Maya Dusenbery's Blog, page 2

"It also makes money. Every media company knows that stories about race and gender bias draw huge..."

“It also makes money. Every media company knows that stories about race and gender bias draw huge audiences, making identity politics a reliable profit center in a media industry beset by insecurity.”

- I loled several times at Jon Chait’s “PC police“ piece, but I really lost it at this line. I am going to maniacally photocopy his article with these lines highlighted and then send it to  investors who have funded bro-led media startups. Feminist publications, you "reliable profit centers” you, just sit back and wait for the cash to roll in! (via annfriedman)

"Looked at from that angle, the fact that marrying your best friend seems to make middle age..."

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Looked at from that angle, the fact that marrying your best friend seems to make middle age “slightly less terrible” (as the headline of the Washington Post’s coverage of the study sardonically boasts) seems less a ringing endorsement of marriage than an indictment of the way many of us spend our middle age—in socially isolated domestic units, each consumed with the nearly impossible task of balancing work and family, made bearable only by having a close friend in the trenches with us.

PERHAPS NOWHERE IS THIS more true than in the U.S., where, despite the growing diversity of our families, our economic structures and work policies stubbornly cater to two-parent partnerships—and don’t even properly support those. Granted, some of the “stresses of middle age” that can be eased by marital friendship are probably inevitable—raising a child, caring for a dying parent, or facing the first evidence of your own impending mortality, for example, will never be easy. But, in the U.S., we seem to have all but given up on the possibility that at least one key challenge of this life stage—the fact that career and family obligations often peak at the exact same time—could, conceivably, be collectively solved. Instead, we accept ever-longer work hours, stagnating wages, astronomical child care costs, and laughable family leave policies, and then find, unsurprisingly, that more than half of working parents say it is difficult for them to balance their job and home responsibilities.

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- I’m excited to be starting a regular column at Pacific Standard. Check out my first piece on a new study on the benefits of marriage. 

"People who have been sexually assaulted know there are good victims and bad victims. Good victims,..."

“People who have been sexually assaulted know there are good victims and bad victims. Good victims, of course, do not exist but they are an elaborate ideal. They are assaulted in a dark alley by a known criminal who has a knife or a gun. They are modestly dressed. They report their assault immediately to law enforcement and submit, willingly, to a rape exam. They answer all questions about their assault lucidly and completely as many times as is necessary. They are adequately prepared for trial. They don’t pester the prosecutor as he or she prepares for trial. When they testify, they are modestly dressed. They are the girl or boy next door. They deserve justice because they are so righteous in their victimhood.”

- Read the rest: Bad Victims - The Toast (via roxanegay)