Reading List: I Love the Smell of a Tweetstorm on the Historical Erasure of Kickass Ladies in the Morning.
Dearests, I’m fasting for some routine blood work and haven’t had my coffee and hoooooooo boy this is going to be a ROUGH couple of hours before the lab opens. And yes, I’ll accept your thoughts and prayers, as long as they also attached to an e-delivered Starbucks card. SEND ME CAFFEINE.
TO THE READING.
Michaeleen Doucleff and Jane Greenhalgh, How Inuit Parents Teach Kids To Control Their Anger (NPR) - A few of you kind folks sent me this beautiful piece on how Inuit parents teach empathy and observation to their young ones through stories. Let it be noted, however, that I do not have children, and therefore should not be allowed any opinions on childrearing whatsoever. But this approach seems utterly kind.
Sarah Zhang, The Fertility Doctor’s Secret (The Atlantic) - No one can spin a dystopic health science yarn quite like Sarah Zhang, and this frightening tale of a doctor using his fertility practice to create his own Boys From Brazil nightmare does not disappoint. Doesn’t this sub-head just chill your spine? “Donald Cline must have thought no one would ever know. Then DNA testing came along.”
Jia Tolentino, Outdoor Voices Blurs the Lines Between Working Out and Everything Else AND On “Shrill” and “Better Things,” Women Stop Being Good Sports (The New Yorker) - If I could have the character from “In A World” follow me around all day, I’d have her say “And a voice of a generation” over my shoulder as I read Jia Tolentino, because she is able to capture and convey such specific emotional moments of 20-to-30-something women in 2019 coastal cities. And her takes on one of my favorite atheleisure wear companies and one of my favorite new shows are so validating to read.
Peter Wilson, Death of the Calorie (1843 Magazine) - This is a long and windy road to remind you that counting calories is BS, it’s better to eat veggies than cakes, and that the sugar lobby should be dismantled.
Margaret Sullivan, Beto, Biden and Bernie: The B-Boys and the media’s dangerous, self-fulfilling prophecy (The Washington Post) - Imma just leave this one quote here, and then go back to hyperventilating over how the Democratic Party is going to eat itself in 2020: “Traditional fiction, after all, likes to depict a woman in peril and the caped male avenger swooping in to save the day. While local news media tend to focus on policy that would affect their communities, national media look for — and endlessly repeat — the broad-brush caricature: Gillibrand is the mean woman who unfairly took down Al Franken; O’Rourke is “tall and cute” and wants to heal a divided country.”
Hanna Nina Jameson, Epic Tweetstorm on Olympe de Gouges (Twitter) - Per the note above about the impact of narrative and emotion on politics, let’s dive into how narrative, emotion and power can go into erasing women from history books. Thank you friend of the Missive Schuyler for sending in an author live-tweeting her discovery of Olympe de Gouges, who was guillotined by the Jacbobins for demanding equality between men and women. The Jacobins then burned her papers, and smeared her as a prostitute. And in later accounts of her life, historians called her ““arrogant,” “sly,” “pampered,” “brazen,” “licentious,” “greedy,” “wicked,” “crazy,” and also said that she had “ceased to be pretty at a young age.”” Don’t worry, I didn’t know who de Gouges was either, which is entirely Jameson’s point. If she, a leftist literati feminist, doesn’t know who this woman is, there’s a problem in how we tell our historical stories.
Darlings, you’re just fabulous. Be kind to each other :)
Xoxo Amy