Bigfoot and the people who love him:
Here’s what I learn from these Bigfooters in the next 24 hours: Never hold a staring contest with a Sasquatch. Keep any white lights turned off and stowed away. They’re preternaturally strong, fast and clever. They have a penchant for chucking giant rocks at people when they’re feeling threatened. They can swim 100 yards without coming up for air. They prey on deer. They fish for salmon. They like peanut butter sandwiches. If you set out a snack for them on a picnic table or back porch, like a bag of apples or watermelon rind, they might leave you a gift in its place — a pile of stones or feathers or 10 dead field mice wrapped in leaves of grass. The females secrete a pleasant, cinnamony odor. The males, according to Taylor, reek of “dead dog, B.O., urine and garbage — mixed together and set on fire.” They migrate with their food supply. Like cats, their eyes glow in the dark.
Marriage advice in the 1950s (this is more ridiculous than even I had guessed):
For a modern reader of the column’s 1950s and ’60s archives, it’s hard not to be horrified by the complete and utter awfulness of many of the husbands – both their behaviours, as reported by their wives, and their own responses to counselling. Perhaps more shocking still are the counsellor’s responses. No matter how bad it got, the counsellor always managed to find a way to blame the woman for the couple’s problems.
Having a miscarriage isn’t illegal.
Here are some ways to help your local domestic violence shelter. Here’s a Maryland-specific one. Fuck Ray Rice, fuck the NFL (the Ravens have now cut him, to be fair, but I don’t know what they magically learned from the video they didn’t already know from probably having already watched the video), and fuck the “pretrial diversion” which is SUPPOSED to be there for non-violent offenders. I also can’t imagine that Janay Rice had a better day bc TMZ leaked the video.
loll gooble gobble gooble gobble one of us one of us:
Q. 13-Year-Old Daughter Reading Porn Disguised as Fan Fiction: I discovered my 13-year-old daughter has been reading fan fiction for a very popular all boy band which describes in explicit detail sex acts between the male band members. I immediately instituted parental control and blocked the sites. We had a brief talk—need a longer one, but I’m not sure what to say? This can’t be good for her at 13—reading about explicit sex between ANY two people. Am I overreacting?
will read anything about how badly American Beauty has aged:
When I was a teenager in the suburbs, I thought my life to be very romantic: the silence, the boredom, the lush, predictable scenery, the feeling of being trapped. My journal was filled with pseudo-profound revelations on the human condition. I never shut up in English class. American Beauty was my favorite movie of all time. I loved it like a friend, and it could occasionally take precedence over my actual friends. I clearly remember shushing a room full of them when they happened to walk into my home during the final monologue. I loved this movie madly, fervently, religiously.
k.d. lang and Roseanne Cash singing “You Ain’t Woman Enough”:
One of my favorite things about the world is how much Bigfoot stays in our collective consciousness. (One of my least favorite things is domestic violence.)
Also, is this a good place to cautiously and graciously ask if anyone has heard anything about the job posting…? /cautious /gracious
Since we’re talking about Bigfoot, has anyone seen the film Willow Creek? I thought it was surprisingly good. Never would have expected to be even slightly scared by a film about Bigfoot, but there you go.
You can combine those two via the “I love a Bigfoot” romance novel cottage industry!!
I think you might need slightly more than a cottage at this point (although I guess 289 bigfoot romance novels might fit in a cottage- depends on how many authors that adds up to, I suppose…)
Oh, Prudie. You don’t think the authors of that One Direction smutfic had 13-year-old girls in mind? It was probably a 14-year-old girl who was writing it. You can’t put that genie back in the bottle, mom, once your daughter discovers explicit slashfic a whole new world of possibilities will be opening up for her every time she has a notebook in her hand. (Or not even a notebook but HER IMAGINATION!)
Also, not related, but am I the only person who encounters this problem? Occasionally with Toast links I’ll click on a link or the “Read More” and it will boot me automatically to an ad page (today it was Sleep Country, yesterday it was something regarding free recipes). If I go back and then click again, issue is resolved.
Yeah, it’s been happening to me as well, but I kept thinking I was clicking the wrong link somehow
It happens to me quite a lot.
YES this happens to me often, but not always, and only when I’m reading The Toast on my iPhone. It also happens sometimes when i click to load replies in the comments. I keep meaning to email their web person (Nick?) about it but haven’t gotten around to it.
It happens on my iPhone as well, but it seems to be a function of not waiting for the page to completely load so you think you’re clicking read more, which is what you see . . . but that ad is somehow the actual location you’re clicking.
I *always* have that happen to me when I’m trying to read The Toast on my phone. No matter how long I wait or how carefully I tap the link, I am invariably taken to an ad page.
Hmm. It only happens sometimes for me. I use Chrome. You?
I use Safari on the phone and Chrome on my computer.
I have noticed another phenomenon which I’m not sure is really a bug, but since we’re all talking about our Toast issues, I figured I should bring it up. For the articles listed banner-style at the top of the page, the title doesn’t seem to be a link, just whatever fraction of the accompanying image is left above the title area.
For example, if I wanted to read “Dating other women as a trans woman” I would have to click on the sliver of landscape at the top, because the whole dark gray “Dating other women…” part isn’t a hyperlink. Is that a deliberate thing?
Hi winterbymorning! Thansk for posting this. Can you tell me what device and browser your screencap is from? I just checked us out on Firefox, Chrome and Safari and couldn’t get it to reproduce, no matter how I sized the window. Thank you!
Hello! I get this issue with Chrome and Safari on a Mac and with Internet Explorer on a PC.
(Don’t look at me like that! They make us use IE at work!)
Same, except it happens maybe 40% of the time. But it really doesn’t seem to be about things moving around; the link has just decided it’s going somewhere else.
It has happened every day for the past week. Only the Morning Links, and only the first click of the day. And I read the links on my laptop. Dell. Using chrome. In central time zone. Usually sometime between 8:30am and 9 am. Uhhhh….what other random details can I provide?
Yes, exactly. Only the link roundup, only the first time daily. I use Chrome.
Hello there! Do you mean this happens reliably each day? If so, the next time it happens, can you both send me a link to the ad it directed you to, aka the outbound url, [email protected] ? Thanks a bunch!
This happens to me a lot, especially when I’m using Safari on my phone.
Happens to me as well, and also sometimes when opening up collapsed comment threads. I have tried clearing cache as advised by Maria last week, but it’s not stopped. (Safari on a laptop, not on phone.)
To be fair, I know plenty of 30 year old women writing One Direction fic, but I think they all just try to forget that they themselves were reading it in Harry Potter or something back in their middle school days.
I’d much rather any hypothetical daughter of mine be reading smutty fic than the kind of stuff I was reading at that age and younger. Yeesh. At least fic tends to assume everyone involved is human and has emotions and stuff.
Only on a mobile page, not on the actual computer … but it happens to me EVERY TIME on the mobile page.
It happens to me on Google Chrome on a Mac, but I’ve discovered that if I look at the bottom of my browser while my mouse is hovering over the link, Chrome will tell me where the link is going. If the URL is obviously not a Toast page, I don’t even have to reload–I just move the mouse away and come back, and the correct URL will be there. Super weird but workable.
This happens to me as well, but I have to go to another link and come back. The first time I opened this thread it was fine, then when I came back a second time it wanted to take me to a UK debt assistance site, which is not an ad on the page that I can see, and then I read the serial killer post and tried again here and it was fine. It’s not only link roundups for me though, it has happened on all sorts of posts.
Hi there! Can you send a screencap of that outbound url the next time this is happening? It’s super helpful for troubleshooting. You can reach me at [email protected]
That happens a lot to me too, especially when I try and click to sort the comments :/ This is on an android phone, probably at weird times, using the default internet browser.
HAPPENS ALL THE TIME. But only on my work PC using Firefox.
I usually don’t have any problems using my personal Macbook and Chrome.
Yeah, has Prudie even SEEN fanfiction?
Yes, it happens almost every time I try to read The Toast on my phone. For a long time I didn’t have internet at my house, so I read the Toast on my phone, and there were days when I would see a really interesting article and never be able to read it. There’s no connection that I can see between the ads on the Toast and the site I get taken to. And I always wait for the page to load fully before clicking; it makes no difference.
Ugh, this American Beauty piece is going to break my heart, isn’t it? It was, of course, one of my favorite movies when I was a teenager, along with Rushmore. I won’t revisit either of them for fear that they won’t hold up to how ideal they were at the time. Ditto Moulin Rouge and Amelie, come to think of it.
Also, I’m pretty sure Lester Burnham was my Hot Dad Awakening that’s become a serious problem in the decade since I first saw American Beauty.
Nobody better come for Rushmore, I watch that like once every six months and still love it.
The barber shop from Rushmore is at the end of my street. Same guys still work there.
Rushmore holds up!
Rushmore totally holds up, if you still have passion in your soul and a dream in your heart.
I do! This is accurate! Now I just want to run through all the quotes. All of them. Especially “I saved Latin. What did you ever do?”
“I WROTE and DIRECTED a HIT PLAY! And I’m in love with you.”
“I like your nurse’s uniform, guy.”
“These are OR scrubs.”
“O, R they?”
“O.R. they?” is a joke that gets said in my house at least once a week. This movie also totally holds up.
Max: The truth is, neither one of us has the slightest idea where this relationship is going. We can’t predict the future.
Rosemary: We don’t have a relationship.
Max: But we’re friends.
Rosemary: Yes, and that’s all we’re *going* to be.
Max: That’s all I meant by “relationship.” You want me to grab a dictionary?
Amelie holds up in the sense of it being a movie about how beautiful Paris can be during that one hour of the day.
Also the suicidal goldfish is still funny.
We tried re-watching Amelie after Friendsgiving dinner last November because I’d gotten super hooked on listening to Yann Tierson’s music while writing. We just could not finish it, though. I remembered it as vivid, charming, and whimsical, but it was a lot slower-paced and melancholy than we could handle after a plateful of roast duck and mashed potatoes.
I still love Amelie. I think I like Delicatessen better, but Amelie has the same sort of comfort for me that rereading Emma or watching Clueless has. I therefore save it and deploy it judiciously, watching it only every few years, usually when I’m sick. There are completely valid criticisms to be made about it, but it’s sealed in my head as A Movie I Love.
I’ve only seen American Beauty once and disliked it for the reasons the author describes, but my husband likes it a lot, so we’re going to have to rewatch it together and revisit these issues. But the comments on that piece, good GOD. Have people who comment on (other) websites lost all ability to engage critically with something they dislike, or are misspelled ad hominem attacks all that they have left?
Yes, and yes, apparently. Also, the guys really seem to enjoy ragging on the author because she mentions Women’s Studies, which to them is an automatic discreditor. Fascinating.
Oh good heavens, I just came here to say the same thing. How many white hetero cis dudes are crying into their dinner Cheerios, for someone dared slight their tattered idols?
And apparently she is fat too. Ah, Toasties, I came for the humour, but stayed for the misandry!
Moulin Rouge still holds up, in my opinion. Maybe I take it a bit more camp than I used to? But still great.
Agreed. You just have to see it as a sparkly, melodramatic spectacle and not the Greatest Love Story Ever OMG. And c’mon, that Roxanne Tango is pretty great.
The Roxanne tango is fantastic. Easily the best scene in the movie. The actual song now sounds like a pathetic imitation.
I think it holds up too!
DAMN now I want to go watch Moulin Rouge. Is it on Netflix?
No, but Strictly Ballroom is:
http://www.netflix.com/WiMovie/60022396
It’s another of Luhrman’s loosely-related Red Curtain Trilogy movies. (The third is Romeo (plus) Juliet. [why the crap can’t I make a plus sign????])
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Red_Curtain_Tril…
But seriously, I do miss Thora Birch. She was the straight goods.
That article is spot-on, but I will say this in American Beauty’s defense: The plastic bag scene rightly gets a lot of shit, but I do appreciate the concept that there is beauty all around us & sometimes we just need to stop and look closer. I try to keep that in mind when I’m having a bad day or in the chemical doldrums (as someone on here perfectly put it). I’ll go outside and find something beautiful (a tree, a nice building, small weed flowers, etc) & feel thankful that I get to see & experience it on a daily basis. A lot of people & art made that point before AB, but AB was the movie that put that idea in my head & I like the movie for that much, at least.
I still love Moulin Rouge, but that might say more about me than it does the movie.
(Of course, I also love the remake of The Producers. It takes a lot to make me dislike a movie musical.)
Come to think of it, the only one I don’t like is Les Miserables, a.k.a. Pathos: The Musical. My theory is that having a bit of distance between me and the actors is needed to make that show a bit less soul-darkening.
I loved Rushmore immensely when I watched it, but I cannot rewatch it, because I was a child who attended private school and then public school, and on my first day in public school I made a little speech, much like in the movie, and it was as ill-judged and awkward. Seeing that the first time and remembering was excruciating enough, but I think if I watched it again, I’d literally die of embarrassment.
One of my favourite movies as a teenager, Fight Club, absolutely does not hold up, but I realized it was kind of bullshit fairly soon after.
If you realize it’s a joke on bros it’s pretty funny. As a young teen I tried to dress like Tyler Durden when I took the PSAT the day after seeing it.
FUCK RAY RICE thank you, thank you for saying that! I am so mad about all of this, and especially so at people patting the Ravens on the back for doing the bare minimum only after they were left with a PR nightmare by the leak of that video. Let’s not forget that the team stood behind him (“he’s a heckuva guy”) and tweeted that victim-blaming bullshit about Janay Rice.
Needless to say, don’t read the comments on the marriage advice article. Ooof and ew.
Yeeeep the first one is especially awful!
Oh nooo I just read them whyyyy whyyyyy
I didn’t until you mentioned it. Aaaaaaargh.
Take the case of Christine Taylor, who was arrested in Iowa for merely saying out loud to a nurse that she had considered abortion.
my eye’s going to be twitching with rage for the rest of the day isn’t it
Always here for some sweet cryptozooid articles!
Okay which one of you guys posted this top comment on Prudie??
Be thankful she’s reading pornographic fan fiction instead of something harmful like Ayn Rand.
— Irma Gerd
BEAUTIFUL
I’m in love.
The username alone is a masterpiece.
YES also much better than Playboy, I gotta say.
Irma Gerd is the El Barto of our time.
We shall fan out across the nation – nay, across the world! – spreading the message in the name of Irma Gerd.
I sailed over to Slate and was greeted by the headline “Should you put butter in your coffee?”
No, no you shouldn’t, what is wrong with you
NO YOU SHOULD IT’S GREAT
It’s definitely great as long as you finish the coffee while it’s still piping hot.
DO NOT LET YOUR BUTTER COFFEE APPROACH ROOM TEMPERATURE.
ewwwwwww
I have a perverse desire to try it. I don’t particularly like the flavor of black coffee, but drink it anyway. I love butter, so really, what’s the worst that could happen? 1 pat of wasted butter? I like it an start trying to convert others to buttery coffee?
For me it’s more like an “oops I ran out of milk” tactic, but if you blend it all together it’s basically just like cream in your coffee.
Isn’t it…oily?
Use a blender!
I don’t have the wherewithal to keep milk on hand but you want me to drag out the blender for my morning coffee? Girl.
http://www.amazon.com/Cuisinart-CSB-76BC-SmartSti…
Keep the base plugged in (I put it in the same outlet as the Kitchenaid), just wash the detachable blade piece in the dishwasher/kitchen sink as you would a stirring spoon.
Also acceptable: shake it up in a glass jar real good.
Butter in tea is popular in central Asia I think…
So the Janay Rice thing has brought up a lot of stuff for me. I don’t like that the video was leaked, but I also don’t like that if it WEREN’T leaked, Ray probably wouldn’t have been punished. I don’t like that she’s with him, but I don’t like that I feel myself judging her for her choices. I don’t know where the line is between helping victims and letting them decide what’s best for them, and when is the right moment to intervene, and when it just turns into concern trolling.
Yes to all of this.
It is such a hard thing to navigate. I’ve been feeling similarly, and mostly been trying to keep my mouth shut and call out victim blaming where I see it. I also reread this essay on Guernica, which mostly made me sad but is a powerful reminder of everything I don’t know about domestic violence.
Yess that essay is so amazing. I feel like calling it out and getting people resources is the best we can do, and hope that victims will feel armed enough to leave/seek help.
It’s not quite a one-to-one analogy, but it makes me think of my New Religious Movements class where we talked about cults and deprogramming. Our professor asked us what we’d do if we were legislators being asked to push through alti-cult legislation- outlaw them entirely? Force them to register with the government? Forcibly remove people from their custody? The answer I came up with was, since cults are essentially abusive relationships on a much larger scale, the only thing we can do is create resources for people who are willing and ready to leave. Frustrating as it is, you can’t make someone leave a bad situation- if you do, the only result will be them mistrusting you and anyone else who tries to convince them to leave.
It is awfully difficult. I have a friend in an emotionaly abusive relationship wh keeps on *almost* leaving and then giving him ‘one more chance’ just as she’s almost gotten free, and it’s getting so hard to not get judgey when the cycle keeps on repeating and repeating, and it’s so very opposite to how I reacted when I was in a similar situation.
I also feel really uncomfortable with using this as a platform to speak about abuse, since it seems Janay didn’t consent to it being used that way. Like, here were are with this “teachable moment” but fuck us for using another woman’s trauma, without her permission, to learn? On the other hand, we should talk more about abuse and what it looks like, and hold those accountable responsible. I just feel uneasy sitting here getting to use this as an opportunity for debate while she’s suffering.
I don’t know, I guess I just don’t understand this line of reasoning on a fundamental level. Other humans are a thing that exist in the world, and how are you going to talk about the world and things that happen in it if you don’t talk about the people in it? I’m sure she *would* like it if no one ever had thoughts or opinions about her. Wouldn’t we all. But that’s just not how life in a society works.
Assaults are crimes, and in our society, crimes are *explicitly* the business of, well, everyone. That’s why they’re (theoretically) prosecuted on behalf of The State and/or The People, who are represented in court by a tax-financed professional prosecutor. I’m honestly not really in charge of how Janay Rice feels about her husband or his crimes or the fact that we know her husband committed a crime, and she’s certainly not in charge of how I feel about it or whether or not I’m allowed to speak about it. I guess that sounds sort of horrible, but the idea that we just won’t talk about domestic violence unless we get any specific person’s consent on it seems baffling at best to me. We use everyone’s lives to learn. That’s just how we learn.
That’s sort of what I’m saying. We should talk about this because it happens, and there are countless examples of it happening. But how much is this actually caring about what happens to Janay, and people using it as an opportunity to talk about the general ideas of it? I don’t think we should do the latter without the former when the conversation is launched from a very specific incident like this.
Also, that “statement” of hers was posted on her private Instagram, so if people are now invading her privacy even more for content and talking points, that seems like just furthering the abuse.
According to the Baltimore Sun, the Instagram account she posted on was public when she posted it and she has confirmed that she intented the statement to be public. I assume she has made the account private since then, probably because of the horrible responses she must be getting.
I draw the line between using specific people’s lives as “teachable examples” and seizing the opportunity to talk about these problems in general. I wouldn’t hesitate to post a link like the one Nicole did (“Today’s a great day to send a few bucks to your local DV shelter!”), but I would want to use great nuance for the former, and consider whether using this specific person’s life in my message is really necessary.
That said, I’m not sure how to rule it out entirely. I’m sitting here trying to think about whether it would be possible to talk clearly about Racism In America In 2014 without saying the words “Michael Brown”. I might be a bit too consequentialist in my thinking on this one, but at some point, a case for changing a world full of harms does need to include some evidence of that harm, and faceless statistics only go so far.
Also: I mentioned yesterday that I have been a Ravens fan, but one thing I didn’t mention is that I also grew up (until age 8) with a dad who was abusive to my mom and my sister. This is ultimately about Jenay, but I can’t help but feel a bit frustrated like you about what is going on. I want to respect what Jenay decides is best for her, but because of growing up watching the legacy of my mom’s choices, I think my feelings are leaning very hard into concern trolling and I’m trying really hard to rein it in. Part of me doesn’t think abusers can be rehabilitated, but I’m not an expert in this area and I probably have selection bias.
I’ll say this though: as far as I can tell (since I was very young) it was ultimately my teenage sister who got my mom to set the legal proceedings in order, and it was her encouraged him to leave by reminding her that as the kids, we ultimately had no choice whatsoever. I grew up relatively trauma-free thanks to her, and I wouldn’t want to wish that task on any other child. I hope their family gets the help that they need to be a healthy one, whatever that means for their living situation.
ETA: I realize that I basically just said “but think about the children!” in that second paragraph, but oftentimes abused women do think “oh no, my child will grow up without a father if I leave” which is very heartbreaking. Anyway, I’ll stop, Jaya’s above point about this becoming a platform to discuss DV without Janay’s consent is huge.
I’m also struggling with the line between advocating for someone who may not know how badly they are being abused and acknowledging that she is an adult who can maker her own choices, even if I don’t agree with them.
Right now, for me, the scales are tipping to the former, only because I think that domestic violence is a weirdly unique form of abuse where the survivor is socially conditioned to internalize responsibility for another person’s behavior. A stranger hauls off and punches you in the street, and there’s no question as to who is at fault, but in domestic situations for some reason, our auto-response seems to be to let the couple sort it out on their own.
I think some of it has to do with the person to whom we afford the benefit of the doubt. I’m afraid that when people “let the couple work it out” we’re inherently affording the benefit of the doubt to the abuser, and assuming that both people must be equal contributors to the situation, so they should have an equal role in its resolution. It’s like reversing Newton’s Third Law and saying that every reaction must have had an equal and opposite action, when there’s never anything equal to (or that calls for) violent abuse as a response.
I’m still working through it, and I’m open for criticism, but that’s kind of where I sit with it for now.
Yep, it’s awfully hard to STFU and think ‘she can make her own choices’ when those choices might get her killed and you care about her.
I think it’s also worth taking into account the fact that most abusers escalate when you try to leave. It’s quite possible she considers herself safer with him (where the patterns are predictable) than she would be in that period after she tried to leave.
It’s incredibly difficult to watch from the outside, but I feel like it’s less “she can make her own choices” and more “she’s the one with the best information about her situation and we should trust that.”
YES.
Yes – the period immediately after deciding to leave is the one when the victim is at the greatest risk. Leaving an abusive relationship is not easy, and I can understand not wanting to make things worse.
“domestic violence is a weirdly unique form of abuse where the survivor is socially conditioned to internalize responsibility for another person’s behavior.”
These words are perfect.
I actually consider the bystanders to be the most important ones to talk to here. Like with college campus assault issues; in theory, focusing on the victims, and how they can protect themselves, or the attackers, how they can learn what does and does not constitute assault, is great. But I think that ultimately, the most effective form of education comes down to “hey, watch out for your friends (and even random strangers!), provide a social support network, and call out sketchy and abusive behavior.” We can’t make abuse victims leave, and rehabilitating abusers is something best left to professionals. But the rest of us can try and create a world in which victims have somewhere to go, where they can tell their stories without being further abused by the rest of society.
I just read Janay Rice’s instagram statement and it’s so, so sad. She’s in such an impossible situation and I really hope the good people in her life are reaching out to her.
Reading the column about 50s’ marriage advice (from eugenicists! fucking A) in the context of what Janay Rice is going through is getting me way depressed at how far we haven’t come.
Especially the last para of the article, where the author is basically like “yeah we all think this is funny now, buuuuut turns out it’s still happening!”
It’s like mocking historical racism. “Ha ha! They sure were horrible in the past! Glad we’re past that! Ha ha…oh.”
re: therapists’ biases towards husbands – just in the 50s and 60s? ha! I remember my mom talking about it (my father was an alcoholic emotional abuser) and, not surprisingly perhaps, I thought she was being overly dramatic.
But then I entered therapy with my alcoholic emotional abuser (yeahhhh) and very similar things happened to me. At first I was chalking it up to the therapist having to really play the middle of the road to ensure she didn’t alienate anyone, but then it became apparent that she wasn’t really interested in helping us establish hard boundaries around abuse, and she even came down on me for encouraging and enabling his behavior. Which is just such a load of BS…
Uuuugh that sucks. Do you think marriage counselors worry about their “success rate,” for lack of a better term, and then maybe try to keep couples together at all costs, even if it’s clear one person is abusive and the relationship needs to end? I wouldn’t be surprised if there are some (shitty) therapists out there doing this.
I was about to edit my post to say that therapists have a pretty tough gig, they can only go off of what people present: maybe my tendency to over-apologize and be neurotically self-aware, and his ability to polish all his turds to a high gloss led to her seeing things a certain way? I don’t know. But I definitely feel that there are some entrenched issues that make it (clearly, in light of recent abuse cases) less likely for women to be believed, and for their needs to be honored.
When my ex and I went to relate, the very first thing she said to us in the very first session was ‘I am not here to keep you together. I am here to help you figure out if staying together is the best course for both of you, and if not, to help you negotiate splitting up as least painfully as possible’.
AMAZING. Love that.
Yeah, it didn’t end in the 50s and 60s. My husband’s mom went through the same thing during his parents’ divorce. The counselor insisted that their marital problems were her fault (playing on her own guilt, which is easy to do), and put all of the responsibility on her to fix it. It was, of course, impossible to fix from only one side. I don’t think the damage was fixed until she went to a counselor after the divorce, who told her how fucked up that was. I think she finally feels like it wasn’t her failure, but it took awhile.
This was in Texas a few years ago. UGH.
“Tell her you love that she’s doing extracurricular reading, but you were really surprised by the kind of thing that is found in fan fiction.”
HAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA (That is my only comment on that).
Even as I read this headline and realize that technically, yes, I grew up as these books were released, the only series I really count as relevant to my childhood/adolescence is Harry Potter.
All the same, this interview with women in my age cohort about what the series (Harry Potter/Twilight/50 Shades of Grey) mean – or don’t mean – to them is pretty interesting.
Wow, the 1950s marriage advice column. It’s kind of shocking, I was looking for something in Google Books not long ago and came across an old women’s magazine – Good Housekeeping, perhaps? – from around 1918 or so. It would not be a stretch to say that the 1918 advice, while being definitely very traditional, was less horrifying than this 1950s stuff. For example, they had readers writing in to discuss whether women needed to know lots about housekeeping and cooking before marriage, and it was more or less agreed that they could learn on the job. (Contrast with “Many a husband has to pay the penalty for his wife’s failure to get any real education in homemaking before she married”). Kind of highlights to me how the 1950s were Peak Conformity Time.
What was also kind of amazing about the 1918 magazine was that, with tiny tweaks in the language, it could have been written today. I mean, they were having the exact same arguments about whether you should rock your babies to sleep or let them cry it out!
Yeah, the Patriarchy Propaganda Machine had to go into overdrive after WWII.
Yeah, that and I think the Establishment was scarred by the big Constitution-altering success of women’s movements in the 20s and 30s as well — not just the suffragettes but also Prohibition, which was seen as a women’s movement (because men were spending all their wages on alcohol and coming home drunk and violent, a real problem in a time when women can’t work outside the home easily/profitably). That, and women founding women’s colleges. It’s amazing to see how many important nationwide organizations were formed and led by women in the period of 1890-1925 or so.
Ooh, good stuff.
just randomly going OMG YES
I’ve been noticing it especially strongly the last few weeks as I watch 90% pre-1942 movies on TCM and then the other 10% are 1944-1953ish and even though the 30s’ stuff can be sexist and cave to gender essentialism, the post-War pictures have me dropping them within ten minutes because they’re so disgustingly Patriarchy Yay! and shit.
it’s especially come home to me as I watch the Pre-Code Friday Spotlight this month, and you get stories about women being sexually independent of their husbands, or otherwise not completely folding their identities into the Man’s. compared to something like EVERY GIRL SHOULD BE MARRIED (that stupid Cary Grant post-War pic with Betsy Drake) or SEVEN BRIDES FOR SEVEN BROTHERS (boo hiss hate that one so much).
Oh god, Seven Brides For Seven Brothers. That is right up there with Pretty Woman for me — fun to watch, terrible to think about.
Interesting you say that, because my husband and I talk fairly regularly about how we’re living in the 50s, AKA Peak Conformity Time, right now. People may not be conforming to quite the same things as in the 50s, or to the same norms across different-thinking groups. But from parenting to gender roles to education to sex to cultural touchstones, it’s all about Fitting In. Sigh.
I think that’s very interesting! I wonder if because there are more options/family structures open to us today versus the 1950s, people aren’t just a little bit desperate to fit in to their own social crowds just to reassure themselves that they’re “doing it right.” It would explain the massive amount of marriage/wedding/parenting etc advice out there.
I wonder if this is partially because of the explosion of social media? You’re supposed to package all of your (formerly) private life moments so that they’re palatable for mass consumption. Suddenly what you ate for breakfast becomes the business of your extended family, your coworkers, that dude who sat behind you in 9th grade AP English, etc. No wonder everything becomes about demonstrating how well you fit in.
Sarah’s American Beauty piece is so awesome but oh my God I wish I hadn’t scrolled down to the comments. ONLY HERE IS THAT ACCEPTABLE. Someday I’ll learn.
Ugh, yes, I unfortunately got one comment in before my mouse reached the “close tab” x of sanity.
So let us discuss it here. I must admit to having never seen either Spice World or American Beauty, but I enjoyed reading both the pieces back-to-back this morning. I am now allllmost more inclined to watch Spice World if I ever were to watch one of them. I really can’t imagine a Humbert Humbert that we’re supposed to sympathize with.
I’d never seen American Beauty, either, but found myself nodding along with her assessment of it based on what I know. Not only about AB but about…most stories about dissatisfied middle-aged men? “Ah, yeah, of course he’s the jerk but we’re supposed to think he’s the hero, that’s how it goes.” Not sure why I was surprised to then scroll down and see variations of “get laid and chill out,” but there you go.
“Obviously he’s a Jesus metaphor, so your entire review is invalid”
Ew, what? No, no. No. A Jesus metaphor? Really? Well that’s disgusting. I was 17 when that movie came out, and obviously I ALSO liked it a lot at the time, but Lester himself made me deeply uncomfortable.
Honestly, I think in 50 years we’ll look at the advice columns in Cosmo and the like the way we’re looking at these Ladies’ Home Journal columns. Granted, I haven’t picked up a Cosmo in a few years, but I remember all kinds of questions like “I hate going down on my BF but he won’t stop asking for it!” with answers along the lines of “Here’s how you learn to love BJs in order to keep your man” rather than “you shouldn’t be with someone who doesn’t respect your limits.”
Someone posted that Prudie column on Tumblr yesterday and I was DELIGHTED. I feel a bit sorry for the daughter though, if her mother reacts to everything by going into lockdown down.
HEY I went to that Cryptozoology Museum in Portland, and they had this sign up in the bathroom and I thought it was the best:
Did they have the painting in question displayed full size nearby, or was it just immensely important for everyone in the bathroom to know that the museum disagrees with its mission statement? It seems to be quite rare for museums to be so transparent about the fact of having positions on their subjects..
Yes, they did! The painting was right above this sign. Perfectly readable while sitting on the toilet.
“Here is a painting we have chosen to display. WE HATE IT. STOP LOOKING AT IT, IT’S WRONG.”
Show of hands – who wants to help the young fanfiction reader figure out how to evade her mother’s attempts to keep her from smutty joy?
Me, me! Let’s teach her how to clear her cache!
and enable private/incognito browsing!
Oh man, once my parents sat my sister and I down for a Serious Talk about the inappropriate website they had found in the browser history and we eventually had to point out that had it been one of us we would have cleared the history, which was probably not comforting to them.
AMAZING. LIFE ACROSS THE DIGITAL DIVIDE.
This was shortly after we got the internet at my house, before that I would save fanfic to a floppy disk while at my grandmother’s house (clearing the history obviously) to bring home and read on our internet-less computer. Dark times.
grim.
Me! And also, “Smutty Joy” would make a great band name.
Her mother won’t be able to keep her from it unless she starts reading over her daughter’s shoulder all the time … which, given this mother, she might do.
nah that’s how you know she’s mature enough for it, is she figures that out on her own. just like back in my day, you knew you were ready for porn when it dawned on you you didn’t have to tell the truth when the computer asked you to click a box if you were under 18.
also THEY PRINT FILTH ON PAPER TOO, YOU KNOW, DON’T YOUNG PEOPLE HAVE LIBRARY CARDS ANYMORE
The first time I lied about my age to get on a fanfic archive, I was fifteen and looking for Jack/Ianto, and I spent the rest of the weekend terrified that the Canadian equivalent of the FBI were going to kick down the front door and charge me with . . . something. I didn’t know what the something would be, but I knew it would involve them telling my parents that I had lied on the internet to read gay alien smut.
That was my procrastinating from grad school ship! Bitter about Children of Earth forever.
She needs to ask for a Kindle for Christmas/her birthday if she can. That way it’ll look like she’s engrossed in serious e-books and never be bothered again.
IA, this is how I am able to read Anais Nin on the subway
I would bet that she also has a smartphone. Ha ha Mom, foiled again!
(In MY day, I had to sneak onto AOL at like 2am, desperately hoping that no one would pick up the phone line and 1. catch me, 2. kick me off)
Well, pretty sure I learned about explicit sex at around age 13 by reading one of the Anne Rice Mayfair Witches books, which is glorified fanfiction, so…
was it the one where she had sex with a ghost on a plane under a blanket? that was a (the ?) good one.
I think it was the one where she has sex with her demon kid and there’s a lot of sexual breastfeeding? I have no idea. The ghost plane book sounds like it was probably better.
I seem to recall that was like, all the same book. Well like, she has sex with the ghost on the plane, then she has the ghostbaby, and has soon as it comes out of her they fuck and that’s the end of book one?
I like how I still remember this.
Are they? Was it Lasher? I’m pretty sure the book I read was almost entirely about how she has hot sex with this demon baby who becomes a full-grown man immediately and gets turned on by breastfeeding?
I do remember the start of the book has this awesomely blunt teenage girl having sex with her cousin in a graveyard, which, ew, but also, she was great.
It was the first one, The Witching Hour.
It was all right! I think it was the first one, before the whosis is fully corporealized by impregnating her with himself or whatever. I mainly remember how after she has this incredible ghost sex where she can feel his scratchy ghost beard and all, she sort of wakes up and realizes she has just had dream/ghost sex and looks all around her in what I certainly hope was first class because even a ghost can’t fit two in a coach seat, and hopes that nobody noticed anything untoward. but I bet they totally did.
WAS IT THE ONE WHERE MONA LOST HER VIRGINITY AT AGE SEVEN (ON PURPOSE) AND THEN HAD SEX WITH THIRTY-YEAR-OLD MICHAEL WHEN SHE WAS TWELVE?
I have never read anything by Anne Rice and this thread is amazing. “Was it the one where WHAT NOW?”
It’s like “horrify the Twilight/Hannibal noob” over on Cleolinda’s blog.
I’ve waited a long, long time for the rest of the world to come around to how much I hated American Beauty all along. And it feels good.
Standing next to you, nodding silently.
Prudie’s article: awakening the realization to the older generation that an entire generation of teenager girls has grown up with access to vivid erotica, without any of the parental fillers or browser history their brothers got caught by.
I am filled with a strange kind of glee at the thought of a mother stumbling on One Direction fanfiction. Maybe because I imagine a mother finding RPF is even more confusing/jarring than finding ones based on books/films. My mom knew I read Harry Potter and Jane Austen fic growing up (and ok, I still read Austen fic…) but most of what I read was relatively tame…ish. I never shared specifics but I wasn’t going to lie when she asked what I was always doing on the computer. I also knew she’d never figure out how to check the browser history (she just learned how to copy/paste when I was in college), so the danger of specifics being discovered was low.
Also, even if she could check browser history, how many parents want to torture themselves by reading all the different pages/types of fanfics that their daughters are reading?
Can you imagine going through a 13-year-old’s browser history?
Mine would’ve been an odd mix of fanfic and Neopets at 13. Luckily, my mom also had 0 interest in looking at my browser history.
That American Beauty thing was great, but it’s become really annoying to me when people talk about the “pre-9/11” era of the mid to late 1990s as some kind of prelapsarian utopia of peace & prosperity, free from terror and war, just because the United States had a fairly low unemployment rate.
Remember that this was the period just after the Rwandan genocide when the most deadly military conflict the world had seen since WWII, the Second Congo War, was just kicking off. The wars in Chechnya and the Kurdish regions of Turkey were still going strong, NATO was bombing Yugoslavia to stop a genocide there, Abacha’s military dictatorship in Nigeria and Suharto’s dictatorship in Indonesia were collapsing, ongoing tension and terrorism between India and Pakistan. The late 1990s was not a happy time for the 2 billion or so people implicated in the above listed events.
Even in the US, 1999 was the year that Amadou Diallo was shot 41 times, the year of the Columbine massacre and the Clinton impeachment trial and the WTO protests in Seattle, not to mention several deadly rampages by right-wing nutjobs. A year earlier, some fellow named Osama Bin Laden had killed 224 people at two US embassies in East Africa.
Pretty sure if you had told an American — let alone a Congolese or Chechen — in 1999 that their time would be remembered as a glorious golden age, they would laugh in your face.
Now that I think about it, this is probably also just a thing for people who were YOUNG in the late 1990s. I’m sure people who were young in the late 70s or the early 2000s idolize those time periods even though they were objectively chaotic and terrible.
Does anyone who was older than, say, 25 years old in 1999 (and not profiting from the first tech bubble) remember this as a uniquely special time?
I was mid-30s when planes crashed into the Pentagon and NYC’s WTC. For me, it is a demarcation. Before and After. I had never thought of my country as a bomb target Before. Now, After, I do. I had never felt physical threat from war against my country Before. Now, After, I do.
Caveat: These feelings are certainly colored by the fact that I lived in DC the day the Pentagon was hit. And not 2 years prior I had worked on Wall Street. My train used to stop in the basement of the World Trade Center. I rode its escalators up and down daily. And former coworkers on Wall Street died that day. It was intense and personal.
I was 30 on 9/11 and feel the same way. I lived then (and now) in Boston, and knew a couple people on American flight 11 and a few more who barely made it out of the WTC area alive. It was definitely intense and personal.
But to stuffisthings’ point, I never think of the late 90s as some golden age. And as he points out, it really wasn’t, in the U.S. or overseas.
No but it didn’t feel special at the time, that’s why the nostalgia is so compelling and painful. I was 19 or 20 in 1999 and I hated the ’90s when they were happening — for people of my generation, when we were teenagers, we all knew our pop culture was garbage and we envied and resented everyone who was just a few years older and could remember the ’80s. Like you say, terrible things were happening everywhere. It’s just that we, or I, didn’t know it was about to get worse in such a particular way.
9/11 aside, it’s particularly awful for me to hear people blathering on about nostalgia for ’90s pop-feminism and how empowering all that bullshit was. Because at the time, it was really sickening; everybody did still hate women just like always, but then there was this patronizing veneer of girl power over everything to kind of tame and domesticate anything mildly feminist and make it seem stupid and ineffectual and for-pretend. And the worst part is when people look back on it wistfully now, they’re not even wrong because everything suddenly got ten times worse about when I went to college and it’s not getting much better.
Echoes of Glen Beck waxing nostalgic about the late 70s, which made me lololol
I dunno, I was young in the late 1990s- I’d just turned ten and started fifth grade when September 11th happened- and while I remember the late 90s as a relatively idyllic period for me (because I was in primary school and didn’t have that many worries or responsibilities as compared to my middle- and high-school self) I don’t think I was ever labouring under the impression that the world was a great, safe place.
On the other hand, it wasn’t 9/11 that made me start paying attention to world issues- it was the war in Iraq. I remember the night before war was declared, the news was talking about Bush’s ultimatum re: the weapons of mass destructions, and my parents were shaking their heads. When I asked them why, they told me that there were no WMDs, and Bush knew there were no WMDs, but he was using them as an excuse. I lived in a very conservative town, and my schoolmates were all swearing up and down that the WMDs were real and that they’d been found in kindergarden classrooms in Iraq. It was my introduction to the idea that a) politicians were liars, and b) people could be fooled by them. But since I was so young when all this started, I don’t really remember a time when I didn’t mistrust the government and the mainstream media.
I also remember the “strategic air strikes” against Iraq. I think I was in 5th or 6th grade then. Pre-teen me didn’t get subtle distinctions between bombings and all out war – I stayed up at night listening for bombs to come our way.
ETA: In fact, as someone born in the late 1980s, my view of America has nothing to do with peace. There was the Gulf War, Kosovo, the bombing of Iraq, and then the clusterfuck of wars since 9/11. As long as I’ve been aware, the US has been in conflict.
I remember working on a school project with GPS; one day we couldn’t get any satellites to connect and couldn’t figure out why.
“Oh that’s right, we’re at war today! How inconvenient!”
That is – I think I felt then, and I do feel very strongly in retrospect – that the US was involved in a lot of conflicts, and that we were very very cushioned from the consequences of those conflicts. I do remember that when my little brother woke me up on 9/11/01 and said “Terrorists have destroyed the World Trade Center, we’re going to war.” my first thought was “Oh, it’s started.”
I would have to disagree in terms of the economic climate of the 1990s. I was in my 20s in the 1990s and the experience of being young at that time seems like it is quite different from the experience of being in one’s 20s now, at least when comparing the experience of those with a college degree. We all either had or felt pretty confident that we were going to get a decent job that paid okay and we would be able to afford a home one day and we didn’t have the same experience of tremendous college debt. The economic crisis of 2001 and then 2008 really changed young people’s perceptions of employment and feelings of economic security. And don’t forget what has happened to the distribution of wealth over the last two decades. The 1990s is considered to be at very tail end of a long period of relative economic equality, before wealth became concentrated among the top 10%. In other words, there still was a middle-class in the US in the 1990s.
Best parts of the Bigfoot article:
*Patty Patterson (!!!)
*Jane Goodall believes he’s real
*”Moan for Bigfoot”, a porny e-book about Bigfoot. (!!!)
I don’t get why that one dude has a patch of Bigfoot hair and hasn’t had it DNA tested though.
I must find the article on Bigfoot DNA for you. DNA tests place several samples in widely divergent parts of the mammal phylogeny; next to buffalo, next to horses, next to bears.
http://www.lanevol.org/LANE/yeti_files/yeti_1st_A…
Yetis are actually horses.
WHAT IF THAT’S WHERE THE NORTH AMERICAN HORSES WENT, HMMM???
(Well, some of them.)
…
This is my new favorite bigfoot theory.
How does “Moan for Bigfoot” stack up against “Bear,” though?
It did NOT win a Governor General’s award, so who can really say?
That said, someone should read them both and write a piece about it for us here, because I think it would be amazing.
Pretty sure Charlotte Shane wrote something either here or at the Hairpin about the Bigfoot porn revolution
“‘I was out being a rock star and just living the outdoor Sasquatch-research lifestyle.'”
Omg
I have to say, most of the fanfics I’ve read have healthier relationship depictions than porn videos, and more educational than Science and Health classes combined.
Also, is this a thing: I just noticed that a lot of movie/show/old and new advert protagonists are The Dark-Haired Guy and The Blonde Lady. Point me over to deviants, oh wiser folk. Deviants like the Captain America/Peggy Carter pairing or Hermione Granger/Ron Weasley pairing.
I assume you’re looking for mostly het but: Mako/Raleigh from Pacific Rim, Sherlock/Molly from Sherlock, Nat/Steve from CATWS, Nat/Sam from CATWS, Nat/Bucky from…everything….
Oh yes, I’m looking for het examples because I mostly see this pattern in het stuff. Like in adverts and old movies (and some modern movies): the guy is almost always the dark-haired one, and the lady the blonde or variations of lighter colouring. Nothing against it, I’m just wondering if this is A Cultural Thing. (I was reminded of this because of the article picture on 1950s couple problems.)
Nick and Nora were dark and dark! Holly Golightly and her fella (her hair was lighter than usual in that film, but George Peppard was positively golden). Andie and Blaine from Pretty in Pink?
There appears to be the beginnings of a wave of Peggy Carter/Howard Stark swelling atm–I’m seeing a lot of people writing snippets and drabbles or talking about the longer stories they’re going to write–so keep an eye out for that!
Also, Carol Danvers/Steve Rogers; Sif/Steve Rogers; Darcy Lewis/Clint Barton . If you’re good with femslash, Sharon Carter/Jessica Drew!!!
I’m more than good with slash and femslash. 🙂 But with het stuff, like adverts or old movies (or even the modern ones), I’m just wondering if it’s A Thing to have the guy almost always the dark-haired one and the lady the blonde one. (I was reminded of this because of the article picture on 1950s couple problems.)
I’m a long time lurker but I realized I could not keep this from Toasties: http://www.theverge.com/2014/9/8/6121227/a-new-st…
MISANDRIST TAXIS.
Or, at least, safer taxis.
OMG…. apologies if this has appeared on the Toast before.
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/judge-f…
http://the-toast.net/2014/08/07/link-roundup-150/…
😀
Hey, is there an article out there about how sometimes, it is totally OK to not weigh in on a public debate because you’re concerned about your safety? I need it. For reasons.
Something… something like “We need to prioritize people’s safety over the need for particular conversations to take place right now.”
IF there could be a “you privileged fuck” coda, that would be a bonus.
Oh yes, I'm looking for het examples because I mostly see this pattern in het stuff. Like in adverts and old movies (and some modern movies): the guy is almost always the dark-haired one, and the lady the blonde or variations of lighter colouring. Nothing against it, I'm just wondering if this is A Cultural Thing. (I was reminded of this because of the article picture on 1950s couple problems.)
I'm more than good with slash and femslash. 🙂 But with het stuff, like adverts or old movies (or even the modern ones), I'm just wondering if it's A Thing to have the guy almost always the dark-haired one and the lady the blonde one. (I was reminded of this because of the article picture on 1950s couple problems.)
I get this like once a day and I've always assumed it's me clicking the page instead of the link or not hovering and making sure the link is like, linking? (idk how to phrase that, I hope you know what I mean)
Nick and Nora were dark and dark! Holly Golightly and her fella (her hair was lighter than usual in that film, but George Peppard was positively golden). Andie and Blaine from Pretty in Pink?