ruth asawa at moma

James Oppenheim, "Bread and Roses," The American Magazine, December, 1911.

Winter Poem by Nikki Giovanni

Nutcracker ballet papercuts 2025

Bisan says that among all the aid organisations working in North Gaza right now, Ele Elna Elak is one of the most effective, geared towards resolving the water scarcity and making clean water and vegetables available to Gazans.

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[“Desire is uncertain and unfolding, and this is unsettling. It is unsettling because it opens up the possibility of women not knowing themselves fully, and of men capitalizing on that lack of certainty by coercing or bullying them. Should we then deny this aspect of desire as a consequence? No. We must not insist on a sexual desire that is fixed and known in advance, in order to be safe. That would be to hold sexuality hostage to violence.

We don’t always know what we want and we are not always able to express our desires clearly. This is in part due to the violence, misogyny and shame that make desire’s discovery difficult, and its expression fraught. But it is also in the nature of desire to be social, emergent and responsive – to context, to our histories and to the desires and behaviours of others. We are social creatures; and our desires have always emerged, from day one, in relation to those who care, or do not care, for us.

Desire never exists in isolation. This is also what makes sex potentially exciting, rich and meaningful. How do we make this fact galvanizing rather than paralysing? Commentators on the ‘new’ landscape of sex and consent often plaintively ask why it is that men are expected to be able to ‘read a woman’s mind’ when it comes to sex. My question is different: why are women asked to know their own minds, when knowing one’s own mind is such an undependable aim?

Self-knowledge is not a reliable feature of female sexuality, nor of sexuality in general; in fact, it is not a reliable feature of being a person. Insisting otherwise is fatal, and it’s an assumption that has been conceded for far too long, to the impediment of conversations about pleasure, joy, autonomy and safety. If we want sex to be good again – or at all – anytime soon, we need to reject this insistence, and start elsewhere. Instead of fiddling with formulations of consent on which we place too high an ethical burden, and instead of decrying women’s attempts to make their worlds safer and more interested in their pleasure, we need to articulate an ethics of sex that does not try frantically to keep desire’s uncertainty at bay. A sexual ethics that is worth its name has to allow for obscurity, for opacity and for not-knowing. We need to start from this very premise – this risky, complex premise: that we shouldn’t have to know ourselves in order to be safe from violence.”]

katherine angel, from tomorrow the sex will be good again: women and desire in the age of consent, 2021

Aid Herrera

Svetlana Rumak

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