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Now, the links you’re here for:
Rough sex murder defence: Why campaigners want it banned (Caroline Lowbridge, BBC)
“The difficulty is that it feels like people who have nothing to do with BDSM are appropriating it to try and get away with some vicious and evil behaviour, which is really sad for a community that has spent a long, long time fighting for some recognition and a right to exist in an authentic way,” she said.
“The important thing with the Grace Millane case is that it was not that he was a well-intentioned young man trying to please his new fling who accidentally got it wrong. This isn’t a case of people emulating what they’ve seen in porn and making honest mistakes.
“This was calculated murder.”
Inside the Spectacular Implosion at the Romance Writers of America (Kelly Faircloth, Jezebel)
The Romance Writers of America, one of the country’s largest writers associations, is in chaos. In late December, the RWA board made the perplexing and instantly controversial decision to censure, suspend, and ban author Courtney Milan from ever holding national office in the organization again—essentially, because she called a 20-year-old book a “fucking racist mess.” That move set off a chain of events that now threatens to rend the institution apart in a battle for the heart and soul of not just RWA, but the romance genre as a whole. It has been a spectacularly public fight, one that reflects a long, contested history of who gets to be visible in romance.
Inking against invisibility (Talia Hibbert, Longreads)
Tattooing the sites of physical trauma on my body, like beautiful X’s marking the spots no one wanted to see, was my promise to myself that I would never again fear making a fuss. Did my tattoos hurt? I know, logically, that they did — but they felt so blissful to me.
For the slipped rib my uncle didn’t understand, I got my ICON tattoo. During the session, I sat a few meters away from a bearded man who was having a fish bowl tattooed on his belly. He winced when he saw my chosen placement. “Ribs? That’ll come keen.”
I smiled.
Frequently asked questions about your craniotomy (Mary South, The White Review)
Much later: Pain pills are increased to straight-up morphine to, finally, liquid morphine that’s absorbed inside the cheek because you’re too tired to sit up or even swallow. Hospice workers visit who seem like they’ve been sent straight from the choirs of seraphim; hospice workers visit who you want to punch in the face because they talk about “wanting to give back” or “observing the whole range of the human condition.” Your spouse or mother or child caretaker is overwhelmed by a crying jag at the sight of a newly delivered commode chair. Your spouse or mother or child caretaker gives you a haircut and you feel fully afraid and not just numbly afraid as you watch your thin hair on the floor get swept away. Your spouse or mother or child caretaker, if artistically inclined, draws your likeness while you nap. This likeness won’t be completed and is left, parchment edges curling, with only one wide turtle eye. Plan on being brought outside for a last trip to see the migration of geese. A dry fever calms you and shuts down all your bodily systems. You breathe harder and harder until you stop.
In My Father’s Final Year, He Was Not My Father (Crissy Van Meter, Buzzfeed)
He tells me not to fly home, to keep on working and living, that my grandfather wouldn’t want it any other way. He reveals he’ll get a little bit of money so he can move into a studio right on the sand. He’s happy, he says; he’s back with his friends, he’s got to go because the game is on, tells me there’s nothing like California in October, and then everything goes silent.
Image credit: Jeff Turner