“If corporate feminism is the end of feminism, then it is the end of a movement that has been ending for generations—and continues to thrive, most indebted to its harshest critics.”
Just two weeks ago, the Princeton Packet announced that it would be permanently shutting down commercial printing services at its Witherspoon Street facility. For decades, the paper had printed the Nassau Weekly, the Daily Princetonian, and press releases for a number of local businesses, in addition to their own weekly publication.
A teenage girl is found dead in her bedroom. The culprit? Emo, a death-obsessed youth subculture. But while some teens claim emo romanticizes mental illness, others call it therapy.
And as the yelling continued, it became clear to me that we had done nothing — nothing, that is, except for being female and alone on a Saturday night.
When I walked into the women’s locker room at Dillon gym earlier this week, I noticed a poster that made me bite my lip. Tacked up between weekly fitness schedules, the sign grabbed my attention with the headline: “The weight is over.” The line, I thought, could have been pulled from a diet product ad—Sensa, maybe, or Alli. It was the sort of cheesy slogan you see on caffeine-and-diuretic “supplements” at CVS.
“What is that thing?” I watched in confusion as Anna exhaled a thin stream of what looked like smoke into the cramped air of her bedroom. With only a few weeks left in our senior year, we had spent the afternoon trading high school reflections and speculating about the mysteries of college, now only months away. Real schoolwork and the anxieties of the application process now behind us, these last months of spring had begun to feel like a sort of limbo, a time of licensed aimlessness before the fall brought new routines.
When Facebook expanded its gender options early this February, many users were finally able to represent themselves authentically to the online community. The popular social network, which had previously required users to list themselves as either male or female, added a new “custom” gender option to accommodate individuals who do not identify with the traditional gender binary.
