Femininity

Thursday

Gage Klipper

Is it OK to be a horse guy?

From our US edition

Is it gay to be a horse guy? According to my parents, the answer, hilariously, is “yes.” I never grew up riding in a very professional or competitive manner because, as I recently learned as an adult, my parents thought it was just too gay. Everyone knows the stereotype of a horse girl. My parents certainly did, after raising two girls in the horse-show world. Linked to social privilege, emotional intensity and a bit of naivety, the horse girl eventually shifts the obsession with her horse into her boyfriend and becomes the caricature of a high-maintenance clinger. I can see why my parents wanted to avoid that type of socialization for their only son. But the stereotype isn’t all true (my sisters turned out normal.

Tuesday

Emily Rhodes

Boxing clever: Headshot, by Rita Bullwinkel, reviewed

Rita Bullwinkel’s knockout debut novel adopts the structure of the boxing tournament it vividly describes. Eight teenage girls are competing in the ‘Daughters of America Cup’ at Bob’s Boxing Palace, Reno. We encounter them in the ring as they progress through four opening rounds and two semis to the final. The author details the exhilarating, pummelling progress of the fights – ‘the hit is quick, like a jump rope whipping forward’ – and the physicality of the girls’ bodies, ‘so close to each other that, from far away they look like two parts of the same animal’. She also nimbly delves beneath the protective headgear into the girls’ interior worlds and circles out to explore their life stories, revealing where they have come from and where they’re going.

Monday

Casey Chalk

Why are wives still taking their husbands’ last names?

From our US edition

“Why don’t more men take their wives’ last names?” asked the Washington Post in a recent piece about a Maine husband who took his wife’s name. And why is it less common for a woman to keep her existing last name, which accounted for only about 20 percent of marrying women in 2015? Amazingly, even in our progressive era, women are still choosing to assume the names of their husbands. It’s obvious what side WaPo comes down on. Their article quotes an author who labels women taking their husbands' last names “bizarre and anachronistic.” It quotes the mother of another husband who took his wife's name, praising her son’s decision for “subvert[ing] the dominant paradigm.

Thursday

Taki

In praise of femininity

New York Who was it that first coined the expression ‘It ain’t over until the fat lady sings’? The great Yogi Berra got credit for it, but what he really said was: ‘It ain’t over till it’s over.’ Well, I think it is all over, although it’s going to be dragged out by The Donald, who never knows when to stop. But as Roger Kimball writes in American Greatness, the fix was in; that’s why the man who lives in a basement remained in the basement while Trump flew manically all over the country rallying the troops. Apparently the cheating was on an industrial scale.