7 Essays To Read This Week: Miscarriages, Fembots, And Gay Marriage

In an essay for BuzzFeed Ideas, Sharline Chiang recounts having multiple miscarriages in a row. She explains how stigma discourages Asian-American women like Purvi Patel from seeking reproductive and mental health care and how anti-choice laws criminalize their health problems. Read it at BuzzFeed Ideas.

BuzzFeed film critic Alison Willmore revisited ABC's All-American Girl and Fresh Off the Boat. She concluded that not much about the portrayal of Asian Americans on television has changed. Decades later, and network television continues simplifying complex characters and premises into "stories that could be neatly wrapped up in 22 minutes." Read her analysis at BuzzFeed Entertainment.

After being asked to give a presentation on “trash food,” Chris Offutt wrote a piece on the implications behind the term that has been ascribed to all of the food he grew up eating. "It's "an epithet of bigotry that equates human worth with garbage," he writes. Read it at Oxford American.

BuzzFeed writer Jessica Probus used to think that the marriage equality movement was a distraction from more important queer issues affecting the LGBT community. That was before she attended an LGBT Wedding Expo in Michigan, where same-sex marriage is still banned. There, she realized that "a public declaration of love, especially queer love, is itself a radical act." Read her story at BuzzFeed News.

Julie Beck, an editor at The Atlantic, wrote an ode to Dashboard Confessional, a band frequently mocked for being melodramatic. In it, she looks back on high school, how it was OK to show emotion then, and how there is bravery in saying how you feel. Read it at The Atlantic.

Angela Watercutter, an editor at Wired, wrote a piece on why Ava, the fembot at the center of Ex Machina, and Alex Garland's portrayal of her are problematic. "...The message we’re left with at the end of Ex Machina is still that the best way for a miraculously intelligent creature to get what she wants is to flirt manipulatively," she writes. Read it at Wired.

Jaya Saxena examines how on shows like Four Weddings, all of the culturally determined notions of what a wedding "should" be land on the bride's shoulders. "If something goes wrong, it is never because her mother invited 20 people without asking ... It is the bride alone who succeeds or fails in giving her guests a good atmosphere and a good time," she writes. Read about it at BuzzFeed Ideas.