This is good, I like this.
***
I have this idea for a TV show that’s like Scandal but instead of political fixers it’s about a halfway house that’s just for sheltering women who have murdered men and it’s called “The Dead Boyfriends Club” and only women know the address, every woman who works there has murdered a Man too so you’re all bound by a code of sororal honor and all you have to do is show up and they make you a cup of tea and get a team of silent, strong-armed ladies with a lot of garbage bags and strong lye to make everything go away and maybe instead of a TV show I’ll just start the house.
***
I am so glad that he found his mother because his father is quite possibly the worst human being ever featured in the Post, which is saying something and then some.
***
I don’t want to make promises I can’t keep, but I’m pretty sure “How African Americans beat one of the most racist institutions: the swimming pool” is the most engrossing article written about swimming pools this year.
This chapter of New Orleans history helps explain some of the truths underlying the stereotype that black people don’t swim — but also illustrates why that reputation is ill-deserved, just like the notion that people of color don’t like the outdoors.
***
How come you never see drawings or whatever of mermaids with short hair? Why is long hair such an intrinsic part of the mermaid aesthetic? FIRST MOTHERFUCKER TO TALK ABOUT “SECONDARY SEXUAL CHARACTERISTICS” AND “MARKER OF FERTILITY” AND “OUR CAVEMAN ANCESTORS” IS GETTING FUCKING DROWNED, I SWEAR TO ASS.
***
Toast Friend Shafiqah Hudson has written a book. GOOD.
I wrote a book! It’s called “This Mermaid’s Life,” and it’s a collection of creative non-fiction vignettes. Some of it’s heartbreaking. Most of it’s funny. ALL of it is awesome, so much so that I gave you 100 reasons to love it – see? No agent? No publisher? NO PROBLEM!
You may purchase it here.
***
Jamilah King on Dr. Maya Angelou:
I have 55 doctorates. My last was from Columbia University. I teach all over the world. So, the pressure on me, the challenge on me, was always mitigated by love. That is to say it was softened by love because my grandmother loved me, my uncle loved me, and my brother loved me. I came through that. I have come through so many challenges because of love.
Good Lord.
***
I love this woman.
***
“They in no way conveyed a sense of being “unclean” in either the visual or olfactory sense…Not odorless, but not as bad as I would have ordinarily.”
What a low, low, low, low, low, low, low, low, low, very low bar to clear.
THERE IS NOTHING WRONG WITH SOAP. THERE IS NOTHING WRONG WITH SHAMPOO. WASH YOUR BODY. WASH YOUR HAIR. DO NOT MIST YOURSELF WITH DIRT ATOMIZERS AND DO NOT MASSAGE KITCHEN SOLVENTS INTO YOUR SCALP. DEODORANT WILL NOT GIVE YOU CANCER AND THAT CRYSTAL STICK DOESN’T DO SHIT, WE CAN SMELL YOU.
Spoiler alert: she ends her experiment by taking a shower, because it’s advisable to wash.
***
I would read a profile this length about friend of the Toast Tricia Lockwood EVERY SINGLE DAY. Someone at the Times should needs to get reassigned to the daily Lockwood beat. MAKE IT SO.
“I consistently felt myself to be not male or female,” she said, “but the 11-year-old gender: protagonist. Maybe it’s a byproduct of reading a lot of books, of projecting yourself into different bodies.”
Oh man, and this:
Her father has never heard her read her poems. “I stay away and let her do what she needs to do with her life,” Father Lockwood told me one evening during a visit to the rectory in Kansas City. “She’s crazy smart and very talented. Good theology teaches you that everyone belongs to themselves.” Then he turned to his daughter and said, “You come from us, but you’re not us.”
Tags: link roundup, mallory’s back, seriously i’ve talked to napoleon chagnon on the phone and if you’re such a dick that he kicks you off his expedition YOU ARE A DICK, that one guy sucks though, the internet, ugh more swearing sorry team
My thoughts on the mermaids so far:
1. It would probably be really hard to keep your faux-hawk perfectly styled underwater
2. But long hair would attract its own kind of uncleanliness, not to mention a target for predators (what eats mermaids?)
3. Clearly, a *realistic* mermaid portrayal would have them all just be bald.
Maybe mermaids’ long hair functions to strategically cover their breasts in case the strapless seashell bras fall off. Only sometimes, though. A google image search tells me that pasties are also acceptable, as is toplessness.
Obviously the long hair is a thing because it looks really cool when it’s floating around in the water. For evidence, I would reference the America’s Next Top Model underwater challenge[s].
Am I being too much of a wet blanket if I say that mermaids are not real and they have long hair because they were envisioned by heterosexual misogynist men?
all mermaid blankets are wet blankets
+1
There’s been a bit of a mermaid reimagining on tumblr, and it’s been pretty cool. I’ve seen manatee-maids, and pufferfish-maids, all with a wide variety of body shapes and hair lengths.
I love all the mermaid stuff on tumblr right now. Because I love mermaids. And my fave mermaids have tentacles for hair.
Edit: One of my faves. And another one of my faves
perhaps the long hair is a method of trapping fish and food items which allows the mermaids to eat, like jellyfish? Since mermaids can’t really swim fast to actually catch prey. Mermaid food= half rotted dead fish and zooplankton sucked out of hair, ALL THE WAY.
does anyone remember that Animal Planet “DoCumEntaRY” about mermaids with “real footage” because obviously if we came from the water a section of the human species stayed behind and yet did not develop any particularly useful adaptations for the water and end up looking, like, say, whales or manatees (needless to say the amount of body fat or fur necessary for warm-blooded animals to live in water would be significant) and instead looked basically like skinny people but WEIRDER and with WEBBED HANDS.
OBVIOUSLY. /end rant
There is a children’s book with selkies in it (“The Folk Keeper”, which is slightly spoiler-y, if you haven’t read it) where long hair fulfills that sort of function? The selkies don’t trap things in it, but it acts like cat’s whiskers to help them sense the environment around them/find prey in the water/etc.
I think that EP’s hypothesis above is probably correct? Long hair looks cooler floating around/you can feel the pull of it as you swim? But no one in real life has ever been able to do that thing where your long hair looks perfectly styled as soon as you leave the water like fictional mermaids tend to do.
I SAW THAT
It was so weird and bleak! My favorite part was the ending where they said “these dolphins in one geographic region help people fish, therefore mermaids.”
It’s not hair at all it’s external alveoli, like an axolotl’s gills. Mammalian lungs are a poor fit for water-breathing, after all.
Favorite explanation right here
This is now my mermaid canon.
I’m gonna go with it being an extension of the nervous system, all the better to feel out your environment. Kinda like shark electroreceptors, but less awesome… except when it warns you a shark’s nearby.
Oooh, or maybe it glows in dark water, lamprey-style? That would be one additional possibility to avidbio’s scavenger-only feeding theory.
I always assumed that the long hair was an aesthetic match for the billowy tailfin. Short hair would probably look killer on a mermaid with a more streamlined tail. Like a shark-punk mermaid.
I just want to point out this book cover <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Waterfire-Saga-Deep-Jennifer-Donnelly-ebook/dp/B00HZTXPEW/ref=sr_1_1_ha?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1401392284&sr=1-1&keywords=deep+blue#reader_B00HZTXPEW" target="_blank"> ;http://www.amazon.com/Waterfire-Saga-Deep-Jennife…. Where the mermaid not only has long hair, but also a tail fin length dress on. As you do in the sea. (The mermaids in the book are apparently also fond of tea-drinking. Underwater.)
Whaaaaaaaaaaaaaat
(If anybody’s having trouble with the link, I think this is the image in question?)
Yeah, that’s it. I didn’t even try to do html, so don’t know what happened with the link.
The book summary also mentions a merperson being killed by an arrow.
Hydrodynamics may not be this author’s area of expertise.
Everybody seems to be forgetting one of Ariel’s sisters, with the short blonde hair! http://disney.wikia.com/wiki/Andrina I don’t know about her headpiece thing, but then a few of the sisters’ hairstyles are kind of strange. (Adella, Aquata. Come on.)
Seems simple to me: Scissors rust in saltwater. (Even stainless steel does eventually).
WE CAN SMELL YOU.’ yep. The only thing I ask of public life is PLEASE DON’T MAKE US SMELL YOU. Yes it’s “natural” and hey I enjoy camping as much as the next person, but if you wish to interact in modern 21st-century life, part of the social contract is that you do not smell odorous. I don’t give a tiny fuck HOW you do it, maybe if you do so much Bikram yoga you’ve sweated out everything that could give you a bad smell and you’ve reached the next plane of enlightenment where you have no odor anymore, that’s fine, but PLEASE DON’T MAKE US SMELL YOU.
In grad school I knew a dude who considered tooth-brushing an optional thing and I taught with him and seeing him at 8am where he would speak to me with a mouthful of….I don’t know, demons or something–was enough to make me dread the entire day.
Well, unless “the next person” is me, because NO CAMPING NO NO NO NEVER. We have spent the last several thousand years developing roofs and floors and central heating/air and indoor plumbing and I see no reason to throw that away, plus bears.
(People will occasionally try to get me to go to Pennsic, and I’ll be like “I don’t like camping, no thanks,” and they’ll say it’s not camping, really, and I’m all “Do you go to the bathroom in a thing that flushes? No? Then it is CAMPING and I say TO HELL WITH IT.”)
I wouldn’t want to push anyone to do things they don’t want to do! BUT there are campgrounds with regular plumbing! A few weeks ago I was camping at a campground that has washrooms (men’s and women’s) with normal stall toilets and hot water and even showers with hot water as well! They were even very clean. I mean, there were ALSO vault toilets and stuff but there was normal plumbing too!
That’s true–and we have those when we’re LARPing–but that’s pretty much my backest-to-Nature level of tolerance, and I only do that because we have flush toilets and cabins and I can pretend to be a sun priestess or whatever. (I’m weird.) And given an ideal world and infinite money, we would do all of that in a hotel and go outside for brief periods of time when it’s warm-but-not-too-warm and there aren’t a lot of bugs.
Best thing Nature ever did was give us opposable thumbs so we could evolve carpeting and Lysol, is what I’m saying. 😉
I endorse this stance entirely. I did enough outdoorsy stuff with my family as a kid (camping with only portapotties! In Arizona! In the summer! And in Alaska! Also in the summer, but that’s also kind of awful with all the insects!) to know that I want nothing to do with it as an adult. I will happily sit by your campfire for a while and drink wine, but afterwards I’m going to want to sleep somewhere with beds and a roof and a sink and a fridge.
And, yes, we’ve also acquired the technology to not be stinky, so we should work at not being stinky.
Camping is bullshit. All that work to take your damn fake house outside and lug it around and set it up and its not even like a house. Which is fine and all, but its the goddamn moral highground of a person who goes out and does it that gets to me. Like you are more spiritual because you like when your back aches and there’s dirt in your blankets, instead of just going out, seeing a tree and then going home to sit nicely indoors where who knows, maybe I”m just writing checks to foodbanks and knitting scarves to orphans, huh? who’s the good person now jerks?
ENDORSED.
I like doing outdoorsy shit. I even like getting sweaty and gross doing those things. But then I like to take a shower. Sit on a couch somewhere. Drink an espresso. Or eat a well-cooked meal. Also, I like beds. With sheets.
And you can just stay in a CABIN! I love a fucking cabin. It’s way neater to stay in some random house you don’t own than in your stupid tent. I’ll do a cabin with gas lamps, or like a wierd outdoor fridge or something. i like that stuff. So long as there’s a coffee and a place to sit around that’s not full of mosquitos.
I am a total fan of cabins. In the woods. Also, ski condos. Near ski things. But only when there’s no snow. Because I don’t know what to do with snow.
Anyway. Buildings. With Showers. And beds. I like these things.
I hate the “it’s natural!” shit, as if human beings have not been regularly washing themselves for thousands upon thousands of years. Soap is also a hella old human invention. Granted, bathing died out in the West for a while after the fall of the Roman Empire because WHITE PEOPLE ARE THE WORST, but not smelling like a foot is, and has been, a thing among humans worldwide for about as long as there have been humans.
Not entirely! Bathing was actually fairly common in cities, and in England bathing houses weren’t closed until like, the 1400s, because they had become dens of iniquity and general disgustingness. But there was a whole millenium there where public bathing, in cities, was not unusual and in many places very common. It was just the system of aqueducts that fell apart after the fall of the Roman Empire.
Interesting! Thanks for the correction. I’m glad to know my ancestors weren’t quite as disgusting as I’d thought.
I always like to point to the maps of the black plague in Europe because there’s a HUGE HOLE in the death maps where Poland is because Jewish religion has guidelines about cleanliness and hygiene written right in there, and Poland had a very high Jewish population at the time. They did not die of plague because THEY BATHED. BATHING IS GOOD. DO THE BATHING THING.
“It’s natural” is never a legitimate argument. We are goddamn humanity, and we surpassed natural a long ass time ago. I refuse to have someone who spends time in front of the computer and drives a car and gets haircuts and goes to a doctor’s office and has a bank account use that defense.
YES. You know what’s not natural? COMPUTERS. Synthetic-fiber clothing! Unless you live in a cabin in the woods you built with your own hands from tools you also made with your own hands and clothe yourself with nothing but woven grasses and animal skins, and eat nothing but what the land gives you…..then please WASH.
YO GRAD SCHOOL DUDE, tooth-brushing isn’t “optional” hygiene. You skip that and they GET HOLES and TURN BLACK and little dead pieces of them MIX IN WITH YOUR FOOD until you have to PRY THEM OUT OF THEIR BONE SOCKETS.
You know what else? He could not MOVE for dates AND later got a steady girlfriend. HOW????
Know what else is natural? Death. Arsenic. Infection. Earthquakes.
My grandmother talked about taking the bus in the 20s and 30s and how bad everyone smelled, up to and including the fact that you could tell who had her period at all times. NO THANK YOU.
Unanticipated benefit of hysterectomy: never having to worry ‘can anyone smell that I’m menstruating right now?’
I hope that is just one of the many upsides!
Well, the not bleeding every damn day for a year is a bonus, too.
My mother talked about going to school in the rural South (US) with girls who did not bathe *at all* while menstruating. They’re mothers taught them it was wrong. Generations and generations of superstition/ignorance. My mother credits their sainted Home Ec teacher for correcting that notion for every class, every year. ::shudder::
YIKES.
I am at an international science conference right now, and there are some real stinkers here. Like, I’ll be sitting and listening to a talk, and there’s a stinky bearded Italian dude in front of me, and then he gets up and leaves and is immediately replaced by a stinky Russian dude. There are some very nice smelling soaps on sale here in France! Please investigate them!
ALSO in Canadian News, http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/government-surplu…
You can buy all kinds of absurd things, including a 16-foot non-operational canoe, hair extensions, a $285,000 former Coast Guard ship (to decorate your lawn, presumably), and some of those super pretty concrete flower planters you see outside government buildings.
The phrase “non-operational canoe” fills me with such delight.
I looked it up! It has a hole in the side. It’s also kind of scraped up.
But it’s a kevlar canoe with wood trim, which means it would have been over $2000 new, and the minimum bid is $50. So I’m pretty sure there’s someone somewhere who will think it’s worth the cost of having it repaired.
Maybe we can patch it with those hair extensions that are also, apparently, on offer.
Ok, but if we’re going to use it to take to the sea, we’ll also need some means of transporting it there. The vehicle selection is a bit biased towards dented white Ford Crown Victorias, but at least some of them don’t specify that the rear doors can’t be opened from the inside.
I wish they’d offer more background information on these surplus items! There’s a lot of “approximately 100” costume-jewelry rings with a brief note saying they were confiscated. From whom? Why? When? Ditto the wedding dress. There’s a tacky framed print that has been “forfeited to the Crown” – who else is itching to know the circumstances behind that?
Oh, my God, that man in the Post. There are no words.
HE IS JUST THE WORST HUMAN omg.
“We weren’t a touchy-feely, talk-about-things kind of family.” LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, THE SOCIAL SCIENCES.
“DON’T I HAVE THE RIGHT TO DO THIS OR THAT IN ANOTHER CULTURE?”
NO, WHITE MAN, you DO NOT HAVE ALL THE RIGHTS. No more rights for you! RIGHTS REVOKED!
And of course he happily took the right to ‘take’ a wife but then didn’t feel the need encumber himself by actually looking after her because no he didnt need his ‘right’ then, did he?!
When the tribe/Yarima agreed to the marriage, I’m pretty sure they meant an actual marriage where he had responsibilities to her/the tribe. Not “would you like to fuck this pre-teen then dick off when you feel like it and divorce her when your movie deal falls through?”
UGH and the movie deal! “No. I don’t watch television. I want the big screen.” and “Everybody wanted me. I’m basically at the level of Pacino, De Niro, Redford.” Yeah, no, you’re at the level of an entitled douchenozzle.
Holy shiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiit D:
AAAAARGH RAAAAARGH I AM SO ANGRY. “You’ve been here long enough, have a wife!” HAVE A WIFE. Like she is a nice cup of tea or something instead of A NINE(ish) YEAR OLD. If I were Yarima I would be moving into Mallory’s Dead Boyfriends Club so fast.
Recall that that’s Kenneth Good’s way of telling the story. Due to the fact that the language is spoken by very very few people who also speak English, it’s pretty much impossible for us to find out how it really went down (although, you know, maybe it was like that).
Yeah, you’re right. ALTHOUGH, if that’s not how it was actually said but Good related it as such, it’s just more evidence that he is the wooOOOooOorst.
The sad thing is that’s the best case scenario here. That the actual story is somehow less creepy* but he thinks “I was given a child bride as a gift” is a better excuse.
*As in reflects better on her family, not on him. He’s a monster no matter what.
Even if that was how it happened, you’d hope a decent human being would be like “that’s kind of you, but no thanks” right?
I actually stopped reading a couple of times cause he was so awful.
I feel very sorry for that young woman. Taken away from her home and her community and her family to a world that she didn’t understand, that terrified her – he didn’t seem to put any effort into easing her way, or anything – not knowing the language, with no friends and literally NO-ONE to talk to other than him.
There’s just so much there. I can’t even begin.
I haven’t even reached that part yet; I had to stop after the husband made his careless error that resulted in the horrifying gang rape by 30 men on this poor girl.
Jesus, his attitude to that. Like he didn’t even care at all.
Their culture only fears the husband, and he lied to her and made her unsafe and as a result of that 30 men raped her. And the most he can summon up is ‘that’.
I thought anthropologists weren’t supposed to get involved with the people they study, to avoid shit like this happening? Yes, without him she’d still have been married off at 9, because that’s how they do things, but it would have been to a man raised in that culture who could actually protect her like he was supposed to. Not just fuck off for four months.
And note that she STILL WOULD RATHER live there than with this asshole.
Just so so bad. Can you imagine growing up with him as your father? Just … wow.
“My dad tells me not to walk around barefoot in my underwear, but I want to”
Tell your dad to FUCK RIGHT OFF
That guy was the dickiest dick ever. I didnt think it was possible to get this angry at a stranger.
Also The Post was so condescending and insulting about the son returning to that tribe. Did they really need to emphasise his mosquito bitten genitalia? No. They just want to bang on about how ‘primitive’ these people are because clearly that’s more satisfying.
It was so fucking insulting. His mother is part of that tribe, he can opt to explore joining them if he wants, it’s a valid choice.
None of that shit would have happened to that poor woman if his father hadn’t had that same attitude about their ‘primitive’ state. They are human beings, but only the son seems to understand that about them. His father certainly didn’t.
UGH YES could we please stop describing other people as living in the “Stone Age”?
EVERYONE CURRENTLY ALIVE LIVES IN THE PRESENT (ie I agree with you)
Yeah, that is awful. Is there a reasonable word to describe the difference in the way of life that isn’t so judgmental? “Primitive” is totally not cutting it. There may not be a word for it, but I’m curious if any of y’all have any thoughts on this.
I think there isn’t a word, nor do I think there should be. The way I see it, there isn’t one timeline of human progress where the Yanomami are at Step 2 and middle class Americans are at Step 75. It’s more like human progress isn’t a single straight line at all, and the Yanomami are at Step Purple and middle class Americans are at Step Umbrella – the adaptations each group has derived for itself aren’t even comparable.
That’s a good point. If there was a word, it would have to not have anything to do with timelines or so-called progress, but rather need to focus on the differences in the style of living. And perhaps that is too complicated and nuanced to succinctly described without bringing judgments into it.
Step Purple and Step Umbrella, I like that.
Survival International just uses “tribal,” which is perhaps too vague but at least nonjudgmental. I think describing them as hunter-gatherers or slash-and-burn farmers is probably another decent way to go about it.
We have this problem in biology; there are things like moss or sharks or bacteria that many still describe as “primitive”.
They are still around because the traits they have still work. The traits did not stop working. They also probably have some awesome adaptations that we haven’t noticed because they aren’t like our adaptations. Also, our records of what things were like in the past are super unreliable, so maybe saying this organism is more like the past organisms than other organisms is straight up bullshit?
idk, I think that attitude might work in the social sciences too.
I recently finished Jared Diamond’s “The World Until Yesterday.” He uses “traditional societies,” subdivided into a few anthropological categories reflective of structure — bands, tribes, chiefdoms, and something else I’m forgetting. IANAA, but I enjoyed the book.
‘SUCH A DICK’ is preeeetty much the only way to describe that guy. I hope his son gets vengeful as FUCK someday.
That father is the worst.
The Post’s coverage of the story is hardly better.
But now that I’ve gotten my grump out, I’m really glad David got another chance to meet and connect with his mother and her culture.
Sociopath, right? Like, he has to be a sociopath.
“CBS wanted to do a miniseries,” Kenneth says. “I said, ‘No. I don’t watch television. I want the big screen.’ ”
IT IS ALL THE WORST THINGS EVER, IN ONE HUMAN.
Also “Alan Alda called and said he wanted to write, direct and star as Kenneth. I said, ‘Gee, Alan, isn’t that a lot for one man?’ ” FUCK YOU DON’T TALK TO ALAN ALDA THAT WAY
I know this is a small point given the level of awfulness but, “He’s shorter than Al Pacino.” How is that a thing that someone says?
That tag about Napoleon Chagnon is 100% accurate, I have taken classes from him and let me say that if HE thinks you are an arrogant asshole, then wow. Just wow.
These look like some nifty links but mostly I liked the part where you swore to ass.
I can barely ever use deodorant because my skin is so sensitive. But I wash every day, sometimes two or three times in hot weather, and do quick washes under my arms and stuff when I think I need to.
Am I allowed to live?
Me toooo, except for the sensitive skin part. We can build a small part of the commune together and reassure each other we don’t smell.
I will join the commune! Except my problem is weird body chemistry that makes deodorant smell like ass after I’ve used it. I thought it was the antiperspirant parts, switched to plain deodorant-bad- switched to clinical- even worse- switched to fancy stuff from Sephora- SO Terrible. I just smell better without.
Anyone else have funky chemistry?
My husband, who also eschews deodorant, only smells when he eats processed meat. And then he smells so bad I can’t even stand it. Bodies are just ridiculous.
A lot of perfumes and oils smell like TCP (antiseptic cream) on me. And I don’t smell much anyway, really. My fresh sweat smells… kind of nice, actually, sort of spicy. Old sweat is obviously manky, but I wash it off.
FIND SOME SENSITIVE SKIN DEODORANT, THEN YES
IT STILL BRINGS ME UP IN GROTESQUE SUPPURATING SORES, MALLORY
I AM FED UP OF OOZING PUS FROM MY ARMPITS
(my allergies are the weirdest things in the world and include all deodourant (but not expensive perfume), vaseline, bergamot oil)
I had that problem, too, for two reasons: 1) very sensitive skin and 2) a skin condition called hidradenitis suppurativa that’s made worse when my skin is irritated.
I don’t know if you’re looking for deodorant suggestions, but Dove makes a hypoallergenic unscented deodorant that’s currently marketed under the name “go sleeveless” instead of some sensible name indicating that it’s hypoallergenic and unscented. I spent YEARS stinking and mortified of it, including carrying wet wipes around with me so I could swap my armpits down as needed. Someone online cued me into this specific deodorant and it’s changed my life. Uh, it’s also left my armpits SUPER moisturized and incredibly soft. Almost creepily so. But it works and doesn’t cause abscesses so yay!!
That dove for sensitive skin deodorant is the only thing I can use on my poor armpits. Anything else, including all the scented Doves and my husband’s Dove for Men unscented (why is deodorant gendered again?), makes me break out into horrible red weeping hives.
I love that stuff so much that when I lived in Germany and couldn’t find it (the scented ones I could find, but not that one) I had it imported.
My skin condition is made worse by sweat ( 😐 ) so the antiperspirant nature of it is fantastic.
There’s a fragrance-free version that has masking scent added to it. It smells gross AND gave me pit zits that bloomed into horrors. I keep accidentally grabbing it, though. “Go Sleeveless” is the WORST name for a hypoallergenic unscented deodorant.
Every other Dove deodorant goes on sale regularly, but not the “go sleeveless” variety. My dang skin keeps costing me money.
“There’s a fragrance-free version that has masking scent added to it. It smells gross AND gave me pit zits that bloomed into horrors.”
how horrible. Apparently, I can use both interchangably (thank dog), but oh my GOD what a terrible betrayal that must be.
(that also potentially explains why the men’s one makes my skin so angry. why is this so damn complicated?!)
Masking Fragrances are really common and are meant to take a product that smells chemical-y and make it smell neutral/not have a smell. I am super sensitive to smells, so if masking fragrances didn’t also make my skin break out I’d love it.
I refuse to play along with gendering on most consumer goods, as well. However, armpit chemistry does differ according to hormone levels. Effective deodorant for higher testosterone levels is not so effective for us female-bodied persons. Our sweat pH differs too, for the same reasons.
that explains it, although the man often borrows my deodorant and it works fine. (in fact he switched to Dove after he borrowed mine one morning and discovered how wonderful it is. He says he likes the wider stick that men’s deodorant comes in.) Neither of us are particularly sweaty/BO-y people, though.
I love the Dove unscented go sleeveless, and it turned out to be the ONLY thing my boyfriend can use without a painful rash. He has his own tube and tears the label off so he won’t feel awkward about the gendered-ness of it.
Jesus I have hidradentitis supporativa, too (solidarity!). Only not in my pits, in my groin 🙁 I know the pain.
*fist bump* I have it EVERYWHERE it’s possible to have it, including behind my ears. I’m looking into pursuing a SSDI claim but am intimidated.
ok that’s gross you can skip it, i don’t want you to have pus-arms
I have super sensitive pits, too. I use one of those pit rocks and it works fine. When I’m going to be in particularly sweaty circumstances (or when I’m wearing a cashmere sweater or something) I use the second recipe of the two listed here (minus the essential oils EWWWW) and my pits don’t smell like anything for two or three days.
“Don’t I have the right to do this or that in another culture?”
Yeah dude! Fight for your right to have sex with and impregnate a child!
“THIS OR THAT”
this or that
this rape or that rape
this or that
thisorthat
http://media.giphy.com/media/OG8jlh9Pkcpm8/giphy….
I forgot how to imbed things in my rage…
My cousin just found her old, sick runaway cat after 3 weeks and a massive search effort. She seriously moved heaven and earth to find her cat, and people had some very different reactions to that! I’ve never had a pet, but what she wrote here made me a little sniffly.
Oh tears. When I had my dog and he was old and sick I constantly worried about what would happen if he got loose and I couldn’t find him, or even worse if animal control took him for some reason… Our pets need us, and we need them. I’m very happy your cousin found her cat!
The link is just taking me back to this page but I am so pleased for your cousin. Just the thought of mine going missing makes my blood run cold.
Oh no! Try this link: http://michellehodkin.tumblr.com/post/87188871738…
There’s something in my eye now….
I am so happy she found her cat, and also whaaaaat your cousin wrote the Mara Dyer books? They’re so weird and good!
I knowwww, I seriously can’t wait for the Retribution to come out.
I work within the Penn system, and was ready to see the typical, self-centered, Ivy league uber cerebral no common sense stereotype, but nothing prepared me for the extent of narcissism that Kenneth Good displayed. WTactualF. There are so many horrible things in that story, I had to keep taking breaks from reading it, but then this really took the cake for me for some reason:
“His dad had a fundamental misreading of David’s identity crisis. “You know what I feel bad about?” Kenneth says. That the Yanomami are short. “David’s only 5-4. I mean, he’s shorter than Al Pacino.””
I would be really interested to find out where he is around here, so I could just stand before him and be like “WTF.” Show up outside his restaurant window with a sign that says “WTF.” Send him a text in the middle of the night that says “WTF.”
That is the most majestically awful part. I FEEL SO BAD YOU ARE SHORT. That’s his takeaway about what he did wrong.
and I bet it’s less that he feels bad for David being short – it’s probably more that he feels like David’s shortness reflects poorly on him… he doesn’t want to have such a short son.
“Our culture is obsessed with numbers.” THIS GUY.
Numbers that matter to Kenneth Good: The number of feet and inches of his son’s height.
Numbers that do not matter to Kenneth Good: The age of the child he is marrying, impregnating and dragging away from her family, home and culture.
Amazingly enough, he’s not actually bound by ANY cultural rules! He can impregnate an underage woman, and then just abandon her to gang rape. All those dumb rules are just made up anyway! Those dumb rules like “don’t have sex with children” and “protect your wife who relies on you”. Like, don’t abuse your children.
The cultural rule against men being short, though, is inviolable.
Not just WTF. I wish there were some way he could be arrested.
don’t think there is, but that doesn’t mean that a sustained guerrilla campaign against him wouldn’t be more effective and more satisfying for all the haters.
Yarima was in the States for a while. Given the circumstances it is literally impossible for her to have given consent to him if they ever had sex there. His treatment of David is parental abuse as well. Not that dragging either of them back to the States to stand against him in trial would be a mercy.
exactly. and statute of limitations is probably passed or something (I know very little about law).
**GUERRILLA TACTICS**
(SERIOUSLY)
I think the movie star comparison does it because it shows how lightly he takes the whole situation. Especially since they also quote him saying “Everybody wanted me. I’m basically at the level of Pacino, De Niro, Redford.” Of course he compares his son’s body shape to an actor he’s probably never seen in person. He’s the protagonist of his own awful movie. He’s not sharing his life with any real people.
the answer is narcissistic personality disorder.
David Good! That story is heartbreaking in so many ways – you can hear him tell it in his own words on Snap Judgment: http://snapjudgment.org/The-Return (The segment entitled “Yanomami Mami”)
This past year I was writing a paper on agriculture in Botswana and came across an article that seemed to support my thesis pretty well – but then I recognized the author as David Good’s dad and discarded it.
This is a much more sympathetic interview, and yet the guy still comes off as THE WORST.
It makes me sad how this woman is the center of this story, but so erased, too. Her point of view on the whole thing is basically missing, save for a couple of sentences translated through her creep husband.
I hope in her tribe he’s only a side character in her story and that when she tells it she does scathingly sarcastic imitations of his voice.
Oh man I want that to be written and shared sooooo bad.
I’m sharing it all over facebook and now I’m sharing it here:
Your Princess Is In Another Castle: Misogyny, Entitlement, and Nerds.
(It has provoked some infuriating responses on facebook, obviously. And I don’t have to tell you to not read the comments, right? Don’t read the comments.)
I posted this yesterday! yes, excellent article!!! boo, never ever read the comments!!!
Whoops, must have missed your post yesterday, sorry for the double!
oh, haha! no, I posted it on Facebook. Wasn’t very clear there – you missed nothing!
GOTCHA, we are on the same page. Continue to share the good words of Arthur Chu!
I missed it yesterday, so thanks! This is so excellent. Arthur Chu is awesome.
I started to read the comments, and then the first two were people being like “BIG BANG THEORY IS FICTION WHAT DO YOU HATE FICTION OR SOMETHING” and then I remembered that I know better and peaced right on out of there.
I started following “Don’t Read the Comments” on twitter. It’s my version of a daily affirmation.
“See how happy children are? They’ve never read a comment section, and neither should you.”
Thanks for posing this. I think this sums up why I do not like Big Bang Theory. Plus his conclusion that these guys do not need to get laid, they just need to grow up. Wonderful!
I read that article on the shuttle to work yesterday morning and my heart grew three sizes.
Then I read the responses in Slashdot’s comments and wanted burn everything down.
This is really great!
Great article, thank you!
I’m having, like, the opposite reaction of “This is bad and you should feel bad.”
This link is great and you should feel great. And Arthur Chu should feel great. Well, except for the feeling bad about all the shitty nerd misogyny out there, but you know what I mean. (He should also feel great because of his fantastic fuck-you Jeopardy strategy.)
I want to start yelling “YOU ARE GREAT AND YOU SHOULD FEEL GREAT” at people I like.
If the mermaid myth arose from sightings of manatees trailing seaweed (which I don’t know if it did, it just makes the best story) then that would explain the long hair, but not why none of them are ever shaped like gloriously zaftig venus figurines.
I just had the most glorious mental image of a manatee gliding gracefully through the water, long hair rippling behind it.
Photoshop please?
I am sending the idea out to the universe in the hopes that someone with more photoshop skills than I will help us out.
Sounds like a job for icebergmama.
But, of course.
Sailors get lonely out there on the sea
also they were all like 14
I hope it’s a Monk 1 & Monk 2 situation where the 14 year old sailor asks what women look like and “Manatees with hair” is the 14.5 year old sailor’s answer.
Oh my god, teenage dirtbag monks.
it is was the age where probably those barrels of tar or smoked fish or whatever were lookin’ pretty good, too
<3 <3 <3
I am thoroughly enjoying today’s roundup! Except the Post article, because the Dad is so awful and I just can’t handle this shit anymore.
I love when Mallory threatens murder and/or permanent hammerbanning. It brings me such weird joy.
(Also, I only wash my hair once a week BUT I SHOWER EVERY DAY. I also use conditioner on my hair every day. I promise, I smell like soap. I do have certain hippy tendencies, but I love my Dove.)
I have long, color treated hair and I wash it maybe every 6 days. It really only starts to get grimy around the evening of day four, at which point, I pshhhhhsh it with the dry shampoo and go with a ponytail or bun.
But you better believe I shower/bathe every day. The two things are totally separate. My hair can be left to its own devices for days on end, but the rest of me has a date with a wash clothe and soap.
I’m a disgusting greaseball who needs to cleanse every part of me every 9 hours or so lest I start leaving a trail of oil behind me. However, I have friends who only wash their hair once a week or so and they’re fine. different bodies have different, less expensive and time consuming, needs. Embrace your hair/scalp and the money and time it saves you. Rejoice in it.
“Whitlock thought about how much horses sweat in the summer. He wondered whether the animals managed their sweat by engaging in dirt bathing.”
Do we not wash most horses regularly unless they are still wild? Do wild horses go to the Whole Foods?
We do hose our horses down after they get sweaty. They do however still smell like horse. If humans smelled as nice as horses did I would be ok with people not showering.
This is true, I would purchase horse sweat cologne.
Horses only get a bath if they really need it – plus their sweat smells amazing.
I can only speak to my own experience with horses, but, nope, they don’t get regular baths in my neck of the woods. The only time they get bathed is when it is necessary for human purposes–like getting ready for a show or trail ride or some other event where you want the horse to at least start out looking ‘spiffy’. Most of the cosmetic type things used for that are not things you would want to use daily. The hoof products in particular tend to dry out the hoof and make it more susceptible to cracking, which for a horse is a serious problem.
And I often don’t actually bathe my horse, I just curry him more thoroughly than usual and I don’t shine up his hooves, because his hooves have had cracks in the past and it takes weeks/months/years to get them to heal up.
Anecdote time: I live in Texas. In the winter, we didn’t bother. If your horse had a particularly bad stain, you could use a damp warm towel to buff it out, but mostly just good currying and brushing keeps a horse sufficiently clean. In the summer, because it was NINE MILLION DEGREES OMG, we would always spray the horses down after a ride, to get rid of the sweat and also because it feels good. A “bath”, ie, with shampoo etc happened maybe once a month or if I had a show or a clinic.
Oh, I did take care of one horse who had to be bathed on a regular schedule year round. Poor guy had sensitive skin and a fungal….thing that required bathing in stinky prescription shampoos. He was an exception, though.
The only concern horses hae about their sweat is that it dries and attracts flies to the salty residue. So they get sweaty (which they actually rarely do in the wild, because they don’t do a lot of fast running, it’s more wandering about and mostly at a walk), they roll in dirt which sticks to the sweaty wet patches and then they roll again on something more grassy to get the dirt off.
As others have said, we only wash horses with shampoo when they need to be clean for a competition. It takes the natural grease out of their coats and stops them being waterproof, so it’s done as little as possible. We are waterproof regardless of washing!
Horses stay outside. If you’re willing to live naked outdoors and grub for food in the dirt like an animal, you get a pass on daily bathing.
That Kenneth Good article is terrible, and I am pretty skeptical of the way it talks about the Yanomami. Obvi referring to people as “stone age” is bullshit, since everyone is living in the present. It’s not weird to get up and try to give birth squatting — that’s a pretty regular way to give birth in a lot of parts of the world and is arguably less hard on your body.
Also, what a fucking disgusting and horrible person (Kenneth Good and no one else in that story, I mean). The fact that dudes like that are the only way English speakers who don’t live in the Amazon have of understanding folks who live there and speak indigenous languages is a huge problem in how we can understand and relate to them. New rule: only not terrible women can be anthropologists?
It’s by way of New York Post language better adapted to describing Bat Boy and secret pedophile rings and a cultural understanding apparently brought to you by sociopathic pedophile tourists, but stone age bronze age etc. are used by real people too to describe general levels of industrial development, not a global epoch in time.
It’s just a bit Western-centric in its idea of how technology progresses, but stuff like city-states, literacy, and specialist manufacturing do tend to come together as a package deal to describe a discrete Bronze Age say, and if a society is described as “stone age” you know you’re talking about small villages, no or low-yield farming, oral histories, and so on.
Fortunately Kenneth Good is a product of a certain era of anthropology and a certain lineage (being involved with chagnon in any way is a strong correlator) that was absolutely terrible and sparked a strong backlash that coasted into today’s post-post-modernism. People like Good still exist, but they get censured now, or work in “evolutionary psychology” or “sociobiology” or whatever Pinker calls himself instead of anthropology.
I always thought mermaid’s had long hair because if you wanted to strangle and drown a sailor dude, then having long hair was easier than hauling rope around everywhere.
WHAT ARE YOU GONNA USE THAT STUPID FUCKIN’ ROPE FOR
CHARLIE BRONSON’S ALWAYS GOT ROPE
I love everyone on this thread. I truly do.
oh yeah, obvi! check out, checks out
Misandrist mermaids are the best mermaids.
“David says that for a few years, Kenneth would sit the kids in front of a video camera and have them beg her to come back.”
I DON’T EVEN
Literally every thing this man is quoted as saying made me think, “That’s the worst thing anyone’s ever said, ever.” Then the next thing he said would come.
I legit teared up reading the Lockwood profile. The little tiny details were big (her first time in New York, her meeting her husband online back during the scary years, the living in a rectory), but the thing that killed me was the insistence that she was a poet, fuck everything else.
buying that book on the first day it’s out
While reading Kenneth Good’s wikipedia article, I discovered that there is actually a documentary about what a shittastic person he is. I have no interest in anthropology at all, but I want to watch it just to see him eviscerated.
That fucker had unlimited funds from Germany- GODDAMN
I was thinking about his unlimited funding when his son needed 3 years to come up with $700 to F*ing visit his mama. Where were those funds then? Could dad not be bothered to help his kid see the kid’s mama? Dad’s a glass bowl.
It sounds like if daddy dearest thought he could have gotten away with keeping his exotic savage halfbreed children in a cage and charging a dollar to let people poke them with sticks he would have.
“He’s so short because his mom is a stone-age heathen from the jungle!”
Can’t afford antivenom! Oh well. Antivenom is just a made up cultural rule anyway.
aaaa it wasn’t just him
300 years after Columbus and those dudes are still how you get the big hello from the West, great, awesome, hope we never meet aliens
That Amazon story – this line “he knew his absences left Yarima vulnerable, but the work was just as important.”
NO – he felt that the work was MORE important than the life and safety of his child bride that he raped
He is the worst human being – if he is actually human.
Mermaid hair is a strategy for self-censorship in our nipple-phobic society.
Only *female* nipple phobic. Male nipples can be ignored.
The REAL question is why do mermaids even have nipples since they’re obviously not mammals?
…hot damn
barnacles
We’re only assuming those are nipples. You may notice that unlike fish, mermaids don’t have a vent mid-body to expel wastes. Those have to come out somewhere…
NEWEST FAVORITE THEORY. Today’s link roundup has provided so many new worldviews…
I’m working on a drawing of a mermaid with an undercut and knuckle tattoos as we speak! I want to sell some prints at a con but I’m not sure what the market for alternative lifestyle mermaids is like.
I am fairly certain you could sell about a million just right here on The Dash Toast.
Caveman ancestor need to know how much baby to pack in fish woman.
MEGANOOOOOO
I’M SORRY MALLORY IT JUST CAME OUT.
If we want to get all “Real mermaid” sea mammal-y –
1. They would not have long hair – see dolphins or whales
or
2. they would have lovely soft fur – see otters or seals
and they wou\kld not ever wear those dumb seashell thingies because there are no Victorian body shaming misogynists among the Merpeople, who are Ruled by a Mermother
Ruled by a Mermother. Love it.
There are some awesomely punk-haired, bald, and head-finned merpeople over in Julie Dillon’s Catalog of Merfolk, an art challenge she did on tumblr a while back. (Uh, general NSFW warning if your work frowns on naked merpeople boobs.)
*whispers* i am over mermaids
anyone who lives over sea level is
The swimming article was really interesting. I remember a black co-worker once saying rather off-handedly that the reason he doesn’t know any black guys who swim is that all their mothers, growing up, told them DO NOT GO IN WATER, YOU WILL ABSOLUTELY DIE, terrifying the shit out of them. Suddenly I have a whole appreciation for what was behind the panic there, because those are some terrifying statistics on childhood drowning.
Nicole, please just start the house.
Like the awfulness of Kenneth Good is pure and unimpeachable but man a whole lotta other people come off as pretty awful in that article too
David hated his mother but missed her, too, and he resented his father for toting him around to events like some kind of experimental offspring.
“I really hated going with my dad to these conferences,” he says. “I remember the wife of a very prominent anthropologist — I was 12 or 13 at the time — asking me what I wanted for Christmas. I said, ‘A Nintendo 64 with Super Mario Bros.’ She looked at me in horror and said, ‘Oh, my God. You’re a typical American kid. I thought you’d be different.’ That really cut me.”
Everything is awful
I know this isn’t anywhere near the same level of awfulness, but that part reminds me of when it comes up in casual conversation that I was born in Exotic Eastern European Country, and there’s always some idiot who says, “Wow! Your English is so good, I couldn’t tell you’re not from here!” A little bit of my soul dies every time.
My mouth makes polite noises like “My family came to Canada when I was 7 so I did all my schooling here” but inside I am endlessly shrieking GO TO HELL YOU’RE STUPID AND I WISH I WERE UNINHIBITED ENOUGH TO VICIOUSLY KICK YOU IN THE SHINS UNTIL YOU FELL OVER AND CRIED.
The bit that irks me about the microbiome article is this bit:
“A few months before, an equestrienne he was dating asked him to answer a question she had been long curious about: Why did her horse like to roll in the dirt? Whitlock didn’t know, but he saw an opportunity to impress.”
Still trying to work out exactly why it makes me feel sandpapery, but IT DOES.
Haha, those women, always encouraging men of science to make breakthroughs by being curious and sexy.
“Whitlock wasn’t one to let a total lack of knowledge stop him from mansplaining”
Who here remembers reading Joan M. Lexau’s Striped Ice Cream? Segregated swimming pools were a huge part of that book.
MALLORY SAW THAT MICROBIOME SPRAY ARTICLE WHEN MY SISTER POSTED IT ON MY FACEBOOK WALL AND NOW SHE IS ON HERE DISRESPECTING THE ENTIRE O’NEAL FAMILY
My hair looks way better without shampoo and doesn’t smell bad, sorrrrryyyy! Soap is essential for your armpits/feet/nethers, but I would totally use that microbiome stuff on the rest of my body, sorrrryyyyyy!!
I’m not going to insult your hair on the Internet, Lauren.
Excuse me????
The BBC has a great article about David Wood and his search for his mother. His dad comes off as less awful, but perhaps because he doesn’t get much chance to speak. Also, it gets into Yarima’s experience more. http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-23758087
I’m reading that NYT article about dirty people, and this threw me off: “The only way that horses could evolve this behavior was if they had substantial evolutionary benefits from it”
I’m no scientician, but this seems wrong totally. Horses could roll in dirt because it feels good, right? So long as the trait was not disadvantageous genetically, they could engage it even without evolutionary benefit, right? Bueller?
YES, and furthermore, fuck evolutionary psychology right in the ear.
My initial response to that was, “NO, no fucking for evolutionary psychology. It might reproduce.”
Then I imagined a male evolutionary psychologist poking himself in the ear with a dildo. That would be acceptable.
no you don’t get it
everything happens for a reason and that reason is pressing evolutionary necessity
you evolved to write this post
long hair looks good underwater. When you come up it looks like crap, but underwater it swirls around and at least it FEELS like it looks amazing. This shift between glamorous and horrible amazed me as a child in the pool
the stupid crystal shard deodorant. I ONLY used it AFTER showering, yet it absorbed moisture and became “odorant” omg. It was like a phantom smell making me think “I better use some deodorant!!” NO
~~~~~~*~*~”he’s shorter than Al Pacino”~*~*~~~~~~
I click the link to buy the book and it takes me to the (admittedly best thing ever written about) Latkes article (which I would happily re-read every day for the rest of my life). Where can I buy the book? HELP ME BUY THE BOOK. (Or maybe help me to not suck at link clinking. Either way.)
http://www.gofundme.com/9khzfo
My theory on mermaid hair was always that they wouldn’t be able to forge blades/make scissors underwater. Same reason dolphins can’t make shivs.
the answer is narcissistic personality disorder.
I remember well that documentary about the anthropologist and his Yanomami wife. No surprise it turned out so badly.
Re: the house idea – have you read Murakami’s 1Q84? One of the protagonists, Aomame, works with an older, very wealthy woman called the Dowager, who owns a house like that for women who have been the victims of domestic abuse. Sometimes she also pays Aomame to kill abusive men. And Aomame teaches (I think Aomame teachers it and not the Dowager – it’s been a while since I’ve read it and I can’t remember) a self-defense class for women that is all about the proper technique to kick a dude in the balls.