Asked why they were taking pictures, the two young women hesitated as if the question were so dumb it might be a trick.
Isn't that... refreshing? Considering the hang-ups that plague American women around admitting the same? It came up again week or so ago, on the topic of the lingerie modeling: Russian women just don't see what all the fuss is about. I've written about beauty (as a sociocultural phenomenon) a lot, and there are multiple links embedded in the above links.“We are pretty,” Ms. Ignatova said.
So stop telling me—"family values" traditionalists, shitty rom-coms, and Zales commercials—that it is my biological imperative to trap a complete stranger into a lifelong contract based entirely on how many diamonds he's willing to buy me with. Stop telling me that when you're choosing someone to sleep next to every single fucking day until you die, your personalities and goals and aspirations are irrelevant. Stop telling me that my lived experience is "nothing" compared to some numbers cooked up by a repressed bigot with an agenda.and yup
I reject all of this stupid, boring, outdated shit. I reject your numbers. I reject the idea that my personality is a negligible variable in the equation of my happiness. I reject the implication that you understand my relationship better than I do. Do not insult my intelligence by telling me that the best way to avoid divorce is to marry a stranger when you're too young to even know yourself. Don't try to bluff me into swallowing your lie that a world with more marriages is objectively a better world. You cannot trick me into believing that divorce is a failure of society and not a grand fucking triumph, and you will not drag me and the rest of society into the past with you.
It depresses me to see talented writers figuring out they can phone it in, and that no one will know the difference. I’m annoyed by gossip masquerading as biography, by egomaniacal boasting and name-dropping passing as memoir. It irks me to see characters who are compendiums of clichés. I can’t explain precisely why a sentence like “His eyes were as black as night” should feel like an insult, but it does. It’s almost like being lied to.With that, I'm glad to be advised not to read Mitchell Stephens' new book on atheism, even though the advising column itself is ever so tiresome (I expect no less from Adam Gopnik, who has been guilty of sentences far worse than "his eyes were as black as night." He doesn't do that in this review, but he does drown a few interesting ideas in his pompous, self-indulgent, wordy style.
The average marriage today is weaker than the average marriage of yore, in terms of both satisfaction and divorce rate, but the best marriages today are much stronger, in terms of both satisfaction and personal well-being, than the best marriages of yore.East and West in simple graphics.
What’s the problem with girl LEGOs? Why is everyone against pink?, ask many parents. I’ll let Rachel Giordano answer that question: “Because gender segmenting toys interferes with a child’s own creative expression. I know that how I played as a girl shaped who I am today. It contributed to me becoming a physician and inspired me to want to help others achieve health and wellness. I co-own two medical centers in Seattle. Doctor kits used to be for all children, but now they are on the boys’ aisle. I simply believe that they should be marketed to all children again, and the same with LEGOs and other toys.”
In other words, we’re all subsidizing a churning rotation of bankruptcies that keeps companies like Tyson supplied with the newest infrastructure and a desperate labor force.and
American meat eaters live, for the most part, in happy ignorance of the system that grows animals for slaughter. When that ignorance is interrupted with a bit of information about the meat industry, we typically respond with outrage.and
At the same time, because urban meat eaters live far from the farms, we see nothing in a piece of meat but the price, and we reward those businesses who can provide it most cheaply. This has led to true outrages: environmental degradation, Tyson-style exploitation, and the evolution of antibiotic-resistant bacteria. These, Ogle points out, are the tradeoffs we’ve chosen as eaters who overwhelmingly opt for the cheapest meat.
In other words, when our ignorance is interrupted by outrage, sometimes it’s justified, sometimes it’s not — but either way, it’s our own damn fault.
Manure spills, dead hogs, and bacteria-tainted meat highlighted Americans’ contradictory relationships with their food and their values: They wanted cheap, low-fat meat, and they wanted it from a drive-up window, but satisfying those desires carried costs in the form of environmental damage and real threats to health.Ogle has a point here: We shouldn’t complain about the hidden costs of industrial meat if we’re not prepared to cover those costs at the butcher counter.
There is something profoundly upsetting about a proud, confident, unrepentantly muscular woman. She risks being seen by her viewers as dangerous, alluring, odd, beautiful or, at worst, a sort of raree show. She is, in fact, a smorgasbord of mixed messages. This inability to come to grips with a strong, heavily muscled woman accounts for much of the confusion and downright hostility that often greets her.” ~ David L. Chapman
The last thing we need is diversity being defined by Coca-Cola – a multinational corporation that has been accused of human rights, labour and environmental abuses on several continents (allegations the company denies).
pic.twitter.com/8trL9E2WX4
— SciencePorn (@SciencePorn) February 10, 2014
What's the point in anyone even attempting to understand why they were wrong and move on if we're going to punitively insist on people who mess up "living with the consequences"? Christ. People fuck up. It would be better if they hadn't, but apologizing is better than not apologizing.
At its best, literature is pure encounter: it resists consumption because it cannot be used up and it cannot expire. The bonds that are formed between readers and writers, between readers and characters, and between readers and ideas, are meaningful in a way that the bonds formed between consumers and products can never be. Literature demands curiosity, empathy, wonder, imagination, trust, the suspension of cynicism, and the eradication of prejudice; in return, it affords the reader curiosity, empathy, wonder, imagination, trust, the suspension of cynicism, and the eradication of prejudice.
This above all: to thine ownself be true,Just sayin'.
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man.
Scheherazade loved to read books and had lots of fascinating ideas and interests to share. Wisely educated in morality and kindness, she had a passion for poetry, philosophy, sciences and arts. She kept the king on the edge of his bed—not with mere alluring sexual positions—but with alluring stories to be told, each more exciting than the next.Because it's Laurie Penny who really brings the argument home, and I have to add a disclaimer to her brilliant words, too: I keep my hair long because it suits me and is less bother; my natural hair is thick and unmanageable, and becomes only more manageable with length. So it's not about the situation or the look; it's about the message, which remains, "to thine own self, be true," but before I get to the excerpt on that, let me get to the excerpt on how it--the posturing--is BS:
The point is to look like the performance of femininity matters enough to you that you’re prepared to work at it. I know a good few women who do all this every day and nonetheless manage to hold down jobs, raise families and write books, and I remain impressed, but I’ve never had that sort of patience.
Still, none of the women I know with long, pretty hair is anything like the “ideal woman” who’s spoken of in breathless terms on Men’s Rights Activism sites, Pickup Artist forums and in great canonical works of literature written and revered by men, because none of them are fictional. The “ideal woman”, who wakes up looking like an underwear model, who is satisfied with her role as housewife and helpmeet but remains passionate enough to hold a man’s interest, who looks “bangable” but never actually bangs, because that would make her a slut, is almost entirely fictional. She exists mainly as a standard against which every real women can be held and found wanting. She exists to justify some men’s incoherent rage at being denied the ideal woman they were promised as a reward for being the hero of their own story...
...it seems to get at the crux of the problem that non-fictional women seem to present for a certain kind of man: we just aren't paying enough attention to their boners.
Tuthmosis is right, for all the wrong reasons. Wearing your hair short, or making any other personal life choice that works against the imperative to be as conventionally attractive and appealing to patriarchy as possible, is a political statement. And the threat that if we don’t behave, if we don’t play the game, we will end up alone and unloved is still a strategy of control.
The idea that women might not place pleasing men at the centre of our politics, consciously or unconsciously, makes a lot of people uncomfortable. Sometimes it makes them angry. I am regularly asked whether I think that feminism ought to be “rebranded” in order to threaten men less, because anything a woman does, even attempt to chip away at a massive, slow-gringing superstructure of sexism, must appeal to men first, or it is meaningless.
If making your life mean more than pleasing men is “deranged”, it's not just short-haired girls who are crazy.
An infinite number of trolls with an infinite number of typewriters will occasionally produce truths, and on this point, yes, Tuthmosis is right. Chopping your hair off is “a political statement”. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve made bigger ones in my life. But choosing to behave consciously as if the sexual attention and comfort of men is not my top priority has made more of a difference to how my life has turned out than I ever imagined. And that sort of choice still worries a great many women and girls, who learn from an early age to fear what Roosh V, well-known pick-up-artist and Tuthmosis’ editor, warns all “sick women” seeking to “punish” men by cutting their hair: “being lonely and having to settle for a brood of cats is not a good life for a woman, but that’s what will happen if you keep your hair short.”Which brings us back to the benefits of being oneself, of having one's own north star, and of drowing out the message that we'll never adhere to the BS ideal:
Neo-misogynists tend not to want to sleep with me, date me or wife me up however I wear my hair, because after five minutes of conversation it tends to transpire that I’m precisely the sort of mouthy, ambitious, slutty feminist banshee who haunts their nightmares, but if I keep my hair short we tend to waste less of each other’s time. If you've a ladyboner for sexist schmuckweasels, short hair isn't going to help, although they might let you administer a disappointing hand-job.
But if you want to meet men as equals, if you want to fill your life with amazing men and boys as lovers, as life-partners, as friends and colleagues who treat women and girls as human beings rather than a walking assemblage of “signs of fertility” – believe me, they are out there – then I wouldn’t start by changing your hair. I’d start by changing your politics, and surrounding yourself with people who want to change theirs, too.
“It is not an easy issue,” he added. “Race, in our country, is not an easy issue. So whenever you deal with it, I think you have to deal with it honestly and openly and frankly, and also very intelligently.”
Hwang hopes that by writing a comic play in which “my character looked like an idiot,” he’s created a safe, humorous space to spark conversation about race, in casting and beyond.
“To make people laugh about race, I feel, is a pretty good achievement, because we’re often so uncomfortable and so tight around the subject,” he said. “So if we can laugh, that can be the beginning of a discussion.”
Even those who are OK with eating some meat might want to pay attention to just how many dead animals Sunday’s wing binge requires: about 312.5 million dead chickens, if the NCC’s figures are correct.
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