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The End Of The World

Maybe the end of the world wasn’t fire and explosions and lawlessness and bodies in the streets. Maybe the end of the world was some smaller thing.

The Strong, Silent Type

Jaclyn A. Siegel On Masculinity And Male Body Image

Risak: How is the “masculine body” defined?

Siegel: In the U.S. we typically see a mesomorphic ideal: lean, muscular, and with a low body-fat percentage. This is persistent across the U.S. and common in LGBTQ+ communities in particular. Sexual-minority men are at elevated risk for eating disorders due in part to the lean ideal being perpetuated in their communities.

Thursdays For Haru

Haru Jenkins’s husband has been abducted at 3:23 AM every Thursday for six years. . . . It should go without saying that aliens abduct him.

A Private Thing

People laugh about pubescent horniness and untimely erections, but nobody talks about getting them before puberty on a regular basis. I was aroused whenever nothing was demanded of my limbs or mind — in class, at church, on the bus, in the car. Once, I even got hard at football practice while staring off at the Catskill Mountains and half-assing my way through groin stretches.

Sticks And Stones

In 1986 I was the Horse Girl of St. Margaret’s, the tallest girl in sixth grade, with dark-brown hair I tossed like a mane.

Without Ceasing

You never grew tired of watching her work. You loved the hum of the machine, the sawdust that stuck to her sleeve, and how she bent her head over the wood like something swan. You knew she was sharing something intimate with you. You were witnessing prayer.

Intimacy

In a college dorm, in a prison, in a marriage

Saved

It was true what Mrs. Berry said: no one expected to see an old woman in a muscle car, a red and black Mustang convertible with a scooped hood and an engine that ran with a throaty hum.

Sometimes Things Just Don’t

We always went to Dancing Pins because it was cheap and we could spend all day there, easy, no complaints. We’d go when our mom was drunk and didn’t have anyone to sleep with. She brought her own vodka in a paper bag, like it wasn’t obvious.