OH MY GOD WHAT
IS THIS REAL LIFE
UPDATE: It is real, and you can order it here for $75. I will not be ordering it.
reading + writing + feelings
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“She recognized that this is how friendships begin: one person reveals a moment of strangeness, and the other person decides just to listen and not exploit it.”
—Meg Wolitzer, The Interestings -
(Source: martymcphly, via fortunecookie-prize)
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"People sentimentalize punk rock, but there was no escaping its violence and misogyny … and that creates the hard exterior."
This is a Kathleen Hanna quote from this New Yorker profile of Kim Gordon. We also find out that KG loves TV and Tim Riggins. My heart.
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Endorsement: YogaGlo
This week I’m feeling a little high-horsey over the recent subscription I purchased to YogaGlo, an amazing service that delivers hundreds of classes in a variety of styles and lengths to your computer or Roku or AppleTV or whatever for $18 a month. I have done at least 30 minutes of yoga every day since last Saturday. I rule.
Beauty and fellow Roku owner Jeanne Brooks told me about it a few weeks ago, so I signed up for the free two-week trial. I’m usually going for a 45-60 minute practice with equal parts sun salutations and stretchin’ out my bod. Here are some of their offerings that deliver what I want:
- Mindful Awareness of Continuous Change
- No-Nonsense Continuous Flow
- Soften What Feels Unchangeable
- All-Around Feel-Good Flow
- Better Than Coffee (I have done this one twice - it’s amazing)
- Mental Clarity When Feeling Fragmented
Some of the class names, especially the ones that have to do with periods, are hilarious:
- Cultivate Thankfulness During Your Cycle (in addition to how thankful I am to not be pregnant? SURE!)
- Gentle, Restful Menses Practice (lol, menses)
- Connect to the Subtle Realms of Your Being (am I prepared for this?)
- And from one class description: Open a can of whoop-ass-ana!
I used to be really good about going to yoga classes at a studio, but the expense adds up and it’s hard to carve out two hours to get there, take the class, and get home. YogaGlo means I never have to leave my home, which is my favorite thing of anything, especially on the weekdays. ENDORSED!
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having it all
Yesterday I was in a RAGE over this article by journalist Richard Dorment in Esquire. I mean, of course; at first read, it’s a man snidely attempting to take down the idea that women have to fight harder than men to make it to the top AND balance work and family. Shut up.
I went home and reread the Anne-Marie Slaughter article he aims to discredit, “Why Women Still Can’t Have it All,” to try and figure out exactly why I was feeling so angry. I read this take on the issue in The Cut by Kurt Soller. And I’m with you, Kurt, and I’m even with Richard Dorment on a few things, too. Yes, men are now more than ever involved in their family lives, and men work hard and make sacrifices, too. Some feel stigmatized by choices of fathers’ past. I get it. But here’s where he misses the mark, both in his criticism of Slaughter (“… it’s worth keeping in mind that this comes from a person whose husband, by her own admission, sacrificed much in his own academic career to do the heavy lifting with their children, all so she could pursue her dream job and then complain about it, bitterly, in the pages of a national magazine.”) and his whining about the current dialogue on this issue.
In rereading Slaughter’s article, I didn’t get the impression that she was in any way discounting the modern man’s growing commitment to his family. She mentions Chris Christie, her own husband, and Deputy Secretary of State James Steinberg. She wants a world where work-life balance is in place for both men AND women, for mothers AND fathers! She’s not even calling it “having it all” anymore! SO FIRST, WHY ARE WE STILL TALKING ABOUT THIS? We don’t need yet ANOTHER article talking about how hard it is for upper-class, educated people to balance their work and family life. Anne-Marie Slaughter ALREADY COVERED IT.
Slaughter isn’t making excuses for her upbringing or how she got where she is - she is fortunate, which she acknowledges. It is women like her who get PhDs and professorships, who give speeches at colleges and advise lawmakers. She is wondering HOW we can get more women like her into positions of power to change the state of things for women who aren’t in her demographic or salary bracket. Dorment doesn’t even acknowledge his social or economic status, and even uses Sheryl Sandberg’s husband as an example of a hardworking husband.
“We’ll create a better society in the process, for all women. We may need to put a woman in the White House before we’re able to change the conditions of the women working at Walmart. But when we do, we will stop talking about whether women can have it all. We will properly focus on how we can help all Americans (emphasis added) have healthy, happy, productive lives, valuing the people they love as much as the success they seek,” Slaughter wrote.
Dorment also fails to acknowledge that many of us women who are coming up in the world today, who are fighting to make it to any higher level, still saw our grandmothers wait on our grandfathers and have “daddy issues” brought on by absent or abusive fathers. The way it always has been, traditionally, is still very much a part of our lives.
He seems to forget that men are already IN power. They still naturally make more money than women do, without even trying, without even fighting for it. Lawmakers (a large majority of whom are male, duh) are already yielding to the gun lobby and wielding control over womens’ bodies and preventing Medicaid expansion to the poorest Americans, who more than likely have families with children. Acknowledge this before you compare our struggles. “He is so blind to the subtleties of gender politics,” my good bud Jen Girdish said.
Other things that made me go FUCK YOU, DUDE:
- His attempt to reason with feelings: “The validation of one’s feelings is the language of therapy, which is to say that it is how we all talk now. This is not to denigrate the language or the feelings; it is only to say that to use one’s feelings as evidence of an injury is no way to advance a serious cause. And to imply that one has been made to feel any way at all - well, no grown man has ever won that argument before.”
This is why we still have men asking us to give them a smile on the street, even when they have no fucking clue what kind of day I might’ve had. This is why our bosses still think they can talk to us in a way that makes us ask our ladyfriends - was this fucked up? - and once confirmed, it’s already too late, you’re already too tired, you just want to forget about it and go to happy hour or go home and do some yoga and watch TV. Dorment ends his article by saying he lives with the choices he has made. I make choices, too - sometimes I choose to smile at the dude who has asked me to smile because it’s easier than teaching him a lesson. A lesson women don’t need to learn, by the way. - He gives a “small, vaguely pitiful” example from his own life on sharing housework duties with his wife: “We share laundry duty in my house, and yet whenever I’m through folding a pile of clothes, my wife will then refold everything, quietly and without comment. This used to annoy me - why do I even bother? or, conversely, Is this the Army - but now it mostly amuses me.”
How about instead of dismissing all that therapy talk, and instead of being “amused” by your wife’s preference for her own folding techniques, you DISCUSS WITH HER why it makes no sense to share laundry-folding duties if that particular chore is going to have to be done twice. How about you say, Hey, I’ll watch our kid for an hour while you fold laundry as you watch TV (which is, personally, one of my favorite chores for exactly that reason). Pick another chore, dude.
Well, great; now I’m exhausted, and this whole definition of “having it all” doesn’t even apply to me because I do not want to have children. Sigh. Bottom line: Dudes, no more articles about this kind of thing. Bring us home, Tom Petty:
- His attempt to reason with feelings: “The validation of one’s feelings is the language of therapy, which is to say that it is how we all talk now. This is not to denigrate the language or the feelings; it is only to say that to use one’s feelings as evidence of an injury is no way to advance a serious cause. And to imply that one has been made to feel any way at all - well, no grown man has ever won that argument before.”
Theme: Linear by Peter Vidani
