2,229 articles
Aviva Chomsky
Aviva Chomsky (born 1957), daughter of Noam Chomsky, is an American historian at Salem State University and author of Undocumented, They Take Our Jobs!, Central America's Forgotten History, and Is Science Enough?, active in Latin American solidarity and immigrants' rights movements since the 1980s.
Avunculate marriage
Avunculate marriage, also called avuncular or uncle-niece marriage, is marriage between a man and his sister's daughter. Documented among the Caribs, Kanarese, Nama, and Tupinamba; rare, and often traced through kinship terminology.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Somali-born Dutch-American activist, former Dutch MP (2003–2006), author of Infidel and Heretic, AHA Foundation founder, Hoover Institution fellow, converted to Christianity in 2023.
Baba Amte
Baba Amte (Murlidhar Devidas Amte, 1914–2008), Indian Gandhian lawyer and social activist, founded the leprosy rehabilitation community Anandwan in Maharashtra, led the Knit India marches and Narmada anti-dam campaigns, and won the Magsaysay, Templeton, and Gandhi Peace awards.
Bacha bazi (بچهبازی)
Bacha bazi (بچهبازی, "boy play") is the Afghan practice of exploiting boys as dancers and for sexual gratification. Criminalized under the pre-2021 government and banned by the Taliban's 2024 morality law, it persists, with victims fearing punishment and stigma.
Bachelor
Bachelor: a never-married man; also a holder of a first university degree (BA, BSc) and a small one-person apartment. From Old French bacheler, originally a young knight; primary sense shifted to unmarried status in the eighteenth century.
Bachelor pad
Bachelor pad: a mid-1950s American housing type for the single professional man, defined by Playboy and films; apartment for entertaining, pleasure, and stylish consumption, coined in print by the Chicago Tribune.
Bachelor party
Bachelor party (stag do, buck's night, enterrement de vie de garçon): pre-wedding celebration for a groom, traced to fifth-century B.C. Sparta; modern stag/hen form from the mid-19th century, with coed parties now rising.
Bachelorette party
Bachelorette party (hen party, hen do): a pre-wedding celebration for a bride-to-be, traditionally female-only. Emerged in the 1960s-1980s from bridal showers and stag/hen parties; now averages $1,300 per attendee.
Back-to-Africa movement
Back-to-Africa movement: emigrationist projects urging people of African descent in the Americas to settle in Africa, from Sierra Leone (1787) and Liberia (1819) through the ACS and Marcus Garvey's UNIA.
Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women
Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women is Susan Faludi's 1991 Crown bestseller arguing the 1980s saw a conservative media and political reaction against feminism, sparked by her debunking of the Harvard-Yale marriage study.
Badoo
Badoo is a London-founded dating and social discovery app launched in 2006 by Andrey Andreev; a pioneer of web and mobile dating, now wholly owned by Bumble Inc. after Blackstone's 2019 $3 billion MagicLab acquisition.
Bahá'í views of marriage
In Bahá'í teaching, marriage is a spiritual bond requiring the couple's consent, that of all living natural parents, and a simple ceremony with no officiant.
Ball culture
Ball culture (ballroom, house-ball community) is an LGBTQ+ subculture founded by Black and Latino queer and trans people in New York, with judged balls, vogue dance, and chosen-family houses; the modern scene dates to Crystal LaBeija's House of LaBeija in the early 1970s.
Bans on circus animals
Bans on circus animals: legal prohibitions or restrictions on animals, especially wild animals, in circuses, adopted in 51 countries including nationwide bans in most of Europe and Latin America, with no US federal ban.
Barbara Amiel
Barbara Amiel, Lady Black of Crossharbour (born 1940, Watford), British-Canadian columnist, first female editor of the Toronto Sun, Sunday Times and Daily Telegraph columnist, and wife of Conrad Black since 1992; author of Friends and Enemies (2020).
Barbara Bush (born 1981)
Barbara Pierce Bush (born 1981), daughter of George W. Bush, is an American social entrepreneur who co-founded Global Health Corps in 2009 and served as its CEO for nine years; author of Sisters First with her twin sister.
Bareback (sexual act)
Bareback sex, also called barebacking or BB, is condomless anal intercourse; in public health usage, intentional condomless anal intercourse among MSM in HIV-risk contexts. Term arose in mid-1990s gay press among HIV-positive men, later broadened to any condomless sex.
Barrie Drewitt-Barlow
Barrie Drewitt-Barlow, British businessman known as one of Britain's first gay fathers through US surrogacy (twins Aspen and Saffron, 1999) and co-owner of Maldon & Tiptree FC; charged with husband Scott in 2026 with rape, sexual assault, and trafficking offences, which they deny.
Basava (ಬಸವ)
Basava (ಬಸವ, Basavanna), twelfth-century Kannada vachana poet and Kalachuri commander at Kalyana, central figure of the Lingayat/Virashaiva tradition; founder-versus-reformer debate and 2018 Karnataka minority-religion politics distinguish him.
Basotho migrant labour
Basotho migrant labour is the system by which men from Lesotho have worked as contract laborers, above all in South Africa's Witwatersrand gold mines, since the late 19th century.
Bathroom bill
Bathroom bills are US state laws requiring restroom use by sex assigned at birth rather than gender identity; about 21 states have them, from North Carolina's 2016 HB2 to Idaho's 2026 criminal ban, with active litigation and documented health effects.
Batya Ungar-Sargon
Batya Ungar-Sargon, American journalist and author, former opinion editor of The Forward and deputy opinion editor of Newsweek; wrote Bad News (2021) and Second Class (2024); hosts NewsNation's Batya!; self-described MAGA lefty.
Bayard Rustin
Bayard Rustin (1912–1987), American Quaker pacifist, socialist, and openly gay civil rights strategist; co-founder of CORE, advisor to Martin Luther King Jr., and chief organizer of the 1963 March on Washington.
BDSM
BDSM, an acronym for bondage and discipline, dominance and submission, and sadism and masochism, is an umbrella term for consensual adult practices involving restraint, power exchange, and intense sensation, first recorded 1990–95.
Bear (gay culture)
Bear is a gay male subculture of larger, hairy, bearded men; the word was coined in The Advocate in 1979, organized in 1980s San Francisco via BEAR Magazine and the Lone Star Saloon, and went global in the 1990s.
Beard (companion)
Beard is LGBT slang for an opposite-sex companion or spouse whose presence disguises someone's homosexuality, distinct from the bear subculture. The mid-1950s term covers escorts to cover marriages (lavender marriages), documented in Hollywood and still used where coming out is costly.
Bechdel test
Bechdel test (Bechdel-Wallace test): three-criterion measure of female representation in film from Alison Bechdel's 1985 comic strip, credited to Liz Wallace; two named women talk about something other than a man; inspired Vito Russo and Mako Mori tests.
Becoming Chinese
Becoming Chinese (also #BecomingChinese, Chinamaxxing) is a 2025-2026 TikTok trend of Western, mostly Gen Z users adopting Chinese lifestyle habits like warm water, indoor slippers, and baduanjin qigong, started by creator Sherry Zhu.
Becoming white thesis
Becoming white thesis: the whiteness-studies claim that Irish, Italian, and Jewish immigrants became white in America, advanced by Roediger, Ignatiev, and Brodkin and contested by Yang and Koshy's finding of no legal reclassification.