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am no longer a Catholic, and I have abandoned virtually everything the Florida public school system taught me, which is for the best, since they insisted on teaching both perspectives of the Civil War (or the War of Northern Aggression, as more than one of my teachers insisted on calling it).
It’s not the first time a woman has been portrayed as too picky and too demanding about her food, and therefore too picky and demanding about life in general. The message isn’t subtle: If you want to be loved, you must have zero special requests.
(What’s wrong with dying alone, anyway? Do you really want people around as you deliriously mutter the names of old lovers and childhood pets while you empty your bowels?)
That’s the thing about voicing your needs: The world tells you how bad you’ll look if you do it. But no one tells you how great you’ll feel.
Male chefs aren’t subject to this same bullshit. No one put Bobby Flay naked on a couch with a fruit bowl over his crotch or Rick Bayless slathered in mole.
Bourdain praised the women he worked with for being “tough-as-nails, foul-mouthed, trash-talking”—able to thrive in an environment dominated by men through assimilation while failing to acknowledge that the environment was toxic and problematic to begin with. The only way to survive among the bros was to become one.
I never played house or dressed up as a bride. My Barbies, it is apparent in hindsight, lived in a very happy child-free lesbian commune with the occasional dramatic visit from Ken and my brother’s Mr. Kotter doll.
There is a lot of privilege that comes with not having children (including the privilege of having reproductive medical care in the first place), but perhaps the most salient is this: I can tell you that I don’t know if I’m making the right decision. I can tell you that the choices I’m making might come back to haunt me after the window has closed and my lizard eggs are all gone. In five years, in ten years, in forty, I may look back at my life and say, I made a mistake. I made the wrong choice. That is not something that parents get to say.
We’ve stood outside a train station bathroom in Kyoto and tried to decipher a Japanese pregnancy test, the one time my very predictable period decided to show up nearly two weeks late. We used Google Translate to figure out the results. They were hauntingly poetic. “You are standing on firm ground,” it told me. (The test was negative.)
Unattended cooking is the leading cause of home fires.
women of color were disproportionately harassed more than white women on Twitter (with Black women getting the most hate—roughly one of every ten tweets they received being abusive in some way).
