marriage

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.

If you haven't heard, there's only one possible result when you're a "slut"—particularly if you have the audacity to do it without shame and—clutch your pearl, ladies—talk about it in a public forum.

NO RING FOR YOU!

Who would want the cow when he can have the milk for free, we're told (because, like cows, we women apparently have no intrinsic value—we're just about what we can provide for others).

The title of this zine comes from an old Irish expression that says, "There will be white blackbirds before an unwilling woman ties the knot." The zine features interviews with 11 women who all have something to say about why they don't want to be married.