Nine years ago, when I was hospitalized at the Payne Whitney Psychiatric Clinic in New York City, I learned the hard way that psychiatric institutions are not like the glamorous and horrible places that populate literature and film. They are sad, tedious boxes where people sit around watching the National Geographic channel and doing crossword puzzles.

Being in a psych ward is boring. Knock-out, drag-down dull. The endless waiting and watching. The dumb activities. Even while at the end of your rope, you are cosmically bored. I remember thinking, “This is not like fucking Girl, Interrupted. No one is doing my nails in solidarity. We haven’t run off to the secret bowling alley.” That I had a well-developed fantasy about what my hospital experience would be like is disturbing in its own right, but there you have it.

When I was hospitalized, I brought a backpack of books with me, like I was going to catch up on my reading (I didn’t). One of the books I packed was Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper — a classic story of how a woman descends into psychosis as the result of ineffective and abusive medical treatment.

Being in a psych ward is boring. Knock-out, drag-down dull.
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Today, when I teach the text in my literature class, “Representations of Mental Illness,” I emphasize the connections between the narrator’s madness and the patriarchal culture that oppressed her. However, even all these years later, I waver in my interpretation of the final scene, where the narrator’s husband/physician faints at the sight of her crawling around the room she has been convalescing in:

‘What is the matter?’ he cried. ‘For God’s sake, what are you doing!’

I kept on creeping just the same, but I looked at him over my shoulder.

‘I’ve got out at last,’ said I, ‘in spite of you and Jane! And I’ve pulled off most of the paper so you can’t put me back in!’

Now why should that man have fainted? But he did, and right across my path by the wall, so that I had to creep over him every time!

The two questions I always ask myself are: Does the narrator, in her final moments of unabashed madness, gain a terrible power? Or is she hopelessly powerless?

These two questions are at the core of the debate regarding using the psychiatric institution (or the haunted asylum) as a locus of entertainment during the Halloween season. In particular, Knott’s Berry Farm recently came under scrutiny for its show “Fear VR 5150,” and the project was cancelled after protesters called it unethical. Six Flags Great Adventure was also criticized for its use of wandering “mental patients” in the Halloween Fright Fest extravaganza. Due to pressure from mental health advocacy groups such as the National Alliance on Mental Illness, Six Flags eventually replaced the “maniacal inmates” with zombies.

As a person who has been institutionalized, I am surprisingly okay with this kind of entertainment.

In his elegant New York Times article, “Mental Illness is Not a Horror Show,” Andrew Solomon writes:

“I was saddened to see painful lived experiences transmogrified into spooky entertainment. I was also unnerved to consider that I was someone else’s idea of a ghoul, a figure more or less interchangeable with a zombie . . . I think of the effect these attractions would have not only on people without mental illnesses, who might be inspired to patronize, shun, or even harm those of us who do have them, but also on the large portion of the American population who battle these challenges daily. Will they be more hesitant to come out about a psychiatric diagnosis? Will they be less likely to check themselves in for care?”

I understand Solomon’s concerns about the use of mental patients as entertainment in immersive horror experiences. Our treatment of the mentally ill is shameful; many people with mental health issues don’t get treatment, end up homeless, and are seen as threats to public safety. According to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, more than 124,000 of the 610,000 homeless people in America suffer from a mental illness. An estimated 2–15% of people diagnosed with major depression die by suicide. These problems are not entertaining.

And the stigma surrounding them is very real; it’s so real that I’m terrified to even publicly out myself as a former (and let’s not kid ourselves — maybe future) mental patient, because I might be discriminated against at work. That my work as a writer and educator is focused on mental health and literature about mental illness hasn’t really assuaged my anxiety. I have inside knowledge of a place no one wants to be inside.

Our treatment of the mentally ill is shameful.
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But despite very much understanding the concerns that many like Solomon and other mental health advocates share about immersive horror experiences like “Fear VR 5150,” I want to share a perhaps unorthodox way of thinking about these “performances.” I’ve written about how watching horror movies helps me with my anxiety disorder because it feels soothing to confront unspeakable things that are not ordinary, everyday stressors. This leads me to wonder if there is something curative in the power of spectacle. More specifically: Is it possible to get something out of the asylum simulacrum if you’ve actually been a patient in a real one?

Shortly after my hospitalization, I went to a performance of “Sleep No More.” This immersive theater experience spans multiple levels in a Manhattan warehouse converted into what the New York Times described as “a 1930s pleasure palace called the McKittrick . . . what might have happened had Stanley Kubrick . . . been asked to design the Haunted Mansion at Disney World, with that little old box maker Joseph Cornell as a consultant.” Attendants are given masks and encouraged to meander through the intricately detailed scenarios. While you grow increasingly disoriented, dancers and actors perform fragmented bits of Macbeth. You are encouraged to touch everything, go rifling around in drawers, and aggressively inhabit this alternative space.

The floor that contained a reproduction of a Victorian-ish psychiatric ward was the most compelling, and I spent at least an hour wandering through the elaborate, constructed fantasy world of this mental hospital. I lovingly caressed each half-filled filthy claw-foot bathtub. I sat in an old dentist’s chair and stared at a single, dangling lightbulb. I cut off a lock of hair and placed it in an envelope (as per the doctor’s orders). I pored through the patient paperwork. Facing my past in this immersive, explorative theater experience was both life changing and therapeutic. I felt liberated.

Institutions Don’t Help The Mentally Ill

Perhaps what happened to me at “Sleep No More” was that I experienced a cathartic event. Catharsis, which was originally theorized by Aristotle, relates to how viewing tragic theater can provide the audience with an emotional release from negative feelings. In psychoanalytic theory, these negative emotions are related to some kind of repressed trauma and released through emotional discharge. Catharsis is not limited to psychoanalysis, though; Native American healing rituals, collective crying, ecstatic dance, and Roman Catholic exorcism are just a few examples of how catharsis can be used for healing. And while traditional psychoanalytic theory is no longer popular, there is still professional interest in how catharsis can be used in therapy and debate on whether or not it is effective.

While we all deal with our baggage in highly personalized ways, it’s very human to crave the safety of organized chaos while searching for catharsis. When I told a friend of mine that I felt weird about my reaction to the Knott’s Berry Farm controversy, she surprised me by saying she had similar thoughts in the past about similar exhibits and performances: “Show me the hospital bed behind the jail cell bars, the old school medical tools, the doctors and nurses in dated medical clothing. That shit gives me the creeps but draws me in at the same time . . . Maybe it’s all because I’ve seen a mental hospital in the flesh? Does it make me appreciative of current medical care for the mentally ill?”

The idea that a fake asylum with maniacal inmates could be fascinating, soothing, and even fun for those who have actually experienced the reality complicates the sentiment that these projects lack value. If some find these performances hurtful and offensive and others find them cathartic, what is the appropriate response? Is it better to shut them down because they are triggering and stigmatizing, or to leave them open with the understanding that everyone will have a different reaction — and some may even find them helpful?

There’s no easy answer. But because I’ve sat in the sterile waiting rooms; because my friends were in the hospital and wouldn’t return my calls while I tore my cuticles to bits; because I was in the hospital and bored and tired and worried, I do know this: The tacky version is infinitely preferable to the reality.

“The number of cesarean sections hovered around 30 percent most days, well above the World Health Organization recommendation of 10 to 15 percent, but some days it was 75 percent. I saw women bullied into epidurals by their nurses, who would tell them, ‘You will never get through this without one.’ And special, extraordinary scorn was reserved for women who chose to have a home birth. ‘Crazy,’ ‘irresponsible’ and ‘child abuse’ were terms I heard in the staff break room.”

By Sarah Bregel

Dr. Amy Tuteur, also known as “The Skeptical OB” (ironic, since she is no longer a licensed obstetrician), hates the home birth industry. This is not a dramatic statement — she’ll gladly tell you this herself and has written it frequently, in more aggressive ways, on her blog and in the comments section of articles about women’s choices in maternity care. Her view, as Slate put it in an interview with her, is that “ the alternative birth scene is largely based on self-serving myths, not science, and creates unnecessary guilt in women who don’t abide by its standard.” Dr. Tuteur recently wrote a book that faced criticism from advocates of alternative forms of maternity care, and has attacked women who want unmedicated birth on her blog, claiming there is no benefit to such a thing (though years of research prove the opposite).

In a recent New York Times piece, “Why is American Home Birth So Dangerous?,” Dr. Tuteur specifically took aim at Certified Professional Midwives (CPM), the primary attendants of home birth in the U.S., questioning their credentials and qualifications. Since I’ve read Dr. Tuteur’s work before, I actually found the article quite tame (or perhaps heavily edited) — but that doesn’t change the fact that most of what she writes is wildly inaccurate.

Her “witch hunt,” as it was called in a rebuttal to the Times piece, also ignores serious issues with modern maternal care in the U.S. But most importantly, it’s not Dr. Tuteur’s — or anyone else’s — business what women decide to do with their own bodies.

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Contrary to Dr. Tuteur’s opinions, home birth is a safe option for low-risk women. A 2014 study, the largest of its kind on home birth, showed that home birth is as safe as hospital birth, but with much lower rates of intervention. The findings, researchers wrote, “confirm the safety and overwhelmingly positive health benefits for low-risk mothers and babies who choose to birth at home with a midwife.”

Dr. Tuteur’s argument to “abolish the CPM” is also a problematic one, considering CPMs are the only midwives specifically trained for birth that takes place outside of a hospital. A call to eradicate the CPM certification is, then, a call to dispose of home birth altogether — a restriction of choice that is dubious and not likely to happen. There is a growing demand for out-of-hospital birth in the face of high rates of unnecessary hospital intervention. Many women desire home births for a whole host of other reasons as well, such as the best shot at a vaginal birth, freedom of movement that often isn’t found in hospitals, and the comforts of home during and immediately after delivery. A growing number of women want to birth under the midwifery model of care, and will not stop fighting for their right to that option.

CPMs are proven to be capable of meeting the needs of women who want home births. They are trained in all aspects of birth, and their knowledge is extensive. The CPM credential is nationally accredited by the National Commission for Certifying Agencies (NCCA), which has accredited more than 300 programs in a range of professions, including nursing. The rigorous training takes three to five years, and requires completion of a national board exam and a clinical skills assessment process, as well as continuing education and recertification every three years.

A CPM must also meet the standards for certification set by the North American Registry of Midwives, and is the only midwifery credential that requires knowledge about and experience in out-of-hospital settings. For this reason, the American Public Health Association and WHO recommend midwives as the primary maternity care providers for the majority of women. CPMs were also recognized in The Millbank Report: Evidence-Based Maternity Care as the model for low intervention and good outcomes.

The expansiveness of the CPM training regimen is likely one reason why many women who use this model of care often speak to how well-rounded and far-reaching it is. Speaking personally, when I birthed with Certified Professional Midwives two years ago, I was shocked to find out that our prenatal sessions weren’t the quick 15-minute doctor’s office visits I’d become accustomed to when I was pregnant with my first child, but 45 minutes to an hour, each time. I was asked about everything from what I ate for breakfast, to how much stress I was under. I wasn’t merely weighed and measured and sent on my way because, as my midwives often said, there were far more things to consider than the size of my belly. The approach was far from “one size fits all,” but felt in-depth and personal.

Overall, my home midwifery care was more extensive than I could’ve imagined. My midwives saw me through my labor and delivery. They attended my birth from start to finish and stayed for several hours after my baby was born. I spent far more time with my midwives than I ever did with my obstetrician, who did not even end up attending my hospital delivery. Instead, a masked man — the on-call doctor whom I’d never seen before — popped in seconds before my baby came out and left almost immediately afterwards. Someone I didn’t know at all delivered my first baby, but that wasn’t before he sliced me up with an episiotomy (a procedure that is not routinely recommended) without even so much as a “how do you do?” I didn’t see my actual doctor until a few hours before I checked out of the hospital, days later, when she briefly stopped by, pressed on my belly, and offered me a “congratulations” on new motherhood.

A great number of other women report strikingly similar experiences to my own. But despite the facts, stats, and anecdotes to the contrary, Dr. Tuteur continues to claim that midwives are all glaringly incompetent.

That said, there is one point on which we marginally agree: Dr. Tuteur points to the fact that in many states, CPMs remain unlicensed, making the births they attend less safe. Certified Professional Midwives are, indeed, legally authorized to practice in only 29 states (Certified Nurse-Midwives, or CNMs, who are dually trained in midwifery and nursing, can practice in all 50 states, while Certified Midwives, which are similar to CNMs but lack the nursing training, can practice in just three).

Dr. Tuteur is right — midwives being left unlicensed does not do anything to help ensure the safety of women. But ironically, it’s the unfounded idea she perpetuates — that midwife-attended home births are radically unsafe — which has, well, made them less safe. Without legal support, it’s harder for midwives to get proper training, and if they are forced to practice in secret, they are less likely to be able to ensure safe hospital transfers if and when they are necessary.

Dr. Tuteur advocates not for legalization and regulation (which means safety), but rather to abolish the CPM, leaving women with fewer choices in childbirth than they currently have (and that’s not much). Of course, we need standards to ensure that midwives practicing outside of the hospital environment are up to snuff. But the ones pushing the hardest for those standards aren’t people like Dr. Tuteur, who are talking about how ill-equipped midwives are, but the midwives themselves.

They’re the ones knocking down doors and rallying on street corners and going to the courthouse year after year to make sure midwives in every state can be legal and licensed and regulated. They’re the ones crowdfunding and petitioning and fighting for safety standards, not against them. Though Dr. Tuteur would like you to believe otherwise, midwives don’t want to practice illegally. In fact, they want standards more than anyone. They want their licenses so that they can practice with the respect and dignity that they deserve and have been denied for so long. They don’t want to fear prosecution any longer for helping women who are so desperately clinging to their choices in childbirth. And with the rising rates of women who desire different options than hospital birth, not only keeping CPMs around, but making them more accessible, is a very good idea. Not only does it drastically reduce the cost of birth nationwide, but it helps keep low-risk women low-risk.

Out-of-hospital birth has demonstrated that a drastic reduction in unnecessary interventions like cesareans, which have greater risks than vaginal deliveries, is not only possible, but should be the standard of care. The U.S., a country where women primarily birth in hospitals under obstetrician-led care, has the highest maternal mortality rate in the developed world. Are there bad doctors out there who make birth less safe for women, who routinely sacrifice women’s safety in favor of a speedier delivery or a paycheck boost for every unnecessary intervention done to her body, which may take longer to heal from? Absolutely. Our high rates of intervention show how little caution is used. Not to mention the countless reports of women saying they were forced, pressured, or otherwise manipulated into procedures they say they didn’t want or need in the delivery room.

In a rebuttal to Dr. Teuter’s Times piece, an anesthesiologist wrote:

Choices in childbirth are so important, as are all the choices women make regarding their bodies. But Dr. Tuteur seems dead-set on making sure women don’t get to have them. Weeding out the handful of bad midwives practicing out-of-hospital birth would undoubtedly be a good thing, but it won’t happen until CPMs can practice legally in all 50 states. Shouting from the rooftops that they are all dangerous, ill-equipped, and grossly negligent does nothing to protect women, like licensing midwives would.

If Dr. Tuteur really wants to help women, like she says she does, she should rally behind certified professional midwives to ensure they can give women what they really need — the rights to their own bodies and access to safe birth.

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Lead image: Pixabay

When dozens of women express some variation of “WTF did I just read?!” while sharing an article on social media, it’s a guarantee that some media outlet has successfully played us. I call such controversial pieces “Clickbait Crimes” — the result of media outlets intentionally publishing exploitative, bigoted, or sensationalistic content to generate outraged eyeballs for advertisers.

This week’s example, headlined “Staying Hot For My Husband Is ESSENTIAL To A Successful Marriage,” comes from Your Tango, a love and relationships site with a business model that often seems to involve trading tired, anti-feminist tropes for anger-based traffic. The thesis of the piece? Every successful heterosexual relationship is based primarily on a woman’s sex appeal, so you’d better not “let yourself go.” (No link to the piece because #starvethetrolls; like the class bully, Your Tango needs to be deprived of attention sought through bad acts.)

“When we were married a few weeks ago in front of our families, friends and a Rabbi, I vowed to stay hot for [sic] husband,” blogger Amanda Lauren writes, boasting about how happy her husband is to check out her butt on her way to Pilates, listing the fact that his friends “acknowledge he has a hot wife” as a mark of her marriage’s success, and classifying maintaining a hot bod and a makeup regimen to stun a Sephora salesperson as “doing the work I need to do for the sake of my relationship.” To lend legitimacy and universality to her argument — and to justify her glorification of classic societal beauty myths — Lauren quotes a “relationship and etiquette expert” who insists that “it’s incredibly important for women to maintain their looks” because “men are visual.” Based on platitudes from this lone “expert” (and failing to acknowledge that biological, behavioral, and social scientists disagree on how visually motivated men are individually, and as compared with women), she presents her quest for peak attractiveness not as a lifestyle choice but as a responsibility: “If men can’t help but be visual creatures, I need to oblige.” How so? By staying as sexy as possible forever and ever amen, because a lack of sex can break a marriage and “if my husband wasn’t turned on by me, we couldn’t have that essential intimacy.”

Because straight men are only turned on by their partners’ bodies, not their confidence, humor, intelligence, sensuality, or even their talented tongues? Because a straight, cisgender woman’s only route to sexiness is her ability to be male-gaze-approved? Because intimacy is only about boning? What a pity some of you poor saps think emotional, mental, and physical connection are more essential to a healthy and lasting sex life. As Hollywood, Madison Avenue, and meddling aunts everywhere have always informed us, men are only attracted to women who meet a very limited set of externally sanctioned standards: young, thin, big rack, small everything else, light skinned, straight-haired, hyper-feminine. The fewer of those criteria we meet, the less “hot,” the less valuable, the less lovable, we’re told we are.

If Lauren’s essay was framed as just one young woman’s preferences, I wouldn’t waste my time critiquing it. If the author loves to greet her husband with his favorite cocktail when he gets home from work (as she says she does), bully for her. Shaken or stirred? Dress up like Miss Moneypenny and deck your dude out in a James Bond tux if that’s what does it for you. I’m a media critic, not a therapist; I’m not in the business of publicly weighing in on anyone’s personal relationship or beauty preferences.

Here’s the problem: Your Tango packaged this piece (peppered with several “see? I really am hot!” glamour shots of the author) as an implicit and sometimes explicit guideline for how all wives should behave, what all women should be valued for, and the supposedly sad romantic prospects of women who don’t devote themselves to a lifelong quest to be as beautiful and alluring as humanly possible. “I’ve always wondered why many women let themselves go in relationships,” Lauren muses. “The decline of your physical appearance can also reflect your relationship . . . If you stop trying then you aren’t holding up your end of the relationship.”

Implicit in the article’s premise is not just “this works for me” but “BE like me.” Underneath Lauren’s breezy conversational tone is an unstated yet ominous threat: Do as much as you can, at all times, to be as traditionally “hot” as you can approximate . . . or else. Or else when your marriage fails (and it likely will, you poor, ugly, lazy sow), it will be your own fault. You don’t want your man to leave you, do you? So what are you waiting for, get thee to the treadmill and don’t you dare forget your sweat-proof mascara. Besides, Your Tango tells us, even Gloria Steinem, “of all women,” is “80 and in better shape than many women a quarter of her age.” If an outlet uses one of America’s most iconic advocates of women’s political, economic, social, reproductive, and sexual freedom to support its argument, it can’t be sexist, right?

Ever since the 1970s, corporate media have been hungry for culturally and politically retrograde arguments by women about gender issues, which they could package as “feminist” to kill two birds with one stone: continue advancing conservative anti-feminist ideology, but do so in a woman’s voice to mask the misogyny underlying this backlash to the perception that women are making political progress. I wrote about this extensively in my book, Reality Bites Back: The Troubling Truth About Guilty Pleasure TV. Two decades prior, Susan Faludi documented this phenomenon in Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women. The ideas at the core of Lauren’s piece are the same as those of old-school etiquette guides that jockeyed for societal control of women, and of the beauty and fashion advertisements that have commercially exploited women’s psyches since the early 1900s.

Backlash media is deeply destructive. The clickbaity stories that Your Tango and other media outlets run about how it is a woman’s responsibility to “stay hot” for her husband not only play into knuckle-dragging MRA fantasies and echo Phyllis Schlafly-esque right wing women’s playbooks — they also acutely reinforce the fears of many girls and women who believe they are irrelevant and worthless based on deeply ingrained cultural conditioning around beauty ideals. Some women starve themselves trying to live up to ideas like this. Other women stay in abusive relationships because they have been made to believe they are not beautiful enough for anyone but their abuser to want them or love them. Pieces like this are none too good for straight, cisgender men either, essentializing them as unthinking oafs with no emotional range, no ability to think with anything other than their dicks, and no interest in true partnership. All of this is done for the profit of very canny media companies that know that producing substantive journalism (which takes time and resources) is less lucrative than publishing intentionally sensationalistic crap guaranteed to piss off online feminists.

Don’t worry, though, because this piece isn’t actually anti-feminist or old-fashioned. How do I know? The author made sure to tell us so. “Before you label me anti-feminist or old-fashioned, please understand that when I look good I feel more confident in myself,” which “allows me to be a better, happier and more considerate partner,” she writes. I’m sorry, but language doesn’t work that way. Words mean specific things. “Looking good” and “feeling confident” are not the definitions of feminist. When your proscriptive essay resembles a 1950s bridal manual or a 1930s Camay soap ad about “the beauty contest of life,” you can hardly blame anyone for considering your advice “old-fashioned.” Especially not when you open your piece by declaring you have “a more traditional marriage than most millennials . . . it’s kind of Mad Men, but it works for us.” (Quick, someone remind Your Tango that Mad Men spent seven densely-written seasons deconstructing the damaging sexism of traditional, mid-century marriages and the way strict gender roles held back both women and men in the private and public spheres.)

As Bitch magazine co-founder Andi Zeisler writes in her new book, We Were Feminists Once, just because a woman chooses to do something doesn’t make that act inherently feminist. Feminism is not simply about what an individual woman feels, it is a movement dedicated in part to eradicating gender-based double standards that constrain women’s and men’s lives — not reinforcing those biased strictures, as Your Tango too often does.

Let me be clear: I don’t assume negative intent on the part of Amanda Lauren, a newlywed who has not yet had to navigate the toll that age, motherhood, financial problems, and other stresses take on our appearances, and on the time we have to tend to them. It’s easy to see how a young writer, fairly early in her career, would think of an essay like this as an innocuous snapshot into her bridal philosophy with no wider relevance, especially if she has internalized societal messages about her own worth from a lifetime of movies, TV shows, music videos, magazines, commercials, billboards, and — yes — websites like Your Tango. I don’t think Lauren meant to cause women harm, although her article already did so on a macro (advancing reactionary ideas about gender roles in relationships) and micro level (several dozen women have written in social media discussions that they felt bad about their bodies or themselves after reading an essay reminding them that to the dominant culture, their looks make them unworthy of long-term love).

Your Tango, on the other hand, knew exactly what it was doing. In fact, it’s done this before — running the similar “I Think It’s Important To Stay Skinny For My Husband” in March. Yep, you read that right: Your Tango apparently has an actual beat related to making women readers feel disparaged and unworthy of love based on their looks. As I wrote in November about a particularly egregious Daily Caller listicle on “Syria-ly hot” refugees, media outlets regularly stoke the “Outrage Industrial Complex” by “troll[ing] feminists or progressives with intentionally odious headlines and bigoted content designed to generate angry clicks.” To wit, that “skinny for hubby” piece was not pitched by but assigned to the author, another young writer whose lifestyle and ideas were cynically used as grist for the site’s page views. Both Lauren and the author of this “Stay Skinny” piece are adults with agency to choose which articles to write and which ideas they want their bylines to extol. But the majority of accountability for these stories must come from the power-holder: the outlet that chooses to publish them, and the editorial process that recruited and highlighted these messages.

It’s no secret that women are published less often and make less money than male writers. Yet there’s always an outlet eager to throw a bit of cash at any woman willing to bang out some “[whatever outrageous thing I choose to do this week] works for me, so let’s make a huge logical leap and pretend this is true for and about the female half of the population” confessional essay. According to another freelancer who prefers not to out herself to a potential editor, Your Tango solicits articles from a large pool of bloggers by sending out emails chock full of potential headlines and topics. Some recent prompts have included, “I dumbed myself down to see if it attracts guys more,” “I abstained from having sex with my husband as punishment,” and “I’m only attracted to ugly women.”

I don’t expect a fluffy lifestyle and relationship site to read like Simone de Beauvoir or Kimberlé Crenshaw, but I’m going to need Your Tango to cut this crap out. Since that’s unlikely, here’s my counter-offer, direct to writers: If you don’t want to do harm, don’t write for Your Tango or sites that want to use you for clickbait. Just like friends don’t let friends drive drunk or date Trump supporters, I’m here to tell you that there have never been more outlets out there eager to publish engaging, insightful content about women’s lives. The Establishment, Bitch Media, Bust, Mic, Women’s Enews, Ms., Essence, Ebony, and even glossies like Elle and Cosmo now regularly run opinion pieces that respect women — and some of these sites pay more than Your Tango, too. You’re welcome.

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Lead image: flickr/Jean L.