Liz Henry

This is my Tumblr. Everything else at LizHenry.net

[galactustheviking]

this is the real criterion collection cover - pretty dope.

[pinotgris-blog]

!!!!!!!!!

[iwdrm]

“I just hate all these extroverted, obnoxious, pseudo-bohemian losers.”

Ghost World (2001)

[bricesander]

[drugss-deactivated20170318]

I wish this GIF had volume

[mizzhenry]

Burn goals. 

[arabellesicardi]

I return, always, to Baldwin for The Paris Review. I think I revisit it every other month. I always learn something new. 

[ravishlydotcom-blog]

so good

[thedollypartonscrapbook]

[mizzhenry]

Over at The Broad Side

I'm over at The Broad Side today writing about the Jezebelification of Feminism. 

There I was staring at Nicki Minaj’s ass on Google. I did this for a solid thirty minutes — contemplating respectability, sexuality, power, race. As I was doing this, I was thinking how creepy it felt, as a white woman, to gaze and theorize about a woman of color’s body in order to serve some kind of greater good for everybody else. As a feminist writer, this is what I’m expected to do now: explode moments and bodies into viral sensations as protest, activism and empowerment.

But I’m bored. Not by Nicki Minaj –a force of empowering contradictions, just like all of us. Feminism is having a moment, and I’d welcome it if I wasn’t burned out by a decade that’s seen the rise of the Jezebelification of feminism, which is to say a deluge of pop culture think pieces that are heavy on celebrity voyeurism as analysis and righteous anger as activism over Photoshop clicks, while sparing no keystroke to knock Lena Dunham down a peg for daring to turn herself into a cool girl when she’s obviously a frumpy nobody.

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Beyonce has made feminism sexy. For that, I am eternally grateful. We all should be. But it’s not Beyonce’s job or Jennifer Lawrence’s to bring the policy, yet far too many writers focus day-in-and-day-out on the celebrity play-by-play to become quasi-celebrities themselves. F-list celebrities, I might add, but many a career has been made on the wordsmith who can spin an ass into a theory or a MacBook-typed F.U. and GIF-uploaded snark into a book deal or TV appearance. While obviously entertaining, in the past ten years since the rise of online feminism, women have seen — and this is not hyperbole–almost all the twentieth century social wins systematically destroyed or gasping on life support. What feminism has gained in exposure, we have lost where it counts: in women’s lives.

Full piece is here. 

[mizzhenry]

No Dress Code for You Girls

Yesterday I was over at Brain, Child Magazine writing about my daughter and dress codes. Here are the shorts that my kid's school deemed inappropriate. She is 11. 

The takeaway: 

What is there to say? That middle school, for most girls, is an introduction to the way their bodies are not their own, and that now they’re defined by the way other people, in particular boys, may or may not respond. Boys are to be protected and girls are to comply. The burden of consequence, girls begin to understand in middle school, is on them. That’s not to say that boys don’t have their own problems to deal with—like closing off their hearts to emotions for muscles—but dress codes were not made for the respectability of boys, they were made to send crystal clear messages to girls: your body makes us uncomfortable.

None of this is new, I know that. But it is new for the girls among us and that infuriates me; that girls—my girl in particular—are still asked to put their value not in how they see themselves, but in how teachers, adults, boys, view them. On that particular day it didn’t matter that my daughter was comfortable with her body in motion, that she was so proud to have found denim shorts that didn’t guillotine her middle; an arbitrary rule was broken and for that it was worth it to the educators to hold off on teaching math and language arts and instead give a girl a lesson on why rebellion isn’t so bad, after all.

The rest.

[jetpackbear-blog]

Darth Carlton

[mizzhenry]

This just made my day.

[mizzhenry]

Every time a guys refers to the things I write as not facts, but "facts."

[mizzhenry]

How then can we hope to survive the next Pearl Harbor, if there should be one, with not only all peoples who are not white, but 'all peoples with political ideologies different from ours arrayed against us—after we have taught them (as we are doing) that when talk of freedom and liberty, we not only mean neither, we don't even mean security and justice and even the preservation of life for people whose pigmentation is not the same as ours. And not just the black people in Boer South Africa, but the black people in America too. Because if we Americans are to survive, it will have to be because we choose and elect and defend to be first of all Americans to present to the world one homogeneous and unbroken front, whether of white Americans or black ones or purple or blue or green. Perhaps we will find out now whether we are to survive or not. Perhaps the purpose of this sorry and tragic error committed in my native Mississippi by two white adults on an afflicted Negro child is to prove to us whether or not we deserve to survive. Because if we in America have reached that point in our desperate culture when we must murder children, no matter for what reason or what color, we don't deserve to survive, and probably won't.

William Faulkner; son of Mississippi and Nobel winner on the death of Emmett Till in 1955. 

[mizzhenry]

[gracefulbabe]

Words of wisdom from Amy Poehler

[mizzhenry]

My daughter draws the characters she loves. Here's Mable and Dipper from #Gravity Falls. I'm many things, but I can barely draw a triangle. She has my envy. 

[mizzhenry]

This is my county. It annoys the fuck out of me every time the jail comes before the library. 

[mizzhenry]

Heckler culture has grown stronger as we devolve into a society of media consumers, where everyone is a critic. The only difference between a heckler and a critic is manners, and now hecklers are apparently considered journalists.

On hating RuPaul for no damn reason at all.

[mizzhenry]

But it's easier for me, as a physician, to explain why I vote the way I do. I can look people in the eye and say, "I've been in an exam room with someone who has always opposed abortions, but suddenly when it's their 14, 15, or 16-year-old daughter, they start second-guessing things." I don't try to guide them in one way or the other — it's their decision to make, between them, their doctor and their God. And I resent the government stepping into that exam room and standing between me and the patient, and standing between the patient and the patient's choices.

Must Read via Rolling Stone on the Republican Who Thinks His Party Has Failed Women