Staunchly, vol. 116: Did Hustlers Make Me a Flat-Earther?
10/7/9
I learned this week that Elizabeth Warren and my mom overlapped for at least two years on the Rutgers Newark campus. Who knew all the ladies were drinking Bad Bitch Juice there in 1975??
Brb gonna go look at all my mom’s photos from college and see if I can spot Liz in the background, projective light waves of massive structural change, consumer protections, and workers’ rights rippling from her eyeballs.
Speaking of the power of Small Donor Dollars, I’ve added a $1 tier to the Staunchly Patreon. You won’t get the extra weekly issue but you will do a nice thing and make me feel a nice way, by acknowledging the creative labor that goes into this newsletter.
Staunchly is love but she is high-maintenance, especially on low weeks when my hormones and brain chemistry conspire to make the smallest task like, sarcastically challenging (*Chandler voice*: “could writing feel any more meaningless right now?”). I have very strong meds and a great therapist, but depression is very good at defending its home turf against a more sophisticated army. As a suitable metaphor of adequate scale, the Revolutionary War comes to mind.
Thanks as always for reading.
xo
Are you nervous about this Supreme Court term? You should be!
Tomorrow, the Supreme Court will hear a landmark case on transgender rights that will determine whether trans workers are protected under federal sex-based nondiscrimination law.
Hello hi, Anthony Kennedy, are you enjoying your retirement? How is Florida? I hope there are gators.
Then, later this year, the Michael Jordan of looking-like-what-the-word-“boof”-means will get to decide whether you maintain a constitutional right to an abortion.
Kennedy, what’s your favorite beach drink? I see you as a painkiller guy. I see you asking for it without nutmeg. I see you thinking that always makes it just a little too “spicy.”
The court will also consider the constitutionality of DACA, and thus the fate of 800,000 Dreamers brought to the US as children, and possibly expand Second Amendment rights, because yes, that is the only logical response to a summer of mass shootings.
HOW’S THE WATER IN BOCA KENNEDY IS IT WARM WAS IT WORTH IT.
Incredible, gutting work: The women who came forward about sexual misconduct discuss their lives now and whether it was worth it.
Different ways of looking at darkness.
Aspirational: butterflies who adapted to thrive on poison. See also: me on Cool Ranch Doritos.
Wesley Morris defends Gwyneth Paltrow the Actress. Justice for Sliding Doors!
Argentine feminists destroying the patriarchy one tango at a time.
A mantra I may start writing in lipstick on my bathroom mirror every morning: Susan Collins is Trash.
The myth of the frivolous female spender—I grew up deep in this narrative, vigorously promoted by my father but also subconsciously by all members of my family: everything my mom bought for herself was frivolous; everything my dad bought for himself was earned. Both of my parents worked jobs outside of the home and earned separate incomes.
“To be worth arguing about, a movie must first of all be interesting.” A.O. Scott’s review of The Joker is High Woke Art. Richard Brody said this in the New Yorker, “Joker is an intensely racialized movie, a drama awash in racial iconography that is so prevalent in the film, so provocative, and so unexamined as to be bewildering.” I’m excited not to see it!
We all know by now there is no uncomplicated way to like or talk about Hillary Clinton, but her comments on Joe Biden’s creepy touching are inane. As someone who has both enabled and been personally and professionally injured by bad male behavior, perhaps she should just……...not…...say….anything.
My friend Molly wrote about having a secret instagram for shopping and managing our emotional and financial health online.
A tiny, vibrant island on the Baltic Sea with virtually no men, where the women get around on vintage Soviet motorcycles. Currently brainstorming ideas for a Staunchly offsite here.
Another Weinstein horror story, with critical reflections on the way race, money, power, and age intersect to make certain women uniquely vulnerable, by Rowena Chiu: “Since the story broke in October 2017, many actresses, from the relatively unknown to the superstars, have come out with stories about Harvey. Yet the stories of assistants have gotten relatively little attention by comparison, and tragically, even fewer of those voices have been of women of color.”
In the Times Book Review, Lupita Nyong’o described her ideal reading situation and it’s just delicious:
“I have never been skiing, but I have a fantasy about going on a skiing trip with a bunch of friends and spending my time alone, in a cabin, by a fireplace, dressed in a cozy fleece onesie, wrapped in a warm blanket with a big mug of hot chocolate, reading a big, fat, juicy book that I have been intending to read all my life, while everybody else does the skiing. I myself would never actually go outside to ski. Instead I would passionately share my reading adventures with my exhausted, sunburned friends at the end of the day, over hearty dinners that I did not cook.”
Last week I finished Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk. It’s really special. Polish existential noir (feel like that phrasing might be repetitive) that’s funny, feminist, and reads like a fairytale, it has everything: astrology, William Blake, friendship!, vigilante justice, anarchic Central European midwinter energy, a spectacular narrator, vengeful deer, a case for animal personhood, a case against utility as payment for existence on Earth (“But why should we be useful and for what reason? Who divided the world into useless and useful, and by what right?), a meditation on the tiers of consciousness in the universe (we are not dogs, but neither are we stars), and did I already mention astrology?
I finally saw Hustlers this weekend and it’s so great! I have nothing remotely interesting to say I just loved it so much! Feminist Robin Hood meets The Big Short meets Magic Mike XXL maybe meets the most tender, heartfelt, salt-of-the-earth story about female friendship and survival and motherhood (Steel Magnolias?). Also, I’m not a round-earther or a conspiracy theorist in any way, but J Lo’s human body at 50 acts as pretty compelling counterpoint to the whole “gravity” thing. Think it might be time to go back to the science.