Noah Berlatsky

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

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.

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

Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, Edith Piaf: they're all still practically household names.

While Atwood's feminist dystopia remains our favorite nightmarish future, Marge Piercy's Woman On The Edge Of Time is far superior.

Bus ads comparing Muslims to Hitler have been replaced with images of a superhero. And not just any superhero.

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.

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.

So, if there are so many ways to sing this song, and if it's meant different things at different points, why complain about Beyoncé's version?

The loss of gospel history has meant forgetting how important black women have been to American performance styles.