Mallory went home yesterday. It was hard. We also worked out again. We did TRX walk-downs with tabletop rows. They were GARBAGE. They were such garbage I can’t even find videos of them online, because no one else is willing to do them. She did great. I also made her my beef-and-yogurt dish, because it’s her favourite thing that I make, and you should make it right away. Ugh, I miss her. No more talking about Mallory.
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Boston’s segregated nightlife.
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i literally do not understand:
Dear Prudence,
I am a career-driven woman recently married to a similarly career-driven man, and we both plan to continue our child-free existence. I happen to be the type of person who craves the approval of my husband’s family, but they have given me the cold shoulder. My husband’s mother and sister also see children as the most valued products of a relationship. Recently, in a moment of utter stupidity and desperation (and after a glass of wine or two), I texted his mother that I was expecting. Now they love me! I get messages during the day from my mother-in-law and sister-in-law, including lengthy emails full of pregnancy and child-rearing advice. We live far away, but at some point my lie is going to be revealed. I have asked my husband to stay silent until I can figure out how to fix things, but in doing so have made him an accessory to my lie. How do I come clean while minimizing the inevitable damage? I am normally clear-headed and smart, so I still can’t believe I did this and have allowed it to go on for over a month!
—Liar Liar
You probably have to have a fake miscarriage now, honestly. it’s a awful thing to do, but since this is what has happened, that’s my advice. I guess “false alarm” is better, that’s what Prudie recommends. Also therapy.
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OH MY GOD gay men draw vaginas w mixed results
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The Hairpin has a cool piece on the history of the novel-diary/diary-novel!
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This is my everything. RT @kevin_reiss: WaPo Letter to the Editor of the day pic.twitter.com/hBnQ79Amy0
— Jack Kogod (@Unsilent) July 31, 2014
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Anna May Wong biopic is a go!
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I don’t read GOMI a ton now bc I am always afraid I will be on it, but I’ll be damned if it doesn’t serve a mild, necessarily corrective purpose in our society.
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Bulletproof Stockings (the Hasidic girl-group) is playing New York’s Arlene’s Grocery on August 7th, should you be into that!
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This is a really lovely tribute to the late Canadian poet Bronwen Wallace, which I encourage you to watch.
Tags: feminism, link roundup, the internet
#notallcavemen
yabba dabba don’t lump all cave men together
Man those in-laws are jerks. And that lady is an object lesson on why drunk texting is never a good idea.
The first Rule of Texting (teach your kids!) DO NOT DRINK AND TEXT
There should be an app that locks your screen for certain people if your phone smells alcohol
That lady should definitely come clean, but pretend she did it on purpose, and be all self-righteous about it. “It was a social experiment! Look at yourself, people! Look what you made me do!”
I wanted to chuckle over and over to myself about the idea that Boston hides its black people when I began reading the segregated nightlife piece.
Also, out of curiosity: are there cities where the nightlife isn’t so clearly segregated? (e.g. places have more than 4 black people in a predominantly white space, or vice versa, in a space of less than 50 people.) I have admittedly limited experience with this.
I would very much like to go to that Bulletproof Stockings show…any fellow NYCers/Coterians interested?
I am! And I’ve never been to a show at Arlene’s Grocery, despite being here for 10 years.
I am! I was recently introduced to punk rock karaoke night at Arlene’s Grocery so that place already has won my heart.
Wow, there is a LOT going on in that entire Dear Prudence.
I am only on the first letter and WOW.
I cannot lie to my Toast-friends – I have, occasionally and very briefly, considered lying and saying that I’m infertile just so my mother and grandmothers will stop pressuring me to pop out a baby. (Conversation I had with one of the grandmothers a while back: “I just finished my Master’s degree!” “That’s nice, but when are you having a baby?” “Um, well, I’m still pretty young…” “Young? You’re 25! I was married at 19 and had your father at 20!”) I know this would be a shitty thing to do and it would be really insensitive to make light of a condition that’s very heartbreaking for a lot of people who actually have it… but I sympathize with that LW and her drunk texting.
I regularly laugh it off and say “well, I’m planning to adopt a med student so I can skip the work and have someone to take care of us when we’re old!” And then you can embellish details.
I used to say “whenever we’re ready” but that is hard line to push when talking to older women who may not have been the most financially or socially or whatever prepared for having kids!
“I like sleep” is another one I like to use.
p.s. I use this with in=laws too, but it works well only because I get along with them! ha.
All families have flaws, but I realize I should stop complaining about when I got my masters and my father’s response was, “Great, now when are you going back for your PhD?” That’s a much better response than “BABIES!”
Hahahaha I get both, but fortunately not from the same people. “Mom, no one gets a PhD in Urban Planning unless they’re going to teach..” “So…?”
My parents settled for my MS in urban planning after I dropped out of law school. They’ve given up on grandchildren, bless them. At any rate, fist bump, fellow planner.
Don’t go back, it’s a trap.
Please don’t lie. You’re right, it would be insensitive to the truly infertile and heartbroken about it. Maybe assure the asker of intrusive questions that you will certainly alert them right away to any future pregnancy. Then work on how you feel about your choices. Delaying parenthood or avoiding it altogether, as I have, is not a stance you have to defend once you feel certain about it. It does take time to feel certain. Take your time. You have my support.
Not to disrespect your grandmother, but 25 is young. Sooooo young. Sheesh granny, it’s a new era!
If I wanted to disrespect my grandmother, I would point out that she got divorced shortly after having my father at age 20, so she’s not exactly an example I’d like to follow in that regard…
oh SNAP
I respectfully have never understood- but the anguish sure comes through- why people feel it’s “disrespectful” to have honest conversations with parents, grandparents, others on Who You Really Are. Can’t they be persuaded to see that by participating, what a gift they are being given?
You know what worked for me, for real? I started telling the wannabe grandmothers that every time they asked me when I was going to get pregnant, I’d delay having babies for a year.
It was joke-y, but it totally did work without pissing people off, for whatever reason. A non-confrontational way to say “stay out of my business.” Of course, it only works if you do think you’ll want kids eventually, because if you aren’t gonna have ’em, you should just say that and tear off the band-aid. RoseCamelia’s right, you don’t have to explain/defend your choice to anyone.
I’ve known since I was about 14 that I don’t want kids, and I’ve told them this, but every time the only response I get is “You’ll change your mind, you’ll seeeeee.”
My brother and his girlfriend are trying to have a baby, so hopefully they’ll succeed soon and take the pressure off me. (Although I just know this will provoke cries of “Don’t you love your niece/nephew? Aren’t babies adorable? I bet you can’t wait to have one of your own!”)
Ughhhh. That’s the worst.
Not just “you’ll change your mind!” but also “but you’re so good with children!”
yes, because being able to handle kids I won’t ever see again, and not having to care about actually raising them is the same thing as being a parent.
I like kids just fine! I enjoy talking to them when I choose to. But parenting? HA. No.
(People also seem to think I should be a teacher. Ha ha ha ha. good joke.)
I’m almost 47. I haven’t changed MY mind. Nope, nope, nope. Ain’t happening. I provide my geriatric eggs with their own tiny walkers and wave them goodbye as they exit every month.
I had my daughter after my husband and I were both done with our graduate degrees, so we did tolerate years of this kind of talk. I did everything from pointing out that we had two “bouncing baby graduate degrees,” to saying that it would be unwise to get pregnant without health insurance, to suggesting that it was rude of them to bring up my sex life at the dinner table, to flat-out stating that what we did with our bodies was no one’s business. It got through to my mother, but my mother-in-law… well.
When I told an old friend that I wasn’t planning to have kids, she said, “But then you’ll never know the joy of having children!” which I actually thought was a very nice way of saying it. But I did reply, “But I will know the joy of NOT having children” 😀
That GOMI article makes me really sad. Like, why do you need to “point and shrug and go WTF?” at other people who are making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year? Because you don’t like what they have to say, or you think it’s stupid? But you have an entire website devoted to thinking THEY’RE stupid and other people think THAT’S stupid, so….
There is enough heartburn and ache and stress in this world. People are getting death threats and abusive phone calls because PEOPLE DON’T LIKE THEIR BLOGS. Come on.
It is essentially monetized bullying. I looked through the site for a few weeks and it just made me sick to my stomach. Sure most lifestyle blogs are goofy and self absorbed, but no one is forcing you to look at them! And the forums, jesus christ.
It just makes me so sad to see the TIME that some people put into this. Like, really? You hate some anonymous person so much you need a whole different forum devoted to trashing them? But why? If you don’t like a blog nobody is forcing you to read it. Just…..save your blood pressure and delete it from your bookmarks, you know?
So, I hadn’t heard of GOMI before this article, and I just spent a few minutes perusing the first few pages of the main site. I am sure the forums are cesspit of awful, because people make cesspits of awful when left to their own devices, but most of the actual posts seemed to be pointing out instances of genuinely bad behavior with an air of…exasperation? Which I can understand as necessary if you’re embroiled in that kind of parenting community. Like, on this site we bitch about straight white men a lot, and while I don’t think that is uncomplicated, I think it serves a legitimate purpose of catharsis. I think if you were otherwise isolated from fellow like-minded parents and the closest you could get to a community was what you found online, this kind of thing could be sanity saving. The whole Instagram thing…I mean, damn. I’d bet a ton of money that Instagram has no desire whatsoever to fuck with user accounts if they can avoid it, but that someone doing analytics for them was like, hey, here are some creepy patters of dudes who are totally unconnected to any mothers but possibly connected to each other spending a lot of time looking at naked kid pictures SOUND THE GODDAMN ALARM. Because the last thing any commercial social network wants to do (assuming it’s not run by the libertarian geniuses at reddit) is cultivate a community of active, creeping pedophiles. It just doesn’t seem controversial to me that a network might not be cool with public naked kid pictures, and to turn that into a form of martyrdom (for profit) seems pretty worthy of ridicule. There seems a place for cynicism, here, is what I’m saying.
All that said, no way I’m gonna wade into the forums.
I hadn’t heard of them either and just lost over an hour of my day in the main site. I didn’t even recognize most of the bloggers they were posting about but I can’t imagine spending that much energy on hating people you don’t even know.
I briefly looked at a few entries in the forums and no. Just no.
YEEESSS. I read a lot of the blogs that are mentioned in that article, and it makes my heart hurt knowing that there is an entire site dedicated to insulting them. I don’t know the bloggers in person but I enjoy their content. Isn’t that enough? You’ve said it very well – there’s enough bullshit in the world, so how is it helpful to consciously be creating more??
Seriously. I’m sure there are hundreds of thousands of blogs out there that I don’t like, but I DON’T READ THEM. It’s that simple!
It’s interesting, you know! I used to read the Reblogging Julia sites, and decided it was not good for me and stopped, but GOMI never set off my NOPE radar in the same way. Maybe it’s gotten harsher since I stopped reading? I don’t really think the forums were in swing yet, for example.
I think the forums haven’t done any good. It’s just endless sniping and biting and they go after Tumblr and other smaller blogs as well. The write-ups can be bad, but the forums I think have unleashed a new breed of hatefulness.
I have visited the forums, and I found some valid criticisms in there, but you have to wade through a lot of bullshit and wild speculation to find it.
I lurk on the xojane forum sometimes and it’s mostly accurate/funny. Ppl step over the line sometimes, but they usually get called on it. I don’t know about any of the other forums, though.
Now I’m outing myself as one of the horrible, i.e. active GOMI reader, but Nicole, you’re not mentioned. And if they would start, I would go APESHIT on them. The Toast is a SOMI forever.
actually there is some discussion of The Toast on there (I went looking for it bc I’m a glutton for punishment) but it mostly serves to reveal that the people discussing it have sub-par senses of humor and just don’t “get it”
SOAR ABOVE INTERNET SNIPING AND CREATE THINGS, MY LOVES
I’ll admit that I’ve read GOMI on and off for a couple of months, and I do occasionally feel a tiny bit guilty about it, since I honestly don’t go in for mean-spirited things as a general rule…but some of the points they make are really valid, and it’s supremely entertaining. I found it when looking for people who were similarly bothered by a particular wedding blog, and I, um…read the entire 100 page+ forum thread. There’s a good amount of pointless vitriol, but there’s also some really thoughtful criticism.
Not a GOMIer, but I am an occasional shit-talker, and I totally get it. It can be nice to laugh at people who are more successful then you. “You spent a thousand dollars on that outfit but my thrift store outfit looks cooler” or “you have a gorgeous kitchen but your kale smoothies look disgusting,” that kind of thing. I think especially when people make a lot of money for seemingly doing little, in a culture where the amount of money you make is considered the only real measure of success, it makes a lot of sense that people find ways to laugh at people who make more money. There’s obviously a bunch of other stuff going into it, especially gender stuff, but I honestly think a lot of it is about class.
I know a girl who likes to take photos of men’s shoes she thinks are ugly and post them on instagram with a special hashtag. It’s so awful. Let’s just go to the beach, ok? Or read a book. Or as Mallory says, create something.
Here’s a handy tip from my Sicilian Grandma for your tomato paste can issues: if you can’t find tomato paste in a tube, and you don’t want to throw out the remainder (wasteful, anyway), freeze the remaining tomato paste in tablespoon sized globs in a heavy duty ziploc bag. it lasts a long time and thaws really fast.
gasp you have changed my life
I promise that was 100% sincere.
That’s what I do! (Except when I just throw the can itself in a plastic bag and freeze that. It works OK, except then you have to chip it out with a knife the next time you want some.)
Yeah, that’s what I do but my husband HATES it. I’ll have to try the spoons.
I have a local spice store that will sell tomato powder that you can then just add water to and it makes tomato paste? I’m intrigued, but suspect. Has anyone else tried this?
http://www.thespicehouse.com/spices/tomato-powder
I haven’t tried this but please report back if you check it out!
YUP. I plunk it into a dedicated rigid plastic container, just because I find it easier to sort through/find stuff if the freezer isn’t one jammed-in mass of slippery freezer bags.
Another trick is putting it into an ice tray (that you don’t use for actual ice, obvs) and then popping it out once frozen so you have cute little tomato paste pods of uniform size.
I had never heard of GOMI, but I immediately went to the site to look for posts on Cup of Jo and now I feel like a terrible person
UGH YES. I love Cup of Jo but her life makes no sense to me. How does she make so much noney that she can have a nice life in NY? I don’t get it.
this might sound very naive but I am really surprised at the amount of hate on GOMI*
*i promise i was not born yesterday
smack talk is a competitive sport
(I will say that I do not like Bower Power at all) (I think it’s terrible)
Yes, it is. That is probably the only forum that I actually read on GOMI. She is just…ugh.
“GOMI founder A.—who spoke with Racked and asked that her name not be published, though a quick Google search lifts any veil of anonymity”
*snerk*
NOT OKAY, A___.
This is FASCINATING:
“GOMI foes shower [GOMI founder A] with hate mail. She’s gotten anonymous phone calls that “weren’t too pleasant.” People have sent her photos of her own front door accompanied by death threats.”
Who thinks this way? “I think you’re mean so I’m going to find out where you live and send you death threats!” Nobody’s saying GOMI is sweet and innocent, but that’s so obviously out of proportion.
Humans are amazing.
Turns out anonymity turns bored losers into insane id monsters. I just kinda wonder whether they were always that way and comments section staging areas just let them let their freak flag fly, or if they actually drive otherwise at-worst moderate assholes to dabbling in being the Zodiac Killer
I don’t think it’s anonymity. Facebook and youtube comments were just as noxious and crazypants with real names attached, even though that was supposed to herald the beginning of civility. I think it’s the detachment that comes from not having to face another human being that enables the insanity, like how people will say far more vicious things about others when the subject of the viciousness isn’t present, only…far, far worse. Other people on the internet rarely register fully as real people unless you make a serious effort, I guess.
I am 1000% over the gay male population being all, “ewwwww! vagiiiiiina!” so I think O’Malley’s project could be a good thing. However, I’m not optimistic when Keith constantly refers to vulvas as “vag.”
Somehow it became cute and charming for gay men to participate in a culture that makes women feel that their bodies are dirty and disgusting. It’s plain ol’ misogyny (look, the root gyn- is even in the word!) and sexual orientation does not preclude men from being perpetrators.
Whenever my gay guy friends go into “icky ladyparts” mode, I point out that even though I’m straight and look forward to interacting with peen on occasion, their genitalia is frankly ridiculous.
“Yes, let’s have the most fragile and sensitive bits on the outside. What could go wrong?”
I have not clicked on the link, but my first thought reading the snippet on here was – “I bet if you did this w straight men an astounding number of them would also draw wacky shit.” This “gay men know NOTHING about vaginas and think they’re space aliens” trope is WAY out of hand and I’m over it. Call me when we have quality sex education in this country, cause there are fuckin’ WOMEN out there who could not draw their genitalia accurately because they’ve internalized that their bodies are shameful.
Also, jeeze, I do not interact w penises due to sexual proclivities but I can draw and label the whole set because I took a human sexuality class in college. Not everyone is so lucky. But the overwhelming presence of dicks in this society means I could probably draw one if I hadn’t, just because. Phallocentrism everywhere.
I just think this “what are vaginas lololol” topic speaks a lot more to the invisibility and lack of knowledge about female sex organs in our misogynistic culture in general.
While I agree that it’s not fair to disparage gay men in particular for not knowing about female anatomy, I was speaking more to the phenomenon of gay men going on about how gross vaginas are and getting a free pass for it because they don’t sleep with women. I even see people laughing and calling it charming, which no, it’s just sexist. I’m speaking from personal experience as well as what I’ve noticed in pop culture at large.
While the “what are vaginas lol” definitely speaks to our misogynistic culture,”vaginas are DISGUSTING and I’m going to vomit if we talk about them” is specific to the gay male community & I hope that’s what this project is trying to address.
Oh no I wasn’t trying to give gay men a particular pass on this, or say you were unfairly calling it out. I think you’re absolutely right. There is a very specific kind of misogyny gay men get away with and it’s gross. From being allowed to call vaginas “gross” to feeling entitled to women’s space – including unconsented touching, esp breasts, because it’s “not sexual”. Autostraddle once had a fascinating open thread about this where people shared their brushes with gay male misogyny. It’s definitely something that doesn’t get talked about enough even within the queer community.
I guess I was trying to draw a thread connecting it to wider sexist culture where no one is allowed to know about or like vaginas, but somehow because (most) gay men neither have nor regularly interact with vaginas, they have a free pass on verbalizing some of the worst cultural attitudes about vaginas and hiding it with a sheen of “it’s a JOKE because GAY” when in reality it’s just the same sexist bile.
One thing I bristle at with teh boyz is they were able to muster up support pretty quickly for their civil rights issues largely because they have so many supportive and loving female friends.
Yet, where’s the support in kind for women’s issues, equal pay, etc? I’d like to enlist George Takei to marshall some love for us.
You just have to go to a public bathroom and look at the walls to know how to draw a dick. They are everywhere. Just…a world o dicks
I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised if you read the link! It’s actually not at all “lol look at these dumb gays who don’t know what a woman’s crotch looks like.” They have a range of drawings from the accurate to the artistic to the frankly hilarious (cookie monster).
I liked the one where a lady was doing a high kick and everything was made of rainbows. It was awesome.
Thank you!!!! I thought the items shown in the brief article were mostly lovely – and I don’t think the point of the article was “sexist bile” or “gay dudes [thinking they have a] get out of jail free card for… bigoted bullshit” AT ALL. Clearly. If you click on the link and read it.
And yo, by the way, this whole comment thread kind of turned into unsupported gay-male-bashing, or it feels that way to me.
Yeah, for some reason gay dudes sometimes seem to think that being gay gives them a get out of jail free card for every other kind of bigoted bullshit, and it just does not. No. You are still perfectly capable of being assholes. Please stop.
Not to mention the free pass some of them feel they have to violate my physical boundaries. No sir, you may not stroke my hair or feel my breasts just because you’re not interested in having sex with me.
THIS. boundaries and consent are still a thing!
I keep reading GOMI and picturing Hank’s long suffering partner Steve Gomez from Breaking Bad, sitting somewhere shit talking lifestyle blogs all day.
I love this so, so much.
Hank can get in on this too.
“Jesus Christ, Jane Pratt, they’re minerals!”
I’m not a GOMI-er, but I’m glad it exists- mostly because sometimes I’m reading a blog and get a vibe that something’s been left out or there is something weird going on. So I cruise on over to GOMI to see what the scoop is. Honestly most bloggers don’t want to be “called out” on their blogs, so it’s good to have a place for people to let off that steam. And I think it’s pretty easy to see which posters are way too down the rabbit hole. People who hate Dooce tend to be WAY overboard about it. I think allot of stay at home/work from home/work outside of home, rage gets tunneled through how people view her.
Headline: My Mother is a Catfish
Faulkner reference on Prudie?
I don’t know if this has been making the rounds on your FB feeds and so on, but it’s a great piece.
http://www.esquire.com/features/abortion-ministry…
“In Mississippi, there is only one clinic where a woman can go if she needs an abortion. The state is trying to close it down. At that clinic, there is a doctor who tends to the needs of these women, and he has to fly in from out of state to do it. There is no shutting him down.”
Dog bless that man.
He just sounds so *kind*, you know? I’m not sure I’ve ever experienced a doctor visit that was gentle and funny and informative. He should give classes on bedside manner.
“The people who talk about black genocide are the same people who defund Head Start and food stamps and are now trying to dismantle public education by encouraging voucher systems—all of the systems that need to be in place to take care of those black babies. It’s diabolical.”
YES. Dr. Parker is a hero.
I liked this piece a lot, and I thank you for posting it. I do have one major qualm about it, though, which is the apparent presence of the male reporter in the consulting room with these women, many of whom are traumatized and some of whom are not legal adults. I feel torn because the conversations he’s recorded them having with the doctor are heartbreaking and valuable, but at the same time I can’t help but feel that the presence of a strange, random man in the room recording what you say during potentially one of the most stressful and horrible moments of your life is really invasive. I’m sure he got their permission but I have definitely been in the position where a doctor asked me if a student or w/e could come in the room during my consultation and I said yes even though I didn’t want to because we’re just kind of programmed to obey doctors no matter what.
I don’t know what the answer is, it just makes me uncomfortable thinking that these women might have felt they had to endure yet another layer of having their privacy invaded during this stressful time.
Agreed. I hope it was very much a prior informed consent and you can decline if you do not wish to have this person present scenario. (versus just springing it on them at the last minute)
I took a look at GOMI out of curiosity and had to stop when I got to a post that started with “Michelle Phan, allegedly Asian.” What??
Yeah, that was a big ole record scratch, followed by a sad trombone.
can someone do lesbians drawing penises?
I did the same thing when I first heard of it. I actually don't mind Cup of Jo in a kind of 'this is how the other half lives' sort of way, but I got really wound up by one of her posts and left a rather acerbic comment on it. Nothing actually nasty, just trying to call out the classist bullshit on one of those 'motherhood around the world' posts (which I usually find interesting!) I haven't checked to see if she let it through or not.
Playground life got so much better once I realised you could knee a boy in the balls.
Hank can get in on this too.
"Jesus Christ, Jane Pratt, they're minerals!"
I’m confused as to why The Toast would recommend GOMI. I just took a look and wow, nastiness. People read blogs they don’t enjoy, just to speculate about the blogger’s life choices? Like whether or not the bloggers have ever struggled? And to comment derisively about their chins? I could understand a Regretsy type blog that called out people who deserved to be called out. Toast, you don’t usually link to things that make me so sad. 🙁
I realize this is not the point AT ALL and it’s totally fine to not like GOMI but:
FINALLY NICOLE IS THE ONE WHO IS BEING TOO MEAN AND NOT ME
HOW DOES IT FEEL NICOLE
HOW DOES IT FEEEEEL
Gee, that aura thing really got to you, huh?
one of the other Dear Prudies in that bunch starts off, “I watch children from my home for income” and clearly that sounds like someone is paying this woman to look out of her window at any children who might be passing by or playing in a yard or whatever. where can I get this job? hmm. there are currently no children in the courtyard of my building, maybe someone will pay me to look at squirrels.
A squirrel fell out of a tree onto my front lawn yesterday. I was just sitting on the front step, rooting a spider plant, and I hear “rustlerustleTHUMP” and there was this confused-looking squirrel sitting on the lawn.
Isaac Newton: big hair, no heart FOREVER.
Yes, it is. That is probably the only forum that I actually read on GOMI. She is just…ugh.