Em-URGE-ing Voices

Age: 21

School: University of Kansas—Rock Chalk Jayhawk, y’all.

Major: English, Women, Gender, & Sexuality Studies, and Russian Minor

Hometown: Kansas City, Kansas

Favorite writer: Oh god this is too hard. I’ll do a top five. Brian Friel, Cristina Garcia, Chaim Potok, Gloria Anzaldua, Neil Gaiman, Harriet Mullen, Margaret Edson, Emily Bronte, Susan Stryker, Laurie Penny. Okay, so it’s a top ten, but what did you expect? Top five is too hard.

Favorite sex scene from a movie/TV/book: When Ayla and Jondalar get it on for the first time in The Valley of the Horses. Not only is it an enormous, late Stone Age adventure/empowering, romance lead by a badass female character with literally hundreds of pages of sexual tension oozing out the pages, but Ayla never’s gotten pleasure from sex before—so Jondalar makes it his mission to focus entirely on her having awesome orgasms. And it is AWESOME.

Hidden talent: I have an 85% accuracy rating when it comes to guessing where people bought their clothes. It’s been tested. By science.

Posts By: Katherine

Parental Consent is Advised (and Anti-Choice)

If you haven’t yet heard the story of Anonymous 5, the 16 year-old Nebraska Girl who had to ask the court system for permission to have an abortion and was denied because she is apparently “not sufficiently mature,” I apologize  if I’m bumming you out with the complete ridiculousness of her situation. I’m also sorry to inform you, if it’s further news to you, that Anonymous 5’s case is hardly an uncommon one—that is if you live in any one of the 39 states that require parental notification and/or consent of an abortion. Hint: that includes a whole lot of people.

Young, Broke, and Denied Abortion Access: Millennials and the Hyde Amendment

Is there ever any end to the parade of articles decrying Millennials? Judging by the sheer volume that the media churns out decrying my generation as one self-absorbed, lazy, and curated within a bubble of indulgent vapidity, you can say there’s a perception that Millennials are the bane of the United States. Which is funny, seeing as on average, we’re receiving more education than our parents, have less job opportunities, being crushed by debt, and still being pointed at as “just expecting a handout.” This hypocrisy is especially teeth-grindingly blatant when it comes to the Hyde Amendment.

Searching for Consent (From Your Partner, and in TV)

I have a bit of an unhealthy obsession with a show called Teen Wolf. Yes, it’s (very loosely) based off of the 80’s movie Michael J. Fox was in where he’s got wicked sideburns. Yes, it’s about, you guessed it, adolescent creatures of the dark. Yes, it’s on MTV. And yes, it can be so, so cheesy. I’ve been known to fiercely advocate it just as much as I hyper-criticize it. And I certainly criticize it, for falling into some of the same problematic traps so many other T.V. shows fall into, particularly those which are supposedly meant to represent young people. But, it excels in ways I hardly ever (or never) see from other cable TV programming.

This is (Racist) America

I had an entirely different post planned for today. However, when I got home from working a midnight shift, and I saw this article on my Facebook Feed, I knew that post would have to wait. It seems as if quite a few people are upset that Nina Davuluri, the new Miss America, happens to not be white. In fact, she isn’t just not white, but is brown, Indian-American, though a lot of people are seemingly confusing her for being Arab, which apparently means she’s a terrorist. Because all Arabs are terrorists—right, my bad @pizzo_nick, thanks for the reminder. I’ll be sure to inform my Arab friends of this fact. The tweets are disgusting, blatantly racist, and apparently a lot of people’s ancestors must have spontaneously generated from the Purple Mountain’s… Read more »