marriage

The Pew Research Center offers startling, groundbreaking numbers on "Today's Woman" who "often balances her career with her husband and children." (Yes, this is a study from 2012, not 1975.) It is called "A Gender Reversal on Career Aspirations: Young Women Now Top Young Men in Valuing A High Paying Career." Hide your kids, people.

Yet, as a proportion of their annual incomes, the Kardashian kouple may actually be more reasonable than many other Americans. In 2007, the average cost of the American wedding was over $28,000; while the recession caused a bit of a dip for a few years, the price is now back up over $24,000.  These costs represent about half of the country’s median annual household (not individual) income; half of the money a couple makes in an entire year will be spent on their wedding.  Kim Kardashian made $18 million on her faux fairytale, so the budget was only slightly over what she made on a single day. If she’s being unreasonable (and she is), so is everyone else.

• "This is what sets Pariah apart from (white) singular-narrative LGBT films; it debunks the myth that life begins and ends between the point of self-acceptance, and a wedding." Spectra Speaks reviews Pariah at Racialicious.
• Ashley Lauren at Feministe picks apart the troubling world of marriage tropes on television.
• Ann Friedman wrote about the troubling media coverage of Malia Obama's height at GOOD.
• Watching a movie with a young one? Here's five tips for discussing problematic portrayals of gender with a child.
• A British psychological study argues that people can't discriminate between language used in pornography magazines and language used by sex offenders.
• Feministing piece has a piece on the yes-it's-real douchebaggery of the Pennsylvania State Liquor Control Board's new victim-blaming ad campaign.
• Indie hip hop artist Jean Grae stopped by at Aisha Tyler's Girl on Guy podcast this week, with hilarious results.
• From the World Is Still Awesome Department: bienvenidos, feministas, experience the "beauty and magic" (real quote) of Feminist Gael García Bernal.

Tell us what you think in the comments!

If you're straight, monogamous, and female, Carolyn Evans wants to SAVE YOUR MARRIAGE! Her new book, Forty Beads, has "simple, sexy" advice: overcome the "libido gap" between women and men by having sex whenever your husband tells you to.

Hopping angry? It only gets worse.

If rumors are true—and with this couple, it’s only ever 50:50—then Kate Middleton will not promise to obey her husband in next week’s ceremony. When even the Archbishop of Canterbury thinks it’s a bit old-fashioned, you know it’s a tradition worth discarding.

At a time when young graduates struggle to find work, one former art history student’s patchy résumé shouldn’t be headline news. Unless of course, you happen to be Kate Middleton.

Lori Aurelia Williams has been one of my favorite authors since high school, when I was lucky enough to stumble across When Kambia Elaine Flew In From Neptune. Williams' debut novel was a poetic, mesmerizing story of a working-class family in Houston. It also was the rare story to deal with sexual abuse in a believable yet unexploitative manner, as the narrator slowly discovered that her friend, the title character, was being prostituted by her guardian. Williams went on to write sequel Shayla's Double Brown Baby Blues and additional novel Broken China, and while the latter drew controversy for its depiction of teenage motherhood and stripping, I admire both of those works as well.

So it was that I approached Maxine Banks is Getting Married with astronomical expectations. Williams' first published book in five years, Maxine Banks features a seventeen-year-old protagonist, her oldest yet and arguably her strongest. Seeing her friend Tia's (a character from Williams' first two books) happiness at marrying her longtime boyfriend, Maxine suspects that marriage is the answer to her own life's inadequacies. After all, she loves her sweetheart, Brian... and hates living with her hypercritical mother and her mother's many abusive lovers.

No Piers, I'm not calling you out because you routinely dis audience favorites on America's Got Talent (although seriously, dude has built his career making people cry). No no, you are hereby declared an epic D-bag for interviewing one of the most intelligent, politically savvy women in the world and asking her why she's not married and what she'd cook you for dinner.  

The first time I read of a queer critique of gay marriage was in the article "Queers on the Run" in Bitch #47, the Action issue. Maybe this position has not gained much media coverage (or maybe I was just guilty of not thinking critically of the movement around gay marriage) but activist filmmakers Eric Stanley and Chris Vargas's argument that same-sex marriage should not be the ultimate goal for the queer community was deeply illuminating to me.

Hence my excitement to discover that the Against Equality collective's anthology, Against Equality: Queer Critiques of Gay Marriage, has just landed in the Bitch Community Lending Library.

Oprah on choosing your own family, and having to address the gay rumors...again.