There's no way I could or would avoid addressing last week's flap over Samantha Bee’s use of "the C word" about Ivanka Trump. My favorite responses to the outrage over the comedian’s use of the word were both by actors, and both showed wit. Minnie Driver tweeted, "That was the wrong word for Samantha Bee to have used. But mostly because Ivanka has neither the warmth nor the depth." And my friend Sally Field tweeted, "I like Samantha Bee a lot, but she is flat wrong to call Ivanka a cunt. A cunt is powerful, beautiful, nurturing, and honest." Etymologically speaking, Sally is close to the mark. The word currently spelled in English c-u-n-t is actually one of the oldest words in the English language. Linguistic scholars believe it to be derived from Indo-European names for the Great Goddess, variously known as Cunti or Kunda, the Yoni (Door) to the Universe—the...
Recently I spoke with one of the gutsy professional cheerleaders who has registered a formal complaint with the EEOC regarding NFL sex discrimination. You probably have read about the horrendous treatment meted out to cheerleaders, by management and team owners, as well as by boozed-up, testosterone-poisoned fans at games. She said something that particularly struck me as familiar. In dismissing the notion that perhaps sexism was inherent in cheerleading itself, she repositioned it as "dancing." It actually is, of course, requiring dance training plus sometimes onerous gymnastics—but without the respect paid to the Rockettes as artists or to gymnasts as sportswomen. Yet cheerleading isn't simply dancing, and isn’t gymnastics. Cheerleading has been created, formalized, commercialized, and positioned by team owners and fans as sexist entertainment, and they treat it as such, despite the expertise of those performing the cheerleading. Strippers also call themselves dancers. But you...
Since interviewing Maria Ressa recently for “Women’s Media Center Live with Robin Morgan,” I've been haunted more than usual by thoughts of my special sisters, women journalists. Ressa, a former CNN Bureau Chief, is one hell of a journalist, and founder of Rappler.com, an online news site under fierce attack by Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte’s authoritarian government. Me, I'm a journalist, yes, but. I'm also an activist, who believes that "objectivity" is usually subjective. And I'm basically a writer, one all over the map. My foundational rock is poetry. But having fallen in love with the English language and decided I wanted to be a "woman of letters" when I was about nine, I grew up into someone who writes novels, stories, plays, essays, editorials, works of feminist theory, political analyses, polemics, and any other form of writing I can lay hands on—from grocery lists to broadcast/podcast commentaries to, now,...
This week I want to focus on a small story that got insufficient coverage in the Trump glut of news, since it merely is about two of the most important founding principals of our Republic: freedom of speech and freedom of religion. You may have heard that on April 16, Speaker of the House of Representatives Paul Ryan announced that Fr. Patrick Conroy, a Jesuit priest and the House chaplain since 2011, would be stepping down. A day later, it turned out that Conroy was not leaving voluntarily but that the Speaker's chief of staff had told him to resign or be fired. Conroy duly tendered his letter of resignation, to take effect on May 24. But then in strode Nancy Pelosi, House Minority Leader and former Speaker herself, to Conroy's defense. Pelosi takes her Catholicism as seriously as her politics—yet she once endured a six-year estrangement from her mother, with...
My latest book, Dark Matter: New Poems, is just out. It's my seventh book of poetry and 23rd book in all, but I confess that I never get over the thrill of a new book—and also confess to feeling that it's the best work I've done so far. Published beautifully by Spinifex Press, it's available at all bookstores and all online booksellers. This week I'm doing readings and promotion for the book, so there was no time to write the blog per se. Instead, I'm posting one of the poems from the book—a story poem—in lieu of a prose blog. An earlier version of this poem was published in The Hudson Review literary journal; this below is the later version that appears in Dark Matter. The Excavation National Geographic Society announcement, June 2006: The 1600-year-old mummified remains of a young adult were covered with red pigment and bear tattoos, and her imposing...
