I wrote about the lengths women have to do to trade in the beauty economy. [Feminartsy]

I also wrote about my choice to be single. [SBS Life]

Stop holding out hope that Ivanka Trump will tame Donald: she’s on board with his campaign. [Intelligencer]

A common catch cry heard in the wake of Kim Kardashian exposing Taylor Swift’s lies about not knowing that Kanye West would rap about her in his song “Famous” is to “focus on more important things”. But the demonisation of a black man for victimising a white woman is very important and echoes the spate of black men being killed in America. [Cosmopolitan]

Both Taylor’s victimhood and Kim’s famewhoring are important parts of the celebrity ecosystem. [Jezebel]

How Keeping Up with the Kardashians helps Kim control the narrative. [Vulture]

Taylor Swift is not that innocent. [Vulture]

A history of the media souring on Swift. [Vulture]

Once upon a time I wrote about Swift being the perfect victim and the use of the word “bitch” in rap music.

In defence of the term “honour killing”. [Daily Life]

Little Women‘s Meg and the labour of performing womanhood. [LA Review of Books]

How Mike & Dave Need Wedding Dates subverts the use of female nudity in comedy. [Vulture]

The Spice Girls, twenty years on:

“They planted the seeds in my mind, and the minds of countless other young girls, that feminism is important and valid and should be thought about and yelled about wherever you go.” [Kill Your Darlings]

“Why Men Want to Marry Melanias But Raise Ivankas.” [NYTimes]

Actually, spiritualism was the realm of women before Ghostbusters turned it into a male bonding “pursuit focused on hunting a exterminating.” [The New Republic]

Being called a racist is worse than actually being one. [SBS Life]

A Wonder Woman primer. [Movie Mezzanine]

Related: a Captain Marvel primer. [Time]

A condensed version of this article was published at Junkee.

Writer Rachel Hills first began thinking about the ideas discussed in The Sex Myth: The Gap Between Our Fantasies & Reality, her first book released this Wednesday, in around 2007 or 2008. “There was a lot of stuff in the media about hookup and raunch culture and it painted a very exaggerated and hedonistic picture of young people and sex,” she says.

Hills’ sex life at the time didn’t look at all like what pop culture, like Gossip Girl and the Sex & the City movie, was telling her it should. To assuage her insecurities, she started writing on her blog, Musings of an Inappropriate Woman, and places like Vogue magazine about sex and found “lots of other people were feeling the same way, [and] that’s what inspired me to start looking seriously into those ideas.” After seven years of research and interviews spanning Australia, the U.K., Canada and college campuses in the U.S., The Sex Myth was born.

Currently living in New York, Hills is a veritable Carrie Bradshaw for a new generation, having parlayed her interest in The Sex Myth into a regular column for U.S. Cosmopolitan. She also tweets at @rachellhills.

I know you’ve spent at least seven years working on The Sex Myth. Can you give me a brief rundown of how the book went from concept to fruition?

I started thinking seriously about the ideas that are in The Sex Myth in about 2007/2008. There was a lot of stuff in the media about hookup and raunch culture and it painted a very exaggerated and hedonistic picture of young people and sex. I think most people have the media literacy to be able to look at articles that talk about 17-year-olds falling out of trees while they’re having sex or “g-stringed baboons in oestrus”, which is one of my favourite phrases, and understand that this is not what’s happening on most people’s’ Thursday or Friday or Saturday nights.

What was interesting to me was that those stories were the pointy end of the bigger narrative  happening around sexuality in our culture. Even if we weren’t hearing these very exaggerated stories, the same narratives were being told in a more subtle, insidious way in magazines, on the web and in TV shows. So there was this overall picture of sex as something that was constantly available and of course you were doing it and if you weren’t doing it there was something wrong with you.

My personal interest in the subject came from the fact that my sex life didn’t look at all like that at the time and it was something that I felt a little uncomfortable about; like maybe there was something wrong with me. When I realised that lots of other people were feeling the same way, that’s what inspired me to start looking seriously into those ideas.

The case studies and the way you weave certain people’s stories throughout the book, like Portia, Courtney and Yusuf, lend a certain familiarity and an informality. Was that intentional?

It was really important to me that the book was accessible to its readers. I wanted to write a smart book, and in some ways it’s a very theoretical book in that it references Michel Foucault and Anthony Giddens, but I think that those theories are most useful when you can see how they apply to people’s everyday lived experiences. The case studies both give the reader a break in something that could otherwise be exhausting to read but it enables you to find yourself in other people.

What was the interview process like?

I just wanted to talk to anybody who wanted to talk to me! I wasn’t particularly fussy.

My main criteria when I started working on the book was age. The vast majority of the people interviewed in the book are in their twenties, ranging from 16 to 32 or 33 for the most part. The reason I decided to interview younger people primarily was mostly because I was quite young myself. When I started working on the book I was 25, and part of my question was around the portrayal of my generation’s sexualities which then became the scope of my research. I now feel like the book could have benefited from interviewing older people as well but that would have taken longer. It took eight years to start with so it’s probably best to limit the sample to some extent!

The people I interviewed in the book are from Australia, the U.S., the U.K. and Canada. The reason I spoke to people in those countries is because we share a common language and that enables a similarity of culture. When the language changes, often social ideals and standards change as well.

In chapter three you talk about asexuality. Last year Time magazine declared a “transgender tipping point”. Though one is about gender identity and the other sexual orientation or preference, do you think we’re close to an asexuality tipping point where people might start to understand what asexuality is?

Five years ago would we have known that trans issues would be such a big part of the conversation around gender and sexuality? Not necessarily because those issues were much more marginal then.

I wonder, what would an asexuality tipping point look like? If it means a discussion of asexuality in the media, then I feel like we’ve already been there. What’s most important in understanding asexuality as a sexual orientation is to come to an acceptance that sex isn’t this constant thing that everybody is always doing and thinking about and at the centre of everybody’s lives. Like gender, sexuality is a spectrum, so it’s not just that you’re sexual, so you’re constantly humping people, or asexual, and you have no interest at all. We all sit along different points of it and I would like to see an acceptance of the fact that we all have a different interest in sex and access to sex and we don’t all want to lead the same kind of sex life.

And a difference interest in sex throughout different points in our lives.

Exactly. When I was doing some of my more academic research, I came across a couple of sociologists from the U.S. who were doing most of their publishing in the 1970s called John Gagnon—great name!—and William Simon. They were the first people to look at sex as a social activity. One of the points they look at is the fact that sexual desire does change throughout the life cycle. Sex can feel incredibly urgent in youth, the early years of a relationship or when having an extramarital affair. But there are other times in your life when sex falls into the background and other things might be a priority.

There’s a portion on beauty and how being beautiful not only makes you desirable to others and in turn makes them desirable but that a certain level of beauty makes people think you’re sexual, even if you’re not. Does beauty take the power structure of sex to another level?

The relationship between desire and desirability is the core of The Sex Myth. If you want to succeed in any one aspect of the contemporary sexual ideal probably the most important are being desirable and desiring. First you have to want sex, then you have to be attractive enough to get it.

There was a lot of talk from your subjects about who chooses whom when it comes to sex. Ashley says “you want to appear like you are choosing to sleep with the other person, not like they are choosing to sleep with you” while later in the book Brit says “if a guy wasn’t having sex, people figured it was because he chose not to. Whereas if a girl wasn’t having sex, the only explanations were that she was religious or because she was undesirable.” It reminds me of Jersey Shore, for example, when the guys were lauded for picking up as many chicks as possible but the women were called sluts when their sluttiness actually enabled the men to get some! Can you unpack these double standards a little further?

I don’t know if Brit’s point necessarily reflects my own experiences and observations, but if we take it as being true, she is inverting the expectations. So instead of being slut-shamed, like the girls in Jersey Shore, she is shamed for not being attractive enough to get a man in that heterosexual situation.

One of the things I talk about in the book is that the feminine ideal that women are aspiring to is not this pure, submissive virgin/wife character that women might have been taught to aspire to in times past. It’s someone who is self­-actualised and in control, as Ashley spoke about, and who has sexual agency, who wants and likes sex. This new feminine ideal where we’re expected to desire sex still happens primarily in relation to other people. As a society we’re largely for it for women, but it still seems to be more responsive; so her desiring sex means that she says yes to somebody when they want to have sex with her. There’s still a taboo around female masturabation or owning a vibrator because they’re associated with female desire and getting off because you want to not because you want to please your partner.

In chapter five you talk about masculinity and sexual assault. How important was it for The Sex Myth to explore “the rape myth” that certain kinds of women/people can’t be raped?

Rape culture is obviously a huge issue within feminist debate at the moment. There are some really great thinkers—Clementine Ford in Australia comes immediately to mind and in the U.S. Kate Harding has a book on rape culture coming out a couple of weeks after mine—working on that issue. Rape culture is only one part of the politics of sex and what I wanted to do with the book is take a very broad view of how we’re expected to be sexual beyond the gendered politics of sexuality in which men behave one way and women behave another so I wanted to go beyond that but I was conscious that there were other people who were doing it really well.

Men bragging about how many women they’ve slept with solidifies heterosexuality. Do you think “bromance” movies like Magic Mike XXL play into and/or subvert “masculine straightjackets”, as you call them, and if so, how?

The “masculine straightjacket” is this idea that in order to be a “real man” you have to behave in a certain way. You have to be sporty, good with women, tough, you can’t show emotion, you can’t be a girl and you can’t be gay, because those things are treated as the opposite of what a real man is.

In terms of Magic Mike XXL, I think it does challenge some conventional aspects of masculinity. I like that the men in Magic Mike are in some ways incredibly masculine and stereotypically heterosexual but they’re also allowed to have this softness to them. They’re allowed to do things, maybe because they’re so conventionally masculine in other ways, like be into yoga or dance to the Backstreet Boys, that aren’t considered a threat to their masculinity. But on the other hand, they’re still fist bumping about the women they’re picking up and their masculinity is still very much derived from their success with women so I’m not sure that it completely challenges it; it’s still very conventional in a lot of ways.

I don’t talk about this in the book, but I met an academic from Connecticut recently, Christin Munsch, who’s looked at how men are able to play with and challenge masculinity. The interesting thing she found in her research is that guys whose masculinity isn’t going to be called into question—who are socially powerful or considered to be attractive by most people—actually have the most latitude to challenge other forms of masculinity. So men at the top of the social strata are most able to challenge things and men in the middle, who might be more insecure about themselves, might be more likely to cling to the “masculine straightjacket”. So Magic Mike is very much in line with Munsch’s research.

Have you seen Trainwreck?

Not yet, but I love Amy Schumer so I’m planning on seeing it at some point. I’ve heard about the narrative the film takes [damaged, promiscuous woman is saved by good man] which is weird because it’s not what you would expect from Amy Schumer. She proudly and deliberately talks about the fact that she is sexually active and that she has slept with a lot of people in situations that some people would consider to be unsavoury or promiscuous and reclaiming that is a big part of her work. So it’s kind of strange that this film would follow that conventional narrative. I wonder if that’s just about the rom-com format; it’d be pretty hard to create one that doesn’t end like that. It’d be pretty cool, though.

It might also be that it wouldn’t have gotten greenlit if it didn’t have that fairytale ending…

That’s a great point. Because films do need a large number of people to see them, compared to books! They really do have to appeal to a broad audience.

I watched a couple of interviews with Amy that have gone viral and I know that she really rejects the idea that that character is damaged. I think she said in that interview with KIIS FM that she thought of the character as someone who was having fun and [the character] didn’t think of herself as damaged. And then things change and she falls in love hence that conventional happy ending.

Something that I was aware of with The Sex Myth is that I wanted to veer away as much as possible from this narrative that people’s sex lives weren’t up to scratch but then something happened and oh, they’re having great sex. It’s a trap I fall into a little bit in the book but it’s really hard not to because those are the stories people tell about their own lives. We all like to tell our stories about our happy endings. I once was lost but now I’m found. Things used to be bad, now they’re better. That narrative of we’ll be happy in the end when we find a nice man or woman to be with is as much entrenched in our culture as the narratives that I talk about in The Sex Myth.

*This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

The Sex Myth by Rachel Hills is out now.

Image via Musings of an Inappropriate Woman.

Periods are a hot topic at the moment. There was the recent Instagram furor that saw a photo of a fully-clothed woman in bed with a blood stain on her trackies and sheets banned for violating the social media platform’s guidelines and Rebecca Shaw—also known as the holy saviour of the interwebs, Brocklesnitch—wrote at Kill Your Darlings about the menstruation taboo. Like a period, these both came around the time that I had also been thinking and talking about the bonds of blood that signify womanhood.

A female friend and colleague and I were discussing the ins and outs of periods. Topics on the agenda included trepidation about going back on/discontinuing the pill, men’s fear of anything to do with menstruation, and the miracle of being able to go about our daily lives whilst shedding parts of our internal organs on a monthly basis.

My friend assumed she was the only woman she knew not on the pill, while I increasingly feel I’m alone in my medicated state. I’ve been on the pill continuously for ten years (cue blood clot panic), originally to regulate the intensity of my periods, and now mostly for the convenience of being able to choose when to bleed and the fear of breaking out. (I don’t have unprotected sex regularly enough to use the pill for this purpose.)

On the topic of men, I reminisced about a male former housemate, who couldn’t even speak the name of a pantyliner when I accidentally left one unwrapped in the bathroom. Additionally, such frank period talk in the vicinity of men is usually met with groans and the covering of ears. Sorry (not sorry), but if you’re an adult man and you exist in the world with women, periods are a fact of life. The fact of life, if you will. Deal with it.

Something that becomes so routine as to not even phase you is actually pretty amazing when you think about it. Comedian Cameron Esposito’s routine about periods, above, reiterates my point as she hilariously and disgustingly muses about chunks “the size of strawberr[ies]… coming out of my body” but still endeavours to “have that report for you by tomorrow.” Add it to the checklist of things that many women have to do above and beyond the roles of men.

All of this chatter would indicate that periods also serve as a female bonding ritual. “I wonder if men bond over foreskins the way women bond over periods,” my friend asked. Firstly, eww. Secondly, while there is the brit milah in Jewish culture, nothing comes close to the social and cultural rituals surrounding menstruation.

Guru Nanak, the founder of Sikhism, asserts that menstruation is a god given process essential to the creation of any human being. In Indian Hinduism menarche is a cause for celebration with the young woman in question receiving gifts, not unlike Judaism’s bat mitzvah celebration which focuses more on physical age than puberty. Similarly, in Native American tradition puberty and first blood are cause for celebration with menstruating women’s power revered. Shaktism has perhaps the most positive attitude towards periods, with the annual fertility festival Ambubachi Mela taking place in June in which the menstruation of goddess Kamakhya is celebrated.

The act of purchasing sanitary products may not be highly anticipated (and don’t even get me started on the added burden this puts on homeless women and women on Nauru, for example), but the sharing of them, whether that be between mothers and daughters or other family members/adults of influence in a young woman’s life at puberty, friends or other women who happen to be using a bathroom in tandem, is a ritual in itself. While Carrie may be a horror story about the denial of womanhood, many other films and TV have a more realistic portrayal of blood bonds: think the power dyanmics at play when Carrie lends “Face Girl” Nina Katz a tampon on Sex & the City; White Chicks’ white friends offering them an assortment of sanitary products; and the “super jumbo tampon” scene in Mean Girls. Lauren Rosewarne even wrote a whole book about the pop cultural representations of periods.

For those who may not have authority figures or friends to teach them about the bloody birds and the bees, teen and women’s magazines such as Dolly and Girlfriend and websites like Birdee come with an abundance of information. This is not to mention the sanitary products bursting from their pages and attached to their covers as free samples.

The ostracision of periods in polite company and the freak outs that men have when confronted with them mean women only have each other to talk about periods with, creating a bond whether we like it or not. That the specifics of who is and isn’t on birth control; who has painful periods that land them in the emergency room; the age of menarche; and, for older women, when their periods stopped are discussed freely amongst friends and even acquaintances is a testament to both the bonding rituals and banality of periods. The very phenomenon of synced cycles for women existing in close quarters is proof enough of the sisterhood of menstruation for better or for worse.

Elsewhere: [Daily Life] Should We Be Treating Periods as a Feminist Issue?

[Kill Your Darlings] An Inconvenient Truth: Social Stigma & Menstruation.

[Vice] For Homeless Women, Having a Period Isn’t a Hassle—It’s a Nightmare.

[New Matilda] Sanitary Pads “A Fire Hazard”: The Realities of Life for Mothers and Children on Nauru.

[Amazon] Periods in Pop Culture: Menstruation in Film & Television by Lauren Rosewarne.

Image via Daily Life.