Sublime

Um norte-americano em cada dez lê Playboy, Penthouse ou Hustler todos os meses.

Like a lot of the other girls, Alex had found out quickly that she was not beautiful enough to model. The lucky ones realized this sooner rather than later. But she was tall enough and skinny enough that people often assumed she was more beautiful than she was. A good trick.

The tendency to label Minaj “too slutty” or sexually explicit is a symptom of a much larger anxiety: how to process a woman, and a black woman in particular, who has taken control of her body, her formidable talents, and the way they are marketed, monetized, and received.

As a result, dominant factions of both those streams are increasingly united in a new project: to normalize once taboo forms of sex within an expanded zone of state regulation, and in a capital-friendly guise that encourages individualism, domesticity, and commodity consumption.

In Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny, philosopher Kate Manne describes a system in which one class of people,7 the “human givers,” are expected to offer their time, attention, affection, and bodies willingly, placidly, to the other class of people, the “human beings.”8 The implication in these terms is that human beings have a moral obligation to be

So here lies the publishing industry: the “accessible,” commercial book at the bottom, necessary to the bottom line but not worthy of adulation; and in the rarefied air on top, there’s the masculine, the artistic, and the reliant on cultural patronage. That’s an exaggeration and simplification—but not by much. These attitudes dictate how we ascribe