She explains that a young man had once fallen passionately in love with the statue and managed to get locked in with her all night; and that the little stain is the only surviving trace of his lust. The heterosexual and the homosexual both gleefully claim that this proves their point (the one observing that even a woman in stone could arouse... See more
Whatever initial appeal this argument has, it owes to the unpleasantness of corporate drudgery in general, not to the predicament of female corporate drudges in particular. Invariably, the job that features in articles like Andrews’s is soul-sucking, pointless and therefore presumed to have been chosen solely for the prestige it confers (although... See more
Feminine power does not move the world through force. It tethers the masculine powers to life, directs them toward love, and keeps them grounded in beauty. In the marriage of matriarchy and patriarchy, the masculine asks the feminine, “Where shall I direct my powers?” The untethered masculine runs awry, building towers of abstraction and technology... See more
Hermeneutic labor is the burdensome activity of: understanding and coherently expressing one's own feelings, desires, intentions, and motivations; discerning those of others; and inventing solutions for relational issues arising from interpersonal tensions. I argue that hermeneutic labor disproportionately falls on women's shoulders in... See more
The way we think about thought is political. This much was evident at the birth of the modern study of the mind, when Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia wrote to René Descartes in 1643 to question his account of cognition. Her self-deprecation will be familiar to any woman who’s dared to dispute with an eminence, and knows that the best way to begin is... See more
The weaker the connection to life, the more it appears necessary to apply forceful intervention, and the more it seems that human progress consists in amplifying the techniques of force. The result has been endless struggle and alienation, as the world turns into an opponent and an object. Little does the alienated masculine suspect that far... See more