Not to make this all about me or anything, but I have exactly one more week until I board a flight to Tennessee where it’s gonna be cold and there’s a new baby I’ve never met and we’ll make mini cheesecakes and I’ll walk around in the woods and I’m so excited I can barely remember my own name! I hope you’re looking forward to something today, but also I hope you’re better at staying right here in this moment than I seem to be because this is all I can think about. Wheee!
IT’S GONNA LOOK LIKE THIS.
(photo taken six years ago by me)
You Should Go or Do or Give
+ Time’s running out to support Christy C. Road‘s The Next World Tarot deck! You’re gonna be so pissed off at yourself if you don’t get in on this and make it happen. HURRY UP.
The Sun and Chariot
+ But don’t stop there! Help Morgan Collado find a safe home and meet basic needs! You might remember Morgan’s work on Autostraddle. Now’s your chance to give back!
Queer as in F*ck You
+ This Week in Brittani Nichols, you can find Brittani Nichols on Transparent, which everyone but me has already watched and then collectively died over because it’s apparently so well-acted and amazing! Also, don’t miss Brittani Nichols on the latest Golden Girls Podcast: S3E8, wherein Brittani Nichols discusses the Golden Girls episode titled “Brotherly Love” which includes ‘Dorothy’s amazing faceplant and Sophia’s amazing moment with a saucepan.’ I don’t think you want to miss that. You can also catch Brittani Nichols on Turn Up Tuesday! Jesus Christ is someone making sure Brittani Nichols is getting sleep and vital nutrients? I hope so.
Photo by Robin Roemer
+ It’s Kristin Russo on Luna Luna Mag!
+ Here are the Nine Most Inspirational Women Travel Bloggers to Follow, including Melissa Langley, the very travel blogger who’s currently writing our Get Out There series! Hot damn!
Doll Parts
+ God this is so good I want to throw my eyeballs across the room. Beauty Is Broken by Arabelle Sicardi.
So I’ve mostly decided being gendered a woman is enough. It isn’t, not really, but I can see myself in womanhood, and I embrace the feminine. At least it’s not as violent as its foil. So womanhood is where I go when I am exhausted by and afraid of fighting for my other options. I’m already followed home at night for looking like a woman. I know statistically that it would be worse if I ventured, visibly, to be anything else. This is the real gulf in the beauty aisle and in the history of beauty itself: beauty for men is a method to prevent humiliation, and for the rest of us, it is a matter of life and death, getting home or not having a home at all.
Beauty is failing us, because gender already has. But what keeps me coming back to it is that I still think it can be recovered. I think beauty can mean more than what it was ever meant to, that it can illuminate parts of people they didn’t know they had or deserved or even wanted.
Oh damn.
+ How I Got Depressed, Forgave Myself, and Grew Up in the Process by Ashley Ford. Read this! Do it.
+ Why It Sucks to be a Woman in Comedy by Megan Koester.
+ Gaaaaahhhhh this is so fucking good: ESPN’s Super IMPACT25, in which Marvel artists turned these influencers and athletes into super versions of themselves oh my god.
Tamika Catchings
+ Casey Butler is doing cool fun stuff with her life and now all I can think about is climbing on mountains. The Road to the Road to Machu Picchu, Part 1.
+ For Young Saudi Women, Video Games Offer Self-Expression.
+ Haley Mlotek brings you The Year in Found Families and you will enjoy the fuck out of it. “We’re reminding each other that the time to make up our minds is never.”
+ Oh oh, this is also very good! You are so lucky today. Is Moira Pregnant? by Moira Donegan.
Besides the sheer experiential weirdness of being encouraged, as a consumer, to plan ahead, one of the stranger things about buying health insurance is that it requires you to consider the future as something more than merely rhetorical. What is especially strange about buying health insurance on the public exchange is that it requires foresight from people whose lives are necessarily preoccupied with the present. Obamacare’s subsidies, after all, are useful mostly to people who do not receive insurance from their jobs—people who are part-time employees, who are unemployed, or who work in an irregular or nontraditional enough way that they are classified as independent contractors. There’s some evidence that even with the subsidies, many people still can’t afford to go to the doctor: a recent Gallup poll found that 31 percent of Americans had delayed seeking medical treatment because of the cost, even though the number of insured people has increased since the passing of the health-care law. Ours is a now system that demands long-term planning almost exclusively from people whose work is scarce enough and precarious enough to preclude even short-term security.
+ Casey Tolan brings you the story of Ramona Brant: How a First-Time Drug Charge Became a Live Sentence for This Mother of Two.
+ bell hooks: Buddhism, the Beats and Loving Blackness.
+ Dating While Fat: 5 Things I Consider Before Commitment by Ashleigh Shackelford.
To be honest, dating while fat, Black, queer, a hood feminist, and a radical activist means either compromising parts of myself, or suffering through easing partners into gradually respecting all of my humanity. Living in a culture that defines my body as unhealthy, a problem, ugly, unhygienic, and unworthy of love makes it that much harder to find a potential partner to value all of me.
Saw This, Thought of You
+ I keep forgetting to include this incredible piece by Eula Biss! I hope you’ve already read it but just in case you have not: White Debt.
+ Dominique Morisseau brings you Why I Almost Slapped a Fellow Theatre Patron, and What That Says About Our Theatres. “How a seemingly normal night at the theatre led to an altercation with a patron over microaggressions and white privilege.”
+ Do you wanna think and/or talk about the Kilgrave fandom?
+ Here let’s take a look at some of the Muslims who’ve shaped America!
+ EMAIL THIS OR YOUR CRUSH WILL DIE: The History of the Chain Letter by Alexandra Hayward.
And Finally
Hiiiiii you can make everything smell like cat head with this Japanese spray byeeeeeee.
I DO NOT WANT TO TALK about the Kilgrave fandom.
Realized Transparent was out last night and marathoned half the season and I’m not really awake now but LOVING Ali’s look this year and also there are so many boobs this season!
When I saw the link to the “Kilgrave Fandom”, I was imagining MRA fanboys holding up Kilgrave as some kind of ultimate men’s rights activist, doing the holy work of make women submit to his will. Luckily, that is most definitely NOT what The Mary Sue article was talking about. And while the idea of fangirls romanticizing Kilgrave and wanting to reform him and have him and Jessica ride off into the sunset together makes me want to puke, this paragraph really stood out for me:
“The fandom surrounding characters like Kilgrave – these supposed “rape fantasies” – are not actually fantasies about rape. Instead, they seem to be fantasies that offer the participant all of the power and control over the villain in question. Whether it’s a fan-fiction featuring Jessica or a self-insert character, the writer has ultimate authorial control over exactly what happens, moment by moment. That’s the way to get ultimate power over Kilgrave, right? To put him in your own story and make him do what you want him to do.”
Fanfiction giving women power and control? I’m here for THAT. For sure.
Yeah after I said that I read the article and loved it. Although I think the part you quote above is just one explanation (or, what’s happening for one subset of Kilgrave fans). Another facet is that each rapist is the hero of his own story, and when he tells that story to us, and he is (articulate, or white, or has sweet eyes, or looks a little like Doctor Who), sometimes for some reason it’s almost difficult NOT to believe him.
That’s why I love how in Jessica Jones, unlike in other shows, the rape is named. Over and over again (and they point this out in the Mary Sue article too), Jessica is presented with his version of events and yells, no. You raped me. It was rape. It was rape it was rape it was rape. None of his versions of the truth are given the space to flourish and that is AMAZING.
omg thank you for including the Dominique Morisseau article! I had a lot of feelings about it, especially because I’m working on one of her plays rn and she is the most brilliant.
I LOVE YOU LANEIA
oh i have to credit alaina with that find!! and yes such an incredible piece!
The ESPN Super Impact25 is amazing! I would love a poster of the USWNT or Serena Williams as super heroes. So awesome and great AAA all around–thanks for some much needed good news!
I really like the way brittani leans. she leans great.
I agree with that.
oh boy this is always a great column but this week i MUST READ each of these links! MUST! Thanks Laneia.
Also did anyone see the rad article about class privilege on Everyday Feminism by our very own Carmen Rios? In my heart I want Carmen to be SO FAMOUS so that everyone in the world reads her words and learns her message. The Drake of feminism, if you will.
http://everydayfeminism.com/2015/12/everyday-class-privilege/
These are such good articles! Thanks!
every time I see Brittani Nichols pop up in something my quality of life improves drastically
The article about health insurance looks fascinating! I’m trying to figure out what to do for our insurance this year. I was self employed for years and uninsured. I looked into health insurance but decide that for me the best plan was to have some savings and stay healthy, which worked. Then my wife and I got together, and she had some transition related expenses, which insurance most likely would not have covered, especially at the time. So we used our savings and paid for what she needed. Then she had some mental health issues and we again paid from savings. Now with the ACA I figured I would give the whole health care a chance, especially considering that my wife uses health care with some frequency. But the whole thing is so complicated, our income does fluctuate, and then one hospital in our town bought out the other and the remaining conglomerate conveniently does not take out health insurance! I even looked into the “Christian cost sharing” options, but I think we are considered “sexually immoral.” The whole thing is so frustrating!
the bell hooks interview; so excellent thank you. <3
Tennessee
Tennessee
Ain’t no place I’d rather be
Have a safe trip! Come back to us in one piece
I love how every time Laneia casually slips something absolutely revolting into the AAA.
And by “love” I mean “I’ve been compulsively rubbing my eyes for 5 minutes ever since I read the words ‘Kilgrave fandom” as though I can rub the memory away”.
CAT HEAD SPRAAAAAAY
Oh man, thank you for linking to my piece! I’m all flattered and starstruck.
xo
Moira Donegan
Brittani Nichols has always seemed kinda full of herself ¯\_(ツ)_/¯