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Who am I? is not the right question to ask yourself in high school. The right question is How do I fit in?
before I had kids, this is what I believed motherhood would be like, something you could toggle on and off as it suited you.
That’s the joke of motherhood: you don’t get to have children and be yourself. When you eat pizza, you eat pizza as a mother. Every day—hundreds of times a day, every day—you give up what you want and how you want it in so many tiny little ways, that whatever squeezed-out orange-half remains of you, that’s who you are now. It’s fine, really.
In my mind, I had a number of escape routes to divert me from their doomed path: large, smug exit signs labeled Evolved Husband and Flexible Workplace and Gender Equality. But once I gave birth, I was shocked at how unstoppable and how inevitable the sequence of events became, as I too was propelled down the road called “The Way Things Are,” and one by one, the turnoffs to my planned exit routes disappeared over my shoulder.
If it’s not rushing at work, it’s rushing to get things done at home. It’s an intensified way of being, all the time, where you feel like there’s no space.”
although she was targeting both men and women, 98 percent of her respondents were mothers. “When we realized what was happening,” she says, “we ran a second set of advertisements.” The only change they made to the ad was in the wording: the word “parents” was changed to “dads.” Only then did men start replying, because they didn’t think the first ad, for parents, was meant for them. Because to them, “parenting” is actually just “mothering.”
Fathers are able to see themselves as other things because, typically, their professional identity is less affected by having children, and also because they simply have the uninterrupted time and the space to do so—thanks to mothers doing more than their share of unpaid care and domestic work.
On Being 40(ish),
the essential conundrum of middle age comes down to this: “How can you be this dissatisfied when you have this much? How can you be this satisfied when you have so little?”
When a group of women or girls loves something, it’s like the more there are of them, the stupider and more embarrassing their feelings become.
Despite their enormous market power, they devalue the cool factor of everything they touch. Girl fans of boy bands cop it the worst. They are “bad and wrong,” the music critic Anwen Crawford writes, because it’s assumed “they don’t know how to listen.” Instead: “They lust. They look, and the gaze of innumerable girls upon the pretty faces of their boy band idols is a kind of embarrassment, both to the idol and to the world.” She then notes, “See how I used the word pretty there, without even thinking why—the male musician is made girly by girls. And who would want to be made into a girl, if
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Why would anyone voluntarily add themselves to this mindless, coagulated stain, when you can be “not like the other girls” instead? That’s what I’ve always chosen. Brené Brown would say the reason I squirm at the sight of the Cumberbitches isn’t that I’m embarrassed; it’s that I’m ashamed. They have put themselves out there, made themselves vulnerable and open to mockery. They have let themselves be seen, and to make myself feel better, I act like I’m cooler than that, when what I actually am is scared. I’m afraid to be seen. A lot of us have to “dig deep about the cool issue,” she says. I
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unexpressed and unseen are how women’s feelings hold the most value. Hidden inside library books, tucked away in online forums, at a girls’ night in, dancing in the dark, if-only-you-knew, that’s where they come alive.
far and away the most popular type is a ship that involves men paired together (hello, Captain Watson), categorized as male/male or “slash” in the parlance of fanfiction.
Adolescent girls, Ariel Levy writes in Female Chauvinist Pigs, are pressured to seem sexy. The result is that they “have a very difficult time learning to recognize their own sexual desire, which would seem a critical component of feeling sexy.”
I could see with my own eyes that the fanfiction I was reading was better than many published novels, and I could feel in my, er, gut that I was enjoying it, but I also could not shake the feeling that it was making me dumber.
I’ve never been able to shake the idea that there’s a good reason why some things are called “guilty pleasures.”
We didn’t evolve long enough with media around us to develop a different part of the brain to handle imaginary relationships and imaginary people.
“I give what I can of my love, time, and support to my family and friends, but reserve the right to have a private, inner life.”
the blazing mortification hasn’t ever really died down. It’s the feeling of having done the wrong thing.
But it’s hard to cultivate a coherent sense of who you are when it’s built on how you seem. The foundations are too shifting.
what kind of person would honestly think that a writer/comedian is asking them, completely unprompted, about their face during an interview? The kind of person who thinks it’s a question worth asking. The kind of person who is so paranoid about how others perceive her, about whether she is being the right kind of girl in the right kind of way, that this paranoia actually is her makeup now.
she developed another important list (she loves lists), this one being her “list of interests.” She came up with this concept after she got tired of people asking her if she was going to renovate her house. She worked out the best way to shut down these conversations was simply to say: “Renovation is not on my list of interests.”
We all have different interests; we all like different things. It’s a statement of fact, and it’s also an effective strategic defense. I will not be taking any more questions at this time. But it’s not just about “different things,” is it? Some of us like normal things, and some of us like weird things.
