We don’t have to do these mental gymnastics or mold our behaviors to the expectations of men.
“C’mon Rachel, you’re sending kind of a mixed message there,” one of my male friends pointedly texted.
I had been texting one of my friends about our post-COVID plans and the conversation got rather salacious. I was taking a swig of coffee as this message was coming in, and summarily spilled some on my two-day lounge pants that belied some of the sultry topics at hand.
“The fuck do you mean?” I retorted.
“Well, you’ve gone on about how much you want a guy to raise a bunch of toads with…”
It’s not like I got monogamous relationship-minded men with similar life goals lined up outside the door, there’s the whole impending cross-country move deal, can’t date…
Sex and the City was groundbreaking at the turn of the millennium and hasn’t aged well in many respects, but there’s a buried lede in criticisms about the show.
So there’s a Sex and the City reboot coming sans the one character who was actually sexually adventurous compared to the rest of the main cast.
As one would expect, the take machine has been a-churning about reboot culture, the numerous flaws in the show’s original run, and how it both revolutionized the way women discussed sex yet was still quite conservative. I mean, come on: Carrie Bradshaw addressed any kind of sexual activity that wasn’t hetero and vanilla with the same statecraft as The Iron Sheik doling out some Monday Motivation on Twitter.
But as someone who’s now been in the games industry for a decade and is about to go into film, I’ve been thinking about Sex and the City on meta and pre-production levels more than the actual content of the six seasons and two feature films in light of this news. …
While it’s been hard to sacrifice seeing family and friends plus travel and events, being by yourself for this long DOES have its perks.
Ever since lockdown began that fateful day 10 months ago, this lost year has had millions of us feeling lonely, anguished, frustrated, angry, grieving, you name it. And you got every right to feel that way.
When it comes to how single people, particularly single people living alone, are dealing with the pandemic, we’re often discussed in this piteous manner. …
Even if being single or taken is a binary, the conditions and individual wants and needs surrounding one’s relationship status are far from a simple either-or.
In a world where we have seemingly endless options for everything from sandwiches to gender expression, single women [namely, cisgender women who primarily date men] seem to be given just two of them when it comes to relationship status: you’re either in this constant state of despondence and desperation as a result of not having a permanent guy in your life, or YAS QUEEN you don’t ever need a man at all, you never want to bother with that!
If you’re happy and single, so many people take it to mean that you don’t want a relationship. If you’re unhappy about being single, you’re told to settle for the first schmuck who’s halfway nice to you or perhaps some variant of, “But your life sounds AWESOME! …
The concept is vaunted, the actual people are not
I’ve often felt that American society really hates moms.
Perhaps you may think it’s not my place to comment on this given that I don’t have or want kids, and have gone out of my way to avoid becoming a mom. (Except a toad mom, that is. Let’s dish about the best toad litter and bug supplements for our amphibious babies, and kvell about the cute things they do.)
But as someone who’s an inadvertent observer in this whole mess of confused, blithering meat sacks that we dub a society, I cannot help but notice these things.
Because when it comes to motherhood is it an idea, a concept to be contextualized? …
It’s revolutionary for women and femmes to just bow out of things we’re told to do, ignore people who think we owe them attention, and decide things for ourselves.
I’ve often spoken of saying “no” in a professional context.
That when you’re a freelancer or entrepreneur, you don’t accept every engagement that comes your way. In fact, one of the best ways to get amazing clients is to keep declining crappy ones.
It’s often because you can see the telltale signs it’ll be trouble and you’re going to waste time doing back-and-forth over the scope and hemming and hawing over your rates. You don’t even have to be successful to turn down what you believe will be a shitshow of a client! …
Making and getting lots of phone calls was a raison d’etre for millions of Millennial girls in particular, but once we hit our thirties, the phone became the equivalent of junk mail. Did this have unintended consequences?
Millennials, especially those of us on the older end who were born in Reagan’s second term, are a generation of many dualities. Duality comes up in so much of my work and I always thought it was just because of a vast amount of personal circumstances and life events.
But it turns out my entire generation is riddled with them. Our lives have been colored by hope and doom alike, and we watched technology and communications advance at different speeds.
We saw the end of the old world and the last decade of relative stability and prosperity for many Americans. We grew up with technology as it evolved, and for this very brief point in time before the social media boom of the late 2000s —the elder side of the Millennial cohort truly had the best of times where we were on the cusp. We had the best of the early 1990s with its toe still in the analog 1980s, and the early tech and Internet culture of the late 90s which gave way to the app-driven world of the 2000s ushered in, before inadvertently steering us down a slope of no return to the perpetually online hellworld we’d soon inhabit. …
There’s a story of intimacy amid American social undercurrents and business culture, and how they pertain to the way we discuss women’s life choices.
There was a time on the Internet when you couldn’t escape hearing about “pharma bro” Martin Shkreli, most infamous for hiking the price of AIDS drug Daraprim to an obscene level. A rich young edgelord who was prime fodder for hate-tweets and thinkpieces, he became a cautionary tale in the hubris of wealth upon receiving a prison sentence for scamming investors in a hedge fund he ran, after such antics as buying a Wu-Tang Clan album no one else could listen to and trying to buy access to Bernie Sanders’ 2016 campaign (which then donated his contribution to a charity for people with AIDS). …
Every year, we have this conversation. Every year, the same things get said. Can we finally just say something about how this side of 30 is often better?
Forbes puts out this annual “30 Under 30” list of some arbitrarily-chosen people with well-known enterprises and accomplishments, or incredibly coveted jobs. And every year like clockwork, the self-flagellation and cries of “Disclose their parents’ net worth!” on Twitter comes out to play.
Inquiring about the participants’ parental wealth is absolutely a valid point. But while America’s journey from the land of opportunity to one gigantic feudal lordship factors into not being able to attain some traditional marker of success so young, there’s so many other factors that just make this kind of list grating.
Namely, that it’s an enormous blessing and privilege to even just have your shit together when you’re under 30. Let alone have the clarity, resources, and skills necessary to see your vision through. …
The misogynist doublespeak we’ve been fed our whole lives reveals a hidden truth about the impossible standards we’re expected to live up to.
Inappropriate.
A word I’ve heard my entire life in some fashion or another.
First it was lock-and-stock high school bullshit about my first few vaunted pieces of goth and alternative wear, which eventually filled my closet once I had more autonomy over what I wore (then my own cash). Well, one area where goths and cheerleaders unite: misogynist dress codes that assume we wear short shorts and spaghetti strap tops to short-circuit boys’ concentration, not because it is crematorium outside and those cheap pricks won’t install air conditioning in schools that are in what’s supposedly the richest country in the world.
Then it was about how I should wait for a guy to call me instead of making the first move after we traded numbers outside CB’s or the Batcave. Then how I actually spoke to/with him, regardless of who called first. …
