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:
