Link Roundup! -The Toast

I saw HAMILTON. It was a life-changing, transcendent experience. I wish every single high school student in the nation could see it. I wish you were seeing it right now. No praise is sufficient. It made me feel better about art, and the United States, and I both laughed hysterically and sobbed and it was better than CATS. (That part is a joke. I have good taste in musicals, I promise.)

I saw it with my two dearest NYC friends, and we both worried that we would only really like it, and that all the hype would prove burdensome. But instead, we kept giving each other glances to have our own outsized reactions mirrored back to ourselves, and then after it ended, we stood in the street and hugged and became teary at having shared such an incredible experience together. I do not regret that I have now put some enterprising young StubHub scalper’s kids through their post-graduate studies: perhaps those children will grow up to be Lin-Manuel Miranda. If you can POSSIBLY see it, please do.

Now I want to talk about the GQ piece that Mallory wrote about on Friday, and the process of being wrong about something.

So, I read that piece on Thursday when I was waiting for my flight to take off, and I thought it was so funny, and so well-written, and I knew it was snarky, but I thought of the snark as being directed at dudes who think they’re better than the sort of people who hire sex workers, and also at these women who do not self-identify as sex workers, and I airily shared it on Twitter and said nice things about it and then turned my phone off and left for my vacation.

And then on Monday morning, I was on Twitter, and saw that Mallory was horrified by the piece, and had written about it, and then I saw that two women I respect like WHOA were just exceptionally, exceptionally upset and angered by the piece, and not just by the piece, but by it having been read delightedly by people they had worked with (like me.)

And I just hate being wrong, obviously, more than anything, so I immediately emailed everyone I knew who had liked the piece and said “am I wrong? These women aren’t sex workers, right, and this is funny and not bad?” and because I had deliberately just emailed people I knew agreed with me, I received back very reassuring messages of agreement, including ones from people who had done sex work or sugar-babying, and this was nice and reassuring, and I was like, oh, perhaps Mallory and I will just disagree about this.

But I didn’t feel great about it, because I knew I was probably wrong, and I read it again, and I read Mallory’s thing, and called Mallory like four times without reaching resolution, Mallory being a wonderful pillar of “this is not good, this is hurtful, this is hurtful to people” against my equivocations and counter-arguments, and then I called Mallory a FIFTH time and told her she was right, and then I emailed some people to apologize, and said I would write about it, but wouldn’t delete my tweets bc I didn’t want to pretend it hadn’t happened, and then I felt a lot better.

I don’t think the writer is a bad person, or that she realized she was being a dick to sex workers, but my reading of it was wrong, and the humor I derived from it came from a bad place, and I feel terrible that women I love and respect were hurt by my thoughtlessness and that’s really all I wanted to say. I fucked up.

Oh, and this was helpful to me, and might be to you, should you ever be wrong about something: I thought to myself, okay, if you HADN’T already said something positive about the piece, and you read Mallory’s thing about it, would you have disagreed with Mallory’s thing? Or do you have your back up because you said something positive publicly and hate walking things back? And I knew that if I had read Mallory’s thing before having said something, I would have been “oh, yeah, that makes a lot of sense,” and that would have been an immediate end to it. So it was that my back was up. Because I can be a real dick. So I am sharing my process of getting my back back down in the hopes that it might be useful someday for you.

This is a picture of my friend Carrie’s new puppy taking a nap: