Stuff to Read is now Did You Read That?* It’s a work in progress, people.
1. Komen/Planned Parenthood. This one’s going to take up the majority of the post because it occupied my brain this week.
Le Sigh. So many things to read about this, so little time. I absolutely cannot wait until there is an insider-y longread about this, as I’m sure editors are scrambling to assign it as I type this. It’s time to dive deep into this mess. I want to know the back story, and as soon as it comes out you best believe I’ll be sharing it here. Until then, some thoughts… The best part about the backlash and Komen’s tail-between-the-legs reversal is that, well there’s two best parts: 1) Now, a mass audience is going to ponder what some people in the cancer community have been pondering for a while now: “hey, we’re aware of breast cancer, can we cure it now, plz?” This is why I am going to recommend you read Dr. Susan Love’s op-ed in the Times. And 2) What this shows us is that you can’t be for women’s health and against choice at the same time because pregnancy is a health concern, if only because pregnancy actually does kill people. Consider this anecdote from Jill Lepore, New Yorker blogger:
Two and a half centuries ago, Benjamin Franklin’s sister Mary was thirty-seven, nearly the same age as Susan Komen, when she died of the same disease. When Franklin’s sister Jane wrote to her brother in 1731, she didn’t only tell him about Mary. She also wrote that, although her first child had died before reaching his first birthday, she had given birth again, and her second baby, thank God, was thriving. But she had more “melancholy news”: another sister, Sarah, had died. She was thirty-two, and likely pregnant. She left behind five children, the oldest only eight, the youngest eighteen months. “She was a good woman,” Franklin wrote back. He named his only daughter after her.
Jane went on to have twelve children. She named two of her daughters after her sisters. Her daughter Mary died at nineteen. Her daughter Sarah died at twenty-seven. “She was always appeared to me of a sweet and amiable temper,” Franklin wrote Jane. She left behind four children under the age of seven, including daughters also named Sarah and Mary. For the unending pregnancies and difficult deliveries that felled young women, he had no cure. There was no cure. Not then.
2. So Many Feelings by Molly Fischer at N+1
A critique of those ladyblogs, also with backstory on each one. I really don’t know how I feel about this yet. I might write a longer post about it later. I love ladyblogs as much as I love women’s magazines: both are so flawed, yet so much a part of my life, like best friends that repeatedly lead you to stupid decisions but are still great because they’re your friends. Fischer’s main issue with the blogs seems to be that they failed at becoming the bold, new face of feminism everyone wanted them to be, and instead fell back on pleasing people. She writes:
“Neither Jezebel or the Hairpin concerns itself with the harder to articulate, more insidious expectations about women’s behavior. Neither knows how to write for and about women without almost embarrassing itself in its eagerness to please. Jezebel is too painstakingly inoffensive to hurt anyone’s feelings. The Hairpin is too charmingly self-effacing to take itself seriously, too tirelessly entertaining to ever bore a visitor. They bake pies with low-hanging fruit: they are helpful, agreeable, relatable, and above all likable”
3.The Most Suburban Way to Lose Your Virginity by this guy I saw at UCB once.
I love this series from Nerve, and I especially love this essay. Read, laugh, and reminisce about your own sordid virginity tale, which I hope was as endearingly awkward as this one.
And that’s all because I’m tired!
*Inspired by Carrie and Fred, made obvious by their picture.
