I am scheduled to leave for Germany in several days. I have already told my husband that I don’t want to go, in a whining tone that stretches syllables out so far that the words they once formed are barely recognizable. As a woman nearing the aging of forty, this is how I am coping…
(Note: this piece does not link to any of the shooter’s video or manifesto directly, but some of the news sites that I link to may do so. A few include screencaps of his 4-chan forum discussions. Please click with caution.) 49 people died yesterday, gunned down in two mosques in coordinated attacks across New…
I had not worn the socks in years when I fished them out of the back of the drawer. They had survived the journey to college and six subsequent moves. They were one of the few relics of my past that had not been destroyed in the recent fire that consumed my mother’s home. They…
It is with some embarrassment that I tell you that I hated Genoa the first time I visited there, a decade and a lifetime ago. In my book, the only mention I make of the seaside city – the birthplace of Christopher Columbus, the location where Marco Polo was imprisoned for a year (because Italy…
The letter arrived at my house at the end of October in a plain white envelope with no return address. My name – or some approximation of it (“Depruiter” it reads, because, in the words of my beloved, “The person who addressed it is an idiot”) has been printed out on a label and affixed…
I have yet to call my in-laws (my husband’s grandparents) in the wake of a shooting at a synagogue in Pittsburgh. A few days have passed. For the collective American consciousness, the lifespan of a mass shooting is short. The newscycle has already moved on, as has everyone’s social media posts. (Even this post, written two…
(Above: my student ID in 1999. Let’s just keep our comments to ourselves.) There’s this pattern I keep seeing. It goes like this: Woman accuses man of sexual assault. Man denies accusations. Man’s PR team then releases numerous letters from women saying that he’s not a sexual harasser because, you know, he didn’t harass…
I quit Twitter for a month. This should not sound like a profound thing, but for someone for whom the social media platform was essentially an extension of my psyche, the act has felt monumental. I have said, again and again (usually when talking of internet abuse and responding to people who tell me that…
Trigger warning: please note that this is a blog post about online abuse, and includes screen caps of tweets sent to me. Graphic threats and abusive, hateful language toward women appear therein. A few weeks ago, I gave a keynote talk at World Domination Summit in Portland. The thesis: while we regard online misogyny and abuse…
Tales of Food, Feminism, and Fury
by Geraldine DeRuiter
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