I’m in my forties. It’s an age where you can really no longer consider yourself young by any honest stretch of the imagination. You can fudge the “I’m a young woman!” for a bit while you’re in your thirties but once you read your forties…. nope. You’re middle-aged. When does it hit a woman that she’s truly middle-aged? When she starts having perimenopause symptoms? When she sees that wattle starting under her chin? When she sees her son shave for the first time in the bathroom? When she sees that actor who is the same age as her who she had a huge crush on is, well, middle-aged? Maybe. In my opinion though, a woman doesn’t realize she is truly middle-aged until she sees the men she has known for decades start dying. It’s a very harsh and sad reality that I was unprepared for when I entered my forties. I have now lost four male friends in the past four years, and they were all my age when they passed. My female friends are still alive and despite multiple posts about mental health and exhaustion they are thriving to various degrees. The men though…. My first male friend suddenly passed when I was 39. He was 40. I had no idea until I saw an update on his Facebook page from a family member. He had passed away suddenly from an apparent suicide. I was shocked. The last time we had talked (well, texted) he seemed quite happy. He messaged me out of the blue and asked how I was. He said he was about to marry the “love of my life.” He and his fiancee already had two kids together and he had posted their pics all over his social media. I don’t know why he decided to unalive himself. It was a massive blow. Since then, every year another male friend of mine has died. One was a heart attack. Another was an intestinal bleed. And two weeks ago, a fourth friend and former work colleague of mine dropped dead suddenly. People still don’t know why. He had brought his wife to the hospital because she was suffering pre-term labor. As they were waiting for the doctor, my friend suddenly collapsed. He was transported to the ER but there was nothing they could do. He was gone. He had been a paramedic. He was one of those medics who would always work overtime and would work your shift if you needed a day off for whatever reason. He constantly overstretched himself and ran himself into the ground. A lot of men who work in EMS and other first responder capacities act in the same way. They see pushing their bodies to the limit on a daily basis as proof of some form of masculine virtue. And now my friend is dead. Gone from this Earth before he was even 45 years old. There has been a lot of ink spilled in the last few years about the sudden diminishing lifespan of American men in the 21st century. This isn’t coming from far right “feminists are ruining this country” publications either. Even the New Yorker has noticed that men are not doing well. What’s the matter with men? The magazine asked in its January issue, They’re floundering at school and in the workplace. They’re also dying. I have written before about how American men have not been doing well recently. I admit that women may be feeling a certain lack of sympathy here. After all, we have just endured Roe v. Wade being overturned, a “shecession” caused by the pandemic that ended hundreds of thousands of women’s careers, and an incredibly toxic turn in American politics where poisonous misogyny is applauded on the far right and the very definition of “woman” is being erased on the far left. It’s easy, as a woman, to say “Men still rule the world. We have our own problems here.” To that, I respond that there is literally NO period in history where women thrive while the male population suffers. None. (Well, okay, except for World War II in the US)
Schadenfreude is an easy reflex for a woman but we are all in this together. It could be argued that throughout human history it is normal for men to hit a “wall” once they reach middle age. In earlier times women died in their teens and twenties, usually from childbirth. If women survived childbirth (or just didn’t have children) they tended to live longer than men. Once you hit the big 4–0 your body starts telling you to cash all those checks you wrote in your twenties. When you’re a woman, your body allows a payment plan. When you’re a man, your body demands a lump sum up front. Or so it seems to me. There’s a reason why nursing homes are 80% women. After my third friend died I posted a message to Facebook. “IF YOU’RE A GUY CAN YOU PLEASE CHECK IN AND LET ME KNOW YOU’RE OKAY?!! SORRY, I’M FEELING NERVOUS ABOUT MY FRIENDS EVER SINCE ( — — -) DIED!” Fortunately a lot of my friends did check in. “We’re good.” “Yeah, it was tough to hear about ( — — ). We’re doing okay over here though.” “Doing okay :-)” “I’m good, so’s the kids.” It was comforting.
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I was on Twitter again (I know, I know) and geez it’s like that app is built to help people let their trauma go untreated. The whole thing is a toxic social stew disguised as community-building. I have never- NEVER- come away from a Twitter scroll feeling any sort of positive emotion. My latest despair-trigger was a recent viral tweet about someone coming out as ace. For those who don’t know what “ace” means, ace- or asexual- people are people who don’t experience sexual feelings. We all feel like that sometimes, but there is a difference between being ace and just going through periods where you don’t feel like having sex. Sometimes people are healthy and just naturally have a lower sex drive. There has been some anecdotal evidence showing asexual people to be over-represented among people on the ASD spectrum but no real studies have been done to corroborate that observation. People have started considering asexuality as a sexual orientation. This makes sense if people are careful to differentiate between a lack of sexuality being a baseline for a person’s mental state (asexual) and a sudden lack of sexual feelings as indicative of a larger mental health problem (NOT asexual). For example, women in my family tend to have low blood pressure. My pressure runs about 98/50. That’s low for most people but for me it’s normal. When one doctor I visited at an urgent care said I had a blood pressure of 120/75 and said reassuringly “Don’t worry, that’s normal,” I said “Nope! For me, that’s hypertensive.” I ended up cutting down on coffee. My pressure has gone back to the high nineties. Likewise, if a person with chronic hypertension suddenly has her pressure drop from 140/80 to 98/50, that’s a problem! She needs medical interventions stat! The same goes with asexuality. If you’ve never really had a lot of sexual feelings as part of your life experience, fine. That’s your baseline. If you suddenly experience a loss of sexual feelings as a byproduct of stress, trauma, depression, drug addiction, etc…. that is a problem. Asexuality is not a normal baseline in that situation but a symptom of a larger imbalance in your life. I cannot stress this enough: a trauma response is not a sexual orientation.
The idea that any sexual orientation that is different from heterosexuality is a trauma response to past sexual abuse is an ugly stereotype. 20th century mental health charlatans would say gay teens were gay because the teens had been sexually abused in the past or lacked father figures. These unverified conclusions formed the backbone of “conversion therapy.” As James Guay, a gay man who was forced to undergo conversion therapy as a teen, describes: For a year, I attended weekly individual therapy sessions where I was encouraged to blame my distant relationship with my father and over-involved relationship with my mother for my same-sex desires. I was also guided to “remember” an original wounding — in particular, sexual or physical abuse — that I had not experienced. The main cures were to build “healthy same-sex non-sexual friendships,” become more “masculine” and date girls. Again, a true sexual orientation is not formed through past trauma. Your sexual orientation is a baseline to your personality whether you have been abused in the past or not. There is nothing wrong with being ace. There is nothing wrong with being celibate or just stepping back from relationships until you’re ready. There’s nothing wrong with realizing that you may just be happier being single. But please, I beg of you, please learn to separate your sexual trauma responses from a valid sexual orientation. And stay the heck off Twitter! Trigger Warning: This essay discusses suicide, mental health, emotional abuse and domestic violence. Y’all know I don’t like Dylan Mulvaney. And that’s not because I’m a TERF (or, as I like to call myself, a STEF or “Some Trans Exclusionary Feminist”). My dislike of Mulvaney goes WELL beyond trans issues and into territory that involves Mulvaney’s deliberate emotional abuse of female critics. Last September Dylan Mulvany made a Tiktok video that was a response to a female comedian who goes by @slxthkween who was parodying Mulvaney’s “Days of Girlhood” Tiktok series. Mulvaney was, at the time, already a huge public figure with a massive following in the millions. And yes, public figures get mocked if they are controversial (and Dylan Mulvaney is very very controversial). So I’m going to react to Dylan Mulvaney’s disgusting response video. In this video Dylan Mulvaney decides to use very abusive, manipulative techniques to try to silence a female critic. I know that many young girls and women watch Dylan’s videos. I need these people to know that what Dylan is saying in this video is not okay. Let’s get into it. Dylan starts the video by stitching @slxthkween’s video. Dylan then says this, after showing @slxthkween’s (public) face: Ah, yes. The whole “Let me just winkingly suggest that my MILLIONS OF FOLLOWERS dox a female critic of mine who has a tiny platform on Tiktok and Youtube.” LOL. Yeah, we see what you’re doing here Dylan. And it’s a form of abuse. It’s a form of trying to silence your critic by asking that people expose her private information. (BTW, Dylan’s huge mob kicked @slxthkween off Tiktok so she’s just on Youtube now.) Clearly Dylan has a fantastic life. Cool. So @slxthkween isn’t exactly punching down here with her parodies that reach a few thousand followers a month compared to Dylan’s millions. Dylan is a huge celebrity. @slxthkween is just a small female creator on Tiktok whose videos have less views than pizza-chewing ASMR. But Dylan thinks coming down hard on this woman and not big scary MALE transphobes like Matt Walsh, Ben Shapiro, and Michael Knowles is more important. I get it. It hurts more when guys punch back. Fighting women is easier. She does actually. It’s called the First Amendment. And Dylan is a public figure. Parody is very much a protected form of free speech, especially for public figures. And frankly, if Dylan gets to mock the female identity (and, as many trans women are (quietly) arguing, mock the trans female identity) …. then @slxthkween gets to mock Dylan. MAYBE PEOPLE LIKE VIDEOS NOW HONEY BUT YOUR FAME ISN’T GONNA LAST FOREVER. Phew, the projection is strong here. Feeling some existential nervousness here Dylan? Misogyny masquerading as trans activism is going to have a very short shelf life and judging from the Bud Light controversy, your fifteen minutes may be on minute fourteen now. I understand. Nope. Nope. Nope. No. We’re not doing this. We are absolutely NOT fucking doing this. We are not threatening suicide as a way to emotionally abuse someone. That is a textbook example of coercion in order to gain control over someone else’s actions. Domestic violence organizations across the globe regularly list suicide threats as a form of abuse often used to keep domestic abuse victims from leaving their abusers. (Both genders are guilty of this type of abuse). Hell, just go to the National Domestic Violence Hotline website. It’s right there on the damn page: “When Your Partner Threatens Suicide.” But what if your partner regularly threatens suicide, particularly whenever you’re not doing something he or she wants you to do, or when you’re trying to leave the relationship? First, understand that this is a form of emotional abuse: your partner is trying to manipulate you by playing on your feelings of love and fear for them. For us oldheads in the audience who have been around a few decades and can sniff out blatant emotional manipulation, Dylan’s doe-eyed toxicity of “My suicide would be on YOU!” can seem eye-rollingly dumb. For Dylan’s extremely young, mostly teen audience on Tiktok however… this suicide threat probably carries a punch. It is dangerous. Oooo, is that another threat Dylan? Yes, yes, … I believe it is. That is Dylan threatening a very small female creator on Tiktok. Dylan, btw, does not own Tiktok. But Dylan is very wealthy, very influential, and has a whole hate mob that is itching to do Dylan’s bidding…. especially when it comes to silencing women who refuse to shut up when people with penises tell them to shut up. Honestly, what’s driving most women- including most trans women — crazy is how very artificial Dylan’s view of womanhood is. Dylan is portraying womanhood in the most stereotypical, shallow, misogynistic way possible.
Nobody cares that a trans woman wants to be perky and glamorous on social media. People love Nikki Tutorials. Women have no problem with Gigi Gorgeous. Why? Because neither Nikki Tutorials nor Gigi Gorgeous are grotesque parodies of women. They’re just women who are trans. And they certainly don’t pretend to be girls! The trans issue, however, is tangential. The real problem is that Dylan thinks that threatening female critics, calling them “evil” and saying that any suicide is the fault of these female critics is fine. And Dylan, as a massively influential public figure (and ADULT despite the whole “Days of Girlhood” garbage), is telling children that this behavior is okay. Nope. It’s called emotional abuse, and it’s not okay. Trigger Warning: This article will contain upsetting illustrated images. Republican officials in red states (and even purple states) are trying to pull Maia Kobabe’s Gender Queer off school library bookshelves. And you know what? I agree. Keep Gender Queer in public libraries but please for the love of God get Gender Queer out of school libraries. The reasons I have for wanting to ban Gender Queer in schools and the reasons Republican officials have for banning Gender Queer in schools are completely different, of course. Republicans want to ban Gender Queer because the graphic memoir talks about being gay, queer, trans etc. etc. I want to ban Gender Queer from school libraries because Kobabe is spreading dangerous misinformation about necessary women’s healthcare procedures. Here’s the deal: Maia Kobabe is a nonbinary comic book artist and illustrator. E uses e/eir/em pronouns. And yes, I know that there is a LOT of controversy about neopronouns. Frankly, I love neopronouns. E/eir/em, ze/zir/zem…. they’re great. Unlike people who insist on using “they/them” pronouns as a singular when the English language is literally constructed to only use “they/them” pronouns as a plural…. people using “ze/zem” pronouns never confuse others. Because “ze/zem” and “e/em” have no other meanings in the English language. You use neopronouns to refer to someone in a sentence, I will immediately know you are talking about a singular nonbinary person. I will not get confused with “Wait, how many people are we talking about again?” Yeah, I said what I said. Anyway, Kobabe’s memoir isn’t really that controversial in my opinion until we get to one scene where Kobabe gets a pap smear. A pap smear is a small, uncomplicated procedure that has saved countless women’s lives ever since George Papanikolaou found in the 1920s that a microscopic smear of vaginal fluid could detect the presence of cancer cells in the uterus. At the time cervical cancer was a huge cause of female mortality. It’s the cancer that famously killed Henrietta Lacks. Since the Pap Smear test, named about Papanikolaou, came into common use in the 1960s, cervical cancer rates have fallen by 70%. The pap smear not only detects cancer, it detects pre-cancerous cells as well when the cancer is at a stage that can be easily resolved without chemotherapy or radiation. The pap smear test has saved millions of lives. And if you are a woman who has sex with people with penises, you will need regular pap smears. Also, please get the HPV vaccine. Being informative in a non-shaming non-stigmatizing, non-fearmongering way about necessary healthcare procedures for women is very VERY important. Middle school and high school age girls need to be presented the facts without drama or judgement when it comes to necessary healthcare for their bodies. So what did Kobabe do that was so wrong? Well, Kobabe described, in graphic terms, how e had a trauma response to getting a pap smear. I will post Kobabe’s description below: So why did Kobabe experience this reaction? Did e have vaginismus? Was e sexually assaulted in the past, triggering a bad psychological reaction? Was the provider giving the test doing it incorrectly? No, or at least not that I read in Gender Queer. According to Kobabe, e had a bad reaction to getting a pap smear because e is nonbinary and cannot stand any type of procedure that reminds eir of the biological reality of eir sex. More troublingly, Kobabe goes into detail about how even after eir provider gives eir anti-anxiety medication and painkillers before the procedure Kobabe still has a very bad reaction to the pap smear. Kobabe also drew a horrific image in relation to the pap smear. It implies that a pap smear is a barbaric bloody procedure. This is the image I have the most problems with, because it appears to be deliberately trying to scare away anyone who has a cervix from getting a *necessary* medical procedure. Kobabe is deliberately portraying a medical tool like a medieval torture instrument dripping with gore.
In reality speculums are disposable or have disposable covers, are generously covered in water-soluble lubricant, and are designed to cause no damage to the vagina. If the speculum has blood on it after a pap smear, it means that the procedure was done incorrectly by the provider. The doctor accidentally caused damage to the inside of the vaginal walls. A pap smear may cause a woman to have light spotting for a few days after the procedure, but no speculum is going to have any sort of blood on it, let alone be coated in it! If Kobabe had at least portrayed a scene where e talks about the necessity of pap smears and how measures can be taken to help reduce patient discomfort and how many trans people get pap smears without any trouble, I would be less unhappy. Kobabe saying “Listen, this was difficult for me, but that doesn’t mean pap smears are scary or will chew you up and make you bleed. Many trans people can get pap smears comfortably. Trans people do need pap smears if they are sexually active and have vaginas.” But Kobabe never says that. Kobabe instead portrays pap smears as a horror show and then asks that high school nonbinary kids with vaginas read this garbage. It’s irresponsible fear-mongering on Kobabe’s part. And no, Gender Queer does not belong in school libraries. Trans people, cis people, anyone with a cervix… you need a pap smear. Period. You have no idea how many people’s lives have been saved by pap smears. I promise you. And cervical cancer does not give a damn about your feelings. Life is too precious to allow a mediocre cartoonist to scare your nonbinary kid away from the doctor. I work as a substitute teacher occasionally. It’s a fun job. You chill with kids, read books to them, and most importantly you help public schools.
Teachers are like the rest of us. They get sick sometimes. Their kids can get sick. They have sitters who occasionally fall through and can’t watch the kids. So teachers have to cope with sometimes having to not go to work, and schools have to cope with a substitute teacher shortage while they try to make sure the students still have an adult in the classroom. If you can be a substitute teacher, even for just one day a week, you are doing kids and schools an immeasurable service. Anyway, back to my story. I substitute teach sometimes. And one day, just as I was about to dismiss a class to lunch, I heard over the loudspeaker that there had been a “spill in the hallway” so all students had to remain in classrooms until the spill was cleaned up. “Stay in your classrooms please! We don’t need people tracking the spill everywhere. We will tell you when you can leave.” “Stay in class guys,” I said. The class sat back down and fidgeted. I stood by the door. This was annoying. One spill and no student was allowed to leave the classroom? That seemed excessive. Just rope off the spill in the hallway and let people leave. The loudspeaker clicked on a couple more times. “Please stay in your classrooms! We’re still cleaning up the spill.” How long does it take to clean up a spill? Was this one of those insurance things where even a small accident that can cause a student to slip and fall and hurt himself merited everyone to stay in their classrooms? “Do you know what a spill REALLY is?” I overheard one student tell another. “What?” “It means someone PEED in the hallway! And they have to clean up the pee!” The class giggled and said “Ew! Ew! Ew!” “Settle down,” I said, but I wondered if the student were right. Urine is technically a biohazard so there may be some firm rules about students staying in classrooms until a biohazardous substance was cleaned. That made a little more sense. Still seemed a bit excessive though. After about twenty minutes the loudspeaker clicked on and said we could all leave our classrooms. The spill was cleaned. “Thanks for your patience folks!” I later talked to the teachers during lunch. “It is a bit frustrating that lunch is shorter because of that spill situation. Does that happen often?” The teachers all looked at each other. “No, not often,” said one teacher. “Don’t tell the students this,” another teacher told me, “But there wasn’t actually a spill.” “Huh?” I was confused. “So what was the whole….?” “We have a lot of behavioral kids here at the school,” one teachers said, “They’re all good kids but sometimes one of them has a bad day and he has a meltdown. He can’t control it, he becomes dangerous, starts punching teachers … and we have to declare a crisis. Then we call the ambulance and the police and lock down the school.” “Yeah,” another teacher said, “We don’t want to scare the kids, so we don’t say ‘We’re in lockdown.’ We just say ‘There’s a spill in the hallway. There’s a mess in the hallway. Stay in your classrooms until we clean the spill.’” “We just don’t want the kids to start seeing police officers and paramedics,” the first teacher continued. “And we don’t want them to see a kid in crisis. We want to preserve privacy too.” “Ooohhh,” Suddenly everything made sense. Forbidding students to leave their classrooms because someone spilled a bit of juice in a hallway? Delaying lunch by thirty minutes because maybe one of the first graders had an accident? The oddly long time it took to clean up a simple spill? Of course it had been a code! The word “lockdown” strikes so much fear in people’s hearts these days. If a child with autism is simply having a bad day, the word “lockdown” doesn’t need to be uttered over the loudspeaker while staff take the child to the hospital. “Spill,” in my opinion, is a fantastic substitute code word. Even if it does mean we’ll be late for lunch. One of These Cups Contains Coffee. One of These Cups Contains Tobacco Juice. Choose Wisely.7/20/2023 Working as an EMT in the Deep South is hard. I worked as an EMT-P in the Southiest, craziest part of the Deep South: inland Florida. The area was rough. I was on the trucks during the days when people were chewing each others faces off because of “bath salts” or stabbing each other in the local jail. Working as a woman in EMS was a bit challenging too. Luckily I was too old and rather matronly-looking to have to deal with sexual harassment (though I often saw younger female EMTs have to fend that off) but my skills were sometimes questioned. I was always eager to prove myself and keeps the whispers that I was too genetically incompetent to hack it in a male profession at bay. I would be the first to help in a lift-assist with a bariatric patient or take over another EMT’s shift if he wanted a day off. I would be there for the calls the other medics hated (usually labor and delivery calls) and would cheerfully clean the ambulance whenever a patient had a “code brown.” I knew I had to work twice as hard as the guys to get respect but I was okay with that. I liked working EMS. Once my male co-workers saw that I could do the job, they began to trust me. But there were still moments of tension. Mostly having to do with “dip.” If you don’t live down South, let me give you a quick lesson. “Dip” is tobacco that comes in a round flat can like a hockey puck. The dip is shredded tobacco that looks like black pencil shavings. Guys who use dip (it’s usually a guy) will scoop out a wad of their stuff with a finger (hence the name “dip”), insert the wad between their gum and inner cheek, and let that wad sit there for a few hours. This wad would produce plenty of brown saliva that the guy would occasionally spit into a cup. When I was on an ambulance with a male EMT back in the day, the pattern would always be the same. We’d be in a lull period for calls so we’d swing by a gas station for coffee. We’d put the coffee cups in the cup holders by the dashboard. The guy would finish his coffee before me and, feeling satisfied, would lean his seat back, dip into his can of “Skoal” and place a wad in his cheek. And he would use his empty coffee cup as the spit receptacle. And I, drinking coffee out of a paper cup that looked exactly like the paper cup the EMT was spitting into, had to be very VERY careful to make sure I was drinking out of the right container. I took this picture from an average shift. One of those cups is my coffee and one of those cups is my work partner’s saliva.
And you can be damn sure that I had memorized EXACTLY which cupholder held my cup. It was still a test of the nerves though, let me tell you. What if I took a sip when my partner lifted his cup to spit and we switched places on the dashboard cupholder? Well, there were other safeguards. If the cup is warm, it’s probably my coffee. Room-temperature cardboard was a danger sign for a potential sip. The cup lid being open was also a sign that the cup held coffee and not stale saliva. Once my partner finished his coffee and started spitting in his cup, he closed his lid. This was to reduce possible splashing from his old mouth excretions if the ambulance suddenly braked hard. He was a gentleman like that. Still, to this day, I have memorized the danger signs of picking the *wrong* cup of coffee. Any old coffee cup in a dashboard cupholder, no matter what part of the country I am in, gets a suspicious glance from me. I’m not touching it unless it’s at least warm. It’s a chess game folks. Choose wisely. The late nineties was a great time for movies. Back then men were real men, women were real women and CGI monsters were real fuzzy. It’s only fitting that this era produced The Mummy. The Mummy, released in 1999, is the sort of PG-13 action flick that was cultivated especially for teenage boys. There are roaring undead monsters, sword fights, gun battles, plane-swallowing sandstorms, hot almost-naked Egyptian temptresses and a lot of wisecracking dialogue. So it may surprise you to learn that The Mummy is actually a chick flick. Yeah, you heard me. The Mummy is a chick flick. Oh, this film may look like a boy’s film but it’s basically Shakespeare in Love with mummies. And yes, I will explain. The Mummy opens up 3000 years in the past in ancient Egypt. We see Anck-su-namun (Patricia Velasquez), the mistress of Pharaoh Seti I (Aharon Ipale). The Pharoah has ordered that no man besides the Pharaoh is allowed to touch Anck-su-namun. Anck-su-namun, however, has other plans. She will do what she wants with her own body. We see Anck-su-namun visit the chamber of her lover, High Priest Imhotep (Arnold Vosloo). She walks into Imhotep’s chamber where Imhotep patiently waits for her, clearly at her request. In the first scene alone we can see that Anck-su-namun is calling all the shots. Imhotep does not touch Anck-su-namun until she touches Imhotep’s face, giving him permission to proceed. They then kiss. The Pharaoh interrupts Imhotep and Anck-su-namun’s love-making. Before the Pharaoh can really react, however, Anck-su-namun kills him. The Pharaoh’s bodyguards rush to Imhotep’s chamber and Imhotep prepares to protect Anck-su-namun knowing he will probably die in the attempt. Anck-su-namun orders Imhotep to flee instead. “Only you can resurrect me!” Imhotep does as she asks though he clearly does not want to. Anck-su-namun then faces the Pharaoh’s bodyguards. Before they can kill her, however, she defiantly states “My body is no longer his temple!” and commits suicide. Technically it’s not really suicide though because Anck-su-namun does not intend to stay dead for long. She knows her boyfriend will steal her body and bring her back from the dead before she loses too much skin tone. The opening scene is indicative of a theme in The Mummy. The men may be the ones fighting and stabbing and hiding from mummies but the women are the ones who initiate all the action. We then fast-forward approximately three millennia to 1926. We meet Evelyn (Rachel Weisz), an adorable and brilliant (if rather clumsy) librarian who works at a museum in Cairo. Evelyn is a true scholar and Egyptologist. Her language skills play a massive role in the movie when it comes to fighting the mummy and setting the adventure in motion. Despite her intelligence, Evelyn is stuck sorting books at the museum library and acting as a semi-caretaker for her impulsive, lazy brother. After translating an ancient map that her brother (John Hannah) stole from a treasure-hunter named O’Connell (Brendan Fraser) Evelyn decides to rescue O’Connell from a local jail and set off to find the legendary lost city of Hamunaptra. Re-watching The Mummy I am struck by how respectfully the film treats Evelyn. She is not an average action movie hot chick. We do not get any close-ups to her chest or bottom. She never gets her clothes ripped away in a fight scene like what happened with Princess Amidala in Attack of the Clones. Her vintage dresses are not designed for the male gaze. She wears stylish pretty outfits that look exactly like what a woman would choose for herself, not what a man would choose for her. More interestingly, Evelyn’s skills in this adventure are remarkably feminine strengths. Her grasp of emotional intelligence is high. She rescues the hero O’Connell (Brendan Fraser) from being hanged by cleverly haggling with his executioner. In another scene Evelyn is able to gently persuade twenty men pointing guns at each other to lower their weapons without firing a shot. The Mummy does not descend into false feminism by pretending that women are as physically strong as men in a fight. We see no stupid Charlie’s Angels-style scenes of Evelyn dropping a man twice her size with one punch. Instead we see Evelyn help her brother finally defeat the mummy by translating the necessary ancient Egyptian text to send the mummy back into the underworld. And yes, studies show that women are better at language skills than men. Evelyn is also absolutely unapologetic about her feminine status and job in a world dominated by men. Never once does she allow a man to talk down to her, not even the mummy! “I may not be an explorer or an adventurer or a treasure seeker or gunfighter,” she says in one scene while drunkenly flirting with O’Connell, “But I am proud of what I am.” “And that is?” O’Connell responds. “I am a librarian!” Evelyn happily proclaims. And why the the hell not? Be proud! For my closing argument that The Mummy is a chick flick, I present the men. Oh yes, there are men in The Mummy. And they are gorgeous. We’re talking Brendan Fraser in his prime (yes children, before Brendan Fraser played a 600 pound dying man in The Whale he was once one of the most handsome men in Hollywood). We’re talking Oded Fehr. Hell, even the mummy was pretty good looking once he was fully resurrected. The Mummy was made for the straight female gaze. In other words, it’s a chick flick. And a pretty decent chick flick too. I’ll take it over My Best Friend’s Wedding any day of the week.
Julia Roberts may be perky but she’s no librarian. If you are a single mom, your options when it comes to just simply making a living are very limited.
2. Have extended family take care of your children while you work. If your extended family is unwilling to do so or are too sick or have too many other responsibilities, then you really only have one option left. 3. Go on welfare. You may end up having to go on government assistance. You will be dependent on federal aid until your children are old enough to take care of themselves for at least a few hours. When a kid is old enough to get off a school bus and go home and chill by himself for a couple of hours until you get home from work, you will probably be able to return to work full-time. Of course a child isn’t really old enough to stay at home by himself for a couple of hours until he’s twelve or so. And twelve years out of the work force looks so bad on your resume. You might get re-employed at a service industry job but you’ll probably be in your late thirties or early forties by then. It will be difficult to kick-start a career when you reach that age. And this is also all predicated on your child being neurotypical and not special needs. Special needs children will rarely ever reach a level where they can safely be left home alone for a few hours.
This whole ugly, awkward reality of single motherhood tends to slam against you that moment when you realize that as a mother you are alone, alone, alone. Babysitters are expensive and your bills and your rent don’t care. They still have to be paid. The only answer is to have some sort of government system set up so that 24-hr low-cost childcare is available to single moms. People object to this of course. “Why should my tax dollars support sluts who couldn’t keep their knees close?!! If you can’t feed ’em, don’t breed ‘em.” That argument only holds water for so long since single moms are almost never single by choice. Single mothers exist because of male failure and male evasion of responsibility. The conservative argument that childcare is unnecessary falls apart when even conservative women find themselves vulnerable to sudden single motherhood because of circumstances beyond their control. So what do conservatives do then? Admit that they’re wrong and that a government-sponsored 24-hour daycare is necessary for women to return to work? Nah. Instead conservatives start to spread the destructive myth of “babysitting co-ops.” Log onto any libertarian website or homeschool organization or independent homesteaders etc. etc. and you will have a cheery description of how y’all can TOTALLY work as much as you want and not have to pay a dime in childcare. And you don’t need anything from big gummint either! It’s not that hard folks! As “insteading.com” wrote: Babysitting coops are small groups of people who trade babysitting with some form of tracking. The basics are simple — find a group of people, decide on a currency, make sure everyone has contact information, and you are good to go! Sounds so simple! You work 40 hours and then spend another 40 hours watching another person’s kids in payment for their watching yours. Even if babysitting coops work (they don’t-nor even exist) it still means women have to work 80 hours a week just to enjoy the benefits of getting a 40-hour paycheck that they can actually use to pay bills. The fact is that if you have the capabilities to assemble a whole group of people to give free babysitting -on time and on schedule- using a barter system then you don’t need to work. Because right then and there you have already started your own business. The complexities and convolutions involved in getting these entirely fictional “simple” babysitting co-ops off the ground are laughably unobtainable. Insteading.com goes on: You will need a coordinator who will help keep track of the hours everyone spends, send out regular updates, and keeps medical forms on hand. This doesn’t take a lot of time — but it does need to be regular. The coordinator will need to make sure that everyone has a current directory of members. Make sure you have a plan in place for this position to get rotated every year or so. Once everyone agrees to join, you need to decide on schedules. Are members going to email the group when they need someone to help or are they going to sign up at monthly meetings? What happens if someone cancels or has a sick child? Are all hours equal or if there are two or three kids is the fee/payment higher? Taking time to decide these questions at the outset can help save headaches later. Sure Jan. And let’s be very clear: babysitting co-ops don’t exist. Go to Care.com and search for “babysitting co-ops near me.” That’s what I did. I got one result. In Oregon. I live in New Hampshire. Yet this dangerous garbage of “just start a babysitting co-op!” is still pushed on single moms every time we talk about the reality of being unable to work. If we don’t have extended family or an ex take care of our kids, we will need to go on welfare until our kids are old enough to stay home alone. We need government-sponsored daycare. Give women low-cost 24-hour daycare for two years. By that time most people who have been working for two years are often promoted or have made it to a job where the salary can accommodate at least a part-time sitter. It’s better than waiting 12 years on government assistance until our kids are old enough to stay home themselves. And for Gods sake, stop telling single moms to form babysitting co-ops. You might as well ask us to find a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. Babysitting co-ops do not exist. TW: Eating Disorders, Mental Health
I struggle with binge eating. I admit it. I decided to join a binge eating support group online. The support group had strict rules (no “thinspo,” no “pro-ana” comments, no pushing of fad diets or supplements, no bullying, etc. etc.) and I appreciated that. The support group was a semi-safe space to disclose my vulnerabilities about my disordered eating. The support group seemed to be about 100% women. Their posts were pretty heartbreaking and surprisingly problematic. Every woman seemed to hate herself to a high degree despite the fact that she had an essential job or performed an amazing amount of good in the world. Shows like My 600 Pound Life portray people with Binge Eating Disorder (BED) as morbidly obese, unemployed, in need of constant care, and always lying about how much they eat. The reality is the exact opposite. The women in the BED support group I joined were all employed … and they all seemed to be disproportionately working in essential, high-stress positions. These women were nurses, caretakers, foster parents and CNAs. Some women were technically obese, though not to a morbid extent. They were clearly active and employed. Most of the women on the BED support group ranged from average weight to moderately overweight. They were all doing necessary and good things in this messed-up world. Their posts were almost all the same. “I hate myself. I HATE MYSELF. I can’t stop eating. I just got home from the hospital where I had to work overtime and I want to go to bed but instead I am in front of the fridge eating…. and I won’t stop until I am less anxious.” “I hate what I’m doing to myself. I hate my body. I keep trying to stay within my calories but between making sure my son’s meds are straight and my daughter continues to get counseling services and my job refusing to hire more support staff I am exhausted. I am just diving into food. It’s the only way to keep myself going. I hate myself. I’m disgusting.” The saddest post I read was from a woman who was a foster mom to three kids. She was raising the kids alone with her mom. The woman had taken her foster kids to the zoo and her mom had snapped pics. The pics were really sweet. The woman was carrying a sleeping little boy who was maybe two. He had clearly just had a full day and was napping in his foster mom’s arms. You could tell by the way he relaxed into her body as she carried his sleeping form that he trusted her completely. She was his shelter after what had been probably a very traumatic time. Children are not placed into foster care for small emergencies. This woman was giving children necessary love and care after they had suffered. The woman posted the zoo pics on the support group. Under the photos she wrote “I am crying. I told my mom to not take pictures of me for this exact reason but she took them anyway. I look SO fat. I have deteriorated so badly. I am completely apple-shaped and I don’t know how I managed to get this bad. I hate myself.” What? All I saw in those pics was a woman giving love and protection to children who desperately needed it. I saw an angel. And all the woman saw in her pictures was her fatness. I don’t mean to downplay BED. It’s a real disorder with real health consequences if left untreated. It disproportionately affects women and just anecdotally it seems to affect women in high-stress positions. But I don’t think BED can be defeated through self-hatred. Can’t you just see how beautiful you are in terms of your acts and the real benefits they bring to the world? It is so, so hard to love yourself for the amazing goodness you bring to the world when the world only defines you by how your ass looks on Instagram. We need to fight that. Part of the solution to treating BED is finding the strength to self-love for the valid reasons that are there. That is how we stop the binges. If you were between the ages of 15 and 28 back in the late nineties, you read Bridget Jones’ Diary.
Bridget Jones’ Diary was a comic romance novel about a chubby 32-year-old single British woman who couldn’t get a date because she was so damn fat. How fat was she? My friend, she tipped the scales at 136 pounds. 136 pounds! Man, what a sack of lard. The entire book, written by Helen Fielding, talks about Bridget Jones desperately DESPERATELY trying to keep her ballooning weight under control so she can marry a nice guy and not put up with emotionally abusive jerks like her boss because, you know, she’s too fat to be choosy about lovers. 136 pounds people. Yes, she weighs 136 pounds. At one point in the book she even goes up to 140! I mean, once you hit 140 pounds I think the fire department has to remove a wall from your house just to get you out of the living room, right? Oh Bridget. Anyway, imagine reading Bridget Jones’ Diary as a teenage girl. To be more precise, imagine reading Bridget Jones’ Diary as a teenage girl who weighs 170 pounds. Now imagine reading book reviews of Bridget Jones’ Diary where all the reviewers talk about how overweight Bridget Jones is supposed to be. Then imagine reading all the news articles about the movie adaption of Bridget Jones’ Diary where glamorous movie star Renee Zellweger had to stuff herself silly and gain thirty pounds and ruin her body to star as overweight 136-pound Bridget Jones. Again, here is a reminder that I was 170 pounds at the time. And a teenager. I didn’t have a lot of friends or social acquaintances back then. I certainly had no boyfriend! I had no real person to bring me down to Earth and say “Hey, it’s actually normal for teen girls to be 160 or 170 pounds, especially tall girls.” I was a very solitary person who read comic books and Lord of the Rings. And an insanely popular best-selling romance novel that cast a 136-pound woman as a fat loser unlucky in love. Anyway, wow. If Jones was fat at 136, I had to be morbidly obese at 170. I was lucky I didn’t need my mother to heave up my skin folds just so I could scrub all the crevasses! So there I was at 17 years old and 170 pounds, reliably informed that my weight was just grotesquely off the scale, and trying to live my life fairly normally despite all of that. I knew people who told me I looked nice were just lying because I was 170 pounds! Any guy who asked me out on a date was probably just teasing me or maybe had lost a bet. I was 170 pounds people! I wasn’t dumb! (BTW, I want to now apologize to all the guys in high school who asked me out and only got a cold stare in return. I’m really sorry. It takes a lot of guts to ask someone out and I should have been more polite. Believe me though, it wasn’t you. It was me. And Bridget Jones’ Diary.) Anyway, I didn’t really begin to snap out of my body dysmorphia until college. My freshman year in college I started hanging out with more friends. I was more comfortable. Other people were hooking up all over the place during freshman year. I wasn’t hooking up (170 pounds, remember?) but I was enjoying the new freedoms of living away from home. There was booze and movies and fellow geeks to discuss Lord of the Rings with during late nights. One night I managed to sneak into a frat house party. Several popular girls were in the corner drinking beer from solo cups and talking about how fat they were. “I am so fat,” bemoaned one girl, sighing and pinching her navel-ringed belly. (Needless to say, none of these girls were fat) Another girl was sitting on the couch. She was entwined with a very hot guy who I knew was her boyfriend. She chatted with us while letting the guy’s arms snake around her. The entwined girl, in a total teen girl power move, acted like it was normal to be desired by the most good-looking guy on campus. I respected the hell out of it. The entwined girl on the couch addressed the belly-pinching girl. “You are NOT fat!” the entwined girl said, “Oh my Gawd, you so are NOT fat!” “I am though,” said the belly-pinching girl. “You are NOT,” said the entwined girl. She temporarily un-entwined herself from her boyfriend. “Babe, one sec,” The now-un-entwined girl stood up, “How much do you think I weigh?” she asked the belly-pinching girl. “Um,….” the belly-pinching girl said. She clearly didn’t know and wasn’t going to guess.” “I’m 166 pounds,” the un-entwined girl said, “There is no way you’re heavier than me.” The un-entwined girl then sat back down on the couch and re-entwined herself with her boyfriend. I had been silently watching this from another corner the entire time. I was dumbfounded. Was the hottest girl in school really only 4 pounds lighter than me? How was that possible? If I were only 4 pounds heavier than the girl with the taut bod and the hot boyfriend…. maybe I wasn’t so morbidly obese after all. With that the Bridget Jones curse broke. I started to have a more realistic view of what my body looked like. I’m still not completely cured of course (is anyone really?) … but watching the Bridget Jones movie these days is still a surreal experience. (I tossed out the book decades ago). Wow, people were really accepting the fact that 136 pounds was overweight back in 2001. Let that sink in. Like…. geez. |
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