used pejorative term for men, refers to sexually coercive men who treat women as objects for their pleasure. The female equivalent for a f**kboy, therefore, isn’t a basic bitch but rather a slut or a whore. The f**kboy is ridiculed for his misogynistic treatment of women; the basic bitch is ridiculed for her love of holiday drinks and yoga pants.

There is no vapid and air-headed male stereotype who is unoriginal in his embrace of all things masculine. Society does not derive the same level of pleasure from ridiculing men for lifting weights at the gym, posing with freshly-caught fish, and waxing eloquent about their cars—even though a quick glance at Tinder shows me that these kinds of men are in no short supply. Somehow, it’s much more enjoyable to make fun of the women who go to SoulCycle, drink green juice, and experiment with makeup.

The nation's highest glass ceiling didn't shatter on November 8th. Many of us hoped it would. Many of us waited with bated breath, ready to hear the sound of millions of tiny glass shards crashing down, ready to bask in the sight of a limitless blue sky stretching up above, ready to live in a world where a woman can be President of the United States.

It looks like we have some more waiting to do. And in the meantime, many people, especially men, have been quick to blame Hillary Clinton’s defeat on the fact that she was a “weak candidate.” But what they fail to understand is that in a world so misogynistic, for a woman to even come close to shattering the glass ceiling is a superhuman feat of resilience and strength, and a testament to Hillary Clinton's unstoppable willpower in the face of male dominance.

It’s not just Hillary Clinton: Many women who dare to exist in the public sphere are deemed transgressive and punished accordingly. When Leslie Jones dared to speak up against the criticism of the “Ghostbusters” reboot, she was verbally assaulted with racist and sexist slurs by Milo Yiannopoulous and the alt-right community, which then went on to leak her private documents and nude photographs. When Anita Sarkeesian dared to talk about the sexist portrayal of women in video games, she was attacked by Gamergate, a loosely organized movement of anonymous Internet harassers, who promised to shoot anyone that showed up to Sarkeesian’s talk at Utah State University and who threatened to “come to your house and violently rape you in front of your family.” When Jessica Valenti dared to write about feminism, she received rape and death threats directed at her 5-year old daughter.

Female birth control has been available for many years now, beginning with the hormonal birth control pill that Margaret Sanger pioneered in the 1950s. Nowadays, birth control comes in a variety of forms, including implants, patches, shots, and intrauterine devices to name only a few. More than 99 percent of sexually experienced women between the ages of 15 and 44 in the United States have used at least one contraceptive method, and the majority of current contraceptive users rely on hormonal methods.

Hormonal male birth control, on the other hand, is not yet available. There is no pill that men can take every day in order to prevent an unwanted pregnancy. Women are still expected to assume sole responsibility for not getting pregnant. This expectation, unfortunately, is nothing new. Single mothers are stigmatized whereas the men who left them are not; teenage girls are chided for “getting themselves pregnant” as though impregnation is something that you can do to yourself; a heterosexual couple engaging in risky sex may end up with an unwanted pregnancy, but only the woman will be shamed and potentially even forced to surrender control of her body for nine months in accordance to restrictive abortion laws.

Thankfully, scientists have recently begun developing a male birth control shot. It is nearly 95 percent effective at preventing pregnancy, and it was heralded as a breakthrough for science and for gender equality. Women have long borne the sole burden for preventing pregnancy; now, with this study, men could assume a greater share of the responsibility.

“When you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab ‘em by the pussy. You can do anything.”

These words came from presidential candidate Donald Trump, as he boasted to Billy Bush about sexually assaulting women. These are the words of rape culture—a culture of male entitlement over women’s bodies, where women are viewed as objects for sexual consumption, where sexual assault is bragged about and met with laughter.

But these words could’ve easily come from our classmates.

Science is objective. The scientific process is rigorous, involving hard data and empirical observations. And, as a result, the conclusions are objectively factual. For example: Gravity exists. The Earth moves around the Sun. Evolution is the process by which different kinds of living organisms developed and diversified from earlier forms. Women are biologically inferior to men.

Wait, what? Charles Darwin is well-known for developing the theory of evolution. He is a little bit less known for teaching that women are biologically inferior to women.

That can’t be right. Darwin was a reputable scientist, not just some sexist bigot lurking in the comment section of The Crimson's website. And yet, the same man who gave us the theory of evolution also gave us the insight that “the average standard of mental power in man must be above that of woman."

When Amber Heard accused her now ex-husband Johnny Depp of domestic abuse and filed for divorce, virtually nobody believed her at the time.

Benicio del Toro, a friend of Johnny Depp’s who was not there to witness the alleged attacks and who also admitted that he didn’t “know the specifics,” nevertheless felt qualified to assert that Heard was a “manipulative” and “twisted” woman who lied about being abused so she could get Depp’s money.

Depp is a “nice guy, very caring, very smart,” insisted del Toro. This was, to him, enough proof of Depp’s innocence. And all over the Internet, people echoed his sentiments. Someone even edited Amber Heard’s Wikipedia page to describe her as a gold digger who “married the super talented and respected actor Johnny Depp to take advantage of his kind nature” and then started “blackmailing him with abuse allegations” in order to take advantage of him.

Take a look around: It seems patently obvious that men and women are different. Men prefer to drink beer and watch football, while women prefer to drink vodka cranberries and paint their nails. Men enjoy earning promotions at work, while women enjoy staying at home and taking care of the children. Given the vast disparity in the choices that men and women make in their hobbies, occupations, and even alcoholic drinks, it sometimes seems like we come from two entirely different planets.

But what if I told you that many of our choices weren’t actually ours to make? Instead, they were made for us from the moment we are born and the doctor examined our genitals and announced either “It’s a boy!” or “It’s a girl!”

Children who are proclaimed boys will be dressed in blue onesies, grow up in rooms adorned with football wallpaper, shop in the boy’s section of the toy store, build battleships with Legos and play baseball with their father, and watch television shows and see men as scientists, as businessmen, as leaders, as United States presidents.

It was rape. He violated her body without her consent. He took her unconscious body behind a dumpster and proceeded to “aggressively thrust his hips into her” and penetrate her with his fingers. And he knew it was rape, because when two bypassers confronted him, he took off running and had to be tackled and restrained until the police came to arrest him.

Brock Turner is a rapist. He should have served the maximum 14 years in prison. Instead, he will spend only three months in jail. People sympathize with Brock Turner, who—as we are constantly reminded in every headline—is a wealthy white boy, a former Stanford student, and a champion swimmer. This is not surprising. After all, people have certainly sympathized with rapists in the past.

But this time is different. Aaron Persky, the judge who sentenced him to only six months in jail, may be sympathetic to him, but the court of public opinion is not. People from all walks of life—people of all political affiliations and racial backgrounds and gender identities; members of the media and the general public alike; even the infamous Internet commenters that are so well-known for their misogynistic and unsympathetic remarks—have coalesced in support of the survivor and in rightful vilification of Brock Turner.

It seems that we need to have yet another discussion about rape. In the wake of final clubs saying that sexual assault happens when men find themselves in the same room as women and requesting details on allegations of sexual assault that happened on their property but only allegations that have been “deemed credible,” and in the wake of a state court's ruling that it’s not rape when you put your penis in an unconscious person’s mouth, it seems like it’s time to talk about rape again.

We’ve already talked about victim-blaming. We’ve already talked about the societal pressures that make it hard for women to report, or even admit to themselves that what happened to them was “rape.” We’ve already heard the brave stories from sexual assault survivors. But people still don’t get it, apparently.

One of the major reasons why women don’t report, and why women who do report are stigmatized, is because of the idea that she’s “ruining his life.” This is an idea that’s thrown around a fair bit in media reporting of rape trials. This is when reporters say things like, it’s “incredibly difficult” to “watch what happened as these two young men that had such promising futures, star football players, very good students, literally watched as they believed their lives fell apart” and they were labeled sex offenders, a label that would “haunt them for the rest of their lives.”

As a society, we look at the female body in two completely conflicting ways. On one hand, society loves looking at half-naked female bodies. We love it so much that we put it on the advertisements all around us, place it strategically in movies and television shows, use it gratuitously in video games—bare legs and exposed cleavage and “tasteful sideboob” and glistening flat stomachs and barely-concealed buttocks. Body parts that are packaged and prepared for our consumption.

But at the same time, society hates seeing the female body. When a mother breastfeeds in a restaurant, we cringe and tell her to put her breasts away. When a businesswoman wears a blouse that reveals just a little too much cleavage, we talk about how unprofessional she is. When a schoolgirl wears a skirt that is an inch too short, we ask her to please go back home and change because she is distracting her male classmates and her male teachers, and a man’s right to not get aroused in school is much more important than a woman’s right to an education.

We ask women who dress “provocatively” why they don’t respect themselves. We ask them to be modest, to cover up a little, to “leave something to the imagination.” Yet at the same time, we don’t want things left to our imagination. When we are watching movies or advertisements, we want to see a woman’s naked body, or as close to her naked body as we can get. Sex sells. What explains this dichotomy, this love-hate relationship?

The “Twilight” series created a worldwide splash when it was first released 11 years ago, setting records as one of the biggest selling novels of 2008. The series’ success can be attributed to its inclusion of vampires and werewolves, but most of all, its depiction of an “instant and eternal attraction” between the dark and mysterious Edward Cullen and the innocent and naive Bella Swan. Twilight is, at its core, supposed to be a love story about two teenagers, one human and one vampire.

However, when we look closely at the story, concerning elements emerge. In “Twilight,” Edward has a habit of sneaking into Bella’s room to watch her sleep. In the books, this is shown as the height of romance. In real life? Not so much.

Edward also damages property when he is angry, physically hurts Bella and leaves marks on her body, routinely scares and intimidates her, controls where she goes and who she talks to, and threatens to commit suicide if she leaves him—all of which are signs, according to the National Domestic Violence hotline, of an emotionally or physically abusive relationship.

At this point, it has been well established that sexual assault on college campuses is an important issue. And practically everyone agrees that rape is bad. You’d be hard-pressed to find people who openly declare support for rapists, or say that rape is okay.

And yet, progress for campus sexual assault survivors is repeatedly stymied. The system for rape reporting continues to fail survivors. Between improperly processed rape kits and inadequate counseling services, sexual assault survivors on college campuses are routinely confronted with a system that seems to be working against them, rather than for them. Who is upholding this broken system, and protecting sexual assault perpetrators at the expense of survivors?

Rape apologists are. The problem is, they don’t consider themselves defenders of rapists. Instead, they call themselves defenders of liberty and due process before the law. They are the self-proclaimed champions of “innocent before proven guilty.” All they want is fairness and equality—that is, for the men who are accused of rape.

UPDATED: March 3, 2016, at 6:03 p.m.

Women are crazy.

This is a common refrain heard in the media, popular culture, and everyday conversation. From song lyrics about how “bitch is crazy,” to movie and television depictions of women as clingy and jealous, to the many articles teaching men how to tell if a woman is “batshit crazy,” we as a society have thoroughly internalized the concept of labeling women as “insane.”

In theory, there’s nothing wrong with the friend zone. It supposedly describes a common phenomenon: you develop romantic or sexual feelings for your friend, but your friend doesn’t reciprocate. Boom, you’ve been friend zoned. It sucks, it’s awkward, and it happens to everyone, men and women alike.

Yet, even though the friend zone is a gender-neutral concept, it seems to be almost exclusively used by men to describe their relationships with women. Sometimes, men who use this term actually start off as good friends with a woman and develop feelings for her over time—a perfectly natural and innocuous phenomenon that nobody can control.

But more often than not, men complaining about the friend zone were never really friends with the woman at all. They simply wanted to get with the woman, did all sorts of nice things to try to woo her, and then accused her of friend zoning him when she turned him down. In this case, being friend zoned is nothing more than a euphemism for rejection—one that places the blame on the woman, rather than on the man’s own undesirability or incompatibility.

My friend scrolls through the photos of a man on Facebook. He’s white, lives in a predominantly white neighborhood, and went to a predominantly white high school. But in many of his photos, he is accompanied by Asian women.

“Yes, he has yellow fever,” my friend confirms. No, not the potentially fatal viral hemorrhagic disease transmitted by infected mosquitoes, but rather a preference for Asian women. The term is most commonly ascribed to white men who seem to only ever date Asian women.

Yellow fever is a widespread phenomenon. According to data collected from online dating sites, all men except Asians prefer to romantically pursue Asian women. In fact, there are many dating sites specifically tailored for white men looking to date Asian women. There is even a Tumblr blog that compiles messages from “creepy white guys with Asian fetishes.” Yellow fever was also depicted in Debbie Lum’s documentary, Seeking Asian Female, which takes a close look at relationships between white men and Asian women.

Breasts are everywhere. It’s impossible to look at a magazine, advertisement, television commercial, or movie without seeing a pair of breasts on display. The reason isn’t exactly a mystery: People, especially heterosexual men, enjoy looking at breasts.

But at the same time, women are also told to hide their breasts. Dress codes that permit men to wear revealing tops or no tops at all often prohibit women from showing cleavage. Breastfeeding mothers are told to cover up in restaurants for being inappropriate. Female nipples are banned on Instagram, while male nipples are allowed.

People get titillated by breasts and enjoy looking at them or masturbating to them, but they simultaneously scowl at the women whom these breasts belong to, deriding them as inappropriate or pathetic and telling them to put their breasts away. In this twisted love-hate relationship that society has with female breasts, women are told that their breasts are valued and attractive, but also shameful and best covered up. We may think we have progressed enormously from the time when women had to cover their ankles in public, but it seems that not much has changed after all.

It was seventh grade, and I was walking to the bus stop with my friend. We were in a heated argument about a TV show, and I was frowning at something she was saying about one of the characters. We were in middle school, and this was serious business.

“Damn, sexy ladies!” A chorus of whistles followed. A group of men were sitting on the stoop across the street from us, wearing dirty denim and even dirtier grins. One of them looked directly at me. “Smile, sweetheart!”

Our conversation ground to a halt. We boarded the bus and sat next to each other, suddenly uncomfortable. I pulled my school skirt down past my knees, and she tugged at her shirt to cover the area where she would one day have cleavage. We exchanged glances, and in that moment, I saw my friend as the sexual object the men saw her as, and I felt like one myself, reduced to nothing more than a pair of tits and an ass.

“I’m sorry—this is a stupid question—but I was confused about question six. Could we do that one again maybe?”

For the longest time, I didn’t understand what I was apologizing for. Was I sorry for asking a stupid question? Was I sorry for wasting my teacher’s time?

“I’m sorry, but can I just say that I think the first proposal was better than the second? I could be totally wrong; I have no idea. Just throwing it out there.”

At some point in my life I am expected to become a mother. Motherhood has never felt like a choice to me. It has felt like an inevitable part of life, just as unavoidable as aging or death. At some point in my 20s and 30s, I am going to feel an evolutionary urge to create little Nians.

I’m 19 now, and I still don’t feel the urge to create little Nians, and I don’t think the urge will suddenly hit me in five years. I do not see myself ever having children.

When I tell people that I don’t see myself ever becoming a mother, I am met with shock. Even though I am incapable of doing my own chores and squeamish around children younger than 12—indications that I would be supremely unfit as a mother—I am still met with surprise, even from friends who have known me for years, even from my own family. They all ask me: “Why not?”

Rape (noun)–"unlawful sexual intercourse or any other sexual penetration of the vagina, anus, or mouth of another person, with or without force, by a sex organ, other body part, or foreign object, without the consent of the victim."

For decades, women have been taught how to prevent rape from happening to them. Women learn that they can prevent rape if they abide by an extensive set of rules: Don’t forget to carry a rape whistle or pepper spray. Don’t leave your drink unattended. Don’t leave your drink uncovered. Actually, just don’t drink at all. Don’t wear anything provocative. Don’t stay out late. Don’t go anywhere without an escort. Don’t go to frat parties. Don’t do this. Don’t do that.

If you forget any of these things, however, all bets are off. Too drunk? Asking for it. Wearing a short skirt? Asking for it. Passed out unconscious? Asking for it.

Call it the crimson wave, Aunt Flo, or cousin red—call it anything but what it actually is. Menstruation, the process by which the body sheds the lining of the uterus through the vagina, is all too familiar to any woman of childbearing age. That “time of the month” is an inconvenient and unpleasant, but also natural and universal, phenomenon.

Unfortunately, despite affecting roughly 50 percent of the world’s population, menstruation comes with a heavy stigma. In the past especially, there were many taboos surrounding a menstruating woman’s behavior. For example, people used to believe that drops of menstrual blood could kill plants and animals. In ancient Rome, Pliny the Elder wrote that "bees left the hives, mares miscarried and corn... withered at the touch of a menstruating woman." People also used to think that beer, wine, vinegar, milk, and jam would become spoiled if touched by a menstruating woman.

Things didn’t get much better though. As recently as the 1930s, scientists were trying to prove that menstruating women produced menotoxins, or poisons, in their menstrual blood, perspiration, saliva, urine, and tears. Professor B. Schick first came up with this concept in 1919, proposing that this was the reason why menstruating women supposedly caused wine to spoil and flowers to wilt at their touch.

If you’re a woman, chances are you’ve been called a slut.

Women who have slept with 10 men have been called sluts. Women who have slept with one man have been called sluts. Women who have never had sex have been called sluts. Eleven-year-old girls have been called sluts. Laura Ingraham was called a slut by Ed Schultz, simply because she was politically conservative. Sandra Fluke was called a slut by Rush Limbaugh, simply because she supported access to birth control.

I’ve been called a slut, too.

What makes a man “hot?” If we take a look at the list of the sexiest men alive—a list that includes actors Channing Tatum, Ryan Reynolds, and Chris Hemsworth—we notice that they all have a similar body type, with glistening washboard abs and rippling biceps.

However, the conventional standard of beauty for men has been turned upside-down with the introduction of the “dad bod.” A term popularized by Mackenzie Pearson in a widely-read Odyssey article published earlier this year, Pearson explains the dad bod as “a nice balance between a beer gut and working out.” Pearson lists several reasons why she (and all girls, apparently) is crazy about guys with a dad bod.

First, girls crave men with dad bods because fit men make them feel insecure about their own bodies, and “we are insecure enough as it is.” Second, girls want a boyfriend who is bigger so that in comparison they seem skinnier, because “we want to look skinny.” Third, guys with dad bods provide better cuddling, because they don’t feel like “a rock.” Fourth, guys with dad bods love eating, and they are “not scared of a cheat meal.” Fifth, a dad bod gives girls a preview of what the guy is going to look like 20 years down the road—relevant because “girls tend to picture their future together with their guys early on.”

By definition, a housewife is a woman whose main occupation is running her family’s household and not working outside the home. She is, for the most part, financially dependent on her husband, the breadwinner of the family.

But the women described in Wednesday Martin’s memoir “Primates of Park Avenue” don’t seem at first to fit the bill. Dressed in designer clothing and armed with Ivy League degrees, the Upper East Side housewives featured in Martin’s book are described as “wealthy, competent, and beautiful women.” And yet, they too are financially dependent on their husbands.

Perhaps the best example of this is the “wife bonus.” According to Martin, the “wife bonus” is a large sum of money that the husband gives to his wife at the end of the year as a reward for good performance at managing the household, taking care of the children, and other wifely duties. Just as an investment banker is reviewed for his performance at work, a housewife is reviewed for her performance at home, and compensated accordingly.

It is a (supposedly) well-established fact that women just aren’t funny. As a result, it’s tough being a woman in comedy. Take Amy Schumer, comedian du jour. A talented and unabashed stand up comic and sketch writer, it’s easy to see why everyone is talking about her all of a sudden.

In “Last F*ckable Day” she rips apart Hollywood’s sexist treatment of aging actresses. In “Milk Milk Lemonade” she parodies the booty craze. Her show Inside Amy Schumer is ruthless. She leaves no avenue unspared as she bashes stereotypes and gender roles and sexism and societal hypocrisies. And all the while, she is downright hilarious.

But look down at the comments section, and you might wonder if the commenters just watched the same video you did. Her sketch may be a satire of Bill Cosby fans, but all the commenters can see is her weight and the shapeliness of her legs.