Katherine Speller
Writer, editor, puppy-wrangler.| Bylines: MTV News, Bustle, WNYC, PRI, The Daily Dot, Women's Health, Thought Catalog, Her Campus, Medium & more. Tarot, Astrology & reformed-skeptic musings via @okaytarot on Instagram.
Hilary Duff on Finding the Right Products for Baby and Mom. Hilary Duff got really into researching products for baby and for herself in the last stages of her pregnancy with her daughter, Banks.
It was during that time that she discovered she actually had real discerning taste for diapers and menstrual-care products — particularly when it comes to what’s in them, on them and what they do to the planet. “You know, you’re so like immobile and just tired that you have a lot of time to sit on the Internet and do research and order products and get yourself prepared,” Duff, who will be speaking at BlogHer Health in Los Angeles this weekend, told SheKnows. The Dos & Don’ts of Raising a ‘Sick’ Kid. It happened in May of 2011.
I was cleaning my childhood bedroom when I felt a flutter in my chest. Since I have an arrhythmia — an irregular heartbeat — this feeling is common. It often dances its way in, taking the form of a hard beat or a small pain. It usually lasts no longer than a minute. This didn’t. I was born without a right ventricle, the chamber that pumps deoxygenated blood to the lungs via the pulmonary artery. Peggy Orenstein on ‘Boys & Sex’ & Raising Our Boys Better. In just about every boy’s life, there will come a time when they’re given admission to “Dick School,” journalist Peggy Orenstein quotes sex educator Charis Denison in her new book Boys & Sex, “The question is, will he drop out, graduate or go for an advanced degree?”
The Real Reason Why We Want Our Astrology Apps to Drags Us. Photo credit: George Peters/Getty Images We all need a little tough love sometimes.
The same way we lean on the friends who tell us like it is, clock us for our worst habits and impulses, and thoroughly (but lovingly) roast us for our faults, astrology apps like Co–Star (launched in late 2017), The Pattern (launched in May 2017), and Vice’s Astro Guide (launched in May 2019), are predicated on our not-so-secret love for being dragged by our cosmic fate. Screenshots of the push notifications users receive from these apps heavily circulate on social media—becoming memes in their own right—with Instagram users, specifically, making a point to share the daily shots that their go-to apps take at them.
These apps allow us to track different parts of our charts—and check in on what’s happening in the charts of our friends, lovers, crushes, and nemeses. “It’s not enough to simply analyze someone’s natal chart and give them boring, dry information about it,” says Banu Guler, CEO of Co-Star. “The Astrology of Love & Sex” Wants You to Think About Yourself. (Photo credit: Annabel Gat) Astrology has been a capital-T Thing for as long as humans have been staring up at the stars trying to figure all this personhood stuff out.
It’s been a Thing for as long as we’ve had occult sections in bookstores and horoscopes in our magazines, and it’s remained a Thing as we’ve found new ways (hello astrology memes and apps like Co–Star reading us within an inch of our lives) to tell stories about ourselves to ourselves and others. While it certainly doesn’t mean that our identity, feelings, and fate are decided just because a planet was in a certain place when we were born, astrology gives us permission to think about ourselves and others in the same context as the celestial bodies roaming around us. I defy you, stars #9: in the air tonight (oh lord) A while back (like last year, yikes) I opened up instagram questions for folks looking for woo woo advice, explainers and questions.
And I'm finally getting around to answering them. So today we're going to talk about air signs & the difference between the skull prison version of you and the meatspace version of you. The Question: Why am I, an Aquarius, so slutty in my head but not IRL? I defy you, stars #8: three leos walk into a bar. I defy you stars #7: vulnerable disaster energy, water signs & why neruda fucks. I defy you, stars #6: the patron saint of broken brains. I knew that today I wanted to write about Carrie Fisher — a favorite fellow-libra sun, taurus moon and card-carrying member of the broken brain club — on the anniversary of her death.
I defy you, stars #5: the longest night. I defy you, stars #4: we've been the desperate men. It's early Wednesday morning or late Tuesday night, depending on how you tilt your head and squint, and I'm thinking about this very specific, Romantic-era thirst-trap selfie painting "The Desperate Man" by Gustave Courbet — a fuckin' Gemini (with Capricorn & Taurus moon and ascendants) because of course he is.
Where the conventions of his medium at the time would have had him painting fancy rich-ass people in places of honor and doing the whole Romantic thing, Courbet — self-described as "the most arrogant man in France" — instead pivoted to the personal and the only things he figured he could ever truly know: the shit right in front of him. I defy you, stars - subscribe. I defy you, stars #2: too many of the wrong words for virgo season. I defy you, stars #3: growing pains. One of the first cards I really studied when I started reading tarot was the Hanged Man.
It's one of the complicated, somber cards that comes across far more menacing than it actually is to an untrained eye (the same way getting Death in a reading seems so much more anxiety-inducing than it often really is).
Grown-Ass Women Roundtables. What Zodiac Sign Is Peter Kavinsky, Anyway? A HC Astrology Investigation. Who among us hasn’t met a cute human, fallen completely obsessively in love with them and immediately began the search for every last detail of their astrological birth chart in order to gauge their sweet & sexy synastry (which is the fancy word for love & relationship astrology)?
Or is that just us Scorpio dominant types? Whatever. Well, sometimes that happens with the cute girl from Trig and sometimes it happens with the cute boy from the movie you haven’t been able to stop watching and crying over. Muslim College Students Got Raw & Real About The Travel Ban's Effect On Their Mental Health. To The Kids Who Deserve Better & The Adults Who Let Them Down. The Beautiful, Horrific Transparency Of Injecting Your Own Blood Into Your Face. Who For Real Got That Big Dick Energy (BDE), According To Astrology. Chicago's Sewer Grate Raccoon Icarus Is You, Me & Everyone We Know. My Child Gritty Is Thrilled About His First Snow Day. FYI This Gentrification Vending Machine Will Never Replace The Bodega. I'm Getting This Ranch Keg For My House & You Can't Stop Me. Losing Your Chill Would Be Great For Your Sex Life. Okay, so you finally meet someone you can actually stand or maybe even actually like. How should women combat harassing dating-app messages?
Forget Everything You’ve Ever Heard About Period Sex. If you're a vagina-owning person who loves sex, you probably have strong feelings one way or the other about whether you want to do the deed while on your period. Some of us have sex drives that shrivel up to nothing during the time of the month and others become the horniest of horn-dogs. Ted Cruz Tried To Ban Dildos. Ted Cruz Is My Nemesis.
This New Online Course Wants To Give Women More Orgasms. There's plenty of talk about the orgasm gap and everything that's terrible about it -- but there haven't been nearly as many tools that set out to actually correct the seriously unsexy lack of balance and education. Enter OMGYES, a website pursuing a lofty goal: to "lift the veil and take an honest look at the specific ways women actually find pleasure. " Lydia Daniller, co-founder of OMGYES, told MTV News that the idea for the site started with a conversation among friends about what made their sex lives better.
"Hearing her talk about the different ways she liked her clit to be touched was totally refreshing. Which led to a realization – hearing this stuff from friends or discovering them through personal experience is way more powerful than reading about it or seeing actors on a screen," Daniller said. This Presidential Erotica Is Not Something You Asked For, But Here It Is. As the cold weather has you exhausting your arsenal of unwatched Shondaland seasons and blowing through titles of your "to read" bookshelf, why not cuddle up with something new, something sexy, political and controversial?
The Pine Bush Pledge Controversy Highlights How Hard Life Can Be For Arab American Teens. You Can Send Your Friends The Gift Of Orgasms With 'Vibe It Forward' The world is full of double standards that are unsexy as hell, but few are as big of a turn-off (literally) as the perfect storm of stigma, misinformation and shame that fuels the orgasm gap. The team behind Unbound Box (which is basically the Birchbox of sex toys -- and, obviously, NSFW) had an idea for a solution: A new campaign called "Vibe It Forward" that lets friends (who spend $100 in their store) send one another a cute little sex toy and, hopefully, kickstart some much-needed conversations about female pleasure.
Polly Rodriguez, co-founder of Unbound Box, told MTV News that she first got the idea when she began noticing that the company's orders weren't always for the buyer -- people were also buying toys for their friends. What I Wish I Could Tell Mike Pence To His Face. Tips From Experts On Staying Mad (Productively) In This 24-Hour News Cycle. How fear of diversity has led to the ‘civil war’ of this election. … And Stay Out – Katherine Speller. A year ago, I tried to write an essay about why coming out is pretty much a never-ending process and it was really fucking hard to write[1]. I’ve found myself re-sharing it a few times since: During pride, on bisexual visibility day and, again, today on National Coming Out Day — each time, hitting send with a deep breath.
Doing it all over again. Much like the process of coming out, writing about the process of coming out involves not just getting your thoughts and feelings out there but also dealing with the ways your family and friends and peripheral connections might react. Getting to Know Grief – Katherine Speller. Okay. 5 Things I Meant To Write (But Obviously Didn’t) – Let’s Keep Goin’ In my mind, driving cross country with occasional bouts of socializing left a lot of time for writing. I thought I could pull off some regular words-making considering the schedule I’d been used to before getting laid off and the sheer amount of stuff I’d be seeing, doing, experiencing.
The Only Living Boy In New York – Katherine Speller. A few months after the arrest, Dad started to work odd jobs at construction sites in the city. He was trying to bring some money in by relying on favors from the old friends who’d still pick up the phone. So many women are saying 'me too.' Editors weigh in about how to move the conversation forward. Repro Madness Episode 36: Probes Recap, Wendy Davis & Aborsh on TV – Lady Parts Justice.
The Golden Probes were a hit! In this episode we're talking about our favorite moments of the night, featuring a bomb interview with our shero Wendy Davis. Katie Speller: Return by In the Field. 'We're All Gonna Die,' Ep. 11: Seriously, We All Might Actually Die. ‘We’re All Gonna Die,’ Episode 9: McCain Gets Meme'd. 'We're All Gonna Die,' Episode 10: Kate Hudson, Mooch Meme Bandit. 'We're All Gonna Die,' Episode 13: Trump's Phoenix Speech, Unpacked. Confronting White Privilege.