“In the seventies men didn’t want women in the dojo,” Denise Williams told me. “Susan, my teacher, she was thrown out because she wanted to do knuckle pushups. They said, "You'll get calluses on your knuckles and nobody will want to marry you.’”

She paused, then added: “People really did talk like that back then.”

Denise is a small woman in her sixties. She wears big glasses and smiles a lot and practices massage therapy. She’s also a karate black belt, and has been head sensei of the Women’s Center Karate Club since the eighties, but no more: this fall, shortly after the death of its founder Susan Ribner—who also helped found the National Women’s Martial Arts Federation—Denise closed New York City’s last women-only karate school. READ MORE

“Oh dear,” Ann Patchett said upon first laying eyes on me. I had just pulled into her driveway after finishing the second leg of a trip that had squeezed me from the crush of Manhattan’s deadlock traffic all the way to Nashville, Tennessee. I would like to say the hours flew by, given that I was going to meet one of my heroes—that as the billboards flipbooked from ads for storage units to ones for porn and God, mountains cropped up in my peripheral vision, all blue at dusk. But anyone who romanticizes road trips has clocked more hours reading travel books than actually driving. The truth is that eventually I ran out of snacks and my phone ran out of batteries and the radio turned to static and I had to yell like Mel Gibson in Braveheart to keep myself awake.

I had not exactly told Patchett that I would be driving from New York City. Instead, I had sort of just implied via email that I would be in Nashville for a ten-day window—a free space that existed on my calendar between various deadlines—and had let her choose the day. “Any day.”

She shook her head at the license plate of my car, flashing me a mournful, stricken expression that I would quickly come to recognize. I wanted to tell Ann Patchett that I’d started reading her books at age ten, and that everything she writes is perfect. But my ass was still asleep from the journey and I felt too embarrassed—especially standing in the shadow of her nice home, which she had paid for with books, to explain that I barely made enough writing to buy petroleum, let alone plane tickets.

So I stood there, fiddling with my camera.

“And you have it in your mind that you’re going to photograph me,” she said.

“I borrowed my friend’s Prius,” I muttered helplessly. “It gets great mileage.”

“That’s heartbreaking.”

She led me inside.

Moments later, I broke her heart again—this time for answering her offer of a drink with: “That would be incredibly exciting, thank you.”

“Heartbreaking,” she whispered, handing me the seltzer.

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Hey gang! We're about to close up shop for the rest of the year, in accordance with the "holidays" but also with the fact that there is a lot of MasterChef Junior to catch up on, but don't worry: we'll be posting entries from the Women of Our Year series, both old and new, throughout the break. (So, yes: you will have something to read when you inevitably lock yourself in the bathroom for ten minutes, just to get some goddamned peace and quiet, Mom, I just want to be able to POOP IN PEACE, we can talk about what's wrong with my hair later, during this lovely holiday season.) We'll be back for real for real on January 5th, refreshed and probably disappointed by the MasterChef Junior outcome. Consider this post your place to come and blab if you need to let off some holiday steam.

Here's what our little week looked like: we wrote some poetry, mastered Microsoft Word, thought about our cool Jeopardy stories, theorized about Drake and Nicki, learned that Festivus is just something from Seinfeld, and interviewed Parinda Wanitwat and Sarah Waters. Go back and catch up, if you must!

From the bottom of our weirdo blogger hearts: thanks for hanging. We've got a lot of good stuff coming at you in 2015, and we hope you are as excited as you are. Catch you on the flip side.

For Your Father: Dad works hard at his job every other day of the year, and probably just wants to relax with a board game or similar activity over the holidays. As any hobby shop can tell you, 3D puzzles are big right now. But rather than dropping coin on one of those fancy store models, go the sentimental route with something handmade. You know that ceramic mug you accidentally dropped last week? Stick it in a gift bag with a tube of superglue and boom! Instant hours of fun.

For Your Mother: Nobody in the history of ever has gotten tired of the "homemade book of coupons." With construction paper, markers, and glitter, make Mom gift cards for the things she really wants: "Good for one outing to any movie starring that guy you like, you know, that 'nice blue eyed fellow from Silver Linings Playbook, Chris something?'" "Good for one evening walk through the neighborhood while you point out every house that has pretty Christmas lights." Additionally, you can give coupons for all the things you normally do ("Good for one hug") but now it means something because it's on a little square of paper. Don't forget— and this is crucial—to add expiry dates to all of them. READ MORE

Goals.

Phoebe Robinson and Jessica Williams, queens, have made this informational video on Kwanzaa, the redheaded stepchild of December holidays. "So Kwanzaa only looks crazy because there are still people alive who know the dude who made it up, and because he looks like he's playing Old Rick Ross in a Jay Z biopic?" Exactly.

Sarah Waters is a woman of our year for single-handedly expanding the queer canon—and making it look easy. The Welsh author of notable queer classics like Tipping the Velvet and Fingersmith has penned a total of five historical fiction novels. Her newest work, The Paying Guests, takes readers to 1922 London. A widower and her 26-year-old daughter, Frances Wray, are newly renting out their home to a married couple, Lillian and Leonard Barber. Lillian and Frances’s close friendship soon blossoms into a secret romance that must be hidden at all costs, until the two women start to plan to have a life together—openly.

A literature PhD candidate who went straight into penning fiction, Sarah’s understanding of queer historical dynamics has made for compelling stories and significant reminders of LGBTQ existence in decades past. While archives of same-sex relationships remain scant in comparison to heterosexual relationships, Sarah’s fictional work has made for tremendous visibility of queer love through history. Her novels have created detailed records of same-sex partnerships where there simply weren’t many before.

Sarah and I spoke on the phone about the importance of queer archives, secret lesbian communities of bygone eras, and the queering of Jane Austen classics. READ MORE

Parinda Wanitwat is the first-time director and producer of Daddies Date Babies, a documentary that explores the dynamics between sugar daddies and the women who date them. Wanitwat became interested in the subject when a friend suggested the website SeekingArrangement.com to her after she lost her phone and could not afford a new one, saying there were men on the site looking for young women to spoil in exchange for sex. Though she ultimately decided against a relationship, she noticed that the media about “sugar dating” is heavily skewed in a direction that makes the young women look desperate and the men look like gentlemanly saviors.

I was interested in Wanitwat’s film as a sex work activist, as well as a writer who has seen the work of sugar babies largely overlooked as a form of legitimate labor. Wanitwat’s exploration of the topic speaks more to the issues of emotional and physical labor that go into these relationships than any previous media coverage I’ve encountered.

The film follows women learning to negotiate the value in their own erotic capital while simultaneously working on their own professional and personal goals. Some of Wanitwat’s subjects took highly transactional approaches to sugar dating, while others never explicitly discuss money. All of the women had multiple sugar daddies in their sugar dating “careers,” but they all have very different feelings about the ethics of sugar dating.

Though still in post-production, the film is drawing lots of media attention for the 23-year-old filmmaker. Everyone from Susan “Princeton Mom” Patton to writers at The Atlantic are weighing in on Wanitwat and her film sight unseen. Being drawn in by the compelling trailer and the feeling that any enemy of the “Princeton Mom” was a friend of mine, I contacted Wanitwat to discuss what drew her to the subject of sugar dating and what she hopes for audiences to get out of her film. We talked about being a first-time documentarian and what media gets wrong. READ MORE

I originally wrote this for a holiday-themed reading at some fancy New York "performance space" and then forgot all about it, but then Rookie tweeted that today was Festivus and brought all the memories right back, so I am posting it online for the first time. To get the full effect, imagine me, wine drunk, reading this aloud.

This is a story about how it took me 20-odd years to learn the true meaning of a certain December holiday.

“ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME?! FESTIVUS IS JUST SOMETHING FROM SEINFELD?!!!!!” I asked my friends, agog. They told me yes, and that, as someone who celebrated the holiday for the past four years, I should’ve known that. It’s true: the liberal arts school in Connecticut that I attended did officially sanction Festivus as a holiday, throwing annual parties in its name. In 2008, I arrived at my college fresh from the underperforming inner-city public schools of New Haven, a city about about an hour away, but seemed, in ways, like an entirely different world; for all I knew, Festivus was just some Greek holiday I'd never heard of.

“Festivus isn’t Greek!” my boyfriend, a Greek, told me, exasperated. “Festivus doesn’t even sound Greek.” He was right. If anything, it sounds vaguely Latin, but, again, if you’re coming from an underperforming inner-city public high school and just started dating a Greek guy, everything sounds sort of Greek. I think of Festivus and I think of grapes and chaises and centaurs prancing and a king’s dead body in the corner, not of the insides of some sitcom writer’s brain. READ MORE

Good morning! Prepare yourself for the latest in my series of DRAKE TAKES™.

So you know how Nicki Minaj went on some television show and was like, I absolutely do not want to fuck Drake? The subtext being that their consistent roles in each other's music videos as partners (bride and groom, lapdancer and lapdancee) is somehow a prolonged public foreplay playing out as part of their respective careers, and that every so often they have to comment on the validity of said foreplay? I mean, sure, it could be. BUT. READ MORE

The second-best part of Jeopardy! is when Alex Trebek asks the contestants to share an anecdote. The first best part of Jeopardy! is whenever there is a question about The Simpsons, and then it's my time to shine. I like to imagine each contestant submits a bunch of fascinating stories to the producer before the show ("I was raised by wolves," "Alex Trebek is my illegitimate father and I've spent my life trying to get on Jeopardy! to reconnect with him.") but the producers always end up asking them about the most mundane. My all-time favorite is: "My cat is orange, but in certain lights looks kinda pink." READ MORE

Dominique Howard was convinced she’d bombed the Microsoft Word 2007 national competition. As the winners were announced, she let third place go by, then second, then promptly spaced out in front of a cupcake display.

“[My] mind is literally just on the cupcakes,” she told me when we met late last month. “They call first place and I hear my name, but it took a while.”

Her mom had to turn around and say, Dominique, hello, that’s you.

“I hop up, ecstatic, and not knowing how this happened,” she recalled.

Dominique—Nique for short—is 22 and lives in Harlem. She’s a foodie, an avid debater, a couponing addict, and the first American woman to win the Microsoft Office Specialist World Championships in the competition’s 13-year history.

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