I took this picture as the plane descended to the Baltimore airport. I was struck by the way the clouds’ reflections in the water and how the boats appeared to be aloft, the road reaching into the heavens, horizonless–limitless. (Also, I was in first class and that was pretty fucking great let me tell you.)
Re-entry into the day to day world after a convention is hard and con crud makes it harder. ConFusion was so much fun. I drank too much, stayed up too late, saw so many of my friends, made some new ones, and attended some excellent programming. It’s rapidly becoming one of my favorite conventions. Let’s do it again next year, shall we?
- Bearing Witness: What Larry Nassar’s Victims Wanted Us To Know “To see them finally being allowed to say exactly what they wanted to say, and to be heard, believed, and embraced was incredibly powerful.”
- The Sexual Assault Epidemic No One Talks About People with cognitive and intellectual disabilities are incredibly vulnerable to this kind of abuse, in part because they aren’t seen as reliable narrators of their own lives.
- This is something that I wrestle with: how do you watch a movie or read a book and still get something positive from it even when you know that someone central to its creation was a horrible human being? I don’t know, but I do know that this is something that’s more complicated than just checking to see if a piece of media passes a purity test or not.
- Laurie Penny: We’re Not Done Here
- It’s Not (All) the Second Wave’s Fault This essay has an excellent point to make:
By asking young women to devour their predecessors in order to feel empowered and unique, we’ve created a culture where feminist narratives are rolled up behind us like a carpet, rendered invisible the moment we’re able to build on them. This has left many older women wounded, believing (not unjustly) that they’re being blamed for not understanding the ideas they originally contributed to the conversation. But it also does no great service to young women—the ones at work now or the ones who will come after us—who can only feel that they constantly have to reinvent the wheel.
- I Used to Insist I Didn’t Get Angry. Not Anymore. Because, as everyone knows, female anger is just too much.
- Searching for the Self-Loathing Woman Writer which then lead me to an excerpt from Tillie Olson’s “Ways of Being Silent”. This quote comes from the Hazlitt piece, though, as Olson’s full essay is behind a paywall and I don’t have access:
We must not speak of women writers in our century (as we cannot speak of woman in any area of recognized human achievement), without speaking also of the invisible, the as-innately-capable: the born to the wrong circumstances—diminished, excluded, foundered, silenced.
- The Female Price of Male Pleasure: “Because we live in a culture that sees female pain as normal and male pleasure as a right.”
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Some great food for thought here. I do think this is a seismic shift in the culture, and a long overdue one, as people who used to be free to ignore whether the art they loved was made by someone who may have been harming others while making it, or through making it, now have to confront how they feel about that. I remember feeling that when I first heard muted reports about Bill Cosby, but just couldn’t believe them. Now that so much of those allegations have come to light, it’s hard if not impossible to see all his old comedy routines in a very different context. Most I can’t even listen to anymore.
As for what happens in the wake of abuse and harassment being a career-ending move, as it should be, I especially like the line in Alison Willmore’s piece: “I’d love to see something even better, though, from someone new.”