Sunday roundup

What if we wrote about male scientists the way we wrote about female scientists?

Men have bitchy resting face as much as women, but we notice it more on women because there's an expectation of smiling.

The Facebook motherhood "challenge" is the smuggest thing ever.

This is beautiful and Ask Polly is a national treasure.

But I also deserved someone who appreciated regular, flawed human beings who sometimes have jawline zits and feel unwieldy negative emotions. I could handle those things. I could handle imperfections and self-doubt and bad haircuts and financial uncertainty in someone else, so I deserved someone who wouldn't take me at my worst moment and say, "Your inability to remain the perfect, sexy badass makes me less attracted to you." I didn't know this about myself then, though. I didn't recognize that I was actually pretty forgiving and flexible with men; I was okay with the fact that all men have flaws, so I deserved the same attitude in return. BUT — important! — I wasn't okay with my own flaws, so I figured no one else should be, either...

You need to know that even if you get older and develop a love of rom-coms and a stomach problem that eliminates whiskey from your diet, even if you gain a few pounds and no longer feel motivated to entertain self-centered men, even if horror movies start to depress you and you struggle to get it up for a night on the town, even if your jawline pimples turn into a full-blown, treatment-resistant acne and your hair turns gray and you can't deliver dirty jokes to a drunk crowd the way you used to, you will still be good enough. You will still matter. You can turn into a cookie-cutter girl or even less than that — that average, lumpy, rapidly aging kind of woman who's currently beneath your contempt — and you will still be worthy of love.

Women who work hard to be better than other women suffer a lot. They don't actually need to be upbraided for it. They're already struggling enough. So I'm not saying NEVER EVER PUT YOURSELF ABOVE OTHER WOMEN, SISTER. What I'm saying is that when you try to set yourself apart from other people IN GENERAL, in your own mind, in order to soothe yourself and tell yourself that things will work out just fine for you, in order to reassure yourself that you're sexier and better than the desperate cookie-cutter girls you see out at bars, it doesn't actually make things any easier for you. It makes things harder. When you choose to love yourself for superficial reasons, you teach other people to love you for superficial reasons. And when you reject yourself and scold yourself for things that are beyond your control, you degrade your own ability to show up and enjoy your life. You hate your own humanity. You reject yourself for being a fucking mortal.

Oh I love this, too:

These Lazy Girl guides admittedly offer much the same set of lessons women's publications have been peddling for decades, and they generally follow long-established formulas: Assemble some obvious facts, add a couple genuinely insightful tidbits, lay it all out in an attractive way...

The whole thing smacks of the "cool girl,” to use Gillian Flynn’s description of conspicuous, attractive female chillness. The allure of the effortless reigns supreme online, where it’s easy to chase each other around in circles about who’s faking and who actually doesn't give a fuck (see the debate around the You Did Not Eat That Instagram account) and to applaud the occasional admission of a constructed identity. The only real conclusion that falls out of all this mess is that, still, effort is never cool.