The Best of Millicent and Carla Fran

So, our “Best of” category currently republishes all the posts we like in their entirety. It’s been kind of tough to navigate, so we’re experimenting with other ways of organizing old posts. This is going to be an updating work in progress, but this post should work as a sort-of-helpful index to the site.

Here, in no particular order, are some posts we regard as decentish:

The “Sloppy Jane” or “Nu Woman” Series (the advent of the awkward female in film and television)

From Carla Fran:

• “Sloppy Jane“
• “She had me at ungraceful exposure of honest thought“
• “The Brits Get It“
• “I Love You, Three-Dimensional Well-Written Character.”

From Millicent

• The Princess Bride Speaks!

Masculinity and Media

• Wherein I Think Too Hard About Your Highness (this one also covers Eastbound and Down)
• Our Men (Louis CK, and more Eastbound)

The INTERNET series

• The Feminist Blogosphere: A Retrospective
• How Sady Doyle’s #MooreandMe Twitter Campaign worked
• TL;DR (a post on the “internet academy”)
• To Angie: A Thank-You Note: on the woman who Tweeted her abortion
• Ladytalk: on Slate’s XX (when it launched)
• Yip Yap Hooray (on the charge of “oversharing”)

The “Women’s Reproductive Health” series

• Here’s Carla Fran’s history of the women (and man) behind the first birth-control pill.
• Millicent’s post on HR–1171, the South Dakota Bill that would allow for the legal murder of abortion providers, and how Rep. Phil Jensen’s vision for women is worse than the “sharia law” the state is trying to ban.
• Carla Fran’s six-part “Doula” series on how she came to a be one and what she learned about obstetrics and power on the way. Parts one, two, three, four,five, six. (Go straight to 6 if you’re in a rush).
• Millicent’s takedown of Sarah Palin’s Mama Grizzly, which turns out to be (oops) pro-choice. (Insofar as animals are political. Which they aren’t.)
• Carla Fran’s “Thanks, Tuba City“
• Carla Fran on CEDAW
• Carla Fran’s “Ballad of the Pregnant Ice Dancer“
• Millicent, “What Utah’s Miscarriage=Homicide Law Could Mean: Some Scenarios“
• Carla Fran, “Disinfect to Protect,” on Lysol in the vagina. History!
• Millicent, “Why Don’t Fetuses Get Free Health Care?”
• Carla Fran on Placentophagy: “Eating the Temporary Organ“
• Millicent’s response to placenta-eating.
• Carla Fran, on Dr. Tiller’s assassination: “The Commitments“

Feminism

• Carla Fran’s response to the VIDA charts on women in publishing: “Why Don’t Women Submit“?
• Carla Fran’s goodbye to Jessica Valenti.
• Carla Fran on Latisse: “The End Days“
• Carla Fran on Norman Mailer and “The Bitch“
• Millicent on the marginalization of women writers and how to respond.
• Millicent on the Publisher’s Weekly Top Ten list in ’09 that excluded women, with help from Francine Prose.

Millicent’s “Selfish Women” series

• “Unselfish Female Feminists: True or False?”
• A look at the popular response to Julie Powell of Julie & Julia
• Contra Priv-Lit
• And a forthcoming post that selfishly refuses to write itself.

Delightful Historical Flotsam

• Carla Fran’s report on a 1732 gentleman’s club, The Most Ancient and Puissant Order of the Beggar’s Benison and Merryland, Anstruther, “a group of elite men that got together to get sexy and learn sexy,” including instructional circle-jerk rituals.
• Millicent on “Recessionomics: How the Anti-American Spy Lives Now“
• Carla Fran’s take on foreskin-inspired sleeves.
• Millicent on a cringe-inducing illustrated obstetrical guide: Touching the Female.
• Carla Fran on the Caganer: “Everybody Poops.”
• Millicent on Ben Franklin’s proposal for perfumed farts.
• Millicent on the Victorian Bathing Machine.
• Carla Fran, on The Duggars and Casanova.

Movies

• The Trip
• Bad Teacher
• Bridesmaids
• More Bridesmaids
• Sucker Punch
• The Green Hornet
• “The Other Guys,”
• “Paper Heart” and “The Puffy Chair.”
• “Holiday.”
• “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.”
• “Scott Pilgrim,” where “the movie almost lets her go join the other two dimensions of her character that are lurking somewhere, but instead, Scott joins her.”
• Star Trek
• The Social Network
• Inglourious Basterds
• The Hangover
• He’s Just Not That Into You
• The Fantastic Mr. Fox
• Belle Du Jour
• Borat
• Away We Go
• Away We Go (again)
• Whip It
• Up (sort of—this one’s pretty digressive)
• Twilight (the first one)
• Funny Girl
• Doris Day, who we have a bit of a thing for: Doris Day, Fertility Godess,  It Happened To Jane, The Thrill of it All, and this wonderful picture of her with dayglo poodles.

• Millicent and Carla Fran on the suckiness of Funny People after seeing it, and Carla Fran’s earlier, astoundingly prescient take on the movie poster.

The Women on TV Series

• Carla Fran on Slings and Arrows
• Millicent on The Wire, Parts 1 and 2–2 is basically stolen whole-hog from Sophie Jones.
• Carla Fran on Kourtney Kardashian’s delivery.
• Carla Fran on Daisy Steiner in Spaced.
• The awesomeness of Garfunkel and Oates.
• Millicent on Freaks and Geeks vs. My So-Called Life
• Millicent on Roseanne.
• Carla Fran and Millicent on Bea Arthur’s death, and the Golden Girls.

Carla Fran on Hollywood Series

• “The Protagonist’s Diet“
• On reactions to Kathryn Bigelow’s DGA win.
• “The Yellow Screen“–a great piece on women in Hollywood.
• On the romantic comedy: The Last Act.

Millicent on the weird racism at the Oakland Zoo.

Carla Fran’s “Weddings” series

• “Costume Drama“
• “Bride Revisited,”
• “What I Love About the Clinton Wedding Photos,”
• “Gowns in the Wild,”
• “The Personal and the Political“
• “The Eyes Have it“

Millicent’s “Arcane Scholarship Applied to Contemporary Issues” series

• “How to Tell if You or Your Husband Are Infertile: Pee on Plants“
• “What a 1690s Advice Columnist Would Say About Pale Male and Lola“
• “On John Milton Waiting to Be Milked“
• “Christ’s Foreskin and Other Gifts“
• “Respect the Cock“
• “A Very Great Company of Radiating Pencils“
• “Bromance vs. Romance: (Boys) Cross-Dressing for Love“
• “American Idle: How Fear and Anger Drive Us to Our Fallen Work“

Death and Mourning

• Carla Fran on the dead neighbor upstairs.
• Millicent on “The Perfect Funeral“
• Carla Fran “On Privacy and Domesticity,” on her grandmother’s death.
• Millicent on “Mastering The Art of Emotional Corseting“
• Carla Fran’s gorgeous essay on the death of a pet: “The Little Emperor, The Complete Animal“
• Millicent on her grandmother’s death: “Hallways and Eggs“
• Millicent on the first”Mother’s Day” after her grandmother’s death.

Writing

• Carla Fran, Drilling Down
• Carla Fran, How Not to Write
• Millicent, on one of the pitfalls of creative nonfiction.
• Carla Fran’s response to the above.

Books

• Freedom
• Alice Munro vs. Lorrie Moore
• Logicomix
• Away (Amy Bloom)
• Gaudy Night
• Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
• Joan Didion’s essay “Goodbye to All That“
• Millicent being slightly irreverent with Norman Mailer’s Prisoner of Sex, part 1 and part 2.

Millicent’s “Christianity” series

• (Part 1 here)
• “The Modesty Survey” <–that’s part 2.

The “Memory” Series

• Carla Fran on her grandmother’s decaying memory, and her response.
• “Such, Such Were the Joys“: on that teen institution, The Mall.
• Millicent’s response re: grandmothers and memory.

The Eugenics Series

• The Evil, Jam-Selling Quakers
• On Beauty: How Eugenics Got Darwin Wrong
• The Eugenics Review: USA as a British “Dumping Ground”
• Miss USA: Why Beauty Pageants Matter Again

Millicent’s Natural Disasters and How They’re Told Series

• Tsunamis and the Survivors’ Tell–On Phuket.
• Let us descend into the blind world now–On Haiti.
• Chile 8.8: Earthquakes and How We Tell Them–On Chile.
• El Mercurio’s Last Top Story Before the Quake

On the 2009 UC Berkeley Strike

• Cops Beating UC Students: Time to Judge
• UC Berkeley Strike in Photos

Sex

• Safe Sex
• Now We Know