Babbling Beaver:

MIT’s Consortium for Graduate Studies in Gender, Culture, Women & Sexuality seeks to forge new “liberatory conceptions of space and time in the contexts of racial justice, abolition, disability rights, queer/trans ecologies, human development, death studies and practices, embodiment, community building, and more.

Send proposals (and your pronouns) here.

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What we need is an academic conference discussing How In Hell Did These Whackjobs Ever Get Academic Positions? and What Exactly, Beyond Firing, Should Be Done To The Adminstrators Responsible?

The Cut reports that Goop, Gwyneth Paltrow’s beauty, fashion, &c. products marketing company is breaking rather unusual new ground in lifestyle accessories.

[W]hat’s better than inviting guests into your home, having them compliment you on the lovely scent, and then humbly saying, “Thanks, it’s this new vagina candle I picked up”?

The candle costs $75, and Goop says it sold out within hours at one of the company’s events (it does match the other branding). High-end, wellness-y Brooklyn beauty shop Shen also carries the candle, but it’s currently sold out on its site.

But does it really smell like what it says it smells like? Here’s what several Cut members thought.

Allison P. Davis, features writer: “This smells like a vagina that is douching Summer’s Eve too frequently and will probably end up with a yeast infection. And it needs some muskier base notes, to be honest.”

Bridget Read, writer: “No vagina on God’s green earth.”

Kathleen Hou, beauty director: “Maybe if you asked a bunch of teen boys who had never been near a vagina, they’d say, ‘Yeah, like this!’”

Erica Smith, beauty writer: “… I don’t think so? It’s definitely not an aspirational vagina smell. I’d be concerned if it smelled like that.”

Sarah Spellings, fashion writer: “It smells like a vagina if you’ve only ever been exposed to the concept through tampon commercials. This is very much a conceptual vag.”

Madeleine Aggeler, senior writer: “No. Needs more umami.”

RTWT