Noah Berlatsky

Action movies don't usually bother much with romance. The trailer for The Transporter: Refueled certainly doesn't. The hero is cool — sexy women, plural, throw themselves at him, or at least stand near him and things blow up; there are fights and revenge and high production values. Romance is, at best, a secondary concern.

Illicit passions aren't less enjoyable because they're illicit. Quite the contrary.

Some love stories don't end happily. So why do so many romance novels insist they do?

To understand this debate, it's important to consider historical context.

The cover for A-Force is a combination of tired trope and deodorant ad. Female empowerment can do so much better.

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.

These covers remind us of the lengthy, rich—but often obscured—history of female songwriters.

Hating sex workers—and treating them as things—can get you money.

The history of pop music, and of black pop music in particular, has always been gay history.

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.