shield your eyes

“There’s no cleric, no ceremony, nothing,” he said, adding that Shabab fighters had even paired up with thin little girls as young as 12, who are left torn and incontinent afterward. If a girl refuses, he said, “she’s killed by stones or bullets.”

“Yes, the 24-hour news cycle encouraged by the explosion of the gossipsphere gets depressingly ugly, particularly when it comes to the mouth-breathing coverage of young women; there were quite a few victim-blamey pieces that ran after her ugly pre-Grammy altercation with Chris Brown in 2009, and her raunchier side did get tut-tutted by those media outlets who only know how to deal with female sexuality when they’re the ones in charge of it. But claiming that Rihanna is pilloried for being who she is in the same way as, say, a Courtney Stodden (or even a Courtney Love!) is ludicrous.”

“Often our movie actresses have been alarmingly ‘masculine,’ wearing trousers before that was really done, and playing around with traditional notions of gender. The wise-cracking dame of the 1930s screwballs who could give as good as she got, while still remaining “womanly” and soft and appealing is still radical. I miss the wise-cracking good-time gal; she is still missed in today’s cinema. Screen goddesses have power. They enter the screen and all eyes land upon them, placing the audience in a submissive position. She is like a queen in that regard.”

“‘When you’re indoctrinated into a scene, there’s this pride that comes with being accepted and understood by people you admire. But the flip side of that is this almost stifling sense of democracy. You put yourself down, to overcompensate for the embarrassment of riches or the little attention you get.’ Even worse, she said, was ‘the élitism that passes itself off as inclusiveness.’ She went on, ‘The rules are so esoteric, so hard to follow, that no one else could fit in. And what you’ll never admit to yourself is that you don’t want other people to fit in.’ That’s a good summation of what ‘Portlandia’ lampoons.”

“Speciation is often caused by a geographic barrier that keeps populations from mating. But the tree frog situation may be a rare case in which chromosome duplication, and its subsequent effects, presented a reproductive barrier. As in humans, it comes down to whether he calls.”