Noah Berlatsky

With the prospect of another Bush/Clinton presidential contest looming as ominously as Donald Trump's hairpiece, the word "dynasty" seems to be frothing off of many a pundit's keyboard. "Clinton, Bush struggle to shed dynasty labels," a Washington Post headline declared.

As a white woman, Swift can afford to celebrate carelessness. Beyoncé, though, knows that even her casualness has to be perfect.

Who is memorialized in death has everything to do with race, class . . . and who you were in life.

Rather than seeing Beyoncé's sexual performance as linked to destruction, we can consider whether eroticism might be an alternative to violence.

Female masturbation is sexy in part because it flirts with lesbianism. For male masturbation, it's a different story.

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.

This doesn't mean that the outcomes of domestic violence are always equal; men tend to be bigger and stronger than women, and therefore are more likely to cause serious harm, even in situations where violence is reciprocal. Still, the fact that women are frequently perpetrators of violence in domestic situations substantially undermines the typical story of domestic abuse—and helps to show just how harmful that story is.

It's not the gender that's the problem: It's the oppression.

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.

The first graphic novel to win a Caldeott gives children the chance to be adults, and adults the chance to be kids.