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The Buzz Cut: Is It Time to Retire #MeToo’s ‘Believe Women’ Slogan?

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May 16, 2020

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Image Credit: Damian Dovardanes

In The Buzz Cutwe bring you a round-up of all the weird, controversial, and wonderful stories we’ve been reading all week.


#MeToo’s ‘Believe Women’ slogan was borne out of a patriarchal society’s perpetual suspicion of women and their stories. Now, however, those who wield the slogan have ensured there is no space for acknowledging loopholes within #MeToo allegations, or for investigating an incident thoroughly. Is it time to look for another?

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Cyborg universities — iStanford, MIT@Google — as partnerships between tech companies and schools and colleges, might soon become the future of our education, only catering to the children of the 1%. The Covid19 pandemic is accelerating this development, NYU marketing professor Scott Galloway predicts.

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The patriarchal structures that oppress women often live on in language, long after they’re discarded in other cultural practices. Here, Lavinia Liang dissects how her ancestors looked at marriage and gender through the language that’s been passed to her.

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Avatar: The Last Airbender, the childhood staple that positioned itself as one of the more ethically complex shows for kids, is now on Netflix. Here’s why it’s one of the greatest shows ever.

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The Covid19 pandemic has accorded new meaning to obituaries — not just in the sheer volume of them these days, but also in what they signify about the times we live in.

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Pulitzer Prize-winning American art critic Jerry Saltz reflects on his food habits — to-go coffees and frozen chicken — since he was a child. These habits were never really borne out of choice, but by the circumstances, he found himself in. Now, finally, they might just be normalized, thanks to the Covid19 pandemic.

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Robert Pattinson is thriving under lockdown. His self-portraits capturing the mundanity of Covid19 isolation have drawn criticism from fans wondering why he isn’t training for his upcoming Batman movie, while also drawing praise for his artsy picture-making skills.

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A brown man and a white man wrote a story about Guantanamo Bay. The latter even cited a lot of the brown man’s work in his writing. Guess who got the Pulitzer? Most intuitional awards have unraveled in the past few years as simply a product of cronyism. The Pulitzer, Rafia Zakaria writes, has essentially become a practice in the journalistic elite celebrating the journalistic elite.

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A crisis of empathy is plaguing white America, even the progressive quarters. The discrimination that Black people in America suffer today signals that the progressivism white people perhaps know in their minds has not yet reached their hearts. Case in point: the recent murder of Ahmaud Arbery.

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Written By Rajvi Desai

Rajvi Desai is The Swaddle’s Culture Editor. After graduating from NYU as a Journalism and Politics major, she covered breaking news and politics in New York City, and dabbled in design and entertainment journalism. Back in the homeland, she’s interested in tackling beauty, sports, politics and human rights in her gender-focused writing, while also co-managing The Swaddle Team’s podcast, Respectfully Disagree.

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