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Gratuitous Love Triangles and The Desolation of Smaug

  Source  (Emilyeretica, Deviantart) The first time I read The Hobbit, I was in fifth grade. I liked the plot; I liked the style of narration; I liked discovering the backstory to The Lord of the Rings. It didn’t occur to me to care about its utter lack of female characters. I didn’t even notice. It […]

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Life, Death, and the Fear of Zombies

  “The founders of a new colony, whatever Utopia of human virtue and happiness they might originally project, have invariably recognized it among their earliest practical necessities to allot a portion of the virgin soil as a cemetery, and another portion as the site of a prison.” -Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter As Hawthorne points […]

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Reflections on 5C Feminism

   Source Recently, dorms across the 5Cs have become home to large Post-Its asking the question, “What does it mean to be a feminist at the 5Cs?”  In my dorm, several days passed before the first responses began to trickle in. Reading these initial responses made me realize how differently I’d interpreted the question. The […]

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Which of These Women Are Sexually Liberated?

The answer: all of them. A woman’s appearance does not make her any more or less sexually liberated than her peers. Too often, the media would like the American public to believe that the only way to be an empowered woman is to be overtly sexual, like option D. Magazine and newspaper articles, TV shows, […]

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The Problem With Party Culture

  The party is dwindling, the alcohol consumed, but the music remains, along with a few dispersed people dancing. There is a group of women dancing together, all three of them wearing skirts, unclaimed by any of the men at the party. Of course they must be there to hook up, so it is perfectly […]

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Be Your Own Hero, Damnit!

  It’s no secret that men dominate the film industry. Many of the biggest blockbusters are jam-packed with explosions, violence, and muscly male leads in major power positions. Sure there are women. Busty and leggy females in spandex playing the sexy love interest of the male lead whose roles are largely shallow and offer little […]

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Miss Maiden Name

    My full name consists of two different languages mashed together with old-fashioned sensibilities – but it feels right even if it doesn’t roll off the tongue very prettily. When people have taken a stab at it, it is usually horrendously and amusingly wrong. I’ve been called “new-guy-en” and “nug-gui-en” among other things since […]

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Take my deity off your micro-shorts, please

 Source At times, I think that an important linguistic distinction between assimilation and appropriation becomes lost amid our much-needed discussion about the fluidity of culture. Perhaps when, in the same argument, we start using two connotatively different words that both begin with ‘A’ and have five syllables, their distinctions become blurred. I’m really not sure, […]

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The Quagmire of our Dining Halls

  If you’re anything like me, a long day of studying is always alleviated by going to 5cdining.com and choosing a dining hall to eat in. With choices like Taco Tuesday, Mongolian Wok, and A.M in the P.M, this can be quite the ordeal, and is only exacerbated if you’re going to eat with a […]

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Pantless in Claremont

  About a month ago I came to a realization: I had no pants. Other than a pair of plaid skinny jeans I’d begged my mother to get me in 11th grade, none of my pants fit. I’d just been wearing my girlfriend’s jeans on the days when I didn’t drape my legs in plaid. […]

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