Noah Berlatsky

As a parent, you tend to assume that you have some say in forming your child's mental landscape. Then Santa comes along.

For a second, it looked like the rabid hordes of gamergaters would be joined by metalheads. But #metalgate was never meant to be.

"The look on Miley's face during Nicki Minaj's savage, expletive-laden rant says it all," Salon tweeted the day after the VMAs. Less than 140 characters, but still enough to link a black woman to a longstanding racial slur.

Is the gender of the philosopher a marginal curiosity—or is it more central?

Fans of Batgirl are fans of Batgirl. They buy her comic to see her being heroic, not to see her being a slasher movie victim.

Feminist dystopia at its finest. Joanna Russ imagines a world in which the elimination of gender hierarchy leads to freedom, strength, and power.

Their sexuality traps and destroys male innocence, as they grad hold, by the penis- the better to lead him to castration. Make no mistake that castration is greeted with fear, terror, and disgust—but also with glee. Women as super villains allow their characters to be super powerful; a force for evil is at least a force. In a media landscape where women are often rendered secondary, invisible, and passive, the femme fatale, in her icy violence, seizes female agency along with the phallus that she so efficiently cuts off.

Country music is an overwhelmingly heterosexual endeavor. The LGBTQ community certainly listen to, and perform, country, but in terms of lyrical content and themes, country has been focused on male-female romantic love.

Iin a passionate Facebook thread last week, children's author Meg Rosoff rejected the idea that there are "too few books for marginalized young people," as librarian Edith Edi Campbell had suggested.

Genre boundaries are conscious of race—and, in the case of rock, conscious of gender too.