“WE ARE BEST FRIENDS CAN WE GET MATCHING SLAP BRACELETS!”
The most important piece of our time is me on Nicholas and Alexandra in The Guardian, which came out March 31st but I only noticed on Friday when John Underwood saw my bio:
okay the piece is A+++ though:
The tragedy of the Romanovs has never merely been their final days at Yekaterinburg, of course, and if one had to to single out one aspect of Massie’s work for criticism, it might be the transformation of a truly inept and periodically malevolent Nicholas II into a sweet, gently bumbling young man who got in over his head. It is fair to say that Autocrat of All Russia has never been a good gig, nor an easy one, but Nicholas II was a disaster by any reasonable standards.
Massie omits, for example, Nicholas II’s quiet support for the anti-Semitic pogroms that swept Russia during his reign, including the Kishinev massacres of 1903 and 1905, overshadowed as they are by his soft, tentative letters to Alix. The “Nicky” of Nicholas and Alexandra is a husband and a father who is having a bad year at the office, the Nicholas II who presided over the disastrous Russo-Japanese war and watched more than three million doomed Russians trudge their way through nearly a thousand miles of snow to the fronts of the first world war is of greater interest, perhaps, to history.
Jon Ronson can be a wang, but his interview with Monica Lewinsky is great (I like her a lot, and liberal women treated her SHAMEFULLY in the nineties):
Back then, the world basically saw Lewinsky as the predator. Late-night talkshow hosts routinely made misogynistic jokes, with Jay Leno among the cruellest: “Monica Lewinsky has gained back all the weight she lost last year. [She’s] considering having her jaw wired shut but then, nah, she didn’t want to give up her sex life.” And so on.
In February 1998, the feminist writer Nancy Friday was asked by the New York Observer to speculate on Lewinsky’s future. “She can rent out her mouth,” she replied.
I hope those mainstream voices wouldn’t treat Lewinsky quite this badly if the scandal broke today. Nowadays most people understand those jokes to be slut-shaming, punching down, don’t they?
“I hope so,” Lewinsky says. “I don’t know.”
It has been ten years since “Shoes,” and now I feel as old as the hills:
It may not seem like it, but 2006 was a different time. The concept of viral fame didn’t really exist yet. Even the creators of YouTube hadn’t quite figured out what it was for. (They thought it was going to be place where you could easily access “big, newsworthy footage,” like Janet Jackson’s nipple slip.)
It was into this online Wild West that comic and actor Liam Kyle Sullivan uploaded his massive hit “Shoes.” For those of you who’ve forgotten its glory, “Shoes” has Sullivan playing Kelly, a teenage girl with two things; an asshole family who doesn’t get her and an undying love of footwear. The whole song is backed by a sort of electroclash lo-fi thump.
Scientific American on autism in girls:
Emily Brooks, 26, is a writer studying for her master’s in disability studies at City University of New York. She identifies as gender queer and believes gender norms cause many problems for people on the spectrum. She noted, to broad agreement, that boys are allowed far greater leeway to deviate from social expectations. “If a guy does something that is considered socially inappropriate … his friends may sometimes encourage some of those behaviors,” she said, adding that “teen girls will shut you down if you do anything that’s different.”
Leironica Hawkins, an artist who has created a comic book about Asperger’s, also has to contend with social cues about race. “It’s not just because I’m a woman on the spectrum. I’m a black woman on the spectrum, and I have to deal with social cues that [other] people can afford to ignore,” she said. She added that she thought women “are probably punished more for not behaving the way we should. I’ve always heard women are socially aware to the needs of others, and that’s not me, most of the time … I feel like I get pressured to be that way.”
How the Australian women’s rugby team is changing the game:
It took years of campaigning by rugby union’s international governing body to win in 2009 the International Olympic Committee’s vote of approval for the sport’s inclusion. A major factor in the campaign’s success was that with both a men’s and women’s event, rugby met the Olympic requirement, introduced in 1991, for gender equality in any new sport. Sevens was put forward rather than 15s (briefly an Olympic sport in the early 20th century) because the smaller team sizes keeps costs down for participating countries, there are a wide range of countries who compete (including nations that aren’t always competitive at 15s, such as Fiji, the US, Kenya and Sri Lanka), and 14 minutes of extreme action is a spectacle that easily keeps fans entertained.
In spite of having played two gruelling games that day, later in the afternoon Green and her teammates are on their feet behind me, screaming loudly every time the Australian men’s team does anything spectacular in their semi-final. At half-time, they sing and dance along to Summer Nights as the song is blasted over the stadium’s speakers. Music is a big part of the players’ lives: they train to music in the gym, and use it to rev themselves up before a big game. (Green likes to play rapper 2Pac and “dance like crazy” in the car park between training sessions.)
The team plays a lot of country music – a nod to the fact many of them are from the country, mostly rural Queensland. It’s a team tradition to blast Katy Perry’s Roar from speakers before a match as they travel from changing room to field in a tight pack. The song is a reminder of the team’s unofficial motto, ROAR: Respect, Olympic dreams, Accountability, and Rough bitches. Green laughs when I ask her about that last letter. “It’s just to remind us never to be soft on the field.”
Oh, I most definitely once owned Sea Monkeys:
Sea-Monkeys were von Braunhut’s most lucrative toy (and still are: In 2006, according to the filings in this lawsuit, sales were $3.4 million). Part of what made Sea-Monkeys successful was a scientific breakthrough Harold von Braunhut claimed he achieved in the early years. In 1960, after observing the success of Uncle Milton’s Ant Farm, von Braunhut first started shipping Instant Life — simple brine shrimp that could travel in their natural state of suspended animation. This was the era when a good idea with smart marketing was the dream: D.F. Duncan’s yo-yo, George Parker’s Monopoly game, Ruth Handler’s Barbie. Around the same time, the big-time toy company of the day, Wham-O, started selling a similar product called Instant Fish, which was an immediate dud.
“They didn’t work because the formula wasn’t thought through properly,” Signorelli von Braunhut said. Wham-O’s product was actually African killifish, which were supposed to come back to life when rehydrated. But they didn’t. “So it really hurt sales for Harold, too.”
One of our own is participating in a museum dance-off, as one does, so please consider watching the videos, which are being done BRACKET STYLE like March Madness. I will not tell you who to vote for, but voting is a civic duty.
these lions could be bisexual so I am not calling them gay lions but look how in love they are it’s VERY romantic
Yet another Toastie made me this lovely picture of Sansa, so you should go buy her stuff:
Speaking of talented and funny Toasties, ANOTHER one of our own decided to write, perform, and record a modern folk song about the Hatton Garden Heist!
Tituss is always the best part of anything, and this was very moving:
How did you land your first regular role on a series?
I did four episodes on 30 Rock but we never had any kind of conversations about what else I was doing or where I lived, or anything. All of these correlations between Titus and Tituss, we never talked about, so it’s really uncanny how perfect it fit. I tell this story all the time. And I’ll tell it to you. And it is the absolute truth. The last day of 30 Rock, I was living on 47th Street between Eighth and Ninth and my last Broadway show had just closed. It was Guys and Dolls. Alec Baldwin turned to the team on my last day of shooting and said, “You guys gotta give this guy a spinoff.” I had been in pursuit of a purpose, of the next dream to chase. And I wanted to put a pause on theater, so I went home and got on my knees and I prayed, “Please, if the universe will allow, if you will grant me, or can find it in your vastness, a series or a job working with the caliber of talent I’ve been working with and types of writers, I will do right by it and I will honor it and I will do it to the best of my abilities.” That was four years before. Cut to getting this job, and on the first day they called and they said, “Tituss, you need to report to 48th and Tenth and someone will walk you to your trailer.” The trailer for my show was right outside my old apartment where I prayed for this job. I literally could have opened the door and walked into my trailer. I looked around, and I started crying.
And I say that to say I was at the Harlem Tavern a couple months ago with some friends of mine. This young lady runs out, sobbing. And I’m like, Where’s the police, is something wrong? She said, “I just want you to know that I have been battling depression, I’m going through a divorce, and the only thing I had to look forward to is to come home and watch you over and over and over again.” And my first thought was 47th Street when I prayed and me saying, “I will do right by it to the best of my ability.” Because it is so much larger than getting any nomination and me getting accolades. I take it so seriously because it is giving people relief. Things are so thick right now in this world, and even if it just provides a little blip in the lake of all other things that are going on …
I share a lot of stories about terrible men from Reddit, but let’s remember that some women are also terrible!
So, I wrote something for the print edition of Christianity Today, because I am cool and hip and Christianity is a cheesy black velvet Elvis painting and they are super stoked to have me, so they sent a photographer out to me and I was joking on Twitter about whether I was supposed to wear a cross or whatever, and then I got, hm, the funniest email I have ever gotten in my entire life?
I was already pretty sure it was a joke but literally nothing could prepare me for this:
HOLY FUCKING SHIT THAT WOMAN. Way to bury the lede. I spent most of the weekend hunting out terrible people on that sub reddit and that one takes the cake.
That can’t be real, right? Please tell me that can’t be real. No one could be quite THAT delusional…I hope (but fear that I’m wrong).
“From what he’s told me, she’s a massive bitch.” Well that sounds like a thoughtful description from an unbiased source. She does take her time getting there with her careers-are-not-the-problem-sex-is-not-the-problem nonsense.
Oh. Oh my god.
are you me? I did the same thing, read that sub all weekend, and this post… HOLY FUCKING SHIT may be an understatement. Bless her heart.
I’m pretty sure it is fake. For me, the smoking gun of the “fake!” is that if she conceived “sometime” in the next year, her baby would be 4-5 when the boyfriend left his wife, not 6.
I know it’s weird to point to such a petty detail and cry “fake!” but I think a person really in this situation would have thought through the math.
I kept going back and forth reading it. Some of her responses to the answerers made it seem a lot more believable, like maybe this IS just a case of incredibly arrested development and naivete.
Yeah, the answers sounded a lot more believable than the original post.
I think it might be fake but that doesn’t mean this exact thing isn’t happening somewhere.
I counted; she buries five ledes.
I’d disown her just for that, tbh.
In this house, we obey the rules of narrative clarity!
I kind of feel like people are being way harsher on her than she deserves? Not that she isn’t awful/delusional, but compared to some of the dudes that have been written about she’s like a poor lost little lamb. Like, even in this story the man is worse.
Yeah, it probably doesn’t work to have a thread that’s like, “it was appalling how Monica Lewinsky was shamed” and “that woman who has been sleeping with a married man since she was 22 and totally believes his lies about how his wife is a bitch and that he’ll leave her just as soon as the kids turn eighteen is definitely as bad as the guy who sued for custody because his wife won the lottery and he wanted some money”.
I agree, but I don’t think anyone’s really being that harsh on her? At least, not compared to the terrible dudes who got pretty ruthlessly mocked the other day. Like, I don’t read any of this thread as saying her delusion/naivete/complicity in cheating makes her THE bad guy in this whole trainwreck of a situation.
Well, no one this side of a serial killer is as bad as the Lottery Leech (OK, there are lots of people this side of serial killers who are worse, but you get me), but I keep coming back to her having seduced him when she met him at her little sister’s parent-teacher conference (“he texted me that he couldn’t do anything physical cos he was married, so after some conversation, I sexted him and sent him nudes to get him to come over”). That’s not really great.
I feel weird about her phrasing there, mostly because after I was sexually assaulted I assumed I totally initiated it. After therapy, I was able to recognize that no I did not, the guy who assaulted me did. I was also sexually abused as a kid at only slightly older ages than that poster was and… I dunno. I dunno, it affects your ability to determine what it feels like when you give consent. I’m not okay assuming she really did initiate the affair while the guy was innocent I guess.
Thank you for that perspective.
I totally understand your reservations, but we can only judge from the info she provided, and those were her words. The married man is in no way “innocent” — he consented — but from what she said, it’s reasonable to conclude that she initiated.
But his was the first boundary violation- why did he get the number of his students sister? What possible reason could there be for that? Why didn’t he shut it down immediately, rather than “i can’t do anything physical because I’m married”? He sounds like a predator.
You make some good points. He’s certainly not without blame in this situation; he could have simply said, “Sorry, but I don’t think that’s appropriate.”
In my experience, men who say things like ‘I can’t sleep with you because of X’ (usually a partner), but continue the conversation/contact, are usually skeevs and will happily cheat on their partner, they just want to make sure they’ve covered their ass and lined you up as the husband stealing harlot first.
I mean, he’s definitely playing her. (And, as the person with a spouse, arguably holds a greater share of moral culpability.) But she is ignoring reality and willfully buying his bullshit about how much his wife sucks AND planning to bring a kid into this fucked-up situation. Plus, she’s 30 now, and I kind of feel like at a certain point you have to take responsibility for what you’re willing to believe/ignore in order to get the things you want? I mean, “Jeremy” obviously sucks too, but I don’t think that really excuses her behavior.
(Side note: I am currently in the process of breaking up with a Jeremy (obviously not this guy, but an unrelated college student), and this + the reddit thread are kind of flipping me out.)
Love the comment in that thread that says basically “you are so low a priority for this dude that he cares less about you than the wife he’s cheating on.”
I thought that was the best point in the whole thread!
“The problem they have with Jeremy is that he’s married”
*record scratch noise*
He’s really not a bad guy, our love is just so real and strong
I think the Monica Lewinsky interview is really thoughtful and nicely done.
I like Jon Ronson. I generally find his wanginess to be minimal.
I was a kid when the Lewinsky thing happened, so I missed it all, but I did get all the jokes in later years and never really thought about her much apart from as an abstract punchline. But then I watched her TED talk and it really made me think about her as a person, as a really young person, being in the middle of all of that. I’m glad she’s found something that she likes doing, and is able to take back the narrative about herself.
I remember reading one of his long articles on shaming and I had to stop because it was making me feel vaguely queasy. He doesn’t really see any difference between people on social media saying, “wow, gross, that was a horrifically racist comment!” and something like what happened to Lewinsky. It’s all just shame to him. I find that quite creepy.
Yep, and he brings some of those same people back into the Lewinsky interview, which really detracted from it for me. Just let her talk, dude, she’s smarter than you.
I don’t think he’s saying they’re the same. I think he’s exploring the overall culture of how we react to things, which is quite interesting.
I agree. I think racism and misogyny are a huge problem online, obviously, but I am actually glad he tries to strip away the content of the shamings to focus on the behavior. As the Lewinsky article points out, even the “good guys” (90s feminists in this case) can get really tribal and dickish, and no one is immune to self-justification.
I think he does a lot of false equivalency. IMHO, you can see it in how he sums up the Mike Daisey incident, but the worst is how he wrote about Adria Richards. If he couldn’t find it himself to empathize with her, he should have just left her out of the book. I’ve also never seen him pay attention to structures of power and how those affect who is hurt by Internet shaming and who gets second, third, and fourth chances. So to me, he comes across as thoughtless rather than thoughtful.
This is right on – his treatment of Adria Richards was way beyond wang-y.
Yeah, he’s incapable of keeping himself out of the story, and he draws way too many dodgy parallels. That interview is quite good, but overall I don’t trust him at all.
The Mike Daisey stuff is especially irritating. That guy just straight up refused to admit that lying about the people he interviewed in China was grossly unethical and disrespectful toward them.
I could have especially done without the paragraph that starts:
“I tell Lewinsky that I think the problem with focusing all the attention on misogynists and racists…”
Minimal Wanginess is the name of my new electrojazz quintet.
For me, the pinnacle of his wanginess is how in the “publically shamed” essay he lavished so much time on the guys from the Santa Clara tech conference in comparison to how he treated Adria Richards. I might read his work with interest–and I have been reading about Monica Lewinsky lately–but I’ll never really trust him, especially not when it comes to covering women. (I actually dug it up to see if I was remembering correctly and it made me even madder.)
Not trying to argue–just adding my reason for finding him a wang, which no longer looks like a word to me!
eta: especially when he spends all this time psychoanalyzing WHY she might tweet a pic of two dudes being gross (because her father left when she was a child? because she was sexually assaulted? because she can’t sufficiently prove to Ronson why as a black woman she might feel instinctively cautious in a room of white men?) and basically depicts her as unstable and bringing the floodgates on herself. ugh, getting madder thinking about it!
Yes! And it was particularly infuriating because he was buying into Hank’s victim story, even though Hank is the one person on the book able to use a pseudonym. Because Hank was never freaking shamed! His identity is not out there. He probably wasn’t even fired because of the dongle jokes, although only he and his former employer know that for sure (and at this point, probably only the former employer since I’m sure Hank has thoroughly convinced himself of his own blamelessness).
Also, his writing about the Stanford Prison Experiment was either crappy or dishonest.
So much life defining stuff for me happened in 2006 and I’m not ready for that to be a decade ago.
We tried to explain Shoes to my friends new boyfriend recently. He now thinks we’re, even more, weird.
I remember fondly that month when you could reply to just about any text or instant message with “Shoes.” and it would work somehow. Absolutely does not feel like ten years ago!
Still my go to answer for pretty much any question.
We had so many stupid videos that we watched obsessively, I think we probably spoke in nothing but obscure quotes.
Someone I know keeps trying to tell me that the guy in the Shoes video is Jimmy Kimmel, and I have to keep googling it and telling her she’s wrong, but still everytime Shoes comes up (which is often.) she’ll try it again.
I came into being by way of AIM chat and ebaums world
MSN was a way of life for us. MSN and Bebo were literally all we did as teenagers. That and throw house parties that tried to be like Skins so we could take pictures to put on Bebo.
Oh man, I wish I was friends with you in high school. I was never cool but my senior year I went through a terrible break up with an abusive dude and just wanted to be carefree and have fun after that. There was a super hot new guy at school that I was crushing on and wanted to make out with, so I told him I was throwing a party because I wanted to hang out with him and had no idea how to actually suggest that (but a party was a plausible option, I guess). Anyways, word got out that I was having a party, so people showed up and it ended up really being a party, and I did make out with him that night. There’s my anecdote for the day.
House parties were the best thing ever. Despite being a complete loser, I managed to get a reputation for throwing some truley epic parties (Not undeserved, my parties were epic. I had a big house and my mother would leave me alone over night a lot. That’s all you need apparently)
There was a time, when we were about 16/17, when we did nothing but go to house parties and it was awesome. I think its because we were all too young for bars/clubs, but were too ‘mature’ for drinking in a field, and our parents thought we were somewhat responsible so would leave their house in the care of their teenage children for whole weekends.
I miss good house parties now, no one throws really good ones anymore, probably because we have to pay for the damage now.
Ah man, yes! The house party! I do miss those. Yes, I think the ‘not responsible for damage’ thing plays a role in why they’re not as hot. Also, it’s just not as fun when you’re allowed to do it. Half the fun was in telling your mom you were spending the night with your SAT study group friends (which they were). We were not smart enough to know that beer+tequila+JAGERMEISTER = a slow and watery death though, so lesson learned.
OK, that ended really well! I thought it was going to be one of those awful cautionary tales about how Bigger Boys Came and wrecked the house*!
(which actually happened to my partner. She is now 40 and her father only just noticed that his telescope was broken about three years go, so I guess he didn’t use it as much as he thought he would in the intervening 20 years.)
Hahaha! I feel sorry his telescope was damaged, that sucks. But damn, that is hilarious. Nothing was broken, but the next morning my mom was like, “why are there so many Gatorade bottles and McDonalds cups?” Then she opened the lid of one to smell it and figured out why.
I still have an irrational hatred of Skins. The characters (in the first series) were all basically my age, and the little of it I saw just made me want to shriek “No, we are not all like this! Some of us are boring and stay at home doing homework and reading fanfic, and would utterly despise these prententious, annoying arseholes if we met them!”. I continue to bear a bit of a grudge against Nicholas Hoult despite the many things that dispose me to like him (almost exactly my age! Very handsome! In Fury Road! Went to school in my partner’s hometown!).
(I have never attended or thrown a house party, unless you count inviting people over to sit around and drink wine and talk about Harry Potter.)
We were slightly younger than the first generation of Skins and they were literally everything we wanted to be. We tried so hard, but lacked the money and access to drugs to really emulate the Skins lifestyle until a few years later.
We were just as lame and idiotic as you’re imagining, but we had cool hair *shrug*
Ha, I thought the Skins lifestyle looked like a nightmarish hellscape. (I still think that, actually. Wild house parties with loads of drunk and high people = my worst nightmare.)
oh, Myspace was a big deal then, too. That top 8 business was cut throat.
I have never heard of Shoes. I was 16 in 2006! Surely I should be aware of this sort of thing!
Have you heard of Text Message Breakup? It’s by the same guy and if you haven’t seen it you’re in for a treat!
Or Muffins.
“cartoooon muffin”
“cigarette (cough)”
“bits o’ GLASS muffins!”
BLOOD
Oh, you’ll eat a muffin. YOU’LL EAT A MUFFIN AND YOU’LL LIKE IT.
YUP. My best friend and I still quote many of Sullivan’s sketches (tbh a great deal of our friendship lexicon is just quotes from mid-aughts-era Internet videos), but “Muffins” might be the pinnacle of our random interjections and non-sequiturs.
“FIRE!!!”
It doesn’t ring a bell at all. What was I doing in 2006?
I still say ‘ehrmagerd, shoes’ whenever anyone talks about shoe shopping. Most people, of any age, have no clue what I’m talking about.
Related early-00s weird-indie stuff, does anyone remember a song called ‘Eggs’ performed by a band consisting of parents on guitar and drums and a eight-year old kid on vocals? I still sing it to myself when cooking eggs, but I can’t remember the name of the band or any other lyrics except for ‘Easter time is coming and we are getting….Eggs!’
I remember being a freshman in college in 2010 and hanging out with a group of friends in the dorm just comparing internet weirdness jokes. “Do you guys know the ‘Shoes’ video?” “How about ‘We Like The Moon’?” and so on. There was a fair amount of overlap, but surprising regional differences.
I just this minute remembered the Tinfoil Hat song, as presented by some cut-and-paste animation of otters wearing hats in a video which I watched online in 2005 (I know that was the year because I was studying abroad at the time) and it turns out I still know how it goes, so well I can just sit here and sing this song to myself in my head, after not watching it again in the intervening eleven years.
I’ve found weird similarities and differences between England and Ireland! We’re now at that age where we spend a lot of time talking about weird shit we did as teenagers, and when myself and my Irish friends are talking to our English friends we all remember a lot of the same stuff, but then they won’t have heard of random things, like Shoes!
Shoes was my mom’s introduction to viral internet things. Teenage me felt so cool showing it to her!
Oh good, here is where I can ask you all to lol along with me at a) the idea the Shoes was the first viral video (All Your Base Are Belong To Us? That badger mushroom song?) and b) that “we didn’t have the word ‘troll’ back then.” The feminist message boards I was on in 2006 definitely had trolls, and we definitely called them by that name. Cherish your obliviousness if you were only recently introduced to the concept of trolling.
OT: Not in the mood to get into relationship details today, but people who’ve dated both men and women: are men actually so much stupider than women about emotional things like they seem to be? Or is that just my perspective because I’m a lady who only dates men and obviously I’m emotionally brilliant?
Off to read about the tterrible reddit woman/women now!
I think there’s an element of the outsourced emotional labour thing. Women are expected to do emotional management in relationships and understand how people work.
Man, not to hijack the link roundup, but how does a person opt out of that? My husband is an awesome dude, and caring for him is great, and he 100% does not EXPECT me to manage him or our relationship emotionally BUT I TOTALLY DO IT ANYWAY and I hate it!!
Could you just…..not do it? I mean, maybe give him a heads up that you need a break or whatever, but I mean, the only way to opt out is to opt out.
I think the problem is that I don’t realize I’m doing it until I’ve done it in a lot of situations.
Hmmmmm. Maybe journaling would help to start identifying those patterns, that you could then try to change? I’ve found journaling and mindfulness really helpful for identifying all kinds of bad thought patterns, personally.
My experience is that men do not even realize women are doing it. They don’t even know that’s a “thing”, it’s just the norm for them? Unless you point it out, anyway. I actually did that semi-recently, just straight up told a guy “sorry, I don’t have the spoons to do all the emotional labor tonight”. He seemed to understand, you know, after I explained both “spoons” and “emotional labor”.
At least, he understood for that night, not that it got any better in the long-run but STILL, it felt good saying it.
OMG ME TOO.
In fact today I sat with a male friend and talked to him for like an hour about something he is working on when I have an important presentation on Thursday. As I sat there I had this sudden thought that this person is not even my partner, he is a work friend, and yet I am trying to talk him up at the expense of my own time! And it’s not his fault and he probably doesn’t even realize I’m doing it!
I know I should just stop but it’s so hard when I don’t even realize that’s what I’m doing until I’m in the middle of it.
After Jess Zimmerman’s article on emotional labor here, there was a massive metafilter thread about it, which was fantastic, but also so many comments I think it took me 5 days to read it. Someone actually created an organized pdf from that thread; there’s a section on evaluating relationships and how to make it work. https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B4x_uodEDiS0UXln…
(the original article that spawned that http://the-toast.net/2015/07/13/emotional-labor/)
I don’t think men lack any intrinsic ability to be emotionally smart, they just very often don’t bother their backsides developing those skills, because women have been doing it for them since childhood.
I’m 100% not here for gender essentialism BUT I have recently had some experiences with men that lead me to realise that a whole bunch of emotional stuff that is completely second nature to women just does not even cross their minds. They also seem to experience the passing of time at a different speed? I dunno.
It is both galling and relieving at once to realise something you’ve been agonising over re: a male is something they have not even noticed or spent a second of their time thinking about.
That last sentence! The number of times I’ve had that experience with my husband… is many times.
The flip side being how galling it is when you think about the hassle they could have avoided by spending a second of their time thinking about the possible emotional ramifications of an action.
Galling when you’ve been sitting there being like “omg did he think I was ignoring him there? Oh god he prob thinks I’m a twat” and then you talk later and he clearly didn’t even notice and you’ve wasted your energy worrying about it but also nobody thinks you’re a twat. So conflicting.
Okay- I can’t believe I’m linking to Deseret News but I wanted to be sure to use a link that’s covered by Dave Barry’s syndication rights- what you want to read is Chapter II. I don’t believe this is wholly nature but I can’t quite think of it as 100% nurture either. http://www.deseretnews.com/article/420173/DAVE-BA…
I don’t agree with him about men and commitment though. I think that might be the dividing line DB uses between “men” and “guys” so his beliefs could still be accurate.
Yes on the time thing! My best friend and I call it Guy Time. As in, it’s been 5bdays since I heard from him, so he must be on Guy Time.
This also seems to apply to how long a guy thinks a relationship has been going on. “Oh yes, [email protected] and I met about 3 months ago, she’s great!” formergr:”Um, it’s been like 11 months actually? “
Ha yes when I am feeling uncharitable I like to claim it’s because their sense of time is dulled from being so stupid.
#misandry
IT ME
Husband: “Yeah, guess it took me awhile to get in touch after we met, what was it, 2 or 3 months?”
Me: “…or 8 months.” (N.B. we’d been facebook friends that whole time, he just didn’t start trying to date me until 8 months later.)
:’D :’D
I was watching an episode of Property Brothers with a straight couple, and the guy said they’d been married “like, I guess a year,” and the woman just stared at him and was like “three years.” You can’t make this shit up. I wanted to burn them with fire, even more so than most terrible people on that show. ETA: him more so than her but then they were both just terrible during the reno (of course).
My gentleman caller came over last night and as he was leaving I said ‘so are we doing anything this week, or will you say you’re going to come over and then not, so I will actually see you probably next Sunday unless football is on?’
‘yes, and that is all I am saying’ was his response.
Relatedly I am now realising I was totally spoiled by my ex who is, it seems, emotionally female and used to (actually still does) discuss his feeeeeelings with me on a regular basis.
Yes, but we do all the drilling and sawing and get the boxes from that one really tall shelf.
Destroy that one really tall shelf; destroy the patriarchy.
Or buy a stepstool! It’s a cheap and practical replacement for a man.
All I need is a stepstool and a vibrator and I’ll be set. I’m already halfway there.
I’m a cis woman and I’m six. fucking. feet. tall.
I am also in possession of a step stool who has never once talked back to me or asked me “are you having your period?” when I expressed frustration or sadness.
Ugh. To hell with that high shelf.
Oh, yeah, all drilling and sawing that needs doing every single day in our tiny apartment.
EXCUSE YOU I have my own drill TYVM (but yes my husband is very tall and excellent at reaching and it’s faster to have him come pull something from a shelf than to drag out the stepstool so)
Men: a sledgehammer or a stepstool away from obsolesence.
Women are socialized to be caretakers. They also tend to watch and interpret body language more than men, because women are more often in situations where doing so is a matter of safety because of male violence.
There’s also the emotional labor component, but that’s rolled up into the first one (women are socialized to be caretakers).
Yes, women are much more aware of these things and men are stupid about them – this was a shock to the system when I started dating men.
Another layer you can add to this is that I and a few friends of mine independently noticed that bisexual men tend to be better at emotional stuff (from our own limited anecdata). Presumably because they realise consciously or subconsciously how much emotional labour women do when there’s not a woman around to do it.
This one’s bi! But also six years younger than I am so I think there’s still some learning to be done. He is very good about talking about talking it all through though and understanding now what the issue is, so I’m hopeful.
This has been my experience too (women are better but bisexual men can be pretty good).
YMMV; mine certainly did.
I dunno, but I definitely switched both my Tinder and my OKCupid profiles to “women only” after discovering that a good 80% of men on those sites have profiles that looked like they were created while smashed on PBR and never edited when sober. And women have such nice, articulate profiles! And they actually have real conversations with me instead of just hitting me up for sex right off the bat! I don’t get it!
I feel like it’s variable by cultural conditioning? Most of my male friends raised in America are fuck-awful at emotional labor unless you call them on it very explicitly. My male friends raised in Japan are not always good at emotional labor in romantic relationships but really step up to do a lot of emotional labor in friendships (presents! planning outings and parties! helping clean up after things! calling on sick friends to bring meds and books! it’s beautiful and amazing).
Ok, this REALLY explains why the “friend” who eventually ended up trying to sleep with me while his wife was pregnant seemed like such a good friend at first. (for years prior, actually.) He’d spent some years teaching in japan, where he presumably picked up a few things about emotional labour as it relates to friendships.
Here to confirm: men are stupid about emotions. Even with simple diagrams and cue cards. Sincerely too stupid to live.
I *just* had a man (who at least once directly stated he loved me and continues to behave as if he lives here) tell me he thought my emotions were silly so he tried to robot them down. Part of me was so angry I wanted to throw a large appliance at his ‘I’m-so-objective-even-my-feelings-are-more-right-than-yours’ face but most of me was like, “Dude. Seriously. Listen to what you just said.”
*headdesk*
Having a resurgence of my childhood fantasies of running away to the island Wonder Woman came from.
In all seriousness, though, the term ‘dyke-o-drama’ is not without substance.
Also, you probably are emotionally brilliant. (Despite the dating men thing.)
Men in general are just worse than women at everything – especially straight men. Since I’m genderqueer I only date bisexuals to avoid the “what does your gender mean for my precious orientation?!” question and this filter has introduced me to many lovely, caring and emotionally intelligent dudes. Bisexuals: we’re just better™.
I love how you wrote my comment for me, very efficient.
Like I said, we’re just better 😛
Buzzfeed has a terrific article up about Lifetime. One of my new year’s resolutions was actually to stop describing anything I do as “trashy” or “a guilty pleasure” or “fluff,” in part because that kind of language is really worryingly gendered, as this article repeatedly points out. I mean, you never hear men describe Grand Theft Auto as “a guilty pleasure.”
Also, “unpretentiously radical female solidarity” is both a great way to describe Lifetime and a good life goal for everyone.
I was so impressed by their numbers, too. Even if their output WAS sexist drivel, they’d still deserve some props just for giving female writers and directors this much work.
Also: I can’t wait for UnREAL to come back.
Yes to both of your points. I like that Laura Goode acknowledges that the channel did have some problems with playing to the “woman in danger” trope, but you’re right that at least even then they were hiring women to tell those stories.
And yes to unREAL.
I binge watched UnREAL a few weeks ago and I have never loved a TV show so hard and so quickly (not even Orphan Black). And NOBODY would believe me that it was such a fantastic show. When I finished the first season I felt strangely empowered by it.
I did convince one friend to watch it and he understood. It is a glorious thing.
Here for UnReal. HERE FOR IT.
Have you seen The Faith Diaries they’re running right now? Little 6 minute mini-episodes about Faith and her maybe-girlfriend in LA. So great, thank you past self for not deleting the supscription from the TiVo.
That’s a terrific article. Obviously it’s worrying how frequently typically-female interests like romance novels and TV soap-style shows are denigrated (even here, on the Toast! Romance novels just can’t catch a break), but I love how they’re pointing out how Lifetime makes women-centered narratives the norm instead of the outlier, and how they hire women to direct and produce stories about women. Not women as sex objects or eye candy or the Object Of The Game, but women who are people living their lives. Dramatically, because lifetime, but there’s a centrality to it that is incredibly refreshing.
I was just scrolling through the comments to see if someone had posted this already! Unreal and Grey’s Anatomy reruns are pretty much the only thing I’ve ever watched on Lifetime, and I’ve never seen one of their movies, so I didn’t realize just how awesome Lifetime actually is.
I am so on board with this. The denigration of feminized ‘trashy’ culture gives me such a big case of the grumpers, especially when it comes from dudes who enjoy their own masculinist fantasy fluff.
This reminds me of a surprisingly heated argument I had with my cousin about Twilight, a movie I actually despise. He showed me a picture of the kid from the Transformers movies (I don’t even want to bother googling his name but I think it sounds like beef in French?) wearing a t-shirt that said ‘Fuck Twilight’ and I made him try prove to me why Transformers is inherently less embarrassing/trashy than Twilight and he got super red in the face…
It annoys me so much. Sure: Twilight is silly. But somehow, stuff that teenage girls love is singled out for ridicule, while the no less ridiculous stuff teenage boys like is seen as dumb fun.
Transformers vs. Twilight is such a good example of this! I think unfortunately you can play this game with movies, books, music… pretty much all cultural categories, the one considered more feminine is “trashier.”
It’s especially galling in the age of superhero movie saturation. Don’t be looking down on romantic comedies when you revel in the juvenile macho fantasy of Batman.
^^^ this
One of my personal biggest peeves is when people use Kim Kardashian as shorthand for “everything that is wrong with America today,” because a) it assumes that watching a dumb reality show makes you some kind of drooling sheeple, which is both untrue and a really insulting way to think about anyone for any reason, and b) let me see what it is that you watch on TV, because I mean Kim’s show is dumb and boring, but have you flipped through cable channels lately? Most of it is dumb and boring.
I <3 lifetime forever and ever amen.
I had no idea that Mary Harron (American Psycho) did a biopic on Anna Nicole Smith, which interests me.
“I mean, you never hear men describe Grand Theft Auto as “a guilty pleasure.””
I feel like this sentence alone has just made several break throughs for me, mentally, so thank you very much.
Yes! Me too! In my head I can can hear a 70s-era woman saying in a gentle consciousness-raising voice “What is a ‘guilty pleasure”‘ Do men have ‘guilty pleasures’? Why do we say that the things which take us away from the unhappiness of now are bad? Do we think women don’t have the right to escape even for a moment, but men do?”
ME TOO. I love the Toast so much.
these lions could be bisexual so I am not calling them gay lions
I am genuinely super grateful for this disclaimer. Does this say something terrible about the general level of bisexual visibility?
I don’t feel bad for his wife at all. She gets to be with him all the time, and from what he’s told me, she’s a massive bitch. They never have sex, and she’s done many hurtful things to him that I won’t go into. Also she’s not figured it out, so I don’t get how we’re being cruel.
*screams* Yes, humans are just terrible, regardless of gender. (Not that gender doesn’t come into it – intimate partner violence, for example, is by far mostly perpetrated by men against women! Men are terrible, etc. etc. But I sometimes feel inclined to agree with Guardian columnist Lucy Mangan: “All other people do is let you down and eat all the ham”.)
Also: I am seeing an advert for “Genes Reunited” at the bottom of the page, which sounds alarmingly like a service which brings together members of different branches of the same family so they can procreate and unite their genes in one individual once more, just like their common ancestor. I’m not sure that’s a service that needs to exist.
As for having a family myself, we’re probably going to try to conceive in the next year or so. It’s not like I’ll be a single mum (like my parents worry about) because Jeremy will visit every day, support us, and then when our kid is 6 he’ll be a full time dad.
Her partner is going to be one of those men with a secret family! That can’t backfire horribly AT ALL.
Jeremy will visit every day of course he will, poppet
How does she expect him to provide enough support (physical, emotional, financial, whichever) without tipping off his other family to the fact that something weird is going on?
I can’t speak to the physical or emotional side of things BUT in terms of financial support I think she mentioned he’s a teacher, so he can easily make it rain for two families. You know what those public sector salaries are like.
…maybe he’s done it before? Maybe he’s speaking from experience when he reassures her.
ohhhh shit this is terrible to consider
Oh, gosh, this just gave me a flashback to Miss Manners answering a question relating to a similar situation. . .ah, thank you, Google books! I found this by searching “Miss Manners Eva Duarte” because it stuck out in my head so much.
https://books.google.com/books?id=y-MM7zB-TTQC&am…
(if the link doesn’t work, it is the letter “Nonmarital Families” from pp 71-72 of Miss Manners’ Guide to Rearing Perfect Children,” which I started reading at age 6.)
That is wonderful, thank you! I like her utter disdain for the husband.
Heh, the opening paragraph is on a page not in the preview but in that same book, there’s kind of a mirror image of the question–mother of a guy who left his pregnant wife for pregnant wife’s friend because he had “finally found someone who filled all his needs and encouraged his potential” and now finds visiting his child by his first wife socially awkward–but grandma wants a fancy family portrait of her grandchildren and also to have first child for “several hours” on holidays. The letter is just such a piece of work, and Miss Manners’ appalled disdain is ice cold on point.
https://books.google.com/books?id=y-MM7zB-TTQC&am…
Miss Manners WILL call you on your shit, no matter how you try to spin it. Until Mallory became Prudie, she was probably the only advice columnist I trusted.
That was great.
I ended up feeling sorry for her when I read some replies she left talking about how they got together when she was 22 and he was 36, and that her parents are her only friends, and that she was sexually abused as a child 🙁 Don’t get me wrong, she’s still behaving terribly, but that information does provide some context, and (even more) reveals ‘Jeremy’ to be a snake.
🙁 What a mess. Jeremy sounds like a dick.
If her parents are her only friends, and they really want to help her, won’t cutting her off just drive her farther into the arms of her horrible predatory boyfriend?
Yeah, I mean, I very very agree that this woman is deluded and awful, but as to her very narrow point that her parents shouldn’t threaten to disown her if she doesn’t break up with him, that’s not ridiculous. Although, as the parents, it would be infuriating to watch this happen for 8 years. Maybe since those years of letting it happen didn’t change anything, they just feel like they have to do *something*….
It’s almost as if, if terrible controlling relationships that use love as a bargaining chip are the model with which you grew up, you’re more likely to find yourself in terrible relationships as an adult!
I assumed it was a troll redditor, tbh, I don’t know if that means I have too much faith in people or not enough…
I was thinking of the “genes reunited” ad as a dating app specifically for people named Gene.
The sea monkey article blew my tiny little mind. Sure, the guy was a Jewish neo nazi huckster, but those gates…
That article is BANANAS. Just when I thought it couldn’t get any weirder/better, it did. And now I weirdly want to own sea monkeys again, like I did in the early 90s. Is that odd?
I AM SCREAMING AT THAT PICTURE IT IS AMAZING WOWWWWW
All I can think of is the ‘Live Laugh Love’ angry cubicle lady character from Jen Kirkman’s podcast!
Must be nice to be so rich, to afford all those Precious Moments figurines…
*a million thumbs up* #richbitch
#soblessed
I don’t have time to listen to a podcast, I’m busy working at my JOB to make money for my FAMILY!!!
That picture is selling me harder on Christianity than living in the south literally my entire life. I love it.
I think my favorite thing is the blue filter they seem to have used for everything but Nicole and the Jesus memorabilia.
The Jesus tote!!!
I am not queer, or a librarian, does that mean I have to stop reading?
I believe if you email Nicole directly she can authorise a six-month grace period during which time you may try to become either queer or a librarian. If you’re unsuccessful… yes. You will have to leave.
I would like to be a librarian! How do i do this (should I do this?)? (Mainly for the warm Toastie embrace, but there are other reasons.)
Is there a newsletter I can subscribe to that will answer my questions and guide me through the process?
ALA listservs, talk to librarians.
Honestly though, as a librarian, the pay is terrible and job market sucks eggs. Be prepared to move across the country for jobs.
According to Mallory’s talk, other acceptable categories include:
– Female weightlifters
– Outdoorsy archivists
– Stay-at-home medievalists
So, you’ve got options.
Do 25-kg bags of horse feed count as weights?
Yes, yes, they do.
Hurrah!
“Outdoorsy archivists,” eh? I know my sister *reads* it sometimes…
omg omg omg
i was reading through and getting progressively more discouraged
BUT I LITERALLY AM A STAY-AT-HOME MEDIEVALIST
I BELONG
[also — is “stay at home medievalist” a category into which other people here fit, and if so, can we form a club please please please]
I mean, I have a day job, but I don’t like to really leave the house much otherwise, so I’m sort of a stay-at-home medievalist, or SAHM.
YES YES THIS IS A CATEGORY INTO WHICH I FIT AS WELL
insofar as much of my dissertating takes place at home on my couch, which probably counts. definitely at home, definitely a medievalist
The Toast is a major reason why I recently took up weightlifting.
*Swings in from the chandelier* This is AWESOOOOOMMMEEEE* Swings away*
BRB. Changing my job title to “outdoorsy archivist”, because that’s just another way of saying I handle natural history collections, right?
Omg, I actually know a stay-at-home medievalist. And this all works by one degree of separation, right?
(I am also queer and the librarian of my own private collection of books, so I’m safe anyway.)
I have an English degree and I wrote my junior paper on Auden and my senior thesis on Angels in America, surely that counts for something?
I AM AN OUTDOORSY ARCHIVIST. Who spent saturday indoors playing stardew valley, because I have depths (and had food poisoning).
Stay-at-home medievalist! At last I have a job description!
Keep reading and let us know if you become either. Science is trying to determine whether Toast readership causes librarianism and/or queerness.
I became a librarian and came out after reading the Toast, so … yes?
But . . . deep down . . . are we not all queer librarians in our hearts?
Yes.
Clinging to this truth.
Sorry, I’m really not. There is an information professional branch to my role (career adviser) and I am terrible at it and hate it and usually make someone else do it.#
ETA: I’m queer, though!
#NOTALLTOASTIES
interpreted this as No Tall Toasties and I was like HEY!
My boyfriend (who is a man, so I’m out on both counts) is a librarian, which could mean that I have adjacency points, but he also makes his job sound realllly boring, so maybe I’m getting farther away from it.
Good news! You can be both queer and in a relationship with a man!
I mean I thought this website would have rubbed off on me more by now, but I’m pretty sure I’m straight
Sansa is such a happy dog! LOOKIT HER FURRY FACE.
The cat, on the other hand…
That’s what friendship looks like!
Things I Have Mistaken for Cross-Species Friendship Over the Years
The unrestrained canine joy combined with the long-suffering feline endurance = perfect. Twas ever thus and ever shall it be.
my mom made me read “Nicholas and Alexandra” when i was eight and i’m pretty sure it’s why i am like this.
Ahhhh, Nicole, I’m literally reading Velvet Elvis right now for church and that line in the roundup made me giggle, and then I saw that picture and it is actually perfect.
Now to actually read the links…
I really like Rob Bell, I’m pissed off that he has been Cast Out for asking questions about universalism that literally lots of Christian theologians have asked throughout history.
Oh my god, that photography for CT clearly has the best sense of humor <3 Will your piece also be up on the website eventually, or do I need to track down someone (possibly my parents, idk, I’m sure I know someone) who actually subscribes to the print version?
I bet the library has a subscription 🙂
Ask your local queer librarian. They’ll know what you’re talking about.
I think it’ll be online too. It drops in June, I think?
I have read this comment three times already, and I just figured you that you weren’t talking about a photographer for the state of Connecticut. I was so lost! Also confused, because as far as I can tell, no one in CT has a sense of humor… (Sorry CT people, I love to make gross generalizations about your state because I miss my own home)
It took me four tries to realize that CT was not “Chlamydia trachomatis,” which is exactly what you think it is, and which I spend all day writing about, every day. (Sorry Connecticut people [nutmeggers? is that right?].)
Speaking of Bosch, one thing I will say is that it’s a tragedy that I couldn’t get name approval for Hieronymus Braak as a baby name.
Snort. Thx for this.
his nickname was going to be “Hiero”
Naturally.
He could’ve been your Hiero baby.
He could’ve kissed away your pain.
What about Jeroen? That’s apparently what he went by and what most Dutch people call him, which threw me at the exhibition because it’s such a normal-dude Dutch name that it just didn’t feel right to me. It’s like his name is Ted or something.
well, it’s too late now
(Also, “Hieronymus” is the same name as “Jerome”, “Jeronimo”, “Jeroen”, like you said — it’s just a fancy form of a regular name. A guy with the name “Hieronymus” could just go by Jerry, and come on, there is nothing good about that name at all.)
This Link Roundup is getting me where I live.
(You bet your ass I shared that “Scientific American” article on all possible social media platforms.)
I am so ashamed of the views my teenage self had about Monica Lewinsky. I’m glad that we learn to be kinder as we get older but I hate that I, at least, learned on other people.
“I’m glad that we learn to be kinder as we get older ”
Yup. So many things I said/thought as a teen that I’m ashamed of now. But it’s reassuring to see proof of improvement with age.
At the time I somehow didn’t think much about Lewinsky at all–it was her alleged friend who stored up evidence and broke her trust that really shocked me. And of course I’d like to think the President would use better judgement, but that never works out the way I’d like.
Same! I think of what kind of terrible decisions Iiiii was making at 22, 23, etc. and am so glad I was no where near any sort of local platform, much less national. I was a kid when this happened but I definitely picked up on the slut shaming all the adults around me where doing. I feel so bad for her now.
That’s the thing that gets me- she was SO young, which was hard to understand when I was a kid. I’m in my mid-twenties and I look back on my 22-year-old self like “oh that tender stupid summer child.” That totally could have been me, and I am so sad about how she was treated.
Yeah, I was an extremely impressionable child who watched a LOT of TV unsupervised, a great deal of it current-events-focused comedy, and I’m still working on unlearning all the misogynistic ideas I picked up from it.
Friends I am going to tell you this story. At my kung fu school, we had a LION DANCE scheduled for Saturday at a high school that as coincidentally near my house.
(this is my school doing Lion Dance for Chinese New Year)
(EDIT: actually I that is not us, I don’t know who that is, but this is basically what we look like)
ANYWAY, last week I hurt my foot and it’s been driving me nuts, so I call Sifu at the school to see how we’re situated on Saturday — I figure if he’s got enough people, I will call out and take it easy, but if he doesn’t I can tough it out and lion it up for the International Spring Festival.
So, I call him up and I say, “look I don’t know if I can come out today, do you have enough people for the festival?”
“No,” he says.
“Well, how many people do you have?”
“One. One person showed up.” (Sifu has been in America for a long time, but his English is not 100%, largely because I think he’s not real interested in it, and also he’s an old guy who isn’t completely 100% at using the phone either, so bear all this in mind.)
“Only one person showed up to do the Lion Dance?”
“Yeah, only one person.”
Okay, I guess I got to do this. So I limp out to my car and I drive out to the high school and I limp around until I find Sifu and his car —
and the WHOLE SCHOOL IS THERE. There’s like eight people! They have two lions, a drum, spears and swords and glaives for kung fu demonstrations, everything!
And once I’m there obviously I can’t turn around and go back home, so, obviously I do the whole lion dance on my daggone broken-ass foot.
ONE PERSON. Good gravy.
Hahaha, I wonder if that miscommunication was deliberate. 😛 He did not want you backing out.
oh, it was deliberate. This isn’t the first time I’ve been suckered by his, “oh I am an old Chinese man who doesn’t know how to use his phone right, some kind of confusion was bound to happen” shtick.
I love the annual Museum Dance Off because there is something really charming about people that can’t really dance but are trying and having a great time. And working in a museum is often hard work with long hours and little pay so they deserve to have some fun at work, dammit.
I’m going to space out the videos during the day so I have a little pick me up whenever I need it. They’re all having so much fun!
I love When You Work At A Museum so much anyway, and have forced all of my co-workers to listen to the batshit stories (and we have sometimes wondered if one or two of those batshit stories are OUR batshit stories).
I have also appealed to one of our marketing team to participate in the dance off for the last two years and have been unfeeling rebuffed.
Sea Monkeys are great, though as an adult aquarist the fact that you can’t change their water bothers me to no end.
The tidbit about it being originally being killifish was entertaining to me because I learned yesterday from the calendar at my side-gig that American Killifish Association has their annual convention coming up next month. These are the things you learn when you steal calendars from petstores.
And a little OT but I just think this is a really cute story: sidegig is the petstore I steal calendars from (the owner/my boss knows and supports my calendar thievery). Some weekends boyfriend will hang out with me while I work (also boss-sanctioned) and mostly he supervises kids who want to hold a bunny while I need to attend to paying customers.
But yesterday a couple wanted a plecostomous while I was up to my tits in crickets and boyfriend asks in a small voice “maybe… I could catch the fish?” He did a grand job catching that little pleco and was so proud of himself, even though he couldn’t figure out how to tie off the bag.
I volunteer in the herp department of the local aquarium, which has either exacerbated my mild phobia of crickets, cured me of my mild phobia of crickets, or more likely both. Suffice it to say I did not need the image “up to my tits in crickets” to be a part of my life.
sincerest apologies!
I don’t mind catching the crickets or looking at them, but 10 years of petstore-ing has made them a recurring feature in my nightmares.
Can we talk about Nicole’s GIANT LAUGHING JESUS CANVAS COALSACK?
ahh I thought it was a tote bag but COALSACK is even better!!!
Can we not?
I’m a bit afraid that he’s going to unhinge his jaw and swallow Sansa whole.
Is it wrong that I was really hoping the Bosch link was about the tv show?
I didn’t click on it, so I assumed it was!
I assumed it was about the electronics manufacturers.
Same. I hovered my mouse over the link, paused to consider the Toast qua Toast, and then did not click. : )
OMG I am so full of feelings and energy today:
-That Australian Women’s Rugby 7s article is so great! Also watching Ellia Green press 45 kg? 50 kg? easily and do weighted pullups was pretty fun.
For any USians, please know that we have a pretty awesome women’s 7s team too and one of my fav places to follow the latest news is Your Scrumhalf Connection. I haven’t been following 7s as much as I’d like this past round of tournaments, but the international tournaments happen on a very regular basis.
I also have somewhat uninformed opinions about how well USA rugby is treating women rugby players and how well it’s promoting the national 7s team given Rio, but suffice to say that it’s not very different from how US Soccer treats soccer players. (tl;dr version: they could do so much better and I wish they pushed NBC Universal Sports to give women’s sports equal playing time.. or, you know, acknowledge that women play rugby)
-these videos made by college men’s basketball players dancing to “My Boo” by Ghost Town: http://www.sbnation.com/lookit/2016/4/15/11438980…
The strategy that USA Rugby chose to draft players for the US teams in advance of the Olympics gets me all worked up whenever I think about it. They’ve almost entirely ignored experienced players in favor of people who are just young and generally athletic. There’s some dude on the men’s team who, yes, is unreasonably fast (because they poached him from track & field), but he basically walked onto the men’s 7s team without ever touching a ball. He has no agility before contact, he’s barely figured out how to tackle or be tackled safely, his ball handling is abysmal, but, like, he’s good at running in a straight line so let’s put him at winger. And then they’re pouring resources into the men’s game even though we have a snowball’s chance in hell for men’s 7s and we might actually make some progress with the women’s game. THIS IS WHY WE CAN’T HAVE NICE THINGS. USA Rugby is the wooooooooooorst.
Didn’t That Dude Who Got Recruited From the NE Patriots’ Practice Squad (I’m sure you know who I’m talking about judging from your response) get totally wrecked this past weekend? Just as an example of what you’re describing.
I thought Carlin Isles and Perry Baker are starting to do better (thank god, husband and I have a soft spot for them and it is due in no small part to them being Black men playing rugby 7s) but generally I hate how they are trying to build up popularity of men’s 7s while completely ignoring the womens’ team even though we are 31908324908342x more likely to medal in the women’s rugby 7s in the Olympics.
I honestly pitched to the Toast and started writing about the disparity last year on the heels of how poorly the CRC 7s covered the women’s game and on the mainstream reaction to the Georgia Page hit, but I follow rugby at arms length these days, the Her Rugby Counts campaign got started, and ultimately I felt like what I began writing wasn’t very strong. I still have all of these feelings though. So many feelings.
Ughhhhhh I forgot about that dude. He’ll have to relearn how to tackle or he’ll end up in the hospital. I just watched a Vine him getting completely ruined because he wasn’t looking up-field (he literally ran straight into the opposing team’s shoulder), but he apparently scored twice this weekend so I guess he survived.
I mean, none of this should be surprising because USA Rugby is the worst in every way (that redistricting fiasco a couple years ago, for example, was a total nightmare) but I apparently need to re-calibrate my expectations to go EVEN LOWER.
I’ve blocked redistricting out of my mind even though I’ve heard bits and pieces about it via old friends and some of the current players at my alma mater. lalalala can’t hear you USA Rugby
Seriously though, USA Rugby is missing such a big opportunity to further grow the sport among women and girls.
They are following the US Soccer model 🙁
Pay the dudes who suck, ignore the women who are amazing and win.
The women’s 7s tourney came through here a couple of years ago and we all went. It was SO fun.
“Shoes” pretty much defined my freshman year of college, along with Salad Fingers, Günther, “Soccer Practice”, and a very long music video that may actually have been a fanvid for a K-drama.
I miss it so much
“Oooohhhhh you touch my tra la la…mmmmmmm my ding ding dong”
I saw Gunther and the Sunshine Girls perform live and it was pretty much a life highlight.
Soccer Practice!! Aw yiss
Salad Fingers. *shudder*
Salad Fingers came up in conversation with my husband the other day (I think Broad City related?), and he’d never seen it. So obviously I made him watch it.
It’s a lot creepier than I remember, and really hard to explain when you preface the video with “you’ve never seen this? We watched it ALL THE TIME freshman year in college!”
My partner has never seen Salad Fingers and does not understand but it is also creepy for me to rewatch.
Yes!! My freshman year dorm friends made a “Shoes” spoof video, which may or may not be on youtube (ETA: I can’t find it, but I also have no idea how I would search for it. SEO skills were not great in 2006). I’ll also add, we lived for Charlie the Unicorn.
Candy Mountain, Charlie! CANDY MOUNTAIN!
Shun the non-believer! ShhhhhuuuuuuuuunnnnnnnnNNNNNnnnnnnnnn.
OMG YES ALL OF THIS IS ME (maybe not the last one but all the others 100%) AAAAAAAA
“I’m a dirty frat boy
On a dirty soccer team”
Wow yep, this me.
GUNTHER. I still watch that music video sometimes when I’m getting pretty to go out. (Also, “This Is How We Go Out” by Leslie Hall is in my regular Gettin Pumped playlist)
Soccer Practice! Listen, I like to do manly things but, baby, I like to do them with you.
And George Washington (6 foot 10 made of radiation…).
I never understood or enjoyed Salad Fingers, no matter how many times my freshman year roommates made us watch it.
OT, but I have had a nasty few couple of weeks — a semi-lonely birthday, unexpectedly being asked to vacate our lease more than 3 months earlier than expected, stressing about the GRE subject test, and sleeping like shit. BUT I am happy to report that I took the GRE subject test on Saturday and I actually had fun and was giggling because I was so happy to be doing something with literature again. And ever since I have been feeling like a human again, sleeping well, contributing to the upkeep of my house, and just feeling happy. Yay!! I hope your Mondays are going well, Toasticles.
Congrats on the GRE! I’m taking the lit subject test soon too, if all goes well. How was the breadth of the material covered? I feel like undergrad gave me a wonderful education with several huge gaping holes…. anyhow, I’m so glad it went well for you!
Thank you!! This was my second time taking it, and I felt much more prepared this time because I spent a few months casually studying.
There was definitely less modern stuff than I expected. I was nervous that I was going to have to identify a bunch of modernists, but they were only on there maybe twice. Really, there was quite a bit of Shakespeare through Austen. What I did to study was to read the period and author introductions of the Norton Anthologies. I didn’t make it all the way through, but what I read helped. Also, if you can, I would get the Princeton Review book to help. They suggest a few pieces to read (which were on the test and/or common answer choices) and provide an overview of other greatest hits. Good luck!!
I worked my way through the Nortons also, which prepared me pretty well. I remember there was more theory than I expected.
Oh yes, the theory. I studied some overviews, but I still ended up skipping most of those questions. Oh well!
Thanks! I’ll definitely take the Norton tip 🙂
So am I the only person who initially saw all the precious moments figurines as dildos? Just a mantelpiece full of them.
Nope.
You are not.
Anyone want to talk about Kimmy Schmidt? The good, the bad, the gut-wrenching, the incredibly problematic?
They acknowledged the bundle of hotness that is the Disney fox Robin Hood, which needs to happen more.
I mostly liked season 2, but hooo boy episode 3. I mean (trying to avoid spoilers here) I understand being frustrated by people attacking your show without taking into account the context/nuance (and, in one case that I remember, without actually watching it), but depicting those critics with the exact same lack of understanding/willingness to look deeper is not the answer.
I liked some things about the season, but episode 3 was so bad! It was clearly supposed to be addressing “the haters” but didn’t actually grapple with anything whatsoever. Do they really think all the people criticizing them haven’t actually watched the show, and would be totally fine with it if they did?
I’m only 3 episodes in and yeeeeah that episode felt like…I could see the joke working on some other show where it could be affectionate and in-jokey. But coming from a show that’s been criticized, it sounded like “fuck you, haters” and wasn’t even funny in a “I shouldn’t laugh, but…” way.
The thing that bothers me is that Tina Fey has said in an interview, “I feel like we put so much effort into writing and crafting everything, they need to speak for themselves. There’s a real culture of demanding apologies, and I’m opting out of that.”
Okay, you think that being engaged in conversation about the racism of your show is beneath you? Then you don’t get to let your “work” treat all the people who had a problem with your show as worthless idiots who just spend time looking for a reason to be mad. It’s so insulting that she basically said, “This conversation is worthless, unless I get to make fun of people who don’t like what I do with no repercussions.”
The awful thing is that the people who were probably most visible to her/the writers were the people who would just spew a lot of vitriol and demand apologies rather than try to make it a thoughtful conversation, so I can understand to a certain extent why she would make comments like that.
That said, ultimately the people behind the show are under no obligation to engage with the public or listen to their criticisms, but if you’re going to acknowledge the issue on the show then you do have a bit of an obligation to actually explore what’s going on beyond the shouty internet police rather than stooping to their level.
I’m so reminded of the Sorkin kerfuffle over the West Wing. Show runners of modern television write in a way that demands the audience to keep track of continuity week-to-week and year-to-year. People know the names of executive producers who, besides Dick Wolf and Aaron Spelling, were not known until the mid-nineties. If you want the benefits of everyone fawning all over your art; if you want to make buzzfeed videos so that people will watch your shows and movies; if you produce a show for an online streaming service instead of television STOP CRITICIZING THE INTERNET. It’s so petty. Say what you will about your critics, but putting them under the umbrella of “The Internet” and rolling your eyes at the unwashed masses is so hypocritical. We unwashed masses pay for your art!
Tina Fey did a similar thing on 30 Rock after Jezebel criticized some aspect of the show – did a whole episode around a fake “feminist” website that was obviously modeled on Jezebel. I get the impression that if she has the platform, Fey is going to hit back at anyone who dares criticize her shows.
I know! Just — way to insult your audience. (I need to go back and watch it — I skipped through it screaming silently).
so can someone hypothetically skip episode 3 and have stuff still make sense?
Absolutely.
I’d recommend it, in fact.
Yeah, just watched ep 3 yesterday, and was like “well they are really doubling down on that aren’t they?”
Aaron Sorkin did this on The West Wing back in the day (attacking fan critics that is). It was a dumb thing to do then, and it still is.
I am only on the fourth ep of the new season and I’m about ready to give up. It’s so aggressively un-funny! It’s somehow more racist than before!! The funniest characters are the side people who only come up once or twice (i.e., the old society dudes, Amy Sedaris). It’s all so disappointing!!
Someone told me to watch the last half of the season before the first — and the second half is much better (especially because Jacqueline disappears for a few episodes & they also jettison some other problematic plots, and replace them with far better ones. And they delve into a lot of the PTSD stuff).
I haven’t been able to get through most of the first episodes (I keep saying, “no, no no, *skip*”).
I think they actually sort of redeem the Jacqueline stuff, gradually? It’s difficult to explain without spoiling her whole plot line, but what I DO like about it – problematic casting aside – is that in the end her Native American background is not just a gimmick, it is really part of who she is.
That’s what I’ve been thinking!
Yeah, I agree — but I also thinks it helped when her story line became much more secondary one.
I’m only 3 episodes in, mostly because that third episode was problematic as fuck and I needed time to process it.
I actually started watching the third episode, noped out in five minutes, and skipped it. It looks so terrible.
“Teeth are the boobs of the mouth!”
Apart from all of the genuinely problematic shit going on, I really just can’t get over how unfunny this season is. That being said, this line makes me laugh so fucking hard.
I only watched the first episode over the weekend and it was supremely uncomfortable. For about 5 minutes I thought that they had binned off the Native American stuff, but no, they doubled down.
Writers: just because you’re trying to make jokes about yourself and show you’re aware that what you’re doing is problematic doesn’t make it any less problematic or uncomfortable for the viewer.
I could have gotten past that bit if the rest of the episode had been very funny and got me in, but it didn’t and I don’t know if I’ll bother watching the rest.
I only watched half of it! I feel soooo uncomfortable about the Native American stuff. I’m a big fan of Ki Hong Lee but I find Dong problematic
Yes! I realised at some point (I think it was during the Kardashians thing) that he is the only Asian character and he’s a total stereotype. Like ugh.
exactly! and they could do so much with him! he’s really cute! Argh
I’m eight episodes in, so here goes:
Things I like:
– the love story between Titus and [redacted]
– how Lillian genuinely cares about Titus and Kimmy
– acknowledging that Kimmy still suffers and needs therapy
Things I dislike:
– Lillian’s “boyfriend” – are they going to acknowledge that he obviously has problems?
– episode 3. Just no.
I’m carefully optimistic about the Native American storyline; obviously Jane Krakowski is still a white woman playing a Native American and they can’t make up for this, but I feel like they’re doing a good job with acknowledging injustices – I especially liked the parallels in episode 8, when she gave up the painting and really learned something (or so it seems). But then again, I’m not through yet and, more importantly, I’m white myself, so it’s not really my place to comment on this.
That love story was so sweet. It genuinely got to me, which I didn’t expect on such a jokey, often absurd show.
Sweet and silly and I loved [Redacted]’s family because it was so over the top funny and sweet at the same time.
The puppet grandma was so brilliant I got distracted from the Satanist mom.
The love story and the therapy plotline just keep getting better from here. They are both really well done.
Yeah … I don’t, I don’t know what to do with Jacqueline’s storyline. They do try to fix it? But also, like you said, I don’t really feel like it’s my place to comment on it.
Lillian’s boyfriend is probably my least favorite part of s2, though that might be because he’s played by Fred Armisen and I didn’t watch The Jinx.
(so relieved I’m not the only one who dislikes Armisen)
I can’t stand him anywhere! Terrible on SNL, terrible on 30 Rock, terrible on Parks and Rec, terrible on Brooklyn 99, AND he was horrible to Elisabeth Moss (and you bet I read every piece of gossip I could on their divorce).
I cannot stand Armisen so much that it has led me to question Carrie Brownstein’s judgement.
(And I’m so sure that both of them are crying over my thoughts on their personal life decisions, my opinion matters so very much)
TBH I go back and forth on whether or not I was to try watching Kimmy Schmidt but I recently saw on a Twitter convo by Trungles and someone else about a Viet character and something about how “kimmy” is slang for penis and no. Not today. Not for along while.
If it helps decide: Kat Chow had a very insightful piece about that particular character last year.
http://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2015/03/26…
That is actually really helpful, thanks!
thank you so much for linking that!
Just to add: I understand that joke a bit better now (Dong is basically switching the tables) *but* there is a part of me that is a bit sad that there are a slew of us 1.5 and 2nd gen Viet Ams that are understandably out of touch with Vietnamese as a language who are like “wait, what? is that slang?” I don’t expect that the show writers would’ve necessarily saw it coming or it’s necessarily a bad thing; it’s simply a personal observation.
Poor Ki Hong Lee! I’m Chinese and my middle name is Wang and my white friends have made fun of me before for it (which is now why i don’t tell people about it) so I’m very sensitive to that kind of humor!
“Dung” (pronounced like “yoom”) was a v pop name for my mom’s generation to give girls, and I remember her lamenting and wondering about the fact that so many Viet Am girls named Dung were changing their names to a more common US name. My sister eventually had to break it down for her. ^^;
Aw, that’s so crappy, I’m sorry.
Haven’t made it past episode 3, but other people commenting about good stuff in later episodes is encouraging. But, episode 3 ugggghhh…
Also, is it just me or was there a strange uptick in fat jokes in that episode, too? It caught me off guard and gave me a whole other set of sad episode feelings. 🙁 🙁 🙁
There is one later episode with a couple of Kate-Winslet-was-so-chubby-in-Titanic jokes, and it really took me aback. Especially since at least one of them came from Titus.
YES that took me RIGHT OUT of the moment I was like what….??? Also something about “act like a 30 yo single girl and SETTLE”– the tone just seemed off like they were written by… some wm on staff idk
The “I Can’t Breathe” joke was the low point of the series to date.
I don’t think it’s frivolous for people to be upset with the show. But the point of the joke was clearly that being offended by Asian stereotypes is frivolous, and then they brought in the murder and death of a man. lol those people on the internet will get mad over ANYTHING
It made me so furious.
Aahh, thank you for this!
Reading Toasties rant about episode 3 was exactly what I needed.
I’m generally enjoying it, but the episode with the fake ADHD meds made me roll my eyes so hard. It’s not only inaccurate and insulting (I’ve been on meds for years and I promise that I am not a soulless zombie) but it’s also just such a tired and predictable joke. It was played out when the Simpsons did it what, 17 years ago? (holy shit I just had to look that up and now I feel old)
Oh man, I didn’t know that jokes about ADHD meds are coming. I’m in my 30s and just now coming to realize that I might need to be analyzed for ADHD or just other mental health things (currently shopping around some psychiatrists) and I absolutely do not need a television show to add to my fear of even more mental health diagnosis.
And I say that as someone who is currently in a really healthy place. God, why does having to watch a fucking sitcom have to feel like walking through a field of land mines?
Yeahhh, I’ve tutored before and after seeing kids cry because they can’t concentrate on their homework…that’s not bad parenting and it’s not a need for “discipline” (yeah, show, I saw what you did with the RX name, way to hit viewers over the head). It’s a neurological, medical condition.
Speaking of tired jokes, I HATED last season when they made fun of Marcia Clark by having her be the bumbling prosecutor of the reverend. (1) it was 20 years ago, and no longer funny (if it ever was); and (2) Clark did the best she could, having been put in a really difficult position*. Stop punching down, Tina Fey!
*The HBO show has done a lot in rehabilitating Clark’s image, but it’s nothing new–I remember discussing in law school in the mid 2000s how Clark had been hung out to dry by her bosses and held to impossible standards by the judge and the public. Anyone who bothered to think about it should have known that Clark was not single-handedly responsible for O.J. Simpson getting off.
I feel like the season ended on a super dark note and I WAS NOT PREPARED and cannot deal with it. I want Kimmy to move forward and be awesome and weird and not as traumatized, because if so, there’s hope for everyone else who’s been traumatized, but I can’t deal. Nope. Can’t.
Oooh — I’m only a few episodes into S2, but I’m just not engaged at all because it’s so very ~light and whimsical~ (and the jokes are so cringeworthy), and the way she got the job at the Christmas store was so the opposite of reality. So what I’m hearing about getting back to the PTSD sounds excellent on so many fronts, because it’s just ridiculous to pretend that trauma isn’t a factor for her. I find that incredibly frustrating and dismissive, in fact. (One of my favorite moments of S1 was when she screamed and knocked the velcro shoe out of TItus’ hand — it was a great comedic moment that wasn’t offensive.) This is personal to me because I’ve spent the last five-plus years co-writing a 400,000+ word story about trauma recovery, and it all started because of another story that did not admit the consequences of trauma at all.
While I haven’t seen the whole season yet, I am pretty confident the whole series won’t end on a super-dark note for Kimmy! That would contradict the whole title of the show, after all.
True. I have hope. I was watching after some bad braining and vomiting (actual, not word) and I was super hopeful and then last 2 minutes of the last episode happened and I just wanted everything to go away.
Full disclosure is that a coworker and I run a (very lazy) blog critiquing the sparkling gems of Hallmark and Lifetime TV movies.
Production values and acting aside, I love that it’s a space entirely dedicated to women and their often complicated stories. I’m often disappointed when Lifetime, specifically, plays to tiresome stereotypes because usually, their portrayals of women tend to be fairly well-rounded.
Yeah, the women of Lifetime are great but I’m not sure Lifetime movies can be held up as examples of nuanced media when it comes to other groups.
I am now reading your blog and so enjoying it.
THAT PHOTO OF YOU, NICOLE
I didn’t even SEE all the Precious Moments figurines for like ten seconds and I’d already done a spit-take
Man, queer librarians get all the best websites.
The Vulture interview is amazing: I’m very much in love with Tituss Burgess right now. It speaks a lot, I think, that for him the everyman character is the one struggling to pay the rent, with job. This bit in particular snagged at my feels too: “[It] gives me the feeling I had when I’d perform until I released and let myself off the hook of the mandate to always feel the same about any given thing at any given time.”
Buzzfeed also have an interview with him, though they only seem to be releasing it in dribs and drabs. This part seemed especially great.
My favourite part is this (emphasis mine):
It’s easy to be miserable. It’s easy to stay miserable. It’s easy to live in a place where nothing’s working and not being able to work your way out of it. It’s much harder to choose happiness, to choose laughter, to choose a positive.
I love the piece on Sea Monkeys! I worked for a law firm one summer and got to do some [redacted legal work] related to toy company IP, and I swear, that’s a more contentious field than software. Companies suing each other back and forth all the time. I think part of it is that patents are designed to protect process, apparatus or composition, and while toys certainly fall into those categories, that’s not what is valuable about toys. They talk about the technology of the original Sea Monkeys a lot (trade secret here, not a patent) but the issue they’re running into is one of their own making– the Sea Monkeys were never sold on being particularly long-lived or high-quality, they were sold on flash and “humbug.” The knockoffs can be just as successful at those aspects without having to compete on actual product quality.
Also whoa at the neonazi thing, that is crazy and terrible. And a smaller whoa at the sad last paragraph.
Truth on the intense security of toy companies. I worked at an animation studio that got a transformers project, and before we started production Hasbro sent up a goon squad of security guys to audit us. Our IT practices, site stuff, people stuff. I swear they all wore ear pieces.
Quick story: Yesterday I was considering buying an under-the-sink recycling container of some kind via Amazon. The dimensions were filler 0 x 0 x 0 so I asked for them in “Questions”. The manufacturer got back to me in a few hours with 11″ x 13″ or whatever– Great! Now I know! I can get out my measuring tape, see if its fits, go about my life.
DO YOU KNOW THAT MEN ON THE INTERNET HAVE COME OUT OF HIDING TO COMMENT FURTHER ON THE DIMENSIONS OF A RECYCLING BAG?! To clarify, the manufacturers description is publically viewable, so EVERYONE can see the official response. Dudes are getting snippy like “AS IT STATES ABOVE THE DIMENSIONS ARE…”
Anyway, my pt women online something-something society blah blah men are garbage –> WHY
Found on Tumblr today:
Q: Where does a mansplainer get his water?
A: From a well, actually.
<3 <3 <3
Oh my god this is so weird and dumb I actually burst out laughing.
The Museum dance off! So much love!
I keep being surprised by the lion story because I saw male lions humping each other at the San Diego zoo in 1999 or something (the response of parents with small children was funny) and assumed this was just a thing that happens sometimes. Maybe not as much in the wild?
adding that “teen girls will shut you down if you do anything that’s different.”
like PT Barnum said, nobody ever went broke by underestimating the public’s willingness to make up some hateful insult about girls and believe it all the way to the bank.
god knows I thought I was better and more special than other girls when I was an adolescent (because other girls were a subset of other people) but that didn’t change the fact that the only people who ever tried to do any organized taunting of me for reading in the corners instead of talking to people were boys. Or the fact the reason I say “tried” instead of succeeded is because a group of girls of the sort I looked down on knew about it in advance, intercepted me before it happened, and strong-armed me into sitting with them at lunch instead of by myself until those boys lost interest in their plans. not even to make friends, just to be decent.
but you know, girls are mean conformist bitches, boys don’t enforce social norms let alone create them, blah blah
Ha, yes. I liked the SciAm article but yeah, when I was in high school, I never felt like I was being taunted or ostracized by just the girls in my class.
I agree with everything you just said.
I also agree with the girl quoted in the article that teen girls police the behaviors of their girl friends more than teen boys police the behavior of their boy friends. Basically, Girls have their behavior policed by both boys and girls and adults; Boys have their behavior policed by boys (sometimes, maybe) and girls (almost never effectively) and adults.
Oh, for sure – girls are the only ones who care about girls’ opinions, so they’re subject to more pressure than if they just decided that [other] girls are dumb and who cares what they think. so lots of girls decide that the route to personal freedom is deciding that only boys’ opinions should be allowed to restrict them. You’d be just as free — meaning, nearly but not quite as free as a boy — if you got rid of the other side of the box by deciding that it’s boys’ opinions that are the ones that don’t matter, but that is a less popular option all around.
but yeah, I don’t think there’s any doubt that ‘girls police each other’ is the acceptable (because misogynist) way of saying that girls are the only people who act like girls’ opinions and judgments matter and have influence. and this is, of course, misguided of them.
but having said that, I absolutely disagree that the overall pressure of girl “policing” is towards conformity, across the board. Everyone who had female friends as a teen must have had some who pressured them towards risk-taking and foolish danger.
and honestly I have limited sympathy for this whole frame of pressure from friends. The teens who are really fucked are the ones who don’t have any.
and honestly I have limited sympathy for this whole frame of pressure from friends. The teens who are really fucked are the ones who don’t have any.
Yep. yep yep yep yeppity YEP.
When I was a camp counselor I had this totally weird kid (LOVED HER) and I commented to my co-counselor that she was clearly the kid who doesn’t have any friends, and as I former kid with no friends, I sympathize. And my co-counselor just could not compute that there are kids with literally zero friends, and we had to have a conversation unpacking that.
I think that there are a lot of adults who really don’t get that there are kids out there with no friend group, literally none. So they just generalize all peer relationships as “friendships.”
YUP. I’ve never had much time for the ‘teenage girls are suuuch biitches, while boys are just SIMPLE and UNCOMPLICATED’ cliche. In school and college, I saw *plenty* of nasty, manipulative, petty behaviour from boys and young men, and *far* more outright cruelty and emotional sadism than ever was displayed by even the meanest girls.
“Teenage boys are so simple and uncomplicated! Girls are so manipulative! Fortunately that means we don’t have to worry about boys manipulating girls into sex and/or things they’ve seen on Internet Porn, because boys don’t do manipulative!”
(I mean, I am not a big fan of the OMG INTERNET PORN moral outrage, but I do think our cultural narrratives about teenagers ought to have a little internal consistency.)
I remember hearing some similarly delightful snark WRT men and chores (maybe Unfuck Your Habitat?) — that the skills we say men have, just, like INNATELY, ought to make them super great at laundry. It’s all temperatures and numbers and measurements and stuff. Right? RIGHT?!
This, I work with kids of all ages, and with huge ranges of behaviours and needs; and there are plenty of boys who get away with bullying other children in school (I don’t work within a school, I should mention) by staring/ignoring/gossiping/imitating etc. and it doesn’t even get recognised as bullying because it’s seen as classically female behaviour, and doesn’t fit into the stereotype that ‘Girls are horrible to each other, whereas boys have a fight and are done with it.’ (Same as when I was in school myself.)
It’s sad as well, because you have littler kids where the boys learn really fast that it doesn’t matter what your own comfort level is with friendships, you’d better not hug your male friends too long or your parents will start uncomfortably laughing. (Funnily enough, boys and girls hugging gets ‘Aw, adorable, a little couple!’)
(Likewise, there are girls who are physically aggressive, as opposed to ‘bitchy’/psychologically cruel; but society isn’t slow on disciplining girls who don’t fit gender stereotypes, so their behaviour doesn’t go unaddressed at least.)
“The ‘Girls are horrible to each other, whereas boys have a fight and are done with it.’ stereotype”
YESSS I’ve always HATED this stereotype because it’s so observably, demonstrably not true. And I’m seeing it reinforced again with people my age starting to have kids and ascribing all this essentialist bullshit to literal babies.
(Also, I definitely knew girls who were physically aggressive – some in my school even scheduled after-school fights in specific locations, and other kids would turn up to watch/yell)
Just want to throw in my (hopefully not invalidating) $0.02–I actually had the opposite experience growing up.
Girls were the ones who ganged up and literally barred me from entering a room at a sleepover. Girls were the ones who made sure, in a 20-kid class where everyone had known everyone since preschool, that I knew social events were happening but I definitely was not invited. Girls were the ones who, when my name came up in a study hall proctored by a teacher I’d never even had before and filled with students I’d never met, eviscerated me for unforgivable sins such as…competing on a game show (the school had broadcast this info from the rooftops)…applying to MIT…having a Jewish boyfriend while attending a Catholic school…and, worst of all, daring to visibly give a crap about my education and the discussions we frequently had in class! How dare I not assume the mantle of IDGAF as they apparently had!
I have combined-type ADHD and you bet your sweet bippy that my behavior was policed: but almost exclusively by adults (“be more LADYLIKE!”) and other young girls. I would whiff my conversational entrance points, I would lose interest in the Hot Subject of the Day and wander off, I’d excitedly blurt something out, I’d pull some vaguely show-offy move in P.E. class–that all elicited withering looks, vicious behind-my-back comments, and general exclusion. (Teachers said it was my fault, because I boisterously answered questions in class but otherwise kept to myself–it meant I was excluding them? Intimidating them? So I deserved to be shunned? I dunno.)
Boys at that age were way more forgiving of my hyperactivity and social fails. BUT I also played sports, and that’s probably the only reason that worked. Jonesy is a geek but she plays lacrosse like us so it’s okay, I guess. They were still jerks FOR SURE, but it was a kind of in-your-face jerkness that I’ve found easier to interpret and counter.
Now I am out of college and I have finally, FINALLY, found the ladyfriends I never had growing up. I have no more close male friends, because they either sexually harassed me or weren’t sensitive enough to really be my friend.
I agree 10000000% with queenofbithynia as to how society permits and encourages harmful stereotypes of young women as cutthroat gossipy monsters while boys are Pure and Wondrous. It is gross and not okay and I’ve had to fight my own biases on the subject. I’m still fighting them, because, well…I’m prone to black and white thinking, and my brain is more than willing to dredge up the memories that back that thinking up.
But. Very real damage is done to girls, by girls. Especially us girls with Spectrum-related issues, who struggle to understand the Rules of Interaction, who just want to get excited about the things we love and include people in those things and instead get…shunning. Judgment. Rude comments.
tl;dr I don’t like blanket statements about young girls either but the article is about girls on the Spectrum dealing with their typical girl peers and yes, they can be super vicious and it is scarring and it needs to be acknowledged in this one context. And I’m sorry for the novel. As you were!
Thanks for this! Sorry your experience was so horrible. I definitely witnessed similar kinds of behaviour from popular girls towards those deemed excessively ‘different’. It sounds likely that being good at sports may have worked in your favour when it came to bullying from boys. Either way, adolescents torturing each other is terrible and I hope it can end!
Thank you. The sports thing was useful and I understand not everyone can or will pursue that. I was absolutely still bullied, however–body shaming, name calling, even hitting and kicking. It was just that, for whatever reason and whatever brain wiring, I could deal with that better. It was done to my face, so I could and would defend myself.
But I think what’s most important here is that we don’t invalidate autistic or atypical voices on the subject. Emily Brooks, the person who makes the statement queenofbithynia is referencing, is on the Spectrum. If their experience is that female, NT peer groups punish atypical girls for not conforming, then how is this some sort of anti-feminist statement to which we must object?
I just don’t want NT-aligned feminism to run roughshod over the very real pain atypical girls and women can suffer at the hands of typical girls and women.
That’s a really good point, I’ll be sure to keep that in mind . Thanks for highlighting the importance of recognising and validating the experiences of neuro-atypical women.
Not diving into that Bosch link until I’m home and 100% not sober.
there is howling butt music
This is not resonated to the link round up, but I need some level-headed feedback.
So I’m 32 weeks pregnant and my husband and I are trying to finalize the baby’s name. We have came up with a first and middle name we all (including our 4-year old daughter) love. About a month ago I suggested that we add my maiden name as a second middle name. I did change my name when we got married due to being young and not having strong feelings either way. So it the baby’s name would be firstname middlename mymaidenname lastname. It is a mouthful. It’s 2-syllables 1-syllable 2-syllables 3-syllables.
We did not do this with our first child (again young and didn’t even think of it).
My husbands reactions have been surprisingly negative. He thinks it’s too long. He thinks if I want to honor my last name then it should be the only middle name. But we love the middle name we came up with. He also thinks she will get made fun of (wtf) for having four names. Any ways we got into it twice yesterday to the point of me going to bed early and him sleeping on the couch. We didn’t talk to each other at all before I left for work this morning.
I will say I have lots of issues with his family. Mine bend over backwards for us. My dad has completely remodeled our house for free (we pay for supplies), my parents would drop anything and drive the two hours to our house if we needed anything, they have been incredibly supportive in all that we have done. His family…doesn’t do anything. His mom didn’t come see our first daughter when she was born because the 3 hour drive was too long. They can be pretty blatantly terrible about anything that deviates from their conservative view point.
Anyways, I need help to figure out how to calmly communicate and respond to his (literal) list of “cons” that really aren’t that bad.
I’m sorry you have to deal with this! Since you did ask for advice, when you guys discuss this again I would keep the focus on why you want to honor your family this way, rather than why his family sucks (I mean, still discuss that if you want/need to, just separate from the names conversation if possible).
I don’t understand his objections. LOTS of people have four names. My husband has four names (first name / middle name / mom’s surname / dad’s surname, so exactly what you are considering for your child), and I do too (or will, once my name change is finalized). I…can’t say I know anyone mocked for having four names. Most people won’t even know unless you or your child tells them!
I don’t know if it’s immature/petty of me to say this, but you’re the pregnant one / the one giving birth and IN MY OPINION you have every right to steer or even have final say on the name thing. Ideally the two of you would be on the same page, and I suppose it’s important for your partner to not hate the name outright. But if one of you has to give on this, I kinda think it should be him.
If he remains stubborn about this I’d seriously just tell the hospital staff the name YOU want on the birth certificate when your husband falls asleep after labor (men always fall asleep after labor, it’s so hard for them) (I’m kidding, but I’m kinda not) and then what is he going to do about it? YOU’RE THE ONE WHO GAVE BIRTH.
oh p.s. my in-laws were in Costa Rica when their first grandchild was born, because “it’s your first baby, I’m sure she’ll be overdue!”
Who is going to know she has 4 names unless anyone makes a point of saying so? I know several people who have two middle names (and actually, now I think about it, for at least two of them the third is the mother’s maiden name, so there is definitely precedent) and none of them have ever said they were nade fun of for it.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but don’t many hispanic/latin cultures do that de rigeur?
I myself have four names (although I guess it’s technically different since my last name is hyphenated) and the only thing that’s annoying is when people don’t know how to alphabetize me by it. Otherwise I get to walk around knowing that I am representing both my mother and my father’s families, something that makes me feel really proud and good about my family.
Its definitely a thing in Catholic culture, as you grow up and go through the various stages of indoctrination (Christening, communion, confirmation and marriage) you collect names. Sort of anyway. They’re usually Saints names or family names.
i was so excited to add an extra middle name when I got Confirmed because having 4 names = the coolest
Those names can be a rigmarole too, though. I remember one cousin who wanted to be confirmed as “Ursula” instead of whatever dead Slavic virgin was Traditional, and it led to a knock-down, drag-out fight among the hardline Catholic cousins.
Yes, Spanish naming customs are firstname secondname dadslastname momslastname. Women keep their two last names when they get married, they don’t take their husband’s name (although they sometimes add a “de husbandsname” (which means “of,” so, like, Jane Mary Patterson Smith of Williams if Jane is married to Bob Williams). They can end up with really long names! No one ever makes fun of them.
Ah, this is so interesting, I never knew the details of how this works before. Thanks for sharing!
This is ridiculous. I would not even continue the discussion with him. Just when you’re in the hospital, tell the staff exactly what you want on the birth certificate. End of story.
Wow. Really?
Yes!!! The nurses will totally let the mom rule. The baby has the mom’s last name by default.
This… does not seem like a great way to strengthen a relationship or care for a partner. His feelings may be irrational, but a good partner doesn’t just unilaterally decide to steamroll over the other person’s wishes because s/he deems them “ridiculous.”
I think it’s ok to steamroll the other person’s wishes if you’re the pregnant wife and you just want your kid to have your last name in their somewhere. I could understand if the discussion was about WHICH last name to give the kid, but if the kid is 100% definitely having the dad’s last name anyway, I don’t think sticking your name on the birth certificate without confirming with the dad is a huge deal. From my pov, the partner is having some serious control issues and he should be the one to resolve this issue, not the pregnant wife who, again, is having to do all the literal and emotional labor around this.
I don’t think the wife needs to do all the emotional labor, but she is the one who suggested a change. I think that needs to mean a calm discussion, not dismissiveness on her part because his reasons don’t live up to her standard of what’s good enough. Getting to the bottom of his objections is a joint project, because just like he doesn’t get to unilaterally rule her out or give her the silent treatment until he gets his way, I don’t think she gets to unilaterally rule him out and steamroll him while they’re supposed to be bonding with their newborn.
Both my boyfriend and his sister had their mom’s last name as their second middle names. Neither of them ever got made fun of (I agree, wtf? kids don’t care about middle names.) and neither one of them has any issues with paperwork or anything, since middle names don’t really affect that at all. So there’s a two middle name success story! Also, I know my boyfriend really likes having his mom’s name in his own.
How do you feel about it, emotionally? Imagine calling your child by the original 3 names, and write down how you feel about it. Maybe it goes:
Slight disappointment in yourself for not winning this battle.
Mild anger at your husband.
Frustration at patriarchy.
Embarrassed that you didn’t stand up for your family.
Embarrassed that you care at all, because you have your child and you probably shouldn’t care this much, buuuuut.
– but I’m just guessing. Put down whatever you are feeling. You might find yourself going, “Oh, I can’t put that, that’s too silly”. You might find that you’re using a lot of minimising words. That’s OK. Put it down anyway.
Then imagine calling your child by all 4 names, and write down all your feelings about that. Then go through and put a star next to the ones that make you go, “oof, yes, that really matters to me”.
So basically, get really intimate with your emotions around this. I bet you and your husband are naturally going to try and settle this logically on “pros and cons”, but it’s not about logic, it’s about emotions. If you try and do it on logic, you will get really frustrated and either lose your temper and start ranting about his family, or you’ll just give up and go, “fine, fine, three names, whatever.” You need to explain to him that this isn’t “rational”, and you need him to listen to how this makes you feel. So you need to articulate it to yourself first, and decide what’s important, and then he needs to listen to you. (And if he doesn’t? Ouch. Whole other problem.)
I would also try and go through, “these are my frustrations with his family” in your head, and get really familiar with them, and then set them to the side. Honestly, I think it is 100% correct to make this about your name and wanting to honour your family too, but if you make it about your family versus his family, that will probably derail things badly. It’s also not relevant! His family could be 100% amazing and your family could be total deadbeats, and it would still be legitimate to want your kid to have your name! Your family don’t have to earn their place in your child’s name by being their best selves, and naming your child after your family name as well as his is not actually detracting anything from his family! So try and work through that by yourself, so it doesn’t come up and overwhelm the discussion.
Good luck!
This is great.
This was so helpful! Thank you. This is very sensitive for both of us and having extra hormones makes my emotions feel even bigger.
I copied and pasted your comment into my notes I have going about this and I just have to say thank you again. Two things stood out that I haven’t been able to articulate but feel: it’s not about logic but about emotions and his family is not relevant. I think framing it as, “even if your family was amazing I would still want this would help”.
Now to figure out how we approach this again and how we lay the ground rules as this is obviously triggering strong feelings for both of us.
Aw, I’m really glad! Good luck!
This is the best name advice I have ever read.
(IIRC you are also in the Two-Mom Family club? Not to generalize but I think we are the champions of overthinking the names. 🙂
This is great advice, but I do want to say I think it’s entirely rational to want a child’s name to represent both parents equally and not just the on all of society defaults to for no-good patriarchal reasons just cause it’s what we’ve always done. So, yeah, your emotional reasons for wanting it are totally valid and shouldn’t be discounted for being emotional, but there are plenty of “rational” reasons as well!
Chiming in to say that not only do I know folks with four names, but the general reaction to my husband’s four names isn’t “haha, you’re a loser” but “that sounds *badass*.” So you can even frame it to your husband as a positive! Also, his name is 2-syllable 2-syllable 2-syllable 2-syllable JUNIOR, so.. yeah. Long names.
It might be a pain in the ass when it comes to forms that limit you to one middle name or one middle initial, but otherwise it’s no big deal unless someone wants it to be.
speaking as someone who has three middle names, it’s a pain to fill in forms (because mine are long) but no one has ever made fun of me!
BINGO. As I’m thinking about this, I couldn’t give two shits how many names someone has. But when I find out someone has more than I do (I just have one middle name!) that’s literally what I think of – the pain of filling in forms.
I have 4 ‘christian’ names and 2 surnames (or 3 depending on which government body you talk to.). Its never once caused me a problem (well not the length anyway, the fact that one of them is Merlin did cause some problems).
What you put on the birth certificate isn’t going to be what the kid uses every day; nobody I know, myself included, regularly uses their ‘full’ name. Even on official documents I generally go by Firstname FirstMiddlename/initial Surname, but I still know I have other names and they are still important to me. Plus when I went through my identity crisis phase, I had lots of other names to try out and that was fun. I picked a new one every year for awhile, I think all kids should have options like I did.
To me, your husbands ‘concerns’ are dismissive, no other kids are going to care, or probably even know, how many names your kid has, nevermind make fun of them for it (again, unless one of the names is Merlin.), and you can honour your family in any way you want, there is no ‘proper’ way to do it.
TL;DR Kid with long name here, never caused a problem. Name your kid what you want to name your kid, your husband is being silly.
If it helps, there’s a little girl in my neighborhood (good friends with the neighbor kids) named Eowyn.
I’ve nothing against weird/magical names and I’ve largely made my peace with my names in general (I went through a few years of really hating my first name, but luckily I had two other useable ones to pick from!), but the issues around ‘Merlin’ was largely that it was a weird, boys, name, and I was a girl (although a weird one.). And I also made the silly mistake of revealing it to classmates, along with my Dads nickname for me (Celery. Like Selma, get it?), and so I ended up being called Merlin or Celery for a long ass time.
Also, in a twist of karmic arseholeness, my middle name isn’t even Merlin, its Marilyn. Because apparently no one who accompanied my hormonally insane mother to the registry office could spell when they named me and the nurse just wrote down the closest thing she could think of I imagine. So I went through all that pain for nothing AND I missed out on being known as Marilyn for one of my years.
My FirstNameLastName initials, if I use my chosen nickname, are BM. That was always good times when my classmates figured it out.
I started a thread about this on the Open Thread a few weeks back, and the response was overwhelmingly positive. From what I can tell, people love having four names and no one has much issue with it.
If my kid ends up being a girl, her name will be 3-syllable 2-syllable 3-syllable 2-syllable, and I’m planning to tell any detractors that she’ll grow into it (potential boy’s first middle name would only be 1 syllable, so slightly shorter). The fact that it’s such a mouthful is the reason we decided not to hyphenate, but I figure that if the royals can give their kids 5 or 6 names, I can give mine 4.
I know tons of kids with double-barreled middle names and it ain’t no thang — if anything it’s just a cool quirk among the students I teach, and they are 7th graders, ostensibly the cruelest of all.
I guess my advice would be to seek to understand the visceral/emotional part of his reaction separately from the facty/bullet-point part of his reaction, probably in separate conversations, because the facty/bullet-point things, it seems to me, are being used in support of his gut-level, non-rational response. It just sounds like there’s something behind all that that needs to be addressed. I’m imagining something like this: “Hey, husband, you’re coming across to me as very frustrated and angry about this request [insert exemplary evidence here]. Can we talk about that? Because I’m not sure why our child having my maiden name as a second middle name is worth all the stress you’re feeling.”
If he goes back to his list of facty reasons, I think you can go with, “Sure, I hear you, and I do want to work through those qualms together, but you seem *angry* about it, and we’re usually more able to disagree on things without anger. I’d like to understand better why this particular thing is *upsetting* you so much.”
The facty stuff can be dealt with in a brief, dispassionate conversation, IMO, and I wouldn’t touch the “your family does nothing” topic with a ten-foot pole. I think you certainly can say that you’d like to honor your family for all the love and support they’ve offered you over the years, but taking shots at his family (regardless of the truth of those shots) doesn’t seem like a way to build goodwill with your husband.
Yes! I was trying to say this; it sounds like the husband has an emotional/instinctive reason to be against it and is trying to rationalise with ‘logical’ reasons (which are not logical at all). There’s nothing wrong with having an emotional reaction or reason to be against it, but OPs discussions with her husband would probably be a lot clearer if they could drill down into what exactly is making him feel this way (And it might well be some conditioning about the ‘proper’ way to do names or whatever, but at least then you know that and can tackle it directly)
We started to talk about his feelings about this last night. But he started with his “pros” and “cons” again and I got frustrated with that and wasn’t able to stay calm and engaged in the discussion about his feelings. I know a lot of it is the fact that he feels I do not like his family…which isn’t completely inaccurate. And is something that we deal with every year or so. And I’m not sure where to go with it.
I’m worried that focusing on my family will look and sound like “my family is better” and I’m not sure how to bring it up without sounding like I’m comparing.
I dunno. If he takes your “I’d like to honor my family for their support by including their surname in our daughter’s name” as “your family is terrible/worse/whatever,” he may have a bigger envy/comparison problem than can be addressed in the next 8 weeks. Your love for your family takes nothing away from him.
Aside from inter-family relations; by giving your child your family name you’d actually be honoring both families equally, since (I assume) your husband, you, your first child and your new child all already have his family name.
So yeah, maybe you can sell it as caring about/honouring BOTH families.
“Amy Jane Thomas Parkinson” is the fill-in name I came up with to try out syllable length, and yeah, that’s nothing for cumbersomeness.
Your older daughter is only 4 – why not legally change her name to add your maiden name as well? Or even stick it back into your own. Become the Thomas-Parkinson family as a “we were talking about baby names and I realized this is important to me, and if I had thought of it as an option 5-6 years ago, I would have done it then”.
At the very least (if it’s not important to you to all match, but not an empty suggestion) your husband might be like “oh, well, I guess Amy Jane Thomas Parkinson isn’t so bad or troublesome to do”.
Maybe I grew with a weird definition of ‘long’ names, but Amy Jane Thomas Parkinson doesn’t even seem that long or unyielding.
Oh, I know! I have what her spouse would say is an acceptable name (there are only 3), and it’s only 1 syllable shorter. I had a friend in high school whose name was even longer.
My name (first, middle, last) is one syllable longer than your fill-in name (and includes one of the names you have used, in fact), and it feels perfectly manageable!
I have 4 names. My daughter has 4 names. It truly is not a big deal. No one ever ONCE made fun of me when I was growing up.
J.R.R. Tolkein and Lael Louisiana Timberlake Wertenbaker would like to politely disagree that having 4 names is not a thing.
Also, imo, it’s not the length that matters, it’s the scansion; not how many syllables, but how they flow.
Heart-eye emoji-ing at you for the word “scansion.” Also my husband’s surname is a dactyl, and that has ruled out SO MANY BABY NAMES THAT I LOVE lest our children be Benedict Cumberbatch forever and ever.
I’ve got a double dactyl name and I like it very much, though I throw my one-syllable middle name in there as a spacer when I want to be fancy or official. I don’t have as many hard consonants in my name as Cumberbatch does, so my name is rather easier to say than his.
Yeah, I don’t think it would be such an obstacle apart from the fact that our surname is ALSO difficult to spell, ends in an A, and is often mispronounced. Ah well.
I don’t have much advice (names are tough!), but my husband and I had a somewhat similar issue–I wanted a middle name to honor my grandfather, he wanted a middle name to honor a side of his family–so we just went with both. Granted our son is still a baby, but I can’t imagine that having two middle names is going to matter … at all.
One thing to keep in mind is that on some documents, only the first name will show up, so make sure they’re in an order that’s acceptable to you 🙂
I have 4 names, first middle mom’s dad’s. My older sister just had three: first middle dad’s. But after, like, a year they changed it because my mom didn’t change her name and the idea that a mother and child didn’t share a last name was too confusing for people to figure out. (They lived in the south, it was the early 80s, people are dumb)
I have never, ever had a problem. Sometimes on forms there is just a space for one middle initial, and if I have to choose just one middle name, I choose my mom’s name. It’s special to me that I have it. I even considered legally changing my name to first middle dad’s mom’s for a while. My dad and I have a great relationship, but so do my mom and I and am really happy I have that legal tie to her family name. It reminds me that I belong to my mom and dad, that they both shaped me into the person that I am today. (Of course, for some people they don’t have that connection to their name, and some people don’t have awesome relationships with their parents and that is okay to, this is just how I feel about my name.)
I don’t know what will be a good way to communicate with your husband. But here’s the truth about names: they are less final than we think. If your child really hates that fourth name, they can drop it as an adult. Most people don’t know I have four names, and I really only use first and last with any consistency.
So long as the names aren’t ungodly long, I see no issue! I got mom’s maiden name as a middle name because parentals decided that a nineteen letter hyphenated surname would be a pain. Yay for complex immigrant last names! But the syllable count you gave sounds beyond reasonable. The kid will just seem like a fancy badass if you ask me.
I suspect this is not about name length! I bet, with no knowledge of your husband whatsoever, there is some hidden patriarchy business lurking in the back of his head somewhere that even he isn’t sure about? Which is why things have gotten so heated you’re sleeping in separate places? Which is all to say that, if that’s the case, there is literally no point in arguing about whether the name is too long (it’s not, as everyone has said, it’s not remotely unusual to have four names and children will. not. care. unless one of them rhymes with a swear word), because that’s not the real issue.
PS: We discussed doing something similar with our son–Firstname Middlename Mylastname Hislastname–and ended up with Firstname Mylastname Hislastname. I kind of regret it? I wish I’d fought harder to hyphenate, but by the time we had to make a final decision, I was tired and just wanted to hold my baby. So this anonymous internet person supports you pushing for the name you want!
Eh, I have five names (first, middle, middle, mum’s name, dad’s name) on my birth certificate, and it’s never been a problem, apart from because the middle names are both nine letters it was hard sometimes to fit it all on an exam sheet.
When I was seven I took my stepfather’s name too, and so have six names, but go by four (first, middle, middle, stepdad’s name).
Six is too many. Five is borderline. Four is totally fine.
I actually know several (young adult) people who have their mother’s maiden name as a second middle name, and the response is always, “That’s nice!” and nothing negative.
Names are names, in a couple years, this will be his/hers and no one will think twice about how long or not long it is.
Hoping your husband will listen to you with a bit more sympathy!
Hmm. Now I’m feeling guilty for weighing in so strongly against giving our kid a second middle name. But we’re hyphenating last names, and I’m the one carrying, so maybe not THAT guilty.
We’re going with 2-syllable 1-syllable 1-syllable/hyphen/2-syllable. She wanted a second middle name with 3 syllables, but I wasn’t feeling it.
I’m going to check back in with her that this isn’t rankling. After all, we’ve got 15 weeks to get our shit together if we need to revise our plans.
FWIW my kid has 2-syllable first name, middle initial, 2-syllable middle name, and hyphenated last name (4 syllables in all). I love his name, I love his name so much, and I am so overjoyed that he is also very happy with it. (We would have given him straight-up two middle names, tbh, but we couldn’t DECIDE on the second one so he just got the initial, which stands for alllllll our choices.)
We have five kids, only one has four names. The rest have three. It’s just the way things worked out and it’s the right name for that child and the right names for the other children. Literally no one cares, not even the kids. They each like their own names just fine. Other kids at Four Names Kid’s school have never made fun of him and I’ll best most have no idea and some probably also have four names. It’s never been an issue anywhere (and he’s a 3 syllable, 2 syllable, 3 syllable, 2 syllable name). PLENTY of kids have four (or more) names in the world!
I’m so sorry you are dealing with this.
My mom has two middle names… and her full name (pre-marriages) was VERY long: 3-syl, 2-syl, 3-syl, 4-syl. (Oddly, one of her middle names was her half-sister’s first name – her dad must have really liked that name.) She primarily used her first middle name, especially when it came to filling out forms or whatever, and the second middle name was more of an honorarium/bonus. There is no such thing as a name that is too long. Do what makes you happy!
Can’t weigh in on the four names thing, but as someone whose name was definitely made fun of/ teased about in school (and still gets a chuckle in adulthood when people realise my first and last names pretty much rhyme)- it honestly didn’t bother me that much. I mean, it was my name, but my parents were the ones that came up with it, so it never really felt super personal? Of the things you could be teased about as a kid, it really wasn’t a big deal. Plus, in proof that kids are jerks and will tease anyone about anything, my sister got more teasing based on my name than I did! I even kept it when I got married- it’s memorable and I feel like I’ve earned it at this point 😛
And his concern isn’t even based on names that their peers will even be aware of- I can’t remember the middle names of anyone I went to school with- it’s not like it comes up. They’ll be okay.
My husband has his mom’s last name as a second middle name, and our son has my last name as a second middle name (with the same or more syllables total as your potential name). I think that the only problem my husband has ever had is running out of characters for putting both his middle names on forms. But he’s also just used one of his middle names, or the two middle initials, when it’s seemed more convenient, without any real problems–i.e. even when his ID doesn’t match the name on his plane tickets. And I don’t think anyone has *ever* commented negatively on having four names.
If your husband really thinks four names is too long, you can basically just use the second middle name on official documents. Nobody is going to care if you write the whole thing on school forms or anything like that. So far we’ve only really used my son’s second middle name on his birth certificate, SS card, and his birth announcement.
Tell him you’ve thought about it and you agree four names is too many, so it will be [Firstname] [Middlename] [Your Maiden Name], and everyone else will have to change their surname to match.
(I mean, probably this is a bad idea and will end terribly, so maybe don’t actually do it, but like. Ugh.)
My brother had two middle names. He got teased for plenty of things, as did I, but that was not one of them.
That picture of Sansa is seriously gorgeous!
Thank you! Sansa was lovely to illustrate, and one day I’ll come back to her as a subject and really play up her greys and blacks (those toffee-coloured tones were just too beautiful to resist!).
Guys I just put in my two weeks notice at work! I will start my new job and move into a new apartment at the same time and I am very overwhelmed by all this change ahhhhh
You can do it!!! All the hugs and best of luck!!!!
Huzzah for CHANGES!
The Scientific American piece on women, girls, and autism makes large portions of my childhood and adulthood make sense in a way that I don’t quite know what to do with. Thanks for linking it here, Nicole, and for sharing it on Twitter yesterday, Nikki.
Anytime I see one of those Live Laugh Love signs I’m just like DON’T TELL ME WHAT TO DO YOU DON’T KNOW ME
Yup, yup–I will be a miserable old ghost if I so choose, thx very much.
I feel this way about all the “inspirational” posters and crap one sees on the internet these days. So demanding!
“Always remember: you’re beautiful!”
and
“I love you; take care of yourself”
and so on and they’re always these graphics that get shared around and not from the first person who made them
NOPE. They just engender the exactly opposite feeling the poster was going for.
That is some beautiful Sansa fanart!
Thank you! Sansa is my very first (wait, second….no, third, I drew David Bowie in 11th grade for someone) fan art, and I had a wonderful time illustrating her!
Speaking of religion and women being terrible, this weekend’s reading included an article about how the Magdalene system in Ireland included piecework for Hasbro, under the supervision of the Good Shepherd Sisters: How a global board games giant exploited Ireland’s Magdalene women. We’re all flawed people trying to do the best we can, but some of us could stand to try significantly harder not to be awful.
Whoa.
I skimmed the first half of that, saved it for later, and am now SO ANGRY.
My mousetrap game was part of a misogynist slave labor system. I didn’t even know that was a level of grossness we could get to!
man, it is really jarring seeing those Monica Lewinsky photos, especially the ones from her time at the White House, after what, 15? years of not really seeing her come up in the media. It’s like seeing a photo of yourself or your friends in high school and going oh my god, look how YOUNG you are!
I am having a lot of feelings about the “feminists with loud voices” who went after her. There must have been sympathetic feminist voices out there at the time – were they totally missing from the media, or do I just not remember them? Like queenofbithniya’s comment says, it’s this whole narrative of women tearing each other down, and I wonder who was making it look that way, who was choosing which voices to amplify. And if the whole thing had happened in 2016, if the “feminist” response would be just as distorted and cruel.
It’s amazing how foreign the ’90s seem now, despite being the decade in which I grew up and turned from a kid into basically the person I am now.
If you push Bill Clinton’s entire career 24 years into the future, he’d be completely unelectable in 2016. He probably wouldn’t even run, if he did, he’d be out after IA/NH. He would have been vigorously abandoned by the party after the Lewinsky scandal broke, if he held on that long.
I think many people (including me, at the ripe old age of 14) saw it first and foremost as a sex scandal. It was about the cheating and the lying, when in retrospect it should have been about a guy taking advantage of a much younger underling.
this, yeah, and I wish I could say I had that impression because I didn’t understand how the grownup worlds of jobs and sex worked, no, it feels like EVERYONE saw it that way.
Yeah, same! The torrent of prurient jokes and eye-rolling and comparisons to JFK and Marilyn (and the stuff about Hillary’s attractiveness ugh) vs. what nobody was talking about, which was the power dynamic.
And HRC wouldn’t have ever had to push herself into the “acceptable wife” box.
Going back and reading news from the ’90s and ’80s, it is genuinely shocking how much more explicitly feminist content there is now, and how aggressively misogynist stuff from that time period was – we’re obviously not in any kind of paradise now, but there’s much more pushback now (and there are forums like Twitter that just didn’t exist then that give a voice to a lot more people now).
Yeah, I remember reading a Cynthia Heimel book and how she, who was apparently considered in the 1990s to be a radfem, covered things like the Woody Allen/Mia Farrow split as being about a man humiliating his ex by taking up with a younger woman; with the molestation charges being ‘ugly’ but which ‘no one believes.’ Or saying that a woman with post-partum depression who smothered her newborn should die.
Or Elizabeth Wurtzel, of all people, being one of the few to defend Amy Fisher.
I’d imagine that the sympathetic feminist voices were not paid attention to, because the tear-downs made for much better TV. Similar to how Trump gets so much coverage now just because he’s psychotic.
absolutely, they must have been out there, probably treated as weird and fringey if not totally ignored.
Here’s a *really, really good* contemporaneous piece on the “feminist” response to Monica Lewinsky/Bill Clinton from Marjorie Williams. Highly recommend–my takeaway is that it was the intersection of a whole bunch of different forces, like, the fact that Bill Clinton was good for women in so many ways (he appointed Ruth Bader Ginsburg to the Supreme Court), Hillary Clinton was friends with a lot of Democratic leaders who should have been calling him to account, and the elitism of Clintonian feminism that made it easy to dismiss women like Monica Lewisnky. I hope we would do better now.
http://www.vanityfair.com/magazine/1998/05/willia…
thanks for sharing, this is so interesting!
ooh, I was just coming to post this. I read that a few weeks ago–I think I stumbled on Lewinsky’s 2014 essay and tracked it from there–and it’s been brewing in my mind ever since.
eta:I don’t really remember saying anything–I was already considered practically an anarchist for being a pro-choice, anti-capital punishment Democrat in my high school–but my memories are so viscerally uncomfortable and I think it’s because in broad strokes we looked a little alike–at least in terms of face shape/hair layers/basic build/something around the mouth–and I froze whenever it came up because it was like hearing in specific, rather than general terms, how laughably undesirable I was.
I went to the big Bosch exhibition in Den Bosch a few weeks ago! It was great (also very crowded, but that’s to be expected).
Oh goodness, a Toastie in the Museum Dance-off! My fiancee (well, her workplace, but she is in the video!) is also competing–may the best museum win!
Yes, Shoes, but also Text Message Breakup, which I needed at a time when I got text message dumped by a real shithead.
I am extremely happy Tituss and Ellie are friends in real life.
Their chemistry is so awesome, even when Titus is mean to Kimmy.
Also (slight spoiler for second half of the season) I loved it when Tina Fey and Jane Krakowski shared the scene for a little bit!
Name of the Year, anyone? I didn’t know how much I wanted Burm Snart to win until it was too late.
I’m team Dr. Shark Bird now.
Yeah, the Burm fans just couldn’t pull themselves together 🙁
My remaining favorites are Howdy Goudey, Saint Schwing and Onno Hoes, but I think Onno and Howdy have the best chances of making to the end.
And it was so close!
I can see Dick Tips making it to the top, even though I don’t think his name’s so great – it’s funny for a moment, but in the long run? Meh.
Thanks for the reminder! I keep forgetting about Name of the Year. I’m rooting for Taco Pope, unfortunately directly opposed to Dr. Shark Bird.
Also super bummed that Burm Snart didn’t make it, as he was my gut-level fave. Dr. Shark Bird was my other top choice, though, so now I’ve got all my chips on him. But it seems unfair to have him directly against Taco Pope! That’s a tight match for everyone, it seems: last I checked, results were neck and neck. COME ON, DR. SHARK BIRD, FOR THE GLORY
Oh my gosh, I am so here for Titus/Mikey, you have no idea. I will be devastated if they break up. YOU HOLD ONTO YOUR GAY ITALIAN CHANNING TATUM, TITUS!!!
The “Nicky” of Nicholas and Alexandra is a husband and a father who is having a bad year at the office
Is it bad that this description makes me want to <s>watch</s>read it?
Oh Tituss! I spent most of Friday singing “PEEEENO NOOOO-AAAAR” and my husband eventually asked, sincerely confused, “why are you singing that, you don’t even like red wine!”
Also, I was genuinely affected by Kimmy’s last arc and I am glad the series went there.
I have no doubt you have seen this already but I need to make sure: http://pinotbytitussburgess.com/
I loved Nicholas and Alexandra, so I also loved Nicole’s Guardian piece now that I am not 13 and have a little more grasp on history.
I read the Lewinsky interview with a lot of interest and some guilt. Thanks to Unfortunate Life Experiences I understand a bit more about being shamed as a woman, something I didn’t understand as a teenager when the scandal was happening. I am glad she is finding a way for herself and I think it’s shit that people wouldn’t hire her.
I was so obsessed with Peeno Noir my husband actually put Tituss on my Valentine’s card this year and quoted from the song. I loved it.
Shoes omg shoes betch.
Just to reiterate frustrations pointed out in that SciAm article:
Many girls may, like Frances, be diagnosed late because autism can have different symptoms in females. Others may go undiagnosed or be given diagnoses such as attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) and even, some researchers believe, anorexia.
Uhm, yes. I got a milequetoastical diagnosis when I was 8 of “it’s not true (“pure”) Sensory Integration Disorder (but it’s close!)” and “well, it’s sort of OCD but not really, so let’s go with OCPD” and “also she’s really smart?” and when I saw it at age 25 or however old I was, I wanted to shake the write-up paper around at everyone and ask “how did these symptoms and behaviors not look like Asperger’s?!” because they were bing-bang right on. But it was 1992 and I was a girl and not Classical Autism.
But when I tried to tell my family, look! here’s an explanation for my peculiarities and it explains some of my mental health, I just got told “but you’re not autistic now, so you never were” and uhm the whole thing is that lots of kids who go undiagnosed learn adaptive skills and how to hide certain things (because they’re basically forced to), and it’s frustrating.
The more I read articles like this, or about how girls present differently because of different social expectations/pressures, the more irritated I get that not only did I get the wrong diagnosis as a kid, but I didn’t even have support for what I supposedly had, because “she’s just really smart and a perfectionist”.
oh HA HA HA i also just remembered the time i was 15 and got sent to therapy and I thought it was for my anxiety and depression and feeling lost at sea with my peers and not really knowing how to handle my sudden rages, but apparently everyone else in the world thought it was for an eating disorder, but didn’t tell me until one day when I went to a group therapy session and everyone else in there was talking about their anorexia or bulimia.
Yes, I had/have disordered eating habits. The thing is? it’s entirely based on classical autistic traits: not recognizing hunger; texture abhorrence; executive dysfunction that when i realized i needed to eat, not being able to feed myself because of too many steps/choices; plus i saw a video in Health class at age 14 from a camera inside a kid’s mouth while he ate potato chips and it was disgusting and for years I couldn’t eat without thinking of it and thus losing my appetite. (I still can’t tolerate the sound of even my own chewing.)
(I learned only last month that my little sister also has a lifelong aversion to food noises that she directly attributes to that video we saw in the 9th grade. How many other kids at our school developed problems with food because of a video on the digestive system? I thought I was the only one, but now I am angry at the school for making us watch it that at least 2 people had such negative responses.)
That video sounds disgusting and yeah, that would put me off eating. Your response is DEFINITELY VALID.
I’m probably not autistic? Although, my dad jokes about us being on the spectrum, since we both forget to eat (there are THINGS happening), tend to be process oriented, obsessive, blunt and bad at socialising. I maintain that I’m just a shy workaholic and I know that I’m blunt, I just don’t care.
(Now that I’ve read what I’ve written, maybe we are on the spectrum?)
I’ve started to refer to myself as “in the suburbs of autism” because while I recognize a lot of autistic traits in myself, I don’t know whether or not I’m within the diagnostic boundaries (which seem to be… fuzzy? Possibly broadening? IDK).
That is an excellent descriptor for how I’ve been seeing myself lately, thank you!
The video was awful. It was made in the 80s or early 90s based on the video style and clothing, I imagine, and had one of those fibre-optic cameras follow the digestive process as the kid ate potato chips and swallowed, etc. etc.
It also occurs to me that much of the stuff we were shown about eating disorders during that unit was of the Scare Them Straight kind, like with drugs, and not exactly helpful for preventing them. Remember whatshername the actress with bulimia from…Growing Pains? we got to watch her biography about it and hiding jars of vomit in the closet. And we also saw Sybil, of course.
Catholic school = not exactly the best for nuanced education of mental illness.
As for being on the spectrum – it’s possible! There are a lot of things to look at in a diagnosis, to do with physical traits and learning styles, too.
I pretty much match up exactly with O’Toole’s description in the article, with a couple variations (no anorexia or sorority/cheerleading here). But also there are things not mentioned that line up for me (and which were described in my 1992 diagnosis write-up) that are clear. I can’t remember the full list of symptoms/behaviors, but there are enough matches that my stepmom’s therapist mentioned it as a possible diagnosis without having met me, which is why I looked into it at all, and then finding the 1992 write-up solidified it.
The main thing is that if you feel like you’re out of step with the rest of the world and that is causing you distress, then look and see – it might provide an explanation to help ease your mind. If it’s not causing distress, then don’t worry about it.
I have the ease-of-mind now, except when I get resentful that girls growing up with it now have more support than I did, and they aren’t forced to suppress themselves like I was. 🙂 Also, just knowing the condition helps me articulate my needs better, and I can prevent situations which would not be good for me, or I’m more aware of where I might be unknowingly deficient and can pay extra attention to those areas, just in case. Before, it was constant frustration of not knowing why I couldn’t do things like normal people, trying anyway, and then failing spectacularly.
OMG, THANK YOU NICOLE FOR THE SHOUT OUT!!!!!!!!!! It was a real honour to illustrate Sansa, thanks again for the opportunity!
I’m mailing her out today, and the packaging maaaay be overkill but better safe than sorry. She’s, like, extra buffered!
Standard advice I’ve been giving out and honing for 15 years now. Feel free to adapt for yourself:
1: not sleeping with married people (other than your spouse, obvi.) is 101-level good person shit, up there (IMO) with not kicking puppies.
2: if he loves you and he feels trapped on his marriage, wait till the divorce is final. Trust me, you don’t want to be involved during a divorce anyway.
3: (this one is from coketalk back in the day) if someone claims to have an open marriage, ask to confirm with their spouse.
4: if, despite all of this, you still want to fool around with married people, realize that chances are you’ll never be anything but a side piece to them. They always go home to their spouses.
Also, it is NEVER a sexless marriage. Why is that a lie that anyone believes.
See #2. (Addendum: “staying together for the kids” is BS and harmful for the children. Ask anyone whose parents stuck it out in a miserable marriage while they we’re growing up)
Sure, I just mean that really specific detail. Even if people are miserable and trapped in their marriages, sometimes even when one has moved out — they are usually still having sex.
Yes. There is so much attendant bullshit when men decide to cheat on their wives*, that I’ve crafted this advice specifically to respond to all of it.
*i’ve tried to use gender neutral pronouns here, because women do cheat, gay men cheat, etc. etc. etc. but my experience has always been counseling straight women getting with married dudes. Blech.
I also had sea monkeys, back in the day. There were four, in the end, named after the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, because I was obviously the coolest nine year old ever. Everything was fine until Michelangelo gave birth, ate Leonardo, Donatello and Raphael, then ate the babies and died. It was a wild ride.
(And thus concludes the only decent story I have to tell at parties.)
Okay, but that’s a fantastic story, though.
Yeah that’s amazing though! My childhood goldfish – I had close to 20, probably, one at a time, and all named after Sweet Valley characters – always died under mysterious circumstances, while my little brother’s single goldfish (Adventure) kept thriving… and then we watched them more closely and realized my brother’s fish was super aggressive and wouldn’t let my fish near the food.
The food chain, man.
Off topic but I MUST:
I had a dream Friday night that there were all sorts of really bizarre Dear Prudence questions, and Mallory answered every single one with her usual grace and aplomb, but I could tell that even she was struggling. The weirdest one that I remember:
“Dear Prudence,
I really love the series The Hunger Games and am wondering if you know how I can enter this contest?”
And Mallory’s reply:
“I sincerely hope that something was lost in translation, as this question came in a language I don’t speak and I had to use Google Translate. To answer the question I think you are trying to ask, The Hunger Games is part of the vast and fascinating genre of dystopian literature. Battle Royale has a similar premise, and other books you might want to check out include 1984, Fahrenheit 451…” etc etc.
…I had a dream about Mallory.
She tries really hard to answer you. Nice work dream Mallory.
(I dreamed last night that i was trying to work a coup and take over the Devil’s army so yeah)
Here are my thoughts on the Lewinsky scandal at 16 and revised thoughts in my 30s (in parentheses).
1: what a stupid girl (what a phenomenally naive woman)
2: Bill Clinton is a slimeball (no change, although I bet he’s slowed down since the bypass)
3: Linda Trip is the most horrible woman alive (no change)
4: she kept the dress?! Ew! (Oh honey, why did you DO that? And then tell somebody?!)
5: Why are we talking about blow jobs on national television? (Why was oral sex between two consenting adults the subject of congressional hearings?)
6: the person I feel the worst for in all this is Chelsea (no change)
The question I had then is the same as my question now: why would you spit ON YOUR CLOTHES? Who is giving blowjobs and then just sort of dribbling the results down their fronts? This haunts me.
I have to confess I’ve always been mystified by people who don’t swallow, so that never occurred to me, but now I my OH HONEY NO reaction to the whole thing is even stronger.
Some people can have an, um, uncomfortable reaction (ask me how I know!), but that’s why you plan ahead and have an appropriate receptacle handy.
I believe you, it’s just trying to explain to me how it works is approximately like trying to explain scuba diving to a dog: does.not.compute. (that doesn’t make it wrong, I just cannot wrap my head around it)
How do we know she spit on her dress? I always figured the ejaculate (ahem) got on the dress directly, i.e. dick not in mouth at time of ejaculation.
This is what I thought too, but I’m illiterate when it comes to not swallowing.
I don’t know much about Linda Tripp, so maybe she is the worst woman alive. But it also seems to me that she felt it was important to expose the affair given Paula Jones’ lawsuit.
In general, I feel bad for Flowers, Jones, Willey, and most especially Juanita Broaddrick, who I think were all sacrificed on the altar of political expediency. It’s my biggest qualm about a Hillary presidency. I like her a lot and trust her abilities more than Bernie, but I don’t want Bill back in the limelight and being given another pass on being a very probable serial harasser.
IMO the key difference BTW. Lewinsky and the rest of the women you mention (for whom I do feel bad) is consent. I think recording girl talk and reporting to the FBI on a consensual relationship between two adults is pretty abhorrent (but I’m from San Francisco, the land of “let consenting adults do what they like”, so ymmv).
The irony of Bill is that he’s definitely a slimeball and a serial harasser, and quite possibly a rapist, but he’s only been caught and brought to trial for perjury regarding a consensual relationship.
GUYS GUYS GUYS
Is this where we babble excitedly about LMM’s Pulitzer for Hamilton???
http://deadline.com/2016/04/hamilton-wins-pulitze…
Forget EGOT, he’s going to be an EGTOP!
The more letters, the stronger my urge to anagram them.
OT, but victorious update on the grabby guy situation (see last open thread):
He was on best behaviour all evening and from a snide comment he made I gather that my supervisor did have a serious talk with him. Good.
Then when I saw "…so the kids have the benefit of a traditional family environment" (or whatever the bullshit phrase was), I tossed the bloody turntable out the window.
We were slightly younger than the first generation of Skins and they were literally everything we wanted to be. We tried so hard, but lacked the money and access to drugs to really emulate the Skins lifestyle until a few years later.
We were just as lame and idiotic as you're imagining, but we had cool hair *shrug*