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February 2022. Boston. The sidewalks had turned to glass.

I slipped hard walking around a pond and spent a week in the dark, nursing a concussion with a blanket over my head. I had moved to Boston a year earlier from the Bay Area and I was still adjusting. The cold felt personal. The smiles were tight. Everything seemed harder than it needed to be.

The first show I watched when I could finally look at a screen again was Inventing Anna. I don’t remember choosing it; I had never heard the name Anna Delvey, but there the icon was, glowing at the top of Netflix like a cultural assignment I’d missed. I was supposed to be limiting screen time, but I kept watching.

And then Googling.

And then muttering: She just said she had money, and people…believed her?

It wasn’t just the fashion or the fake wire transfers. It was the fact that this beautiful, young, white woman with a weird accent walked into Manhattan’s elite circles and convinced people she belonged. She stayed in luxury hotels for weeks—weeks—without paying and wasn’t immediately kicked out. She simply didn’t pay. And still, people waited, calmly, expectantly, for the money to materialize.

I couldn’t stop thinking: It must be nice to move through the world with that kind of default credibility.

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“Старость не радость,” which translates to “Being old is not a joy,” is one of the first colloquial, everyday Russian sayings that stuck with me when I first began spending significant periods of time in Russia. Often uttered with a sigh of resignation, the simple phrase probably stayed with me because I heard it so often, primarily from middle-aged and aging Russian women. Women like the host mothers I lived with in the provincial city of Vladimir in my early to mid-20s, when I taught English for a year at an institution called the American Home and returned for a summer of intensive Russian study after my first year of grad school at Stanford. I always felt empathy for the people who uttered this phrase in conversation, but as a younger adult I lacked the experience to fully understand where they were coming from. 

Now that, as of last month, I’m 45, “старость не радость” resonates differently in all its brutal Slavic bluntness: no frills, no sugarcoating, no optimism. Aging does not bring happiness. That’s the way it is.

But does it really have to be all bad? 

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The Flytrap is thrilled to announce our new agreement with the National Writers Union. 

As a team of current and former freelancers and a worker-owned business, we value our freelance contributors. They deserve fair pay at industry standard rates and above, as well as transparent and just contract terms and open lines of communication. Like our independent comrades, we are also committed to growing the strength and capacity of the indie media ecosystem. Freelancers are an essential part of this process. This agreement is one way to demonstrate their value to our publication and our commitment to transparency.

Find the full agreement and information about submissions guidelines at https://theflytrap.beehiiv.com/c/union. For more information about the National Writers Union, visit nwu.org. We also encourage freelancers to join NWU’s digital media division, the Freelance Solidarity Project (freelancesolidarity.org), to participate in building a more just, equitable, and sustainable industry.

We’re excited to partner with the NWU, joining fellow independent publications such as Defector, In These Times, and Hell Gate in building a more just and sustainable world for freelancers.

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This aggressively hideous $200 coat rack has been living rent-free in my head for years, ever since the moment I saw it in a Wirecutter roundup of doorway-decluttering products. I’m in a forever fight with my narrow entryway, and here was Wirecutter landing in my inbox and promising a selection of “simultaneously beautiful and functional” solutions. Now, is this coat rack functional? I am willing to take Wirecutter’s word for it, and at an eye-popping price, I certainly hope it performs. But beautiful? I mean, “eye of the beholder” and all that, but this coat rack looks like an errant part that might have fallen off of or out of an airplane–possibly both.

Still, you can’t please everyone all the time, particularly when it comes to something as subjective as the aesthetics of personal style and home decor. I think the Eames Hang-It-All, also recommended, looks less whimsical and more like “it smells like half-regurgitated animal crackers and diaper cream,” which puts me at odds with probably the world’s entire population of fancy design experts. Are they wrong? Am I? Nobody knows! That’s art, baby.

Regardless, $300 is objectively a wild amount of money to spend on any wall-mounted coat hanger, let alone one that looks like it belongs in a high-end Chuck E. Cheese. But as if the Eames itself wasn’t bad enough, Wirecutter recommends not one but two more kindergarten-chic Hang-It-All knockoffs, both at comical price points ($70-$100, which… can people really not throw their coats over a chair or something?). A full third of Wirecutter’s coat storage solutions involve sticking balls on sticks, then sticking the balls on sticks on the wall! It’s a real commitment to the bit. But perhaps beauty is especially in the eye of the beholder when it comes to coat racks; maybe I’m just the kind of person who simply can’t visualize a truly beautiful coat rack. Fine! But sometimes words do mean things, and I refuse to accept that this practically invisible $125 Amazon coat rack falls anywhere in the same universe as “quirky,” but that’s the description Wirecutter chose.

By this time you are likely wondering if this whole piece is going to be one lady hollering about the preferred coat racks of a recommendations website owned by the New York Times, one of America’s most prominent bigotry laundering operations and purveyors of fascism apologia. I promise it will not. I will also be complaining about other bad Wirecutter recommendations, such as these chintzy sunglasses, this list of “wedding guest” dresses that includes one that could legitimately pass for a bridal gown, and a printer I spent five precious and fleeting years of my life in open and active dispute with. I assure you I didn’t write this whole thing just because Wirecutter has become one of my favorite hate-reads after years of getting burned by their bad buys.

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The film bro, a figure that haunts cinephile spaces both online and in real life, is a self-described movie nerd with limited, male-centered film taste. Film bros, who can be professional critics or simply amateur cinephiles, analyze films through an insufferable misogynistic lens, consistently looking down on and over-criticizing anything that doesn’t follow a traditionally male storytelling format (think Barbie versus Oppenheimer). Since Hollywood studios continue to cater primarily to white male audiences, film bros internalize the sense that their opinions are law in cinephile communities, leaving little space for marginalized voices to cut through to mainstream audiences. 

Despite growing concerns about the lack of representation of women and people of color in the entertainment industry in the wake of the #MeToo movement, film criticism remains an overwhelmingly male-dominated field. According to a 2022 study, men account for 69% of critics across print, radio, television and online outlets, while women critics account for 31% and nonbinary people account for 0.3%. Although the number of films with female protagonists increased in 2024, the number of women behind the scenes is still low, with women comprising just 23% of directors, writers, producers, executive producers, editors, and cinematographers working on the 250 top films of 2024. Given these facts, it’s unsurprising that film bros tend to make cinephile communities hostile to anybody who isn’t a cishet white man.

But it doesn’t have to be this way. New, intentionally inclusive grassroots cinephile communities have begun to model alternatives that could help pave the way for a future with better representation for the marginalized both on screen and off. Over the past few months, I spoke to cinephile community managers and founders attempting to build a more inclusive film culture. Their insights helped me understand more about how film bros exclude diverse audiences from conversations about film as well as what it would take to effect positive change in our male-centered movie culture.

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After eight months of pre-trial incarceration, endless speculation, and millions of dollars spent on attorneys, the United States of America v. Sean Combs trial came to an unsatisfying conclusion earlier this month. Combs, a hip-hop mogul with endless access to fame, wealth, and power, was facing a life sentence if convicted of the five counts charged by the Southern District of New York. Despite compelling testimony from several of his victims, including his former girlfriend Cassie Ventura, the jury ultimately acquitted him of three of the most serious charges, including sex trafficking, and convicted him on two counts of transportation to engage in prostitution.

Combs is now facing 20 years, with legal experts estimating that he will likely be sentenced to less than five years and will have that time reduced by 13 months because he was denied both pre-trial and post-trial bail. It is certainly a disappointing outcome, especially for those of us—me included—who perceived this as the proverbial first domino in the long overdue reckoning owed to Black women in hip-hop.  

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When I started following “Latinas for Mangione” on Instagram, I expected news on Luigi Mangione’s ongoing federal and state cases, after spending a few months fascinated with Mangione’s alleged murder of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson. What I didn’t expect was photos of Mangione as a child, accompanied by weirdly parasocial captions, and videos of him in college with comments about how sexy his voice is. 

In a predictable turn of events in late technofascist surveillance capitalism, Mangione’s alleged crime—once understood by much of the public as a response to the inherently exploitative American healthcare system—has become depoliticized. Parasocial fandoms have stripped the assassination of its meaning while unfortunately becoming an essential part in how Mangione is raising funds and public support for his legal defense.

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Washington, D.C. is one of the last outposts for abortion access throughout pregnancy in the United States. But the District of Columbia is not a state. Our murky legal status, a deliberate holdover from U.S. slavery, could have a devastating ripple effect on abortion seekers nationwide.

“Our” applies to the District’s more than 700,000 residents, including me. I am a longtime abortion journalist who covered the daily attacks that marked the first Trump administration and its most significant aftereffect, the Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe v. Wade via the Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization decision in 2022. 

The Trump administration’s second go-around is working to grind the fractured legality of abortion into dust and deny access in the meantime.

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Crinkly paper, rustling leaves, a clacky keyboard, someone puttering around the kitchen. The feeling of someone running their fingers through your hair. For some people, including me, these sensations provoke a response almost like floating, one that makes the skin prickle, an electric feeling often described as “the tingles.” Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response (ASMR), a term to describe the phenomenon, burst into the public eye in the 2010s. There are a few studies on ASMR, including one that’s been tremendously influential in the conversation: the 2018 paper “More Than a Feeling” about the emotional and physiological effects of ASMR. But there’s still considerable dispute over what, exactly, is going on here and if it should be considered a sex thing—a question that has big implications for ASMR content creators.

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There is no denying that a patriarchal society is dangerous for women, but the rhetoric of women’s safety has historically been used to justify state violence, incarceration, and the social exclusion of some of the most marginalized people. While abolitionist feminists note that the weaponization of violence against women to increase police powers and racialized incarceration isn’t a new phenomenon, the divisions sowed by a politically empty feminist analysis of gender-based violence are accelerating as authoritarianism is on the rise globally, making scapegoats out of whole populations and, importantly, not actually solving the issue of women’s safety. 

Patriarchy is everywhere, including right next to you, and the challenge that abolitionist feminism poses is that to actually protect women, to really hold perpetrators to account, society has to change completely. Radical change is required to keep people in our communities safe, both internally—in how we see ourselves, in how we understand our desires, and each other, and externally—how power and work are organized in society, how we deal with harm, and how we distribute resources. While there are many kinds of feminism, this is what I personally and politically understand as a feminist movement: The world needs a complete overhaul to finally destroy patriarchy.

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My male boss and his assistant, a woman about 40 years my senior, sat me down at the private Evangelical Christian college library where I worked and studied in my early 20s. My multiple dress code infractions, most of which applied to the visible cleavage that rose over the necklines of my t-shirts, were a stumbling block for men, they told me. How could any man maintain pure thoughts and a clean conscience with such ample flesh on display! As a library employee, it was my responsibility to set a good example for the rest of the student body. 

"Well, then," I said, taking a deep breath and standing up, "I guess I'm not a library employee anymore."

I walked out before I could hear their response. I wondered what they would have said if I countered with what was really going through my mind, voicing a truth about myself I'd only just started being comfortable sharing with my nearest and dearest of friends:

"Well, I'm a lesbian, so I don't really care much what ideas men have about me."

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It started with a dream: The Old Dykes Home. 

Envisioned during beach trips with friends nearly 30 years ago, this is how Pat McAulay first thought of the concept that would become Village Hearth, the first LGBTQ cohousing community in the nation for people 55 and over. 

“Any older lesbian you speak to has this dream of living together or living in close proximity and taking care of one another,” McAulay said. “Because people from our generation… come out of the closet and then have to go back in, in old age. That was the biggest fear, the treatment you’d get in a nursing home or some sort of a facility. And so that's where the idea came from: You take care of your own, as long as you can.” 

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Shortly after Trump took office in January I noticed an interesting phenomenon in my North Carolina neighborhood: Mexican flags. Within just a mile of my home, I counted three. The first went up just a few houses down from mine, alongside flags for Guatemala and the U.S. I noticed the flags while driving through the neighborhood with my husband one day in February. 

“Eeeeey,” I yelled out, happy to see evidence of other Latinos in the neighborhood. “We’re everywhere!” 

Not long after, I noticed another Mexican flag go up outside of an apartment around the corner. This one belonged to a Mexican couple that often spent time in the front yard, grilling and playing with their children. Then, across the street from the couple, there was a third Mexican flag outside of a large home that also flew the American flag.

What made this phenomenon especially interesting is that during his second term, the American flag has become a touchstone for President Donald Trump. 

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Editor’s Note: This story includes mentions of colonization and genocide.

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In the lead-up to his second inauguration, Donald Trump made no secret about his desire for territorial expansion of the United States. In addition to threatening to annex sovereign territories such as Canada, Greenland, and the Panama Canal, Trump marked his first day in office by signing an executive order renaming landmarks to those that “honor American greatness.” Trump’s order decreed that the Gulf of Mexico should be renamed the “Gulf of America,” and Mount Denali in Alaska should henceforth be called “Mount McKinley.”

Following this executive order, Google began relabeling the body of water between the United States, Mexico, and Cuba as the “Gulf of America.” Fellow software giants Apple and Bing followed suit. The change was highly controversial, with Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum demanding Google reverse course.

“If a country wants to change the designation of something in the sea, it would only apply up to 12 nautical miles,” she said in a press conference, referring to the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea. “It cannot apply to the rest, in this case, the Gulf of Mexico. This is what we explained in detail to Google.” In February, Google replied that it applies name changes based on the Geographic Names Information System, which was updated following Trump’s executive order. 

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In Niko Stratis’s debut memoir The Dad Rock That Made Me A Woman, the writer and music journalist draws a connection between her own journey of self-discovery as a trans woman and the undefinable genre of music that helped her get there.

Challenging the gendered origins and definitions of dad rock, Stratis opens up the genre to new interpretations. “Dad rock is a genre of loose origin and even looser definition, a box with blurred lines and fuzzy edges letting all things bleed in and out of it at will,” Stratis writes, purposefully refusing to define the kind of music that is usually associated with white, straight dads, and calling readers and critics to expand their understanding of both the scope of the genre itself and the identities of its fans.

Stigmatized by its alleged uncoolness due to its connection to fatherhood, dad rock is rarely framed in mainstream media narratives as a genre that is consumed by trans people or queer people in general. I became obsessed with The Beatles at the age of 15, roughly 35 years after the band broke up officially, and Stratis’s book confirms a suspicion I have held for those two decades since: dad rock can be and often is thoroughly enjoyed by queer people–queer women in particular. Dad rock has been an instructive balm in my own life as a queer woman, and Stratis’s book invites further exploration of the connection between queer and specifically trans people and a genre that is canonically understood by the general public as an area of cisheteronormative art. 

In fact, some queer people walked this path before Stratis. In doing research for this piece, I found a playlist of dad rock for lesbians, a Reddit thread asking why gay men in particular don’t like old rock music (in opposition to queer women’s love for it), and a few TikTok videos of lesbians transforming dad rock songs into lesbian indie folk music.

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There is a decadent intimacy to the Black South. When I arrived in Greensboro, North Carolina, less than an hour away from where my first ancestors to the Americas toiled the land until they made it their own, those intimacies made themselves immediately known. There were no strangers; on the sacred land where I attended college and became the woman I was destined to be, we were enveloped in warm hugs, prayed over, pulled close to the bosom, and carried through both triumphs and storms. 

Those intimacies are in the shorthand dialect neighbors use with one another, in the sweet tea and the sour sorrows that seemingly move in tandem, in the courteousness that even shows itself during marches through the streets to protest injustice and demand freedom. There’s a familial connection among the Black folks who have—through destiny, fate, and pure ol’ luck—come to be on the same land at the same time. Those intimacies were even in the dark corners of the nightclubs we thrusted and grinded in, night after night, using our moving bodies to feel even a single semblance of freedom amid endless turmoil. 

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Hello, readers!

Well, our first six months have sure been a wild ride! Remember when we said “let’s launch a feminist cultural criticism newsletter on Election Day, what could go wrong?”

In all seriousness though, a lot went right. Our subscriber base is growing, we’re publishing some truly amazing content, and we’re thinking ahead about sustainability and our role in the larger independent media ecosphere. We’re proud to be publishing alongside a range of outlets, comrades, and friends such as 404 Media, Defector, Flaming Hydra, and The Handbasket, showing that we can make this whole thing work, build community, and support each other. It’s incredibly exciting to see so many publications taking the plunge and proving that worker-owned independent media that is not beholden to the bosses can work, because you, dear readers, are making it happen. 

Because we Flytrap co-founders are relentlessly optimistic despite < gestures frantically > everything going on, we’ve set an ambitious goal for our six-month anniversary: recruiting 1,000 new paid Flytrap subscribers. Because we’re a worker-owned co-op committed to building a sustainable media company, paying freelancers fair rates, and putting journalistic rigor into everything we publish, we’re relying on paid subscriptions to keep The Flytrap fertilized for another year and beyond. It’s a big goal, and we’re offering 15% off all new subscriptions until May 13th as an incentive to new readers.

Readers! Hello! Thank you for being a part of The Flytrap’s first six months in the universe. The community you’ve helped us build since we launched last November has shown us (and the world) that there’s a huge appetite for intersectional, worker-owned feminist media.

This week, the Flytrap is celebrating our six-month anniversary, and we’re thrilled to offer a Flytrap fire sale to celebrate, with a 15% discount on all new subscriptions with this gift link. Thinking about a gift for a friend or trying to sell a comrade on a Flytrap subscription? Now’s your chance! And, by special request, we now offer a MONTHLY subscription option with instant access to our whole archive for just $6.66 a month—for, for the next week, $5.66! On the opposite end of the scale, we’ve had supporters ask if they could give us MORE MONEY, and we’re delighted to announce that yes, you can! Sign up for our Big Chungus tier to support independent feminist media for $1,000 a year!

If you don’t need the hard sell, here’s that link again, and we salute you: 🫡

If you’re still thinking about it? Please allow us to hype our work the fuck up. Because we’re real proud of it.

We hope you’ve already enjoyed our monthly free posts: there was Nicole Froio on “Brazil money” and Bad Bunny, Tina Vásquez on the rise of Latino cookbooks, and Evette Dionne explaining why it’s critical to pay for feminist media, plus more—but there’s a heck of a lot else going on behind the paywall. Katelyn Burns wrote about why trans people are so into radical transit and urbanist policy, s.e. smith dove into #DeathTok, Andrea Grimes unpacked the right-wing marriage panic, Aria Velasquez luxuriated in the excesses of the Real Housewives, Chrissy Stroop called out the normalization of fascism, Christine Grimaldi endured the “red mass” up her ass (sorry, we still love that headline), and Evette Dionne reveled in the joy of seeing fat Black women represented in pop culture.

You’ve probably noticed that everything we run is illustrated with absolutely badass art: that’s all down to The Flytrap’s creative director, Rommy Torrico. We were also able to publish our first freelancer in April, with Cezary Jan Strusiewicz making the case for magical anime boys—and there are more great freelance pieces to come, paid at industry-standard rates. And if you haven’t yet tuned into our sister podcast Cancel Me, Daddy, hosted by Flytrap co-founders Katelyn Burns and Christine Grimaldi, the time is extremely now. By popular demand, we’ve also opened a merch store where you can order your very own posters of our post art and pick up fun Flytrap swag, including a killer trucker hat.

We’re committed to publishing the feminist cultural criticism, reporting, and creative work that we want to see, and that our community craves as much as we do. To keep The Flytrap lights on for another year and beyond, we need to sign up 1,000 new paid subscribers. We’ve sweetened our subscription prices to entice new bites, but these special six-month anniversary rates won’t last long.

Join us for a nibble?

– The Flytrap co-founders
Andrea, Aria, Chrissy, Christine, Evette, Katelyn, Nicole, Rommy, Tina, and s.e.

🛑 HOLD UP THERE, FRIEND! READ THIS FIRST! 🛑

WE’VE MOVED! You’re reading this on an archived version of The Flytrap that exists only to preserve links to content we published before August 27, 2025.

To read this post and get new editions in your inbox every week, subscribe over at our new home on Ghost. (And if you’re already a paid Flytrap subscriber, you should have experienced an almost seamless transition to be able to read our content on Ghost, but if you aren’t able to do so, please reach out to the Flyteam at flyteam@theflytrapmedia.com.)

While we have you: The Flytrap merch store is now open! Get dripped out in the latest Flytrap merch or buy a poster from our collection.

Credit: Rommy Torrico

The Flytrap merch store is now open! Buy a poster of the art for this piece or get dripped out in the latest Flytrap merch here.

Editor’s notes: Shortly before press time, Chrissy Stroop received notice that the Freedom From Religion Foundation will be honoring her with a Freethought Heroine award in October. This award was not offered in exchange for favorable treatment or other consideration in this article, which had already entered copyedits at the time of the notification. Also, Gmail might clip this post due to its size. In case you’re unable to see the whole post, click here to read it on browser.

I’m trying to assess the state of the secular movement in the United States, and I want to believe Kat Grant when they tell me “progress is slow, but it is happening.”

Grant’s optimism is noteworthy in light of the Freedom From Religion Foundation’s choice to publish a disinformation-packed anti-trans screed on their Freethought Now blog last December as a cruel rejoinder to Grant’s own pointed post debunking reductionist biological definitions of womanhood. FFRF published the bigoted response in that spirit of “free inquiry,” “debate,” and just plain cranky contrarianism that old-fashioned atheists romanticize—and which often drives younger and marginalized nonreligious folks away from humanist, atheist, and so-called freethinking organizations. Grant worked for FFRF for almost three years. And if an advocate like Grant—who was harassed mercilessly during the FFRF blog brouhaha—tells me they’ve seen “a ton of improvement” in secular institutions over the last few years, that means something.

The effectiveness of secular organizing and lobbying matters more than ever these days, since the United States finds itself in the ever-tightening grip of a fascist regime backed primarily by right-wing Christians.

Credit: Rommy Torrico

🛑 HOLD UP THERE, FRIEND! READ THIS FIRST! 🛑

WE’VE MOVED! You’re reading this on an archived version of The Flytrap that exists only to preserve links to content we published before August 27, 2025.

To read this post and get new editions in your inbox every week, subscribe over at our new home on Ghost. (And if you’re already a paid Flytrap subscriber, you should have experienced an almost seamless transition to be able to read our content on Ghost, but if you aren’t able to do so, please reach out to the Flyteam at flyteam@theflytrapmedia.com.)

While we have you: The Flytrap merch store is now open! Get dripped out in the latest Flytrap merch or buy a poster from our collection.

I. The Teacher

No one had ever called my father “mister” anything in a professional setting until he taught dry cleaning at a vocational high school in mid-aughts suburban New Jersey. ”Tommy!” to my mother and his more demanding customers then transformed into “Mr. G” with the speed of Clark Kent ripping his button-down open to reveal the Superman logo.

Off came the Costco T-shirts and jorts that stuck to Dad as he worked in the back of his dry cleaning business, starching white collars for many bridge-and-tunnel finance bros living the family life in the suburbs and the high life in the city. Mr. G’s new Costco polo shirts unbuttoned to reveal every goomba’s favorite coat of arms: a 14-karat gold figaro chain with a crucifix that glinted against chest hair that turned a little more gray with every passing year.

The school offered a wide range of vocational and technical programs, among them carpentry, culinary arts, automotive services, and hexating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC). Dry cleaning was not popular with students, nor a priority for school administration. The higher-ups treated dry cleaning like low-skilled labor, albeit labor on which they nevertheless depended for school banquet tablecloths and their own personal items of clothing.