Western women are ostensibly able to do whatever they want professionally and as entertainment, as long as it’s within legal bounds. Our ‘positive freedom’ in this case, or our freedom to do these things, is unassailable. But in terms of ‘negative freedoms’ – the absence of obstacles, barriers or constraints, per Isaiah Berlin in his 1958 ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’ essay – we are hamstrung, with women being demoralised, constrained and even attacked at many turns.

Instead of the generic factoids-plus-publication-list anthologised writers might use, Yi-Fen Chou’s revealed that Chou was in fact Michael Derrick Hudson, a white man from Indiana. According to his bio, Hudson becomes Chou only when his poems are rejected several times, because apparently his poems get noticed that way. That’s cool – because as we know, Asian writers definitely get noticed and published all the time! (No, they don’t.) As blogger Angry Asian Man quipped about this ‘yellowface’: ‘The fuck?’

‘Vengeance Is Hers’, a film repertory series, concluded its two-week run at the Brooklyn Academy of Music last month. Containing almost twenty films, including Carrie, The Lady Eve and Pier Paolo Pasolini’s opera rendering of Medea, the series immediately captured my imagination despite the fact that I rarely attend film festivals – or even the cinema. Some of these films’ female protagonists take revenge on husbands who’ve taken new, younger brides, or on bullying classmates. But it wasn’t these revenge fantasies I wanted to see on screen.