Anne Helen Petersen, who has ALWAYS been here for Betty Draper Francis, brings it home:
Don spends every day attempting to recover from the trauma of his childhood. But Betty spends every day recovering from the quieter, but no less emotionally violent, trauma of her deeply unfulfilling life. It’s hard to remember as much when she’s yelling at Bobby for trading away her sandwich on their field trip — a mistake Bobby should be forgiven for making, as Betty has spent most of her adult life forgoing meals as a means of quiet protest. She’d make food for others, only to hover above them or sit beside them, daring them to acknowledge her suffering.
I love Shirley Jackson’s forked/funny/dark memoirs about parenting, and I’m so glad they’re coming back and people are writing about them!
The setting is bucolic: a ramshackle house in the woods of Vermont, which we are told over and over again has four tall white pillars, though these are presented as absurdities rather than crowning decorations. The children are precocious: one oft-cited passage describes Jackson’s son Laurie’s elaborate tales of “Charlie”, a classmate who does not exist. They misbehave only up to the point that it serves the comic anecdote.
But these are not, somehow, cheerful books. The seeds of dread are everywhere. In the middle of a comic anecdote, Jackson will admit that she’s listening to a her daughter’s story about an elephant who gave her bubblegum, one of those stories by children that goes on and on, while “smiling maternally”. When Jackson’s husband joins the scene he gets a similarly distant reaction: “I gave my husband another smile of patient, tolerant understanding, and asked him sweetly if he would care for coffee?” The edge is subtle, but it is there.
I have never watched The Good Wife but I am all about conspiracy theories! Also, we have a “If Archie Panjabi Were Your Girlfriend” piece coming up this week, so this is good hype.
I find public embarrassment too horrifying a concept to watch the Elizabeth May speech gone wrong.
On Ontario’s controversial (and great) new sex-ed curriculum:
What would it look like if instead of — or at least alongside — rape culture we learned about a culture of consent?
This is part of what’s being proposed by the Ontario Education Ministry in its new sex education curriculum. Along with learning about anatomy, puberty, gender identities and various sexualities, by the time they finish Grade 6 students will have learned about consent: that you have to ask someone if they want to have sex, and they have to answer positively before you go ahead and do it. Seems basic? It isn’t.
If you’d like to know about the Canadian fight to improve nail salon conditions, here’s some info!
I wrote the best thing online yesterday, please make sure you read it and then email it to all your friends and share it on a variety of user-facing platforms:
If Cobie Smulders were your ostensibly platonic gym buddy for whom you have conflicted feelings, you would have exactly the same fitness level. You would be better at twisting reverse crunches, front squats, and skull-crushers, and she would be better at balance moves, bicep curls and lunges. You would be absolutely neck-and-neck for pull-ups, and the two of you would jokingly recreate Legolas and Gimli’s competition at Helm’s Deep. “ELEVEN,” she would text you. “lol impressive for someone who just woke up from a coma” you would respond, while frantically trying to calculate how you could make it to twelve without rocket boots.
There will be no discussion of DadBod on this site. Thank you.
Yesterday’s workout:
Noted crack-smoker Rob Ford expressed his disgust with the new sex ed curriculum, saying that his children “should not be talking about what anal sex is, or what a blowjob is” which is pretty rich coming from a man who once bragged during a media scrum about all the oral sex he performs on his wife.
i have forgotten about that until RIGHT NOW… UGHHHH
AHAHAHAHAHAHAHA OH MY GOD.
(They were selling t-shirts with Ford’s face captioned “more than enough to eat at home” at the height of CrackMayorGate. Someone please free his poor wife.)
Oh my god, people in my area (ruralish Southeastern Ontario) are LOSING THEIR SHIT over the idea of the sex ed curriculum changing like, at all. “But kids will just say yes to sex all the time then!” Uh, I learned about the Second World War in middle school and didn’t run off to start a land war in Europe.
A rumor went around my community that the schools were going to outlaw saying “mom and dad” in favor of “guardians” based on the fact that the school board had been encouraging TEACHERS to be more inclusive when referring to families of students who may not have a mom and dad, but some other family setup. You’d have thought the invading armies were washing up on the lakeshore the way people were freaking out.
All letters home from my primary and secondary school (UK, state education) were addressed to “The parents or guardians of X” (and I feel sure that teachers did say “give this to your parent or guardian”, but I may be misremembering). Is that not a thing elsewhere?
(I volunteered with a local Brownie pack and hated that the leaders would always refer to the girls’ mums when giving them messages to pass on, as in “Tell your mums that you need to be wearing shoes you can run around in when you come to Brownies”. A: not everyone necessarily has one, B: good work making it clear that mothers are solely responsible for childcare.)
I always refer to kids’ “grownups” for this reason: “give this to your grownup!” “Where is your grownup?” So far nobody seems to have noticed that could include A GAY.
I am going to start doing this! Great idea.
This can also include caretakers who aren’t parents or guardians, like grandparents or babysitters or friends’ parents who have the conn, so it has the potential to be even more accurate. I like this.
I’m in the US and for sure heard the phrasing ‘parents or guardians’ on school stuff growing up.
I grew up in (suburban) Ontario, and they definitely used “parents or guardians” in any letters/forms sent home. No-one, to the best of my knowledge, batted an eye about this. (But of course the same people who’d pitch a fit about comprehensive sex ed are the same people who’d pitch a fit about acknowledging that not everyone’s family looks the same. :/ )
Um, have they never seen a parental consent form that says “parent or legal guardian”? Clearly undermining parents and corrupting childhood innocence!
My local news rounded up parents who were keeping their kids out of school, and they were just freaking out. One woman dug herself into a massive hole, repeatedly claiming that she wasn’t homophobic, she just didn’t want her kids learning about *those* kind of people
“I’m not afraid of gay people! I just wish they didn’t exist! That’s all!”
Because that is an argument with traction.
Man, I wonder what it’s like going into such a primal rage because of a rumor that teachers were going to try to be nicer to more kids.
bullies gotta get it from somewhere
Uh, I learned about the Second World War in middle school and didn’t run off to start a land war in Europe.
I’m glad you’re clearly speaking for just yourself there. I didn’t have that same experience.
Um, opportunity missed though. You haven’t lived until you’ve run off to start a land war in Europe.
BRB, off to annex the Sudetenland.
Yeah, because of projection I guess, conservatives can’t tell the difference between “be more inclusive” and “ban things.” I guess because their entire mindset is authoritarian.
Right? Like encouraging the use of “guardians” will suddenly make it illegal to say “parents.” That’s as ridiculous as thinking that allowing same-sex marriage would suddenly make it illegal for straight people to get married. Oh, wait…
Ooh, so much CanCon today! Yay!
Ontario’s new sex ed curriculum is exciting, and long overdue. So many basic changes, such as teaching young kids proper names for body parts, teaching basics of consent, including sexual orientation and identity.
It’s so great. A couple of my colleagues were volunteer parent readers when it first came out; and are prone to keeping a copy around the office, and refuting scaremongering by reading the curriculum for whatever grade aloud. In a righteous voice.
Okay, this is maybe a little weird, maybe, but I honestly mourn for so many queer/trans*/etc people who could never fully comprehend what was going on with their heads and hearts and bodies because they literally didn’t have the vocabulary for it. How many did we lose? I can’t even think about it on a large scale because it’s just so, so sad.
That’s not weird at all – further down, someone mentioned the terrible reception Betty Draper’s always gotten, and how they didn’t “get” it. The folks you’re talking about, she never really had the vocabulary to say what she was missing, and who she was, and it’s a damn tragedy, whether we’re talking fiction or real life.
The best thing my babysitter has done has insisted on proper anatomical terms for genitalia. She said it’s too hard when families use different euphemisms, so boys have penises and girls have vaginas and if they don’t like it, they can find a new sitter.
Seriously, it is so great. And I love that it starts with young kids rather than starting in late elementary school or high school — makes it a continuum rather than a giant mass of information as a teenager with little tools / preparation to deal with it.
When I studied abroad in Spain before my sophmore year of college, everyone in our group was there to do research projects in addition to the classwork. One of the girls in the group did hers on sex education there and we were all SHOCKED at how liberal their curriculum was. Not only did they comprehensively learn about birth control methods and sexual identities (which is something that was NOT covered in our state- I went to a state school) but they learned about common sexual positions and how to make the experience good. It’s possible I’ve exaggerated some of this in my memory, but the fact is that it was a Roman Catholic country teaching their kids waaaay more than our ostensibly state-church separated one ever would.
Relatedly, here’s a fabulous article about the patchwork network of volunteer groups helping women in Texas get abortions.
Kids should learn about sex from highly dubious websites, like I did! *shakes fist*
Or from other kids who hear from their friends who learned from their older sibling who may have watched a video once?
Or fanfiction, though that could seriously backfire.
stack of soggy magazines in the woods
w…. why are the magazines soggy D:
because they’ve been out in the woods and the rain, don’t try to turn this moment into something dirty! finding a cache of sunbleached Black Tails and enlisting a team to painstakingly unearth it without destroying the contents like the antikythera mechanism is a vital coming-of-age ceremony, and while getting around the parental filters on the internet is objectively superior in many ways (selection, practical technical training) it deprives kids of the participatory element and the sense of mystique of finding some utility-van leprechaun’s pot of gold
YES. My friend and I stumbled upon a weathered scrap of a back page ad at a tender age (7, 8?). Instinctively knowing it was contraband, we squirreled it away under some leaves in the side yard, and for weeks(? months? Kid Time distorts) would sneak out and study it.
I remember finding some glorious mags in a park (conveniently located between the bus stop and home) at age 11, and they stayed in their stash down by the creek for at least a few weeks. I was old enough to know what I was seeing (think Penthouse letters, basically bad sex fanfic?) wasn’t real, but not old enough to know how it actually worked. There had to be a clue in there somewhere.
porn tapes at sleepovers after the parents had gone to bed
that was horror movie time for us but there’s probably a lot of overlap between illicit midnight showings of Alien and Booty Massacre 15 anyway
HBO After Dark.
We need to make sure everyone at the sextips livejournal community has a reason to keep posting!
Just a few weeks ago we were all lamenting how much LJ’s user base has declined!
Or old textbooks in my grandmother’s basement, complete with pictures, left over from my uncle’s time in medical school! (This was useful for learning body parts, at least, if not sex.)
I had my parents’ medical encyclopedia. (high five)
The marital counseling section of my grandfather’s pastoral library!
Smutty Beastmaster fanfiction! Smutty Beastmaster fanfiction.
My biggest fear with the new sex ed curriculum is that it will just be continued to be taught by your gym teacher and/or the least squeamish of your regular teachers rather than someone actually qualified and knowledgeable in the area, so the teaching will still be a bit off and the kids still won’t want to be there. My homeroom teacher 10000% taught us about birth control by telling us about how SHE had been on the pill for years and we were eleven and DID NOT WANT to hear intimate details about our homeroom teacher. But my friend’s school at the time had a obstetric nurse come in to do their sex ed unit and apparently she was GREAT. More of that!!
under what possible set of circumstances would the kids want to be there
even as an adult who sometimes seeks out sex advice the prospect of having to sit in a classroom with 40 coworkers and be lectured on how genitals work sounds like an enhanced interrogation technique
One of my former coworkers at the local Catholic Diocese has an extremely uncomfortable and upsetting experience similar to this where they had an all staff meeting to learn about The Theology of the Body. He honestly seems extremely scarred by it.
Yeahhhh
I genuinely don’t know what my high school’s sex ed curriculum was like- we had one, and we did have actual health teachers, but for my class an old man gym teacher got roped into doing it bc of scheduling or something, and he purposefully skipped over that entire unit. Who knows what I might have learned!
Yeah, the teacher makes a huge difference. The art teacher taught sex ed in my elementary school, but she was really good at it. No shame, no judgment, no overly personal anecdote, just straightforward “this is how this works.” Treated it like any other subject, which makes it easier for a room of awkward early teenagers to handle.
In high school, my gym teacher taught health class. In middle/junior high school, it was taught by the science teacher. The former got into safer sex (condom use) and STIs/STDs…and she’s Catholic! The latter was Protestant. Neither talked about sexual orientation or gender identity (I live in a very conservative town, and it was the 90s). I wish they had.
I think in fifth grade we had someone in to talk to us about puberty. Or it may’ve been the school nurse. I don’t remember.
PS: Both aforementioned teachers were cis women.
My school let you take it as an optional summer class the year before enrolling in HS and it was taught by a very competent teacher at the local adult school, although it still included crappy 90s videos. The kids who didn’t want to do a summer class had to take it during the school year, and there was 1 health teacher and the classes s/he couldn’t cover were covered by some rando from the math department who I’m sure did a greaaaat job.
So, I’m dying to know: what are Jane Fondas?
Jane Fondas are where you lie on your side and do leg raises BUT you keep your bottom leg off the floor as well. They look easy but they are actually very hard and awful!
Wait, so you’re maintaining an oblique V while also doing leg raises? How do you not end up flopping like a fish a la Spongebob? Dang, I need a trainer.
The bottom leg is barely off the floor, which makes it a little easier.
If you’re ever in DC, Fuse Pilates is full of this kind of creative core-focused ghastliness. I made the mistake once of asking for outer thigh work and could barely creep down the stairs afterward. (Quick! Someone start a geographic list of Toast-tested and -approved Houses o’ Fitness!)
This is me today. I did what up front didn’t seem like a strenuous leg workout, but two days later my quads ache. I also have a hard time sitting down.
I never really understood how people could hate Betty so much. She is, of course, unlikeable in so many ways, but the show is enormously sympathetic to her. Even Sally loves her mother, and she’s spent the most time thinking about hating her.
I’ve wondered about this too and for every explanation I can think of, it’s logically inconsistent to hate Betty but not hate everyone else on the show.
She represents the old-fashioned awfulness we want to rebel against? (Doesn’t Roger?) We like the other assholes on the show because they make it look glamorous? (No way, I totally want perfect Betty lipstick and a perfect Betty dress!) She’s chilly and bitchy? (I love when Joan delivers a cold bitchy line.) She’s a tragic victim constrained by the era/social class she lives in? (Again, JOAN.) She’s mean to kids, she’s not someone I’d want as a friend, she’s got so much wasted potential, she never changes? (ummm one of those applies to EVERYONE on the show, right?)
A bunch of it comes, I think, from the fact that we never see Betty around other adults. She has her children, and she has Don (and later Henry) and it keeps her out of the world. The result is that she never has anything to *talk* about, and it means that other people don’t really want to talk to her, either. She gets upset by that (reasonably) and lashes out, so the impression is that she’s just mean all the time. Early on, she has other moms to talk to (Francine) but they’re equally unpleasant for the same reasons.
Betty never got to be an adult. She’s 28 in the first season, and I think we see Sally turning 6, so she was already married and pregnant by 22. She had this one wonderful, glamorous year as a model between Bryn Mawr and domesticity, and then it was gone. She’s never allowed back into the world. Of course she’s no fun! How could she be?
and that semester abroad in Italy w the designer 🙂 Good pt I never considered that! And have always like Betty w the exception of her abrupt dismissal of Carla which was COLD and traumatizing for the kiddos
I mean, Betty does unlikable things all the time. She’s not kind, pleasant, or fun, and she’s certainly bigoted and occasionally even cruel. Her choices are often self-destructive and she lashes out against the few people in her life who really do care for her (Carla, Bobby, Sally).
But she’s still a human, relatable character, even if I don’t want to hang out. So I don’t get wishing bad things for her, or wishing she wasn’t on the show, or the rest of the haters. Even if I can support Sally wanting to get as far away as possible!
I agree, if PETE and HARRY get happy endings I dont understand the hate for Betty.
We have one episode left. Hope is not lost for Harry to die tragicomically.
true, when we see her out in the world she’s usually being ogled by men or paraded about at a client dinner but no one talks to her. She must have friends? From college? From the neighborhood? What does she do with all those off-screen hours? We don’t really seem to know enough about her to fill in the details and it’s too easy to imagine she just sits at home cooking and smoking. I could tell you what Pete or Peggy is up to on a Tuesday evening with no work obligations, but not her.
Ive always wondered what Betty does in her off time. Riding, for a little while. Otherwise… smoking at the kitchen table while staring blankly w a slight furrow into the middle distance?
It seems (based mostly on earlier seasons) like most of her “friends” are other suburban moms who are conditioned to view other women as potential rivals, so they’re really only frenemies at best.
And it didn’t really seem like she kept in touch with friends or made any new ones when she moved into Henry’s house. So.. social isolation, sense of futility and waste, no meaningful control over life/body, limited methods of self-expression, constant gaslighting, extraordinarily strict family and gender roles and expectations. Yeah, she’s pretty much exactly how you’d expect.
Betty’s also not a native New Yorker, for whatever that’s worth. Her childhood and college friends probably live in Pennsylvania, and it’s just Not Done for Betty to hop in car and head down there for the weekend. Plus, I’d guess Betty’s not comfortable telling any of them she’s unhappy, instead bragging about her perfect life as they brag about theirs. So they all resent each other for it.
Her modeling friends are hard to track down, I’d guess. I think she runs across one doing sex work (so clearly, they can’t hang out) and the rest – who knows?
Yeah, no-one ever considers that she may have something to contribute to adult conversation — and when she tries (like when she starts talking politics at one of Henry’s events) she gets firmly told she has no business doing that. 🙁
Betty is a doll in a dollhouse and my heart aches for her. I think it’s a cop out to give her terminal cancer; I would have liked to have seen her go somewhere with her studies – or, for her studies to fail but for her to find something – anything – to fulfil her outside the home. And have Henry suffer because of it. That would have been a great character arc for her – real change and struggle. This way, she gets to be a miserable creature and then she gets to die. Boo. Poor Betty.
Yeah, I don’t get it. She’s not an easy woman, and her kids get the brunt of that a lot of the time, but how can you not see how much of a product of her environment she is?
I think to some extent people hate her precisely for being a product of her environment. Either because she represents an awful repressive time for women or because we get frustrated that she hasn’t broken out of her tiny constrained housewife role. So many of the women on the show are cool characters because they’re breaking barriers or changing with the culture, so it’s easy to see this woman who doesn’t as a bad guy holding the culture back.
I hate Betty because she’s deliberately cruel to children. Her own children. No one else on the show (that I can think of) acts like that. Keeping a kid close to you and being cruel to them on purpose is truly horrible.
She’s not ONLY mean to them, sometimes she’s great, but good actions don’t cancel out bad actions.
Yeah–I lost all sympathy for her after that bit with Sally and masturbation in S4. Yes, product of the time; no, not an excuse. But repressing/shaming sexuality in others is one of my major buttons (my first real issue with Don was with his freaking out over Betty’s swimsuit), so.
Please tell me a Jane Fonda is rotating your torso 360˚ because the belt you are wearing around your workout leotard actually hides the seam which separates your top half from your bottom.
I am having complicated thoughts about all the reviews about Shirley Jackson’s memoirs that seem vaguely shocked that a mother of her era wasn’t all sweetness and 100% mental devotion to her children. I actually think the expectation is much stronger now than it was back then to be the Perfect Mom and love every second of parenting, despite this idealized version of the 1950s everyone has built up, so maybe her essays seem more transgressive now than they even did then?
And I mean, if smiling politely through tiny children’s boring stories qualifies as dark and twisted these days, call CPS now because I am the worst mom ever. (I kid, but it actually really bothers me that we’re setting up these impossible standards for what loving our children looks like.)
Word up. I just endured a nasty exchange on a Facebook group I frequent with a bunch of moms (to be fair, on the defensive because they have kids who really can’t be left alone) implied that a blogger, who was calling for grownups not to be all over the playground equipment shadowing their kids every second, must not like her kids or enjoy their company. Because why even bring your kids to the playground if you might possibly enjoy having coffee on a bench with another grownup more than following your 3-year-old around at a distance of 2-3 feet?
Ah, yes, exactly! The 50s were not kind to housewives, not saying they were, but I cannot imagine my grandmother’s generation having that conversation.
Wait, parents are doing that now? How long before someone demands that parents be mandatorily grafted to their children?
Check out babywearing. It has good intentions, but I have seen it taken too far. That is, mothers who refuse to give their babies tummy time or let them explore a mobile from lying on their backs because they keep the kid attached to mama at all times.
!
tummy time is VITAL
how would they learn to crawl and/or destroy things otherwise
eta: I forgot about tormenting small animals once crawling has been established, which was a major oversight since apparently that’s all I did as a crawler
I feel like parenting was always a competitive event for a certain crowd of people, whose standards may shift over the generations but always remain twenty degrees implausible for an actual human of the era
My very much beloved niece is going through a phase where she talks. Constantly. Without end. We went on vacation with the family last year and her parents basically told us to just ignore her. It’s not because we’re assholes it’s because adults need to maintain some sanity in order to parent effectively.
My partner’s nephew, when he was almost three, enjoyed asking the same questions over and over. “What’s your name? What’s my name? What’s his name?” I tried to be polite and engaged and answer him, but it got so exasperating.
Man, I know it’s gross to think about teenagers having sex and all, but imagine if we raised an entire generation of kids who knew enough to be good at it when they grew up?
/ Sounds terrible. Who are these smug teenagers who are better at sex than me?? Awkward encounters lower expectations for the men in our lives and build character. /
The teen section at Amsterdam’s awesome interactive science museum was all about how to have good sex when I was there. There were little booths with different positions and giant french kissing tongues to play with.
I feel like the biggest problem we have in America is that all of our debates about sex education are hamstrung by the idea that we have to implicitly accept the conservative moral value that sex is icky.
I would like it better if our debates could go:
“We should have sex education for teens.”
“We can’t teach kids about having sex, what if they start DOING IT?”
“Well, then I hope they have a good time! Sex is great!”
but learning that condoms (and thus penises) exist is how you get the apocalypse of pregnant single moms driving to the welfare office in Cadillacs
You just got to lean in, that’s all.
FREE CADILLACS FOR EVERY PREGNANT TEEN WELFARE MOTHER!
Oh god, the germs on those tongues…..!!!! *shudders*
Oh, no, they were in a big case and each person put their arm in one to control it and interact with the other. Here’s their website.
The teen section of the science museum is so great. Sex! Drugs! A load of videos of different animals having sex, including one rhino falling off another when it tries to mount! It was all very entertaining.
That would force lawmakers to face the possibility that they’re not as good at sex as they think they are.
“There will be no discussion of DadBod on this site. Thank you.”
No, thank YOU.
Eh, you’ll see it in a lot of pop culture, where if a female character is not unambiguously delineated as LIKEABLE, she’s read by a lot of folks as, if not a villain, someone they root against. The one that grinds my teeth still, is Tara on True Blood, which had a lovely extra layer of racism on top, but Walter White’s wife was read this way on Breaking Bad, even though this was apparently not the show creators’ intent.
TL;DR: most people can’t deal with female characters who are neither perfectly good or evil.
wimmin am i rite
I think in the case of True Blood it was the writers who marginalized Tara, whereas with BB, they clearly made Skyler a rational, relatable character and a horrifying MRA segment of the fanbase totally missed the point…
Oh man, CBC Radio played part of Elizabeth May’s speech every news break yesterday and it never got any less awkward to listen to. I agree with what she said about Omar Kadhr, but dude. Presentation matters.
All the photos of poor Lisa Raitt trying desperately to remove May from the stage! And then the morning after! I can’t even imagine if my most embarrassing moment was broadcast every hour on CBC. I respect Elizabeth May for being able to get out of bed and address the situation. I would still be hiding.
I was happy to hear some Conservative MPs brush the comments off with a kind of, “everybody-fucks-up,” attitude. One actually pointed out that she did appologize right away.
What did she say? I clicked on Nicole’s link, but I squirmed away because seemed like it was about to get uncomfortable.
A lot of rambling jokes and sexual innuendo regarding Male Con MPs. Then as she was being ushered off stage she said, “Omar Kadhr, you have more class than the whole fucking cabinet.” I kind of like that bit.
I honestly just hyperventilated a little in anticipation of the “If Archie Panjabi Were Your Girlfriend” piece.
While I still think The Good Wife is one of the most amazing shows on tv right now, that theory about the actresses (which I’ve heard before) makes me so sad for how much better it could have been.
I would just like to say that my 9th grade sex ed was taught by a teacher named Jack Dimoff.
That is all.
The job he was born to do.
My sister was taught sex-ed by a woman named Ms. Hymen, who fully embraced the excellent wordplay.
My sex ed was taught by a woman from Planned Parenthood. It was the one thing my California public junior high did right. She was dressed like Kelly Bundy though, complete with thigh high black boots, and when she demoed how to put a condom on, she made a joke about how she would pull on the reservoir tip to give her lover a “snap” if she was mad at him.
A “smile of patient, tolerant understanding” through gritted teeth is my go-to as we approach week…8? 9? of my brother living with us as he saves for moving OUT OF MY HOUSE. GET OUT OF MY HOUSE. So thank you for that, Shirley Jackson.
i find this to be a useful approach for most people, really.
Oh man, my partner and I just had two weeks (ish) of a friend living on the couch. In a one-bedroom apartment. With one door key. I CANNOT imagine what two months plus is doing to your teeth (I am a grinder, I assume everyone else is as well).
Y’all have read Alice Dreger’s fabulous essay on what happened when she sat in on her son’s sex-ed class, right? Because Alice is fucking badass, man. She is METAL.
Wow, yes. She is metal and her son gives me hope for the future. Thank you!
Favorite Shirley Jackson line ever, which has stuck with me for more than 40 years since discovering her memoirs in the public library:
“Hell hath no fury like a woman whose bobbin thread has run out in the middle of a long seam.”
especially if she hasn’t noticed before she gets to the end. I have sympathy rage now.
*twitch*
I just read something on Jezebel about Jonathan Franzen’s new book, and I will be here, on the Toast, until September, patiently waiting for the scathing review.
holyshit PLEASE PLEASE warn everyone who clicks on the link to the Petersen article that **SPOILERS ARE AHEAD**. i’m devastated.