Sadie is as nice as her voice. She is friendly and attentive and a delightful combination of laid-back and opinionated. She has a sense of style where you imagine everything at a thrift store magically sizes to fit her and coordinates with the rest of her clothes. She adores her dog Mousse. She is very good at doing people’s hair. She is also, objectively, gorgeous.

Remember the man who complimented my shirt because I was wearing eyeliner? And the man who up-down-up looked me because I hadn’t shaved my legs? These stories came up because I write about beauty culture. They also came up because I have few interactions with men. Sadie once said that I am “less interested in men than anyone she knows.” It is probably true.

My attitude towards individual men is friendly. Like if I meet a human man, I will talk to him. I bake and read books and dance and go to a gym with beige-pink walls, though, so I don’t run into many human men. But my attitude towards Men in general—Men, the cultural force—is pretty uninterested in places where it’s not darkly critical. Sadie is right.

I get my bangs trimmed by Sadie every six weeks. We’ve started riffing on conversations and stories, coming back to certain ideas. And once when I was there, she told me that one of her male clients said, “I wouldn’t want to have a daughter, because what if she grows up to be a slut.”

Another time, one of her male clients said, “I’m thinking about opening my marriage.”

Another time, one of her male clients said “I haven’t seen my friends recently, my wife’s been too busy to plan anything.”

I will tell you more about those stories.

But first, notice what’s happening.

Men are in her chair, talking about their lives.

“Sadie,” I asked, “Do they treat you like a therapist?”

“Oh yes.”

Sadie rents a room in a fancy salon. The lobby has huge mirrors and dense green topiary and gold-foil wallpaper. There are maybe eight rooms, each with their own door and walls up to the ceiling. At other salons, stylists rent their own chair and mirror but share a hair rinse station; it’s open space. Sadie’s place is like a therapist’s or doctor’s office. When I asked Sadie the story of her career—once, she was fired for catching her boss having an affair, which of course is not a fireable offense, but she was nineteen—she said she’d picked this salon because she needed full privacy for “the kinds of conversations I have with clients.” Which was curious and delightful. I didn’t think we’d ever had the kind of conversation you needed walls up to the ceiling for, but still. Someone did.

Most of her clients are women who get a cut and color. Sadie is picky about clients because a cut and color involves hanging out with people for like four hours. She has told me stories about her female clients and the dumpy men in their lives. It is probably my reactions to these stories—incredulous, incensed, bored, calling nonsense by its name—that earned me the Least Interested in Men award. The gag of course is that knowing wonderful men is one golden way to turn up your nose at the terrible ones. As Roxane Gay has said.

Once, at my bang trim, Sadie was wearing a shirt that said “dump him.” She told me, “I was walking my dog today, and a girl stopped me and said, ‘I was just looking for a sign, wondering whether or not to break up with my boyfriend. I think I’m gonna do it.’ And I was like, ‘Do it. Absolutely.’ ”

Not long before, Sadie had broken up with her boyfriend. I’m sure he had some good qualities but I know one story about him and it is one of those stories with so many layers of incompetence that it feels apocryphal. She was moving out of her apartment and needed to store her stuff for a few months. He got her a storage unit that was cheap because it was actually a storage unit for boats and jet skis and old cars. For vehicles, not, like, a suitcase of winter clothes and boxes of decor. In one load he took, there was a box of pantry goods, pasta and crackers. She told him to throw that box out; the rest went in the unit. “The rest” was all of her furniture, including a green velvet Anthropologie couch. Her pride and joy.

You are cringing if you can read my tone. If not, it’ll kick in here: A few months later, they go to the unit; she’s moving into a new apartment. They’d been living at his parents’, and he’d suggested they move in together, and she declined and found her own place. A gentle detail. Predictive, perhaps. They drive to Boats Storage Discount Unlimited. They unlock the unit. You already know where this is going. All of her stuff is completely destroyed. Rats found the food the boyfriend had left. They’d eaten the pasta and chewed through her clothes and made homes in the upholstered furniture. Everything was ruined.

If that’s what it is to have a boyfriend help you move, well.

So! Back to the other men.

Like I said, I sit in Sadie’s chair every six weeks. She will ask me about my life but I would rather hear about her life or talk about ideas. If I don’t get her talking first, I will have to describe my past six weeks, which is inevitably like three slow anecdotes. They are boring and Sadie listens well and asks questions because she is a professional. A professional hairstylist or a professional kind person? Probably both.

So Sadie was giving a random man a haircut, and—I told you this at the top—he said, “I would totally have kids, but I just don’t want to have a daughter who ends up being a slut.”

Please take this moment to look up horrifiedly from your phone and stare off into space.

When Sadie told me this, I’m in the chair, black cape around my neck, making eye contact with Sadie in the mirror. “Sadie. Sadie. Sadie. No! What!! Sadie!!!!!! ”

She nods.

“Sadie!!”

“So,” she continued, “I said that I’d be more worried about having a son who was a rapist than a daughter who was a slut.”

I mean, yup.

Apparently, it must be said.

If only that fit as well on a t-shirt as “dump him.”

I left. Six weeks passed. My bangs grew. I went back. Our conversation came back to the topic of her male clients.

“A bunch of my clients want to open up their marriages.”

“And they tell you that?”

“Yeah. They’ll say they’re thinking about it.”

“And you say what?”

“I tell them it’s a terrible idea.”

Here I will try and fail to replicate the glory of Sadie’s off-the-cuff critique of this poorly-thought-out idea:

“They think some hot young woman is going to go out with them, and she’ll be attractive in all the ways their wife is not. So I say it’s going to be expensive, because why would someone young go out with you, a middle-aged man? Not for your personality! She’s expecting you to buy her things! And it’s going to be more work, you don’t remember how much work dating is. But the main thing is, because you opened your marriage, your wife is also going to start dating, and she’s going to be a hot fucking commodity. She’s going to find a guy who takes her to a fancy meal, and pays attention when she talks, and fucks her like you haven’t fucked her in years. She’s going to love it. And she’ll need you to watch the kids for her date nights. And you won’t be having more sex, but she will. It’s not going to happen how you think it will.”

Incredible. I say, “I mean, yes. Do they listen?”

Sometimes? I think it depends on the guy. I think she’s waiting on a few to come back for their next appointment. I think one guy did open his marriage and everything she predicted happened.

Sadie knows.

“Do your male clients go to therapy?”

Usually, no.

“Do your male clients have friends that they talk to about their life?”

Usually, no.

Which is kind of sad.

So, friends! Friends are for

. . .

I refuse, actually. I refuse to write a paragraph about why it’s important to have friends. I think, if anything, I’d need to argue for vulnerable friendships, relationships where you can be sad, ask for help, sit in silence, talk through something tricky. Tell your hard stories. Those are the kind of friendships that really matter.

But Sadie’s male clients don’t have these types of friends. Maybe men aren’t socialized for vulnerability, so building close friendships takes more intentionality. Maybe men are more likely to have close friendships now than in previous generations, but the increase is incremental, and too slow. This isn’t a research study. I’m not going to generalize. Perhaps the prom-queen men with buckets of friends are just outside of my view. So, zooming in:

Sadie’s male clients don’t have therapists, and they don’t have close friends. One of them had to miss a few months of haircuts and was like “I don’t know who I’m going to talk to while I’m gone.” Or maybe it was that he came back after missing a few appointments, and he was like, “I have three things I need to talk through with you.”

New t-shirt idea. Sports font, jersey material: My Hairstylist Is My Best Friend.

“My wife’s been busy, so I haven’t seen my friends.”

I won’t slow down your reading experience with my reactions to this story. Just imagine me saying “Sadie. Sadie. Sadie” and looking appalled.

Sadie: “Why don’t you make some plans for you and your wife to see your friends?”

Man: “Because I don’t know what she’d want to do.”

Sadie: “What plans would your wife usually make?”

Man: “I don’t know, like, dinner?”

Sadie: “So why don’t you text your friends and invite them to meet up for dinner?”

The story ends there. Of course it ends there. There’s a smudge of assent from the guy, but really, what is there to say? He’s just been owned. Felled by logic. Not even logic—common sense. If you want to see your friends, why not invite them to dinner?

“This, ladies and gentlemen, is what I went to hairstyling school for.”

Except—like so much of the mental and emotional and social labor women do—no, it’s not.

Go back up to the conversation. “Because I don’t know what she’d want to do” is not the real answer to Sadie’s question. He had to say something, because he was talking to someone. But the answer to “Why haven’t you made plans?” is “Because I never have to make the plans and they usually happen anyway.”

I will not generalize here about the incompetence of men. This specific man became lonely because he did not initiate time with friends. He did not realize this, or see this as a solvable problem, until Sadie pointed it out.

But (generalizing now) what about the men who don’t have a Sadie?

So Sadie and I are talking. She’s telling me these nonsense stories. I’m like, “What is this, Sadie?? These men, saying these things! What?! And you tell them what you think.”

“Oh, yeah. Always.”

“This is fascinating. It’s like, you’re female, so if you met them out in the world like at a bar, they would just see you as female, and thus sexually objectify you. But because you’re their hairstylist, they see you first as a hairstylist, a person with a useful skill, one they need. You are primarily utilitarian. Because of that, they have a platonic relationship with you. Whereas if they saw you out in the world, removed from your context, they’d see you as a hot person. And when they see a hot woman in the world, they don’t think about becoming friends with her. They wouldn’t become your friend, so they can’t ever get your advice except in this specific way.”

“It’s that, and it’s the power dynamic.”

Did she just bring up POWER DYNAMICS in a conversation before I did??? This is HEAVEN.

Sadie goes on, “I’m cutting their hair. Guys come to me because I’ll give them a haircut girls like. I make them look hot. So they need me.”

I reply, “You have the power. Because you make them desirable. And also because you’re like, standing over them with scissors in your hand.”

Guys.

Get haircut, chat, pay, leave.

Remove the first, and it’s therapy: Get haircut, chat, pay, leave.

Remove the second, too, and it’s friendship: Chat, pay, leave.

But many men only take all four. No therapy, no friends. Just Sadie.

That’s the men.

Those are three stories I promised up top.

There’s one detail I didn’t share. One we’re going to spend the rest of the article camped out at.

The second time Sadie and I talked about the guy who said “I wouldn’t want my daughter to be a slut,” Sadie told me, “Oh yeah. And I told all my male clients that story.”

That’s the detail.

“I told all my male clients that story.”

She preempted their bad behavior. She said something they might agree with, then she said that it was problematic, then they had to respond.

All in the guise of a story.

Did she tell them the story for their enlightenment? Or to make her own life easier down the line?

I do think telling this story made her own life easier. That’s the first way I understood it, when she told me.

“If you think dumb shit like this,” the story says, “you will not have that part of you affirmed in my chair. I do not agree. I set the norms of this salon, and misogyny is not acceptable here.”

But conversational. Casual.

The alternative to casual is official. I develop a Misogyny and Sexism Engagement Scale, with ten or twelve questions, and greet Sadie’s clients in the waiting area. I ask the questions—“name two connected systemic issues that make the world more dangerous for women,” “why is intersectional feminism important,” “under what circumstances is it appropriate to call a woman ‘dumb bitch’ ”—record the answers, assess the data, hand the memo to Sadie. She stamps it, hands it back, and I go fetch her newest not-too-problematic client. Or she crumples it into a ball, drops it on the floor, and sweeps it into the dustbin with the bits of discarded hair. I go back to the waiting room and dismiss the guy.

I would love to do that. I’ve been wanting a reason to finish that Vogue profile of Gracie Abrams that’s paywalled online but sitting on the glass table for free in Sadie’s waiting room. (Update: I found it at the airport; it was boring.). But I have a full-time job, and a silly-goofy hobby, and my Very Serious writing. So although an admissions test to earn Sadie’s haircuts might be in order, we must do without.

But without the memo, how could Sadie find out Which Men?

The same way women figure out Which Men in daily life all the time: conversation.

Conversation!

Like, for example, “You won’t believe what this client said last week. [Insert story]”

Conversation. I could describe this in a way that would sound calculated, judgmental. I could use the metaphor of a test. A secret test! A secret test the men don’t even know they’re taking!!

But we do this sussing-out in conversation all of the time, with everyone. Ordering coffee, chatting with aunts, meeting a friend’s friend. When I reply “I’m sleepy” to a barista’s “How are you?”, they know that when I ask how they are, I welcome a reply that’s more specific than “fine.” My answer signaled that I have time to chat. Other times, I’ll just say “fine.” They take my order, I get my coffee, I leave. It’s not maliciously sneaky, it’s just how conversations work.

Subtle conversational indicators are an important way for women to figure out big things, like safety. When you say something, the different ways a man responds indicates what type of conversation you’ll have, what type of man he is. In that sense, if we go back to the test metaphor, the stakes of the test are higher for women than men, because the world is more dangerous for women than men.

So, fine. We’ll use the test metaphor. If a man fails this test, he might have to go find someone new to talk to at the bar. That is so minor you almost can’t call it a consequence. But it might not even happen—women often bite our tongues, put up with the rest of the conversation, and tell our friends about the bad behavior later. Test, failure, small-or-no consequence. Not a bad deal for men.

If a woman fails to analyze the results of the test accurately,

Actually, first. We’ve skipped over two unfairness-es already! One, women have to administer a verbal test at all. Men don’t have to do this. If your safety is rarely in question, then when you’re at a bar, you say whatever you want. You think in a single straight line on a clean piece of paper. Women are thinking in sheet music—top note of flirtation, down an octave to a topic that’s divisive enough to glean something about your character, tone switch to keep it fun, with staccato quips and crescendos of laughter. Music—pleasant, intricate, smart.

The men don’t have to layer their conversation, because they are, usually, safe. The women have to. Unfairness number one. Then, number two, women have to make their extra layers count—get data quickly while seeming fun. It has to be both subtle enough to not sound weird and effective enough to yield clear results. Then, the third task, also required only of women, is to assess the info and draw a conclusion. Did he lean too close in a fun way, or a creepy way? Did he glare at the bartender out of impatience, or was he thinking about something actually sad and just happened to be facing the bar? Was his joke off-color because he’s cruel or because he’s tired? Was it off-color enough that it matters?

Conversation.

I’ve set these imaginary conversations at a bar. Men are the default at a bar. They are the default at work, on the sidewalk, in most places in public.

I’m interested in environments where men are outnumbered by women. I believe it’s the responsibility of people with privileged identities to put themselves in environments where they are the minority. Behave well. And see how it feels. Don’t make it anyone’s business, but learn a bit. It’s instructive. Important. If a man takes for granted the ease with which he uses the weight room at the gym, then he should take a pilates class one day instead. It’s an unfamiliar exercise in a female-dominated environment where being the only man makes him feel awkward, not powerful. Then like, do the pilates! Wipe down your mat. Leave! If empathy is a muscle, it won’t only be your hamstrings that are sore.

But people rarely do this. It takes initiative and a willingness to schedule your Saturday afternoon around an obscure value whose execution no one else will know about.

I’ll write a whole article later about “doing your homework.” For now, back to Sadie’s men.

They lack friends. They lack a therapist. They certainly lack the empathetic imagination to insert themselves into a female-dominated space with an open mind and humble posture.

They do, however, need to get their hair cut.

So the men come to Sadie. Where the walls are pink and the male-to-female ratio is one-to-one.

And Sadie cuts their hair. And listens to them, and asks them focused questions, such that when that one guy had to miss a few weeks, he was chagrined. “But who will I talk to?”

And then one day, one of them slut-shames his unborn child.

And the next day, Sadie tells this story to another man.

I imagine a voice-over narrator: “Based on your response to this story, Sadie will allow you to continue to schedule appointments with her. Or she will fire you.”

A conversation, just one. And now she knows Which Men.

So yes, it helped her.

I think she also, though, told them the story to teach them something. We all take social cues from each other. We listen, and we choose how to respond based on the other person’s words and tone. Although people who listen carefully are better at this, everyone does it to some extent. If you tell someone a story as though it only relates to you, they’ll listen, and they’ll notice your indignation. She’s not saying “ALL MEN are SO DUMB they all say such DUMB STUFF.” She’s saying, “Can you believe someone said this to me?” They’ll calibrate their response to match her tone—“How stupid”—either because they’re incensed on principle or because they can tell from your tone that “what an idiot” is the polite thing to say.

Sadie complains about misogyny to her male clients, and they reply empathetically. Then, next time they hear a woman complain about a man saying something cruel, I think there is a little muscle memory ready to listen well, to say, again, “how stupid.” They commiserated with Sadie, so when they notice her tone in another woman’s voice, they can use their previous response. It worked last time.

Taking something you gleaned from a previous interaction and using it in a new interaction is, of course, empathy.

And are their minds changing? No! Or not primarily. Maybe? Not quickly. Not the point.

It’s easier to change a norm than a belief. It takes intention to change a belief, or at least careful thought. And it seems like there’s a moratorium on careful thought in this specific population.

But the way Sadie told this story—it’s training a man to listen to a woman, just a bit. Training him to recognize the validity of a woman complaining about a man being bad is something. Maybe something that leads to empathy, though I’m not optimistic. Rarely. Maybe. But it’s something.

Or maybe not. Because to “use something you gleaned from a previous interaction” requires remembering the previous interaction. Remembering takes effort. A decision to care. People opt out of this all the time. It’s absolutely possible that the men to whom Sadie told that story didn’t even remember it the next day. It’s completely certain that none of them were so destroyed by it that they spent five weeks turning it over and over for a Substack article. Perhaps “muscle memory” is not a concept you can apply to conversation.

It’s appalling, the fact that someone thought that. Separately, it’s appalling that, upon thinking it, he said it.

But Sadie made it clear, whether the men clocked it or not, that if they said things like that in her chair, they’d have to find a new salon.

Thank you for reading! <3 I turned thirty last week and have been thinking a lot about my creative life. I’m grateful to be able to write what I want and publish what I’m interested in. I don’t do this for a job, which I like, but sometimes I feel like I’m stuck too far away from publishers and agents and Real Writer Things. But over the past month, a handful of authors I absolutely adore subscribed to my Substack, which has been a dream. Thank you guys, especially! Made my month!!!! May have screamed a bit. Absolutely chuffed.

This article is one in a long history of writing about hair salons and beauty and barber shops and community and just hair, generally. Comment your faves below.

Thank you to Sadie for your stories and perspective and wisdom and humor and letting me use them here!!!!

And reader, if you need your hair cut in Chicago, you know who to call.

If you want something more visual than Spotify and more boring than TV, try my long videos about books. I’m behind on making thumbnails, so if YouTube chose a still where my face looks weird, just remember that . . . I believe being ugly is important!

Speaking of writers who critique beauty culture and are interested in reclaiming ugliness, allow me to mention Savala Nolan. If you liked this article, you’ll like her book Good Woman. And I interpolated the phrase “Which Men” here, which I most recently encountered in her essay of the same name. But tbh start at the beginning, and read em all. (Dream crossover: Savala on Big Undies Newsletter!)

If you want to make my day, or want to scroll but not doom-scroll, read some of my old favorite articles here. This one is a perennial fave.

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Empath-ethics. It feels funny in the mouth, but I like it enough.

Empath-ethics.

It’s when you adopt ideas about a topic without doing buckets of research, at least initially. A friend talks about something I know very little about, and I listen. Ask questions. If it sounds good, I take a little note in the brain.

I can come back to it later. Build it out. I often do.

But often, it’s a brief conversation that sets up my initial interest. Not just interest, but also belief. I decide to put a bit of stock in the idea right away. I’m sure there’s people who run home and hop on J-Stor right after they learn about something new, but I am not one of them. I just make room on a shelf, set the idea there, and let it have its space. I walk past it. Notice how it coordinates with the other items in my brain.

This, of course, is why it’s important to have wise friends. Growth requires people around you whose ideas challenge you, whose character you admire. “Empath-ethics” requires wisdom in the people around you. If you’re getting weak ideas from grifty charlatans, I’d call that something else. “Algorithm-induced-dumbness.” “Stew of pid.” Idk, “Peer pressure.”

But for the good ideas: empath-ethics. Empathy, and ethics.

I made up (portmanteau-ed?) the word after Viv told me something I knew nothing about, as she often does. It sounded right. I did no additional research. I adopted it as my stance on the matter.

I think it was red meat. I think we were ordering food and Viv said she didn’t eat red meat.

“Why?”

“Because it’s bad for the environment. Like, significantly worse than other meats, and significantly enough to matter.”

Interesting, I thought.

And I promptly stopped eating red meat.

I just logged on to J-Stor (anyone can get 100 free articles with a personal email address! You don’t need to pay money or be a student or researcher or anything). Here’s assorted random facts about red meat:

• One-third of global GHC emissions are from the food system, and 55% of the food system’s emissions are due to red meat and dairy milk (from a brief on red meat and the environment by the World Health Organization)

• Livestock production is responsible for 14.5% of global GHC emissions (from an article by Laurie Ristino about feeding people on a warming planet)

• Replacing red and processed meats with beans, fish, and other sources of protein can reduce harmful emissions by 20-35% (per a modeling study by the World Health Organization)

And on and on. The production of red meat uses water and emits methane and crushes biodiversity and on and on. Beans take less water and chickens take less feed.

I ate drastically less red meat for like nine years before I looked up the facts of the matter in Established Scientific Journals. All because of a chit chat at Taco Mama.

I’m not saying that mattered. I didn’t save the planet or a water system or even probably a single little baby cow. But—and we’ve talked about this before—to live according to your values matters, even if the visible effect is nonexistent.

And wise friends are as good a place as any to pick up a new value.

Next month, I’ve got a long piece full of stories from the salon. It’s pushing eight pages and so close to finished but I’m going to give it a little longer in the oven.

I linked this above, but here’s my long piece on attention, care, and the value of a symbolic act. (Very Garrett Bucks-coded, run don’t walk if that name means nothing to you yet.)

Two relevant quotes from How to Do Nothing by Jenny Odell:

“When you spend enough time with someone who pays close attention to something, you inevitably start to pay attention to some of the same things.” (xxiii)

“Ultimately, I argue for a view of the self and of identity that is the opposite of the personal brand: an unstable, shapeshifting thing determined by interactions with others and with different kinds of places.” (xxi-xxii)

As people mention their tech habits, I’ve noticed how much my insistence on thinking of tech as a physical thing frees me from constant distraction. Like my rule that I can’t use Safari on my phone for anything fun, or the fact that I only let myself use YouTube on the literal television. This was the first time I wrote about those habits, and they’ve only gotten stronger.

Looking to try out an empath-ethic? May I offer my strongly-held belief that when talking about food, one should say yum or say nothing?

A short one this month! But it’s been an idea in the drafts for years. I’m at the point where I have more published articles than drafts, which feels wonderful. A stat that means nothing but still, a good feeling.

<3

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I was reading The Roots of My Hair, a remarkable graphic novel that Megan brought home from a book conference. It’s about growing up on Reunion Island and moving to France. It’s about hair and friends and life. Early on, I came across this page:

If you’ve been following the character, your heart goes out to her. Or even if you haven’t read the book—her sad little eyes in the bottom panel! You care about what she cares about. And she wants to sleep in as late as her brothers and not spend hours having her tangles ripped out. She’s a kid, and she just wants her hair to be low maintenance.

Kids have very little power. And sometimes, or often, this is difficult. Ann Patchett has written about this, in These Precious Days and Whistler. Anne Helen Petersen has a set of articles called “Big No Kids Energy,” and the powerlessness of childhood is something that comes up for a decent number of adults who choose not to have children. It’s hard to be a kid.

And when you’re powerless, the idea of a Power that will give you what you want is appealing. It makes perfect sense that, when it felt like her hair was ruining her life, the kid in the book prayed for different hair.

Adults often ignore things that are fresh and confusing to kids. Because I’m an adult, I wouldn’t pray for my hair to be different in the morning than it was when I went to bed. But also because I’m an adult, I would have other ways to address things. The book ends up taking her all the way into adulthood, which brings greater resources for hair care, things that make it easier and also help her feel beautiful.

But when she’s a kid, she doesn’t have adult resources. Her mother takes care of her hair the only way she knows how. This kid can’t walk around visiting salons, soliciting additional opinions. She can’t get away from teasing at school. She can’t keep her brothers from being mean. It makes sense that she decides to pray about it.

In most faith traditions, there are many different ways to pray. In the Christian tradition, one is called “prayer requests:” you’re in a group of people, at Sunday school or small group, and each person can ask for prayer about anything in their life.

There are no boundaries on what a prayer request can be. And although you could ask for help being kind, help with something interior, usually the request is about something external, logistical—a work project coming up, a stressful appointment. They’re often about someone else—my sister’s car broke down, my kid is struggling with math.

In America’s non-liturgical Christian churches, I’m pretty sure prayer requests are the most common form of communal prayer. Well, besides a person up front praying, then giving the sermon or whatever. Second most common, I’m fine with that. I went to a Christian school, and we did prayer requests every morning. Church groups, every week, same thing.

Theoretically, a prayer request could be a moment for vulnerability. Theoretically, like I mentioned earlier, you could ask for prayer about ways you hope to transform in your very soul. But in practice, they are more often a request for something literal, or at least practical. See the car-themed examples above.

When I was a kid, I learned the acronym ACTS for the first time. It lists four different types of prayer: Adoring God, Confessing sins, Thanking God, and Supplication. I realized, at age twelve or whatever, that almost all of the prayers I’d ever prayed fit in just one category: supplication.

It would be an either/or fallacy to say we should discard prayer requests completely. An expansive practice of prayer would mean more prayer, period, more of all types of prayer. But prayer requesting is so common, we’ve essentially created the either/or fallacy in the other direction. What is prayer? Prayer requests.

We should stop over-emphasizing prayer requests. We should widen our prayer practices. And we should emphasize the way that prayer has the power to change us, inside ourselves.

It’s important to use multiple types of prayer.

Here is a list of Deep and Meaningful Other Types of Prayer: Praying scripture. Liturgical prayer. Contemplative prayer (page 145 of this clunker). Kataphatic prayer (prayer that “seeks to experience God in creation,” page 163, same book, and now I’m jazzed to have pulled it off my shelf). Journaling prayer. Maybe just skim chapter seven, called “Ignatian Traditions of Prayer.”

Second. It is important to pray about our own souls, their transformation. Not to ask just for the physical world around us to change, but our insides. I am of the opinion that what is most powerful and remarkable about prayer is the way it invites God to change us. As this is an article about change management, not a theological dissertation, I will leave the expansion of that idea to other writers. There are many.

Also, the over-emphasis on prayer requests in our communities leaves kids thinking prayer requests are the primary type of prayer.

And now we’re back to the kid in bed, praying for new hair.

Which again, totally fair. I get it. And that fits perfectly into that book’s story of transformation.

But it got me thinkin’.

Zoom out to all kids, and think about the best way to teach kids to understand prayer, and I’m not convinced the winner should be prayer requests.

If we set up prayer less as wish fulfillment, maybe our kids could know how to pray instead for comfort, for strength in the face of bullying, for bravery, for a solution they couldn’t imagine.

When you’re powerless, it’s understandable to want a fix. It might be more helpful to learn how to suffer, how to decide who you want to be, how to put up with misery and still be a human worth being.

One fact about reading that tends to be forgotten in the age of social media is this: you can take from reading only what is useful to you.

If you are in a community in which prayer requests are vulnerable moments for deep storytelling where people attempt to transform themselves, where people ask for help being more full of grace, etc.: I THINK THIS IS GREAT. I really do. I don’t think it’s common. But I think it’s great! Mine is a general argument. It will not account for many specific experiences.

You can take from this article what is useful—switching prayer requests out for journaling once a month, praying through a Psalm, forgetting you read this until you’re stuck at small group and someone is holding forth asking for prayers about the weather.

I’m hedging because I’m nervous that someone will read my attempt at thoughtfulness as a prescription. I am prescribing nothing, except that you think. Reach whatever conclusions you want.

I also want to discuss this: prayer requests are often how we catch up on each other’s lives. Once everyone’s spoken, you know who is going out of town and who’s stressed about work and who is doing pretty well, just chillin.

I like knowing what the people I love are up to. I think it’d be useful to have a non-prayer way to catch up with everyone. The small group I just joined does highs and lows—best and worst parts of the previous week—which accomplishes the catching-up and nicely prompts both happy and more painful stories. And it doesn’t pretend to be prayer. But also, it leads nicely into prayer. Neat!

Also, prayer requests are one of the only places we have regular room for storytelling in the church. Pastors share their stories in sermons, and sometimes there’s a few testimonies, but prayer requests are the only time that everyone can tell a story.

If we lessen prayer requests, I want to find a new place for stories in the church—a different medium, a different practice. Stories matter. There’s got to be a way to keep the practice of stories, to move them somewhere else in our communities.

Sidebar: As a Christian, I find it incredibly important to pay attention to what people outside the church say about the church. And not just to pay attention to it, in a sort of opposing-team’s-playbook kind of way, but to really care about it. The attitude I’ve most often observed from Christians is the opposite of this: insular, judgmental, uninterested. I cannot stand this. It is an honor to know someone and an honor to be told someone’s story. There is no wrong story. And if you listen to stories, you will find that people have deeply compelling reasons to leave the church, to leave the faith. Often the church—individual people, or the institution—is itself that reason. This matters.

Sidebar to the sidebar: I took that short paragraph above, combined it with a longer screed I had sitting in my drafts, and spent a few days clacking away at a breakdown of the issues I have with Christian attitudes toward outsiders. It is glorious. It is eight times longer than I expected. It is not close to finished.

It will take forever to calibrate the tone of such a piece. Gentle. Wise.

So for now, just a few notes on prayer.

Happy last day of the month <3

I structured this essay according to the six parts of a discourse. Thank you to my high school teachers for teaching me what that is.

I talked about the books I read in May here. I’ll cover The Roots of My Hair and other books from June starting Thursday. Slow videos. They’ll lengthen your attention span.

Thank you to everyone who read and shared my EDS article. I like you!

“Uh-uh,” the gate agent said, to no one in particular. “That is not how wheelchairs work.”

She was wrong. That is exactly how wheelchairs work. And I was disheartened, because the airport is one of the only places where people usually get that.

If you’re an ambulatory wheelchair user, you’re able to walk. Also, you use a wheelchair sometimes. I remember learning that most blind people can actually see a bit—shapes, light and dark, general outlines—just not enough to rely fully on sight. Wheelchairs work the same way. Some wheelchair users are completely paralyzed, yes. But most are able to stand or walk some, just not as far as they need to go.

I don’t know who decided that the airport would be the exception to the wheelchair ableism of the rest of society, but at the airport, anyone can have a wheelchair for free. You don’t have to prove that you need it. You just tell someone, who tells someone else, and a strong human rolls one over and bundles you in.

Which is remarkable.

I have been too weak to stand since I was a kid. At church, realm of rules, I was allowed to sit whenever I wanted because my feet hurt. I started seeing a podiatrist at age thirteen, got bunion surgery at sixteen, and received treatment after useless treatment for plantar fasciitis; I was twenty-seven when they figured out that actually, I have deficient fat pads in my heels. My heel bone, and thus, my entire skeleton, just slam against the ground, no cushion. Hence the pain.

So I wear tennis shoes with custom orthotics. I haven’t owned non-tennis shoes for regular wear since high school—no clogs, no sandals, nothing. I’ve owned a few pairs of dress shoes, but I usually leave them on the shelf and wear tennis shoes. I wore the cutest acrylic-block heels to Henry’s wedding in 2021, but when I put them on for Emma’s, I got down the stairs and couldn’t go any further. For some reason, there’s a picture of this moment:

My dad saw me on the ground and said, gently, curiously: “I don’t mean this in a bad way, but. . .why are you wearing those?” I had walked from my bedroom down to the kitchen, where I folded onto the floor. Just a few dozen steps. I would never walk in heels again.

Teddy told me I might have the connective tissue disorder EDS, or Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome, and she’s usually right. I had migraines, foot pain, other disparate symptoms. A physical therapist I was seeing—self-referred, self-pay—also mentioned my joints felt EDS-y. So I did some reading, then asked the migraine doctor who was doing my occipital nerve blocks to diagnose me with EDS. She did. Anyone with an under-diagnosed chronic condition will recognize this circuitous path, this reverse-direction healthcare. My neurologist—different migraine doctor—referred me to a neurologist who specializes in EDS—the only one in the country, or at least the best, if her fourteen-month wait list tells me anything. She said that I’d need both knees replaced if I kept standing with my knees locked, so I spent the last year re-learning how to stand. She referred me to the physical therapist who fixed my subluxated spine. She is as good at listening as she is blazingly intelligent, and you will fall a little bit in love with her too if you read her write-up on her doctor page I linked.

Until that point, my health problems had existed independently of each other in my mind. I wore tennis shoes and sat down when I needed to. I didn’t know I had migraines—I’d just say “my neck hurts.” There were other symptoms I hadn’t identified, hadn’t even realized were unusual. But when I met Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome, everything got context. Everything started to make sense.

It’s hard to explain what a connective tissue disorder feels like. I’m uncomfortable most of the time. When I stand, I feel every joint in my body compensate. When I sit, I feel every joint in my body compensate. When I move, same thing. It’s like being made out of toothpicks. Part of Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome is hypermobility, which means my joints are too mobile and my muscles are too tight. I get massages, which I think is embarrassing because that sounds so luxurious. Well, really I think that massages should be affordable, and everyone should have them. But until that happens, I don’t like to say that I get massages. Also, Thai massage is painful. Sometimes I say “I’m going to go get stepped on,” because that’s true, and more accurate. Jenny can’t figure out why my back and neck are so tight when she’s just seen me; the only other person she sees whose muscles get tight that quickly is the guy who’s training to be a boxer. The massage hurts, but the only other time I feel those muscles in my neck or shoulders are when they cinch me into a headache. The day after a massage my muscles are sore to the touch, like a bruise.

I have POTS, too, an acronym so silly it makes me grateful for the drama of the name “Ehlers-Danlos.” POTS stands for postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome, and it means that whenever I switch posture, I get a head rush. For years I would pick things up off the ground by hinging at my hips, chin up, arm brushing the floor. I thought it was from ballet. I didn’t realize that when I squat down and stand back up, I get a head rush. When I lean over but drop my head down, same thing. My POTS is mild—more severe versions result in fainting—but it flares when I have a migraine. If I have a migraine, I can’t lean over or sit up or crouch down without the headache pain swelling. I didn’t realize I was avoiding that feeling. I didn’t even recognize that I experienced that feeling: “head rush,” a term I had no name for, or at least no understanding of. I didn’t notice until I got diagnosed with POTS.

Having a chronic illness involves a lot of that. Realizing you do something weirdly because you’re avoiding pain. After you get a diagnosis, you make the connection.

I’m in physical therapy, and when you have EDS, you could be in physical therapy until you die. But you have to find physical therapists who are familiar with hypermobility, or it won't help. See: me in physical therapy during high school and college, me until two years ago. Dr. Kincaid referred me to Andersonville PT in Chicago, which is the absolute gold standard in hypermobility care. I am so grateful for the team there and this is going to sound like a Yelp review but they’ve taught me so much about my body! They’ve improved my quality of life so much! And my mom found Becky, my Tulsa PT, who brought up the EDS-ness of my joints before my official diagnosis. She is so wonderful that when I get home from appointments, Rah and Megan say, “how was the magic lady?” because I’m always saying she’s a magician. Because she is.

Dysautonomia is part of EDS, too, and it’s connected to POTS, though I don’t know the genus/species of it all. Your autonomic nervous system controls your body without you having to think about it, and dysautonomia is when it doesn’t work. The part of mine that malfunctions is my ability to regulate my body temperature. I’m always hot. I have to layer my clothes so I can get as much of my skin exposed to air as possible at a moment’s notice. Wide-leg pants are great because I can pull them up over my knees. Even when I get my skin uncovered, my body struggles to let the heat go. I cuddle ice packs. I drink ice water. In the winter, I step outside.

My hair makes me hot, so I put it in a ponytail, but my head can’t handle the weight of my hair in a single spot, so I take it down. Over and over, marching towards a migraine.

Having a chronic illness involves a lot of these trade-offs. I need to travel with extra gear, but then the luggage is too heavy—trade-off. I get hot easily, but I need to use a heating pad to relax my muscles—trade-off. I need to sit to rest my feet, but my neck gets stiff and I start to get a headache—trade-off. To paraphrase Kelly Sundberg, everything that helps me now also brings me pain. It’s brutal.

I can’t carry much of anything, because my shoulder joints are loosey-goosey and they subluxate, which is like having them dislocate except they pop out and then back in. So my neck and shoulder muscles try to help stabilize things, and then tie me into a migraine. Because they’re sensitive, always ready to cinch up, hoping to help, they overreact a lot. If something touches my neck, my muscles tighten for no reason. So I can’t wear necklaces. I can’t buy clothes that touch my neck. I can’t carry backpacks or one-shoulder totes or get tight neck-hugs. It’s brutal.

I have to have a pillow with neck support, so I now travel with my pillow. I have hypoglycemia, incredibly sensitive blood sugar, so I have to eat protein every few hours and I can only eat sugar after I’ve had something substantive. I step out of bed into Hoka tennis shoes, which I wear every standing moment of the day. My arches are in the 4th percentile for flatness. I have a cervical brace that I wear when my neck starts to hurt and a stool that I sit on in the shower. I have auditory processing issues. My lasik surgery already failed out. The cartilage in my knees went out—one in September 2024, one the next July—so now they click every time I step up. EDS is one of the only conditions in the world where yoga is bad for you. I have to do pilates, which is hilariously expensive literally everywhere. I have bad circulation to my hands and feet. I sleep with a pillow under my knees so they don’t lock overnight. I have to sleep on my back—if I lie on my side for more than a few minutes, my neck starts to tighten like a vice, or my shoulders subluxate, or both. I can’t sit on a barstool, my toothpick-body hates it. If I eat one bite of something spicy, I get a headache.

The list is long.

The list existed before my diagnosis, but now it has a title at the top. Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome.

I have been too weak to stand most of my life. It only occurred to me in the last two years that there is a tool for people who can’t stand.

So I rented a wheelchair.

And now we’re back to where we started: How do wheelchairs work? Or, rather: Who are wheelchairs for?

I only need a wheelchair when I’ll have to stand or walk for over forty-five minutes. I’ll only choose to use one if it’s easy in / easy out. I’d rather be in pain standing than use a wheelchair and get stuck one staircase away from a non-accessable restaurant. I am able-bodied enough that I get to trade into pain to avoid the ableist built environment.

Opinions are mixed on whether wheelchairs are helpful for people with EDS. They’re not great if you use one so much that your body atrophies, but sometimes they let you go somewhere that you otherwise wouldn’t be able to go. It’s especially difficult because many people with EDS don’t have enough shoulder stability to propel themselves. Jayne Mattingly, author, painter, and friend (!), tells the story of deciding to use a wheelchair in her remarkable book This is Body Grief: she was at the physical therapist’s office, and asked “Do you really think I need a wheelchair?”

Gently, the PT motioned to the mirror. “Look, Jane.”

She saw herself, her rollator, her cervical brace, her service dog. A wheelchair would be another tool, and yes, she did need it.

My rented wheelchair was hard to lift into and out of my car. I couldn’t propel myself because my shoulders gave out. And often, the jostling as it bumped over thresholds and crooked concrete made my neck muscles over-tighten. Trade-offs—brutal. Everything that helps me now also brings me pain.

When I rented that wheelchair last summer, Megan and I took it to the Art Institute. Even that phrasing—we took it—conveys the amount of work and planning involved. We had to pick somewhere we could park my car, somewhere with thorough, functioning elevators. It’s a whole thing.

So anyway, at the museum, I had to go to the bathroom. I didn’t want to take the wheelchair, but I also knew that everyone who saw me stand up in the hall would be confused. If I were more nervous about people’s judgement (or less grossed out by bathrooms), I could have wheeled all the way into the handicapped stall. I didn’t want to. I stood and walked from the wheelchair into the bathroom.

I’ve thought about putting a sign on my wheelchair that says “google ‘ambulatory wheelchair user.’ ” I haven’t had anyone say anything rude to me, but I haven’t used a wheelchair often enough, and I usually have the buffer of a friend, and I don’t have other compounding factors that often result in harassment. But really, people should google “ambulatory wheelchair user.” Everything that helps me now also confuses strangers? Sometimes I walk slowly or grimace a bit to help make my pain legible, even though I’m not feeling pain at that moment. It feels easier. I might be putting too much stock in my acting skills, might be putting too much stock in how closely strangers are watching me. But when you’re in a wheelchair, you’re othered, and when you’re othered, it’s often sensible, not paranoid, to be aware of strangers’ perceptions.

Teddy pushed me around the High Museum in Atlanta. That museum is like an airport: you can borrow a wheelchair for free. My parents pushed me around Home Depot—“pushed around” is curious phrase, usually connoting bullying, here “pushed” takes the wheelchair as its object,1 leaving me abandoned—and we were all so wrapped up in the fuss of using the wheelchair that we got all the way home without anything we’d purchased.

In the disability community, there’s a saying: either you’re disabled, or you’re not disabled yet. This is a massively helpful framework, as it de-exoticises my life. Sometimes old people (or older people, anyone older than me) will say “when you’re my age…” They’ll say when they turned thirty, their back started hurting, or when they hit forty, they couldn’t go on a run if they didn’t stretch after. They are trying to warn me, but they are actually telling me that they have only lived in the realm of the not disabled yet. I nod. I do not say that I haven’t been able to go on a run since I was twenty-four, that I threw my back out setting down a toddler last month. Disabled folks know all about minimizing the stories of our bodies. Already, I’m worried I’ve listed too many of my ailments for you here.

Small talk is supposed to be light, and it often obscures what matters most. It is hard to maintain this required levity while speaking about disability. So I usually bite my tongue. You can tell me to enjoy my functioning body while it’s young, but it’s not functioning like yours did. And I already know to enjoy it, because I know what it’s like to lose things I used to be able to do.

There’s something about being an active member of a marginalized community that requires you develop values and methods for dealing with a world that’s uninterested in dealing with you. What a chunker of a sentence, but it’s true. I am a woman in a world made for men, so I read about injustice, and it prepared me for injustice. And I am lucky it happened in that order. I am disabled in a world made for bodies that work. In a stroke of luck, I started working at a bookshop that’s passionate about disability rights right as I was seeking a diagnosis. I have formed my disability values. I have developed methods for dealing in a world that thinks standing out of a wheelchair is cheating. It’s like *quotes herself* what I wrote last month, but about disability rather than food:

My values about [food] are as strong as the roots of a redwood. I know what is true and I am not emotionally susceptible to nonsense. When someone shames [food or shames the people eating the food] or shames themself, I do not feel the shame. My values are a spacesuit and my oxygen does not come from their atmosphere.

So I use a wheelchair. And if someone shames the wheelchair, or the ugly shoes, or the cervical collar, I do not feel the shame. My values are a spacesuit and my oxygen does not come from their atmosphere.

And—always and—it’s helpful when people already know what an ambulatory wheelchair user is.

Even if I’m not using mine to take a photo with Miss Oklahoma.

Sophie Strand writes about Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome and ECOLOGY and how everything is connected. As magical and meaningful as it sounds. Find her work here.

Jayne Mattingly’s book This Is Body Grief talks (among other things) about the tendency to apologize for your body and its pain. This piece, and my life, owes so much to her writing on disability.

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Thank you for reading this. May is Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome Awareness Month, which I forgot to celebrate. Until now, with this piece, thirteen minutes before midnight on the last day of the month (she loves a deadline!). To celebrate with me, share this post with someone. It means so much when people read what I write, or share it, or text me about it, or go to the fuss of opening the Substack app to click the like button. Thank you <3

I just finished Savala Nolen’s new book Good Woman. I had the kind of fun reading it that you can only have when you spend massive amounts of time thinking about the same things as the author. It was a blast.

Then Nolen was featured on the Burnt Toast podcast, which is run by Virginia Sole-Smith, spiritual auntie of this series I’m writing. It was a dream crossover! On the podcast, she told this story:

Savala: I work with a fabulous team of people I love and adore at UC Berkeley. One of them had a birthday, so to celebrate, I brought in a box of fabulous French pastries. We have a little birthday party and we invite lots of people to come by and pick something up if they want to. Every single person, every person, who came in the room said something, and they all happen to be women, something like, “Ooh, I worked out this morning. That’s how I earned this.” Some version of, “Oh, God, I shouldn’t. I had a bagel for breakfast,” or, “I’m gonna cut it in half because I think I’m gonna have a big dinner tonight.” I was the only one who didn’t. At some point I said, “Come on, guys. Let’s just let the food be food. We don’t have to earn our food here.”

I recognized this story. I felt anxious and frustrated when I heard it. In social situations, people often have a compulsion to explain away the food they’re eating, and it’s no fun. Un-fun. Miserable, sometimes.

The podcast continues:

Savala: You could have heard a pin drop, Virginia.

Virginia: Oh, I’m sure.

Savala: It was like I said something in a different language. People [didn’t] know how to read the moment anymore. They [didn’t] know how to read me anymore. It’s so disruptive.

And yes. I get that.

Years ago, at a bridal shower, I switched tables to talk to two family friends. You could call them “aunties,” although neither of them are my aunts. An “auntie,” as I understand the concept, is an older women who knows you and cares about you. They mostly know you from knowing your parents, so they might know very little about your individual opinions and values. They care about you theoretically and emotionally, but they rarely have a reason to care about you practically or physically.

Anyway, I went over to talk to them because they’re important to me, and because I am good at Bridal Shower. The verb, the skill. I sat between them. Apropos of a greeting, one of them said, “You’ve lost weight.”

I don’t have friends who speak poorly about food. People saying “I look so fat” or “I couldn’t eat another bite” while people are eating is one of my least favorite experiences on the planet. Tone matters, of course—sometimes people say “I’m full” and they’re not being prescriptive, and it’s fine. Celebratory. But you know what I mean: when someone says “I’m full” after eating a single bite of one sugar cookie, then instead of chatting about life, everyone has to talk about the amount of sugar cookie you’ve eaten. When really, that is uninteresting.

Anyway.

Bridal Shower Auntie said, “You’ve lost weight.”

I froze.

But only briefly. I do not fail to Bridal Shower. I am not rude to Auntie. I have politeness where most people have a spine.

I un-froze.

I said, “My body is always changing sizes.”

A decent response. Quick, aligned with my values, ambivalent about shrinking.

She repeated it back to me, “Always changing sizes, you said?” I think she chuckled. I smoothed things over, let the conversation continue.

But since then, I’ve imagined standing up and walking away.

I’ve imagined lots of alternate responses. Maybe this one:

“Do you have the date?”

“Yes dear, it’s the first.”

“I mean the year.”

“2025.”

“Oh. Hmmmmmm . . . It hasn’t been okay to talk about bodies like that since the eighties. You didn’t know?”

*shares a pitying glance with the other auntie*

(That glance is not returned. It is still worth it.)

I did the eating disorder thing. That sounds facile, sorry: I had an eating disorder. I remember what it was like to think about food all of the time. I am at risk for unhealthy thought patterns. I know that.

So I do not have friends who speak diet. I do not have friends who comment on my body, or tell me I need to be smaller, or criticize the food I eat. And my friends know that if they say aloud that they need to be smaller, I will verbally disagree not with their statement but with its very premise. No, you do not need to be smaller. And sometimes they need to say the things anyway, and sometimes that is okay. Your friends are for your worst thoughts, sometimes.

So yes, it’s me, and my friends know the sitch.

Friends, yes. But aunties?

You can pick your friends, but you can’t pick your aunties.

And aunties are a good part of my life. I am grateful for the people who love me. I am lucky to have older adults who know me tangentially but still care about me. And I know that they are talking about food in the way they’ve learned to talk about food.

But when aunties talk weirdly about food, I think, “Stop talking about food like you’re trying to give the people around you an eating disorder.”

I have never said that.

But I think it every time.

Stop talking about food like you’re trying to give the people around you an eating disorder.

It’s satisfying because it’s appropriately severe. People feel okay about shaming a piece of cake, or shaming themself or you for cake. But most people would recoil from being told they’re “giving someone an eating disorder.”

I know that’s not how eating disorders work—you don’t apply it to someone like a curse in a fairy tale. I know.

Except, also, actually, you kind of do: how people talk about food and bodies matters a ton. If it’s not like a curse, then it’s more like a sneeze. You’ve poisoned the air. Some people won’t get sick, but some people will.

If the aunties themselves have an eating disorder, I want them to receive treatment. I want them to get better. I worry they won’t know this is something they should do. And also, they need to learn how to talk about food:

Say yum, or say nothing.

One time, I made cookies before a trip. I knew these humans I love would like this recipe so I baked them before I left and I transported them across the country in my carry-on. I try to be good at knowing what desserts the people I love will like. I was right about these. They loved them. I went into the kitchen, and one of them came in, and said, “When I saw there was another layer of cookies under the top layer I was like, ‘oh no!’ ”

Meaning, there’s so many cookies and I might eat them.

Which was, of course, my hope. That’s why I made you the cookies!

Meaning, this is the way I give compliments about food.

Which is, of course, sad.

I said earlier that people talking about food problematically is “one of my least favorite experiences on the planet.” This is only partially true. It doesn’t bother me inside; it doesn’t bother me for me. My values about food and eating are as strong as the roots of a redwood. I know what is true and I am not emotionally susceptible to nonsense. When someone shames food or shames the people eating the food or shames themself, I do not feel the shame. My values are a spacesuit and my oxygen does not come from their atmosphere. Personally, I am fine.

But socially, I am annoyed. Because now I have to do conversational gymnastics, when really I want to do conversational Muay Thai. I have to say, “My body is always changing sizes,” instead of “Stop trying to give the people around you an eating disorder.”

I have to say, “This looks yummy,” with a stern, this-conversation-is-over tone, a glint in my eye that is friendly enough to salve their offense but intimidating enough to keep them from saying anything else. I have to do conversational gymnastics, when really I want to talk about something actually interesting. Anything else.

It’s Savala, calling it out at the UC Berkeley office party: “Let’s just let food be food.”

There’s silence, there’s weirdness.

And it’s worth it. I don’t mind.

Except that my values feel so good. You could have them, too. I get my oxygen from my space suit but if enough of us want clean oxygen, we can just meet at a park. With a picnic. And talk about the flavors of the food we’re lucky enough to get to eat.

Say it with me:

“Yum.”

In February, I started this series with one rule for how not to make people’s days and/or eating disorders worse: don’t talk about people’s bodies.

When I was chatting with Teddy, she said, “The next one should be, ‘Don’t talk about your own body, either.’ ” I thought that was implied, but I realiezed she was right. And that’s where this post came from.

Here’s my (now three) recommendations for better small talk:

• Do not talk about other people’s body/weight/size

• Do not talk about your own body/weight/size

• Do not speak weirdly about food

Once, when I was talking to an someone who talked weirdly about food, they asked for examples of what felt weird and why. So, in an endeavor to be as specific and helpful as possible, I have assembled a few tips and tricks.

Tips and Tricks:

1. Avoid talking about amounts of food.

   1. “I couldn’t possibly eat all of this.”

   2. “These sandwiches are huge! Why did we get so many of them?”

2. Avoid talking about food in terms of macros. Aka fat, protein, carbohydrates/sugar.

   1. “I know it’s a cookie, but it’s got peanut butter, so it’s protein, right?”

   2. “I’m not eating carbs right now.”

3. Don’t use numbers, especially for weight.

   1. “I gained six pounds.”

   2. “That’s 215 calories.”

   3. “I’ve had three cupcakes already.”

I could break down why each of those is potentially problematic, but I’m not going to. At its core, the issue is that they come across as prescriptive: there is a right way to eat food in a social setting, and it is to measure it and describe it and create shame around it.

And heads up: an eating disorder is when someone obsessively measures and describes and creates shame around food.

Hence my latest catchphrase, that I have yet to use on An Auntie In Real Life, but hold me back, folks, I might:

When in doubt, say “yum” or say nothing.

As far as I’m concerned, this is the book to read if you want to know how to talk about food: Fat Talk by Virginia Sole-Smith

Aubrey Gordon’s podcast Maintenance Phase is one of the best reduce-your-anti-fat-bias podcasts. Start at the beginning. Also, she wrote two great books (I’ve only read the latter): What We Don’t Talk About When We Talk About Fat and “You Just Need to Lose Weight” and 19 Other Myths about Fat People.

Hunger by Roxane Gay is canon. Short chapters, strong writing. Required reading.

If you’re into moral philosophy, want to know the story behind the term “gaslighting,” (spoiler: before the movie, there was a play), or kind of always hated “body positivity” (how on earth does one feel positive about one’s body all of the time), read Unshrinking by Kate Manne.

Kate Manne replied to both of these posts so you should probably go read them too.

I’ve mostly encountered the concept of “aunties” in fiction, but here’s Maya L. Kapoor on the joy of being an auntie irl.

And finally, you saw it in the edge of the ice cream picture up above, but give the cutest local bookshop in Mesa, AZ a follow! You’ll be glad you did.

I was going out after dark, which felt special, and I wanted to put on makeup. I don’t often want to wear makeup, and I usually deny the desire when it does come up. This is a generalization, but I think makeup makes the world worse. Regardless, that night I decided that looking pretty during a bus ride by myself would not raise the global minimum standard of beauty too much, and I put it on.

I headed to the bus, walking just blocks from where that man had up-down-looked me when I had unshaven legs (story here). It was winter, and I was bundled up, unshaven legs now covered. A man my age was walking towards me. He said, “I like your shirt.” Kept walking.

Listen.

I was wearing an oversized jacket.

Underneath it, a plain black turtleneck.

A turtleneck! One of the least attractive shirts in a closet!

There was nothing to like about my shirt, sir.

But I was wearing mascara and eyeliner and lipstick, and so I looked hot. Before I’d even made it onto the bus, I got affirmation.

Hello, Madeline! Welcome to the World as It Could Be for You, if only you served the twin gods of Looking Correct and Wasting Time. Nice-looking men will compliment you on the sidewalk! And men have power! You could have power, proximal power, if you get nice men to compliment you. Then they will expect Looking Correct from you, but at least they will give you the diminishing currency of their attention.

Beauty is capital, and when you wear eyeliner, you have more capital! Don’t you like looking good? Looking good and feeling good are the same! Did you know that the only way to feel good is to look good?

I caught the bus. I watched the Tracee Ellis Ross movie. I went home.

I know that the more people Perform Beauty, the more people have to Perform Beauty. So I aggressively disdain it all. Individual resistance does almost nothing, I know, but still. I like to live in line with my values.

I reject the aspirational habits. I am less pretty than I could be.

We’ve talked about Heather Widdows’ definition of beauty: thinness, smoothness, firmness, and youth.

I am enough of each of these things to pass as good enough without effort.

I could try to be more thin, more smooth, more firm, and look younger. This, of course, is what most people do.

But I am stubborn in my logical insistence that that would be a short-sighted waste of my precious hours on earth. So I have a tummy and bumpy arms and purple under my eyes, and I have chosen to accept this.

How? Not having social media helps. Reading Jessica Defino helps. Realizing that I can describe my face with neutral language in a simulacra of a GRWM video helped more than I expected. If you haven’t read this piece I wrote a few years ago, it explored the way people say “I do beauty behaviors for myself.” I realized that it cannot be good that the only time we look at our face is when we are actively fixing it. I play-scripted what I’d say in a Vogue video. “This is how my face is.” End video.

And that experience stuck with me. “This is my face. My under-eyes are purple. My nose is always red.” End video.

I’m going to keep thinking about how to not care about beauty standards. I was chatting with some friends on the beach about it. I said, “People say ‘I put on makeup because it makes me feel confident’ as though wearing makeup is the only way to feel confident! And it’s not!! Just acquire confidence another way!” Ranting a bit. And one of the girls was like, “If you figure out how, let me know.” Immediately, someone else, “Agreed.”

I use dry logic like a teenage boy uses body soap—for everything. I understand that logic alone is not nearly so inspiring for many others. I want to figure out how to apply confidence like makeup, without makeup, as requested. Until then, I’ll be letting my makeup go stale in its Vera Bradley bag. Symbolic gestures, and all that.

Another way I manually create confidence is by correcting any wayward beauty-culture thoughts. When I’m out and about and think someone looks pretty, I’ve started correcting my thought from “that person looks good” to “that person looks correct.” I’m so accustomed to beauty beliefs that my immediate, involuntary thought is “good” or “pretty.” But when I edit my thought to “she looks correct,” I am reminding myself that I do not value pretty. I don’t value it for myself, and I don’t want to affirm it in someone else.

“She looks correct” sounds like I’m giving someone a passing grade on a test, and I like this vibe, because it reminds me that beauty is a class I don’t care to get an A in.

I quit a hike fifty yards from the summit earlier this week. I had been climbing for an hour. Fifty yards from the top, though, I realized there was no flat top. No change in the view. The view from the top was not, despite promises from people coming down, worth it. There was no top.

So I turned back around. It’s important to fail at things you don’t care about.

I cut the movie night story from my article about quitting shaving. I spent months on that one; this one, I wrote quickly. I am trying to write quickly more often.

Things I spent ages on:

• Sabrina Carpenter Thinks Cops Are Fun

• Got my first critical comment recently on this piece about simplistic thinking in Percy Jackson

Things I wrote quickly:

• Numbers Don’t Matter

• BHM Book Recommendations

Things you should read:

• the entire back catalog of my Substack (ate and left no crumbs)

• not my blog from college that I just found (not only are there crumbs everywhere but the crumbs are stale and the url is not information you are privy to)

Imagine them finding these instructions.

Or, better yet, send me their address and I can mail them these instructions.

Before you comment on someone’s body, ask yourself this sequence of questions:

1. Have you been to a doctor’s appointment with this person in the past three months?

If the answer is no, talk about something else.

2. Has this person had an eating disorder? If so, what kind, what dates, and is it still active?

If the answer is “I don’t know,” talk about something else. If the answer is “yes,” talk about something else. If the answer is “no,” talk about something else.

3. Are you a certified nutritionist?

If the answer is “no,” talk about something else. If the answer is “yes,” have you gone through continuing education in reducing anti-fat bias and are you familiar with Health at Every Size? If the answer is “yes,” you don’t need me to tell you to talk about something else.

4. Are you malicious or trying to be cruel?

If the answer is “no,” talk about something else. If the answer is “yes,” all the badness you associate with fat is more appropriately assigned to your own character. Spend your time improving.

5. Are you this person’s mother/aunt/grandmother/relative?

If the answer is “no,” talk about something else. If the answer is “yes,” thank you for being a mother! A family member! Still, talk about something else.

But this is so many rules to remember! How do I keep everything straight?

Firstly, this is important, so you could just memorize it like you’re in school. Print this out, highlight it, ask your friends to quiz you on it. Put in the work.

But second, actually, you don’t have to memorize the questions if you just memorize the answers. Did you notice that the answer is always the same?

It’s a party. A dinner. A social event of any kind.

Should I talk to this person about their body?

No.

Talk about something else.

I would type a list of suggestions, but I’m trying not to be condescending.

There are myriad interesting things in the world. What are you learning? What nature has felt like a deep breath? What music are you loving?

Talk about anything else.

You can say whatever you want, of course. You absolutely can talk about bodies. Yes, I made these rules, but I can’t make you follow them.

But here’s what you ought to realize: when you talk to someone about their body, you’re choosing to talk about bodies rather than anything else. You have a limited amount of time to converse. Time with people is valuable. When you talk about bodies and weight, you aren’t talking about anything that matters in a way that matters. The opportunity cost of talking about someone’s body is not talking about their interests, their hobbies, their heart. Imagine replacing “you look great” or “you’ve lost weight” with “what have you been thinking about recently?”

When you talk about bodies first, when that’s what you fill small talk with, you are revealing your priorities. You’re saying, “Your body is what I find important. Weight is what I find important. Your size matters to me.”

Honey, why?

You can choose to have a creative, or humorous, or fulfilling conversation.

Or you can talk about bodies, food, and weight, and potentially exacerbate someone’s eating disorder. Potentially bully someone.

Choose option one, please.

I think about anti-fat bias all the time. I haven’t written about it on Substack since this one. Let’s head out with a few quotes.

Aubrey Gordon writes about going to a party in college, where the first guy she talks to asks her how she’d gotten so fat. Why wasn’t she thin?

“I assured him that I’d lost weight in the past but had ultimately regained more weight after my diet. He responded with a lengthy lecture about calories, fat, and carbohydrates. ‘Just look at the science. It’s pretty clear.’ I stumbled through more clumsy responses, reaching for an acceptable explanation for why I was so inexcusably fat. He wanted me to account for my size, and it had never occurred to me that I didn’t owe a detailed history of my body to anyone who asked. Friends, family, acquaintances, and strangers alike expected answers about why I was so fat. I learned that being fat meant providing explanations of my size to thin people who would then explain to me why I was wrong and how I could look more like them. This stranger at the party was no different. Like so many before him, no explanation of my body satisfied him. He only relented when I reassured him, three times, that I was still trying to lose weight.” (You Just Need to Lose Weight and 19 Other Myths about Fat People 13-4)

Don’t be that guy at the party! Other people’s bodies are not your responsibility!

On “fat” as a neutral, non-stigmatizing descriptor:

“Fat hasn’t become a bad word because fatness is somehow inherently undesirable. It’s a bad word because of what we attach to it. We take “fat” to mean unlovable, unwanted, unattractive, unintelligent, unhealthy. But fatness itself is simply one aspect of our bodies. […] It deserves to be described as a simple fact, bearing little relevance to our worth or worthiness but a great deal of relevance to how we’re treated by individuals and institutions.” (You Just Need to Lose Weight and 19 Other Myths about Fat People, xviii)

Aubrey writes compellingly about reclaiming “fat” as a neutral adjective. Many fat activists do. But the word has such a long history of bullying that you shouldn’t use it this way out-and-about. Especially if you aren’t fat. Just school yourself, know it’s in the process of being reclaimed, and keep your mouth shut.

The reasons people talk about bodies are twisty. People do what people before them have done, and people have talked about bodies and size and weight as though it’s a casual, non-harmful topic for ages. Some people ask about someone’s body as though they’re interested in that person’s health. See question #1 above for my reply to that—have you gone to a doctor appointment with this person recently? Because there are very, very few people in the world whose health is your responsibility.

Additionally, the reasons people are fat and the reasons people are straight-sized are…the same.

People are thin because they have an eating disorder. People are fat because they have an eating disorder.

People are thin because of stress. People are fat because of stress.

People are thin because of trauma. People are fat because of trauma.

People are thin because they don’t have access to healthy food. People are fat because they don’t have access to healthy food.

As I list all of those things, I think about this: there have always been fat people. Bodies are bodies for many reasons. People aren’t thin because or fat because in any useful way! Bodies are just bodies.

Read the Aubrey Gordon book I quoted above, read Fat Talk, read anything by an anti-fat writer who references the research: dieting does not work, losing weight is not an issue of willpower, bodies are more complicated than “fewer calories equals less weight.”

One of the first times I was compellingly exposed to this idea was when Amanda LaCount commented back to someone who was bullying her, saying, “I eat healthy. I dance five hours a day. My body does not get smaller. This is just the size my body is.” I hadn’t read any anti-fat books at that point. It wasn’t something I had learned about. I just thought, “Five hours a day? That’s enough. That’s enough exercise for me to believe that if you were going to lose weight, you would have lost it.” Bodies are complicated. Amanda shouldn’t have had to dance for five hours a day for me to excuse her body. Her body did not need my opinion at all. (vid of her dancing, skip to 1:38)

Here’s Kate Manne, whose fantastic book of moral philosophy was shortlisted for the National Book Award. She quotes from Hunger, Roxane Gay’s memoir about being raped, becoming fat, and so much more. Then she continues,

“As powerful and important as Gay’s account is, we of course shouldn’t make the mistake of assuming that everyone fat has been traumatized—any more than we should infer someone’s health status by reading it off their appearance. People become fat for a litany of other reasons—many common physical illnesses and health conditions, certain disabilities and mental health issues, taking common and vital medications, pregnancy, stress, metabolic and hormonal changes—or for no particular reason. Some people, like me, are just prone to fatness.” (Unshrinking: How to Face Fatphobia 86)

Bodies are complicated.

Un-learn your biases.

And that’s all for now, folks!

My previous article about the word “tummy.” Virginia Sole-Smith and Kate Manne liked it, which was the highlight of my writing year that year.

My most recent article, which gets at weight in terms of beauty standards but is also mostly about shaving and not shaving.

My close reading of Percy Jackson, which is both anti-fat and simplistic.

Forward this to someone you love! I don’t want to write full-time but I do want to write a bit more. Reaching more readers (and hearing from readers!) makes it easier for me to do that <3

I had always believed shaving was a waste of time—why remove hair that grows right back—but I hadn’t disdained the norm enough to actually stop.

My leg hair is dark and thick. My skin is pale. If I don’t shave, you can tell. This is not true for everyone.

I was walking to get coffee one day during the pandemic, and a man my age was walking towards me. He gave me the up-down-up look. I thought, “Now I know I did not do anything to be cute today.” I looked down.

Oh! My legs.

He kept walking, and I kept walking. That was it.

So, like I said. If I don’t shave, you can see my hair.

I got used to it. My legs! I thought. This is what my legs look like. It’s easy to get used to things, especially when you have a contrarian streak and no events to attend.

Not shaving fits my ethos. I do not like makeup or skincare or doing my hair. I am not good at these things because my entire life I have un-valued them. I don’t want to pay for a curling iron and I don’t want to take minutes to curl my hair and I don’t want to learn anything about it: I would rather be reading. I hate wasting my time and I have always found daily beauty behaviors to be an absolute affront to my desire for efficiency and growth.

Let’s define beauty. Heather Widdows is a beauty researcher and professor of philosophy at the University of Warwick. She wrote Perfect Me, a book that argues that beauty is an ethical ideal. Her definition of beauty requires these four traits:

1. thinness

2. smoothness

3. firmness

4. youth

Picture an ad. The human in it will have those four characteristics. If you want a sterile definition of “hotness,” this is it. I’m not talking about when you look at someone you love while they’re laughing, when you see their bumpy skin and greasy hair and you think: beautiful. That’s worthy—that’s love—but that’s not what we’re talking about. Beauty-culture beauty is the opposite of that. It’s restrictive and demanding. It affects how we judge strangers, how we spend our time, and how we judge ourselves.

What about Widdows’ claim that beauty is a dominant ethical ideal? Okay, hang with me. Different behaviors matter different amounts. Changing husbands matters more than changing a tire, for example. You can categorize behaviors by how wide of a circle they reach:

1. Individual Behaviors

   Changing a tire is an individual behavior. Having plants in your home is an individual behavior. I can choose whether or not to have plants, and no one will judge me one way or the other.

2. Social / Structural Norms

   Some behaviors relate to how an individual belongs in a group. Making kimchi or watching football, for example, are things an individual does because those behaviors are a norm in their community. A social norm.

3. Ethical Ideals

   These are moral behaviors. Kindness, honesty, justice. We use these behaviors to judge people as morally good or bad.

Individual behaviors and structural norms are different from ethical ideals because, while all three matter, only ethical ideals make a statement about morality. Unlike the individual and social norms, ethical norms are not just recommended, they’re required.

Widdows says there are five features of an ethical ideal. The easiest way to read them is to think about your moral code while you read each feature.

First, an ethical ideal provides a “value framework against which individuals judge themselves (and others) good and bad.” Think about most religions, for example, which require giving money to the poor. If you don’t, you’ve exhibited greed, and are thus a bad person.

Second and third, an ethical ideal “sets long-term goals to aspire to” and “prescribes habits and practices around which daily life is structured.” You believe that your ethical ideals will guide you as you transform, step by step and long-term.

Finally, four and five: It “constructs meaning and identity” and “promises the goods of the good life” (49). Again, think about any religion. People adhere to it because it makes their life meaningful, because it points them in the direction of the good in life.

Widdows argues that beauty works this way. Picture “habits and practices around which daily life is structured.” This describes monks, yes; it also describes skincare devotees. And what that means is that now, in addition to judging someone bad for murder or good for generosity, we judge people bad or good based on their thinness, smoothness, firmness, and youth.

Considering that, when pressed, few of us would consider smoothness or youth actual indicators of a person’s moral constitution, this is concerning. The mental slide from external beauty to actual morals is hard to notice, but it’s rampant. If you’re perceived as ugly, you’re perceived as bad.

Unless you are trying to be cruel, you don’t call someone ugly. Even if they are, even if everyone knows it. You can’t even utter the word. I approve of being kind, and I get that the opportunity to describe someone as ugly in a neutral way is rare. But it’s interesting to look at what that conversational hopscotch says about our values. If someone is uncoordinated, we call them clumsy. They can be clumsy and also have other positive qualities, for clumsiness is not a moral issue.

Beauty shouldn’t be moral. I really think it shouldn’t, but it is. Widdows writes, “Appearance becomes a proxy for […] character and value […] Judgements are routinely and constantly made, read directly from appearance” (30-1). Yes, exactly. This is illogical—you can tell nothing about someone’s kindness from the squishiness of their body—but it’s absolutely how we think.

Forget calling someone ugly. Have you noticed that it’s also impossible to say aloud that someone is not beautiful? When a friend shows up to dinner all sweaty and says, “Sorry, I look gross,” we don’t say, “It doesn’t matter.” Instead, we say, “No you don’t.” Even if they do! Remember when Tressie McMillan Cottom called herself unattractive? It was hardly the point of the article, but the pushback about that specific line was massive. (She wrote a follow-up essay in Thick, which became a seminal piece of 21st century beauty writing.)

We’re talking about showing up sweaty, and shaving or not shaving, but also, do you know what doesn’t matter? Individual behaviors around beauty. A single person can opt out of shaving, or blonde hair, or anything else, but that does nothing to affect the system as a whole. Here’s Widdows again: “As individuals, we do not choose our beauty ideals.” She goes on, “Arguably, we choose the extent to which we conform to them, but the extent to which we can do this is limited by the dominance of the idea” (4).

When I stopped shaving, I was not free of a world that valued smooth legs. My behavior was free—I was living according to my individual values—but my individual values don’t matter at all to beauty culture, so I was constantly being judged. Cue McMillan Cottom, “If beauty matters at all for how people perceive you, […] then beauty [is] a structure […] that eats your preferences for lunch” (57).

Generally, women must do as much as they can to be as beautiful as they can. This means that, given constraints on your time and money, you opt into learning and performing as many beauty behaviors as possible.

It’s not exact. You will draw a line, slightly below or slightly above the limits on your time and money. You may only wear makeup to weddings, even though you could wear it every day. Or, alternately, you may not be able to afford Botox, but go into debt for it anyway.

There are consequences for not meeting the beauty ideal. I could detail them all fancy-like, but let’s just say this: people judge you. People overlook you. People underpay you. People harass you. People are violent towards you. People equate how you look with your value as a person, and if you look ugly, your value is diminished, and they treat you terribly.

These consequences happen differently for different people. Beauty privilege intersects with other areas of privilege. If you’re white and wealthy, you can get away with doing less. When I moved to Chicago, I was thin, smooth, firm, and young. Call it luck or accident, but I was beautiful. It wasn’t until I stopped shaving my legs that I became, for the first time, ugly.

I told you about the man who stared at me. He was surprised, yes, but silent. He was not violent or mean. I am ugly with leg hair, yes, but I had enough privilege to avoid the worst consequences of ugliness. People treat ugly people like they aren’t people. I was still close enough to beautiful—thin, firm, young, but no longer smooth—to just be confusing.

I assumed that once I joined the population of women-who-don’t-shave, I would start to notice other women who don’t shave everywhere I went.

I did not.

Makeup can be opted out of, hair pulled into buns and ball caps, wrinkles visible, but shaving, turns out, is not optional.

There was a Cool Girl sitting across from me on the N train one day in NYC. She was Performing Beauty—white shirt, gold jewelry, low ponytail tied in a scarf. Smooth skin, light makeup. She was wearing sunglasses while on the train. She had one of those small, yellow bags from L’Occitane. She was judging me.

She got up at her stop, said something to me. I took out my headphones. What?

“I think it’s cool that you don’t shave your legs.”

!!!!!

…

She was a Cool Girl. She was also perceptive.

And she had, it turns out, not been judging me.

Know what’s wild? That was the only time I can remember anyone initiating a conversation about my leg hair. We’re talking about over two years of hairy legs. This also surprised me. I get why you don’t ask someone why they’re bald—they could have alopecia, cancer, or just choose to be bald, so the question is invasive because it relates to their health. But is there a health reason for not shaving? Why would that be private? It’s like the most public declaration of a willingness to be ugly. I thought it would almost be a conversation starter. But besides Cool Girl on the Train, no one brought it up.

“Of course not,” my mom said, when I mentioned this to her, “that would be rude.”

No one asked me about my legs. If I brought it up in conversation, people would jump at the topic, desperately curious, “Actually, why don’t you shave your legs?” My reason was inevitably disappointing, boring.

They never did bring it up. But they asked Teddy about it all the time. She fielded questions about my leg hair at every bridal shower, every holiday, every time someone could corner her without me.

How silly! Beauty behaviors are often bonding activities. Friends get their nails done together. The party starts at 6:00, the getting-ready starts at 3:00. But this only extends to opting in to beauty behaviors. Opting out of them, apparently, not so much. Two years, and never once did someone ask me, “Why don’t you shave?”

Maybe it’s this: people can’t figure out how to say, “Why don’t you shave?” because that feels like saying “Why are you ugly?”

And, as we learned earlier, we never, ever say that someone is ugly.

Ugly is morally bad.

Is ugly morally bad?

Ugly is not morally bad, not actually. I was still my moral, virtuous self even when my legs were hairy.

I realized this: in Chicago, people had only known me with hairy legs. When they met me, I wasn’t shaving, so anyone who wanted to be my friend knew that hairy legs were part of the deal. Family and friends and acquaintances in Oklahoma and Alabama knew me before I quit shaving. They knew I was a good person. So when I didn’t shave—when I was ugly—they were confused.

She is good, and bad?

She is good, but she looks bad?

She looks bad, but she knows better?

The issue was not my leg hair. The issue is that leg hair is treated as a cipher for a person’s ethics.

Beauty should not be an ethical ideal.

I should not have to shave my legs.

Eventually, the day came that I shaved. There was a wedding, a Fancy Wedding, and I had worn pants to the other Fancy Wedding so as not to shame my family, but I had gotten a short dress for this one, and the decision was made that I would shave. Group decision. Before I shaved, I made Megan take pictures of me on the back porch, as I was mourning and worried that I’d never be a little bear-woman again.

Also before I shaved, I went shopping for shoes for the wedding. In those pictures, I look like Mr. Tumnus. I had so little shame, I was so used to my legs, that I stood in Nordstrom in shorts and a T-shirt, and leg hair, with a straight face, shopping for high heels. (Look again at the other collage above—the Tumnus mirror selfies are there.)

Now I shave every month or so, but I resent that I have to. At first, as I got back into it, I’d make my friends sit in the bathroom with me and tell me stories while I shaved. Shaving was worthless, but if I had to do it, I could pair it with something worthy.

By choosing not to shave, I didn’t do anything to change the system of beauty that requires shaving. I just confused a man and got complimented by a Cool Girl and required my older sister to field inquiries about my mental fortitude.

All that, and I had more hours of my life to spend reading.

Thanks to Lo Williams, who read a draft and gave me her notes and thoughts. I was stuck until you edited this. Thank you for finding the holes I’d left and helping me fill them.

The best piece of writing about leg hair I’ve ever read is Sugarcoating by Taleen Mardirossian, from The Audacity. Read it next!

I’ve started taking about books online. Here’s a few videos.

This is an old article I wrote, also about cultural limitations women experience that are kind of weird: “Where Are All the Periods?”

Still proud of this one, too: “Do Not Scorn the Symbolic Act.”

Occasionally one of them doesn’t. Emma didn’t, last April, then two months later, Danielle stayed Eben. But usually, my friends change their names.

I’m talking about marriage, of course. And I don’t like it. 

Not marriage, necessarily. It’s the changing names I don’t like. 

I realized that I don’t change my friends’ contacts in my phone when they get married. That’s the kind of thing I would normally do: take out the maiden name, add the new last name. But I don’t, because I don’t want to. 

I went to high school in Tulsa and college in Birmingham. Now I’m in Chicago, so I usually travel for weddings. 

I only get to see my marry-ing friends a few times a year. I used to see them every week, every day, so to me, these friends are their original names. First name, maiden name. If a new name connotes a new person, this new, updated person is not someone I’ve actually been around. 

So I dislike my friends’ names because they aren’t—accurate enough? If this is the issue, then there has to be a point when the new last name makes more sense than the maiden name. Maybe when the friend has been married longer than they were single? No. They’d have to be married longer than they were single to me. That is, maybe I’d like their new last name once I’d spent more time with them married than I did with them single. This would take years, because they are busier and farther away. If I saw a friend weekly when they were single, and then only quarterly when they got married, it’d take forever for them to earn their new last name in the arithmetic of our relationship. 

Why do I try to use math for everything? It doesn’t work.

In most things, I trust people to be the expert on their lives. If they want x, I want x for them. So it’s strange that I don’t jump in on new last names when my friends get them.

Maybe it’s because I’m not convinced my friends chose to take the new last name. Switching names is culturally implied. Maybe I’m worried they got bamboozled into losing their maiden name. 

A person’s contact in my phone is only for me. I censor friends’ new last names, sure. But in a spot where just I can see it. It’s my private resistance. Because there’s no public resistance to my friend changing her name. It’d be obnoxious and stupid to, like, say their maiden name when I reference them and write only it and never let their new name slip out of my mouth. That would be weird, and do nothing. 

I resist my friends losing their maiden names, but I resist it privately. So I guess this is not about them. It’s about me.

Let’s switch to nicknames, see if that helps me make my point. Nicknames are precious. When I got to college orientation, I introduced myself as Maddie. My mom asked me if I wanted to essentially change my name in this way, and I realized, no, I didn’t. I didn’t mind if people nicknamed me Maddie once they got to know me. But “Madeline” would disappear completely if I didn’t lead with it. To this day, Michael calls me Maddie, because we met at orientation. To the rest of my friends, I was Madeline first.

One night freshman year, when we were all up late studying, Clayton said, “Maddieperkie,” then, pleased with herself, said it again, “Maddieperkie! Like your Instagram!” It was my Instagram handle at the time, and it became my nickname from some of my dearest friends in college. I loved it.

Then there’s Mah, from when Care was a toddler and couldn’t say my full name. There’s Sweet Mad, which my mom called me until apparently I asked her to stop, because I didn’t want to be just “sweet.” I later recanted, and now sign off as Sweet Mad on cards I send her. Skate calls me Mad and Jane calls me Mads and Betsy calls me Maddie. And on and on. 

In Grey’s Anatomy, I noticed that the doctors called each other by their last names. Same with 9-1-1. It seemed cool.

Growing up, most of my family either worked in construction/building or in the medical field.

I thought of the hardworking firefighters and doctors on the TV shows. I thought of the hardworking people in my family. My father and his three siblings learned how to work hard from their father. They worked in his restaurant all growing up, they paid for their own varsity jackets in high school, Nana still tells me that. Maybe, being called by my last name would be a way to reference my family’s industries and labor. I mean, I didn’t have any proof that any of my uncles or aunts had gone by their last names at work. But that didn’t quite matter.

Because I wanted to keep my name when I got married. And I thought this might help. At my first meeting with the woman who hired me at Marsh, I said “Actually, I usually go by Perkins.” Then I changed my Zoom name to Perkins. Done. The bookshop was going to have a Maddy and a Maddie, so I volunteered to go by Perkins. Just to help with the confusion, of course. 

Ralph Ellison, in Shadow and Act: “Nicknames are indicative of a change from a given to an achieved identity, whether by rise or fall” (222). Well, Mr. Ellison, I invented the change myself. By rise, for the record. Perkins.

This was my hypothesis: If everyone called me by my last name at the time I met my husband, it would be obvious that my last name was crucial. Last names are names legally. But if mine was also my nickname, it would be my name functionally. Then, when my imaginary fiance and I had a conversation about whose name to keep, I would have at least one strong tally under my name.

I mean, theoretically, I believe that every couple should consider the heritage and stories on both sides of the family before choosing a name. Theoretically. Actually. Sure. 

But I want to keep my last name.

I was in college when I realized that a bride changing her name to match her husband was super patriarchal. I decided that I didn’t want to, in the way we choose simplistic solutions to newly discovered complex problems. 

And really, I want my husband to take my last name. This came up a few months ago, and Casey pointed out to me that this is completely different from just keeping my own name when I marry. I hadn’t quite realized that. But she was right—I could think of women who had kept their maiden names at marriage, but I couldn’t think of a single man who had changed his name to his wife’s.

Let’s talk about this heritage conversation I imagine. It’s a man and a woman, obviously—only a hetero couple might accidentally skip this step. Our couple begins to talk about engagement logistics, a future together, the details that accompany their sweeping, ravishing love. And among the mandatory discussions of venue selection, house selection, and future spawn, there must also be a conversation about name selection. 

Try this:

Him: “For much of Western history, the role of women in marriage has been as nothing more than property. I am aware of this deplorable history behind the institution of Western marriage. This, of course, is why I have deeply researched the unequal division of invisible labor in the home. This is why I have cleaned your apartment every week for the past year, and purchased refills for the cleaning supplies, and rubbed your feet before I left. This is why I have reserved a small cabin on the lake for you to visit for a week, alone, four times a year, every year, ad infinitum. I started babysitting so I am ready to parent our child and I made my friends start babysitting so that they will be shoe-ins for last-minute childcare. I have read everything I can find about why being a wife is difficult and unfair and why being a mother is even worse. I will live to have a fair division of labor in our home. With each errand I anticipate and vacation I plan and last-minute kid carpool I handle, I will be doing it for you, of course, but also to swing my axe at the fissures in the cliff of the patriarchy. 
*deep breath in*
Thus, I would like to discuss whether we will join last names. It is, of course, an option for us to keep our original family names, separately. If we choose that, then we must figure out what to do for our children. 

Her: What you have said is thoughtful. I would not consider being with someone who did or said any less. On the topic of names, let’s discuss each of our last names in turn—the stories behind them, the heritage we would be claiming if we chose that name. 

Him: Let’s.

Then, I’d tell the story of my name. 

And, if you’re shallow and planning too far ahead like me, you hope that his name is not too strongly connected to his heritage. You hope that yours wins.

When I told my dad that I wanted to keep my name when I married, he said this: “I was thrilled when your Mama took my name.” As in, your future husband would be thrilled like I was. We were threading through a crowd and it was not the time to have a conversation about the distant future, and that was fine. 

But realized later that I could have said, “Then you know exactly how I feel.” You were thrilled when your spouse wanted to take your name. I would be, too.

My dad is one of my favorite people alive. Just writing this, my eyes are misting over. 

So. Let’s you and I have the heritage conversion. 

Richard once described Donnie as “a man you can set your watch by.” When anyone in the house needs a package mailed, my dad will leave for the post office the second you tape the box shut. He goes to church every Sunday and small group every-other Monday and went to Bible Study every Thursday at 6:30 am for seventeen years. The Bible study ended; he didn’t quit. He grows tomatoes in the summer so that my mom can eat homegrown tomatoes; he set up a watering system so it’s, as he says, “foolproof” and they grow largely unattended. I think that defeats the purpose of gardening but it’s not gardening he wants, it’s homegrown tomatoes for his wife.

My father does not yell. He is gentle. It is something to be six-foot-one, straight, and gentle, as a man. He does not drink excessively. He always tells my sisters and I that he loves us and that we look pretty when we’re going somewhere nice. He loves my mother more than anyone else, and he loves us next-most, and his love ripples in very practical concentric circles out from there. 

His father . . . well. We must not speak ill of the dead but suffice it to say my father is a massive single-generation improvement. “Perkins” attached to my grandfather was drunk and cheating. Other good things too—hard work, for one—but not enough. 

The “Perkins” of my father, though, is character and dependability. A sprinkler system that keeps the tomatoes watered every Oklahoma summer day. It is never speaking out of anger. Always apologizing. Ingenious solutions to every home improvement problem and the little tool he uses to clean the inside of my car windshield. My mother has not put gas into her own car in thirty-three years. 

That’s what I want in my name. The character of my father, yes, but also the change from his father to him. The growth that sits in that story. Growth is one of my core values. I want to be better and wiser and kinder than I was last year. The name “Perkins” reminds me that transformation is part of my heritage.

I used to want my mother’s maiden name because it was attached to the math books. But I haven’t since I was a kid. That side of the family has deep Georgia roots, ones I am sure lead to slaveholders. I will trace that back one day, bear that history and learn it and lift it. But I do not want that name.

The Perkins name is my name. I am Madeline Perkins.

And, scene! That’s my side of the heritage story. Touching, yes? Compelling enough?

If we were being severe, I’d give my story a five out of ten. Shared with passion, sure, and full of heart, but only medium-compelling. No strong cultural connections to the phonetics of the word. 

Fine. That’s a fifty-fifty chance that at the end of my heritage conversation, I get to keep my name. Not bad.

Let’s do more made-up math. If my spouse’s story got a seven out of ten, the reasons for us to take his name would be compelling. Maybe I would want it. Even in my stubbornness on the whole issue, I know that there are other names I would choose. Ones I might choose instead of Perkins.

Still, that’s why I made Perkins my nickname right now. It’s like getting a dog before you start dating. Once things get serious, the dog is already there. It’s a player in the game. You can’t really just chuck the dog. Add this to the flimsy feminism that started it all, and no way I change my name. Right? Right?? 

Perkins.

Is my reluctance to change my friends’ names in my phone just another attempt at drawing tally marks in a conversation I haven’t had with a man I haven’t met? Am I trying to accumulate proof that I only interact with maiden names, that I have only ever interacted with maiden names? See, even before I knew you, Abby got married in 2021, and her last name is still “Anton” in my phone. You just showed up, in 2027. You’ve only ever known me as Perkins. It’s a thing I can’t change. This predates you.

A husband is someone who cuts the line. This is just a fact.

I have been loving my friend for years. I hung up her shelves and made her muffins and braided her hair and traveled with her and then what: here you come, and you take up all her time, and you propose to her and marry her and then you truly take all of her time. But three years ago, and six years ago, and twenty years ago, you were nowhere. Bow down to me, the keeper of your wife’s heart and love before your late arrival. Who are you, to deserve her?

She decided that you deserve her. Her body, her name, her time. Fine.

But in a world that only works for nuclear families, I am always bracing to be kicked off the team. 

Maybe my resistance to my friends’ new names is a resistance not to their individual husbands. Maybe it’s resistance to a system that obliterates evidence of their earlier self and coldly sweeps their single friends away in the debris.

And I am. Single.

And I am: Perkins.

<3 mp

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“What type of milk would you like? We have nonfat, 2%, and whole milk!”
I always thought whole milk was 100%. Nonfat and low fat and reduced fat milk were 0% and 1% and 2%. And then whole milk was an indulgence of huge proportions. The word “whole” connotes 100% in my mind. I never much cared, but I did assume that I had to pick between two percent fat and one hundred percent fat. I recently learned that WHOLE MILK IS 3% FAT.

THAT’S THREE PERCENT, PEOPLE. NOT 100, NOT HERMIONE, 3.

Once I stopped to think about it: sure. 100% fat is probably butter. Sour cream. Obviously, milk is not actually one-hundred percent fat. But like, I just assumed.

I could write a whole article about that, except it would just be the equivalent of my gaping mouth. We really made such a fuss about one extra percent? Please, let me invite you to now, forever, select whole milk. As Michael Ruhlman notes in his book Grocery, if they take something out of a food, they have to put something in its place. If you choose to buy nonfat milk, you’re paying the dairy company to put water in your milk for you.

To make it taste worse.

To avoid one percent of fat.

Read more

I’m hoping to do them monthly, or more often, and I think I’m going to paywall them. Emmie, Teddy, and Emma, these are for you! haha

But this month’s will be free to all the people. Every one of you.

I wish bathroom sinks had one handle to turn the water on and a different handle to turn it off. Then the off handle would always be clean. Adjust the temperature with a separate lever or with the on-handle, I don’t care. But the off handle should be touched only after someone’s washed their hands. No germs.

AI has always made me uncomfortable. This billboard in San Francisco did not help. We’re already at “meant to be?”

AI uses massive amounts of water and energy. If you want to do your part to save a teaspoon of water, type “-ai” after putting a query into Google. That’s the hyphen key and then “ai.” It will keep Google from using AI to fetch your results. Tell those twerps at Google that we prefer a planet to quick answer! Of course, this will not save the planet, but it might make you feel better.

Avoid using AI. Do it. Granted, this is easy for me because I am a late adopter to all technology. And generally a hater towards all of it, too.

I was walking around Breckenridge with some friends last fall and one of them asked ChatGPT where we should eat lunch. I was appalled. What?? Why? Especially when Google Maps does exactly that?? I was so appalled that I WALKeD iNTo a stoRE and asked the clerk where we should eat. I talked to a stranger! To be stubborn! Put that phone away! This is how to search for good food: ask a human person with a stomach who has eaten the food you’re curious about! (Then, eat it not in your car.)

Speaking of travel, it's obnoxious to me how impossible it is to avoid watching movies that people next to you on a plane are watching. No matter how hard I try to look away, my eye flicks back automatically. It’s annoying.

Since writing about periods, I’ve been collecting evidence of female-forward period-related wins. Look: Free tampons at O’Hare!

Also, when I was researching something else, I found this article about how there’s very little consideration for menstruation in public bathroom design. It’s one of the first times I’ve heard about periods and design. I wrote about it here, wondering why there’s no infrastructure in private bathrooms for period products. I loved this! Cheers to Gail, Clara, and Jo-Anne!

Pre-Visit Radio Silence:
I’ve noticed that if I have a trip planned to see someone, I don’t talk to them for about a week beforehand. Subconsciously. Megan Garcia’s birthday was April 22, but I was going to see her May 1. I still haven’t told her happy birthday.

I learned from someone on Notes that anyone can have a JSTOR account with 100 free articles per month! All you need is an email.

I also learned from someone on Notes about this book and it exceeded all of my expectations. Rural south + memoir + exploring subjectivity + specific stories + girlhood? Yes please.

<3 perkins

In the music video for “Espresso,” Sabrina Carpenter spends two minutes dancing at the beach with other hot young people. With 37 seconds left, a pair of cops show up to arrest her; she stole a man’s credit card at the beginning of the video. The cops gently slam her onto the hood of their car, where she wriggles. They vaguely attempt to handcuff her, but not successfully enough to keep her from trilling a wave to the girlies as they shut her into the back seat. She kicks her heels up and sits, preening. The video ends. 

“Espresso” was the lead single for Carpenter’s album Short ‘n Sweet. The next single was called “Please Please Please.” Its video opens where “Espresso” left off: Carpenter is in jail and makes bail. While leaving, she sees a man she wants to date. The rest of the video follows their rocky relationship, as they rob a bank, beat up mobsters, etc. Or, rather, as he robs a bank, beats up mobsters, etc., and she sings that she wishes he was not the idiot she already knew he was.

I saw the video for “Espresso” shortly after it came out. I was discomfited by the cop scene. I saw the video for that second single, “Please Please Please,” when it came out. I was aghast that Carpenter had continued the bit into a second video. 

I shouldn’t have been. It’s not like the cops snuck into the first video accidentally. Even if she got joke-arrested in only one video, I would have things to say. Like, for example, please please please do not create a music video that makes me use the phrase “joke-arrested.”

Then Tate McRae had cops arrest her in her video for “It’s Okay, I’m Okay.” Then I found out Sabrina Carpenter “arrests” an audience member for “being too hot” at each show on her Short ‘n’ Sweet Tour. What is happening?

The little White girls are not alright.

The “Espresso” video is essentially about play. Playing with men’s hearts, playing on the beach, playing at getting arrested. Sabrina Carpenter opens the video driving a speedboat, and when the sole male passenger gets too annoying, she makes a sharp turn to fling him into the ocean. She grabs his wallet, drives the boat to shore, and flounces to the beach, where her dancers await. 

Over the next few minutes she plays at the beach. I remember in college thinking that the point of spring break was to look hot at the beach. Carpenter got that memo. She licks an ice cream cone, dances on a surfboard held by six men, dances for the six men with female backup dancers, and pays for all of this with the credit card from the discarded man’s wallet. She’s in a water-filled car, set up cute like a pool, when—oh no! The man she flung off the boat appears. He swam to shore and is pointing the cops in her direction. 

At this point, we’re going to slow down. We’re going to read every frame.

First, Carpenter turns her head, still singing the song, then widens her eyes when she sees the man talking to the cops. 

He turns, sees her, and points.

She places her hands over her eyes. If she can’t see them, maybe they can’t see her? 

The cops sprint towards the car-pool she’s in. Here, finally, something accurate! Cops taking a random white man at his word, sprinting to make sure he gets justice. The man struts behind the sprinting cops.

She peers through her fingers to see if her disappearing act worked. It didn’t.

The cops are in the frame but out of focus, doggedly sprinting. The camera focuses on the power-walking, justice-seeking man.

She covers her eyes again. Two male dancers turn their heads to see what’s going on.

Then, she sinks down into the pool. Her hiding skills have progressed from a three-year-old’s level to a . . . four-year-old’s?

It switches to a close-up shot of her singing. Reflected in her sunglasses is her Black backup dancer vehemently begging the police officer to let her go. Um. . . a white woman requiring a Black woman to sacrifice her energy and body for White safety? Wave hello to reality, for the second time in this video—a place where all too often, White women must be protected, and Black women are expendable.

The next shot is a close-up of Carpenter doing a reverse body roll with a hair toss. It is Carpenter getting slammed onto the hood of the car. It’s sensual. It’s gentle. Her head ends two inches above the hood, not even fake-hitting it.

The cop gives the man his credit card back.

Sabrina now rolls from her chest onto her back, still canted over the car hood, still underneath the cop, still upset with her face and sensual with her hips. Her swimsuit is wet underneath her inexplicably now-dry cover-up, highlighting her breasts and crotch.

The four female backup dancers argue with the cop.

Sabrina lies on her back on the hood, singing again, while the cop tries to grab her arms. 

Then she’s standing, resisting while he handcuffs her. She sings, “Isn’t that sweet? I guess so,” smiles at the camera, and shuffles away with the cop’s arm across her chest. 

As she is gently stuffed into the back seat of the cop car, she waves goodbye to her loyal dancers, shrugs, and puts her feet up on the front seat. This cop car has no cage! The handcuffs from the handsy cop are gone! Getting arrested is so silly!

Carpenter and her creative team chose the cop tropes on purpose: Being slammed onto a car hood. Being handcuffed. Being shoved into a cop car.

I’ve written myself in circles trying to argue that this is a problem. Logic should work here, right? But I haven’t yet been able to make an argument that stands up. I can’t assemble a syllogism that explains why a music video playing with cops is a moral issue. The only thing I’m still sure of is that Carpenter playing with cops made me feel uncomfortable. I wouldn’t do it. (Or so I thought, until I found that photo above. So let’s just say: I wouldn’t do it now.)

I assumed that learned distaste towards cops is now a well-established liberal norm, and I was confused when that norm was violated by a Famous White Girlie. 

I learned early on that my feminism must be intersectional. I know that white women have a long-established hand in racism. So my discomfort is not just judgement and disgust but also some form of identifying—an I thought we were better than that.

When Sabrina Carpenter plays with cops and forces her Black backup dancer to fight them on her behalf, I think—didn’t we all learn about intersectional feminism? Did you miss that day in class? 

And I kept writing, and I kept trying to make this a moral issue. I still couldn’t find traction for that argument. A music video is pretend. The cops in the video were fake. They didn’t cause any actual harm.

So I reluctantly set aside the issue of ethics and focused on my discomfort. If this video wasn’t wrong, but I felt uncomfy, what was left to me to say? I maneuvered my discomfort into understanding this video as an issue of poor taste. But that’s a weaker point to make. Taste is subjective. And used to judge others, often rudely. 

But regardless: I, a White woman, declare this to be tasteless.

Here’s Gene Grabiner, writing in the journal Social Justice, stating the obvious that still must be stated: “As we have seen so far, excessive force in policing is generally aimed at poor and working people, and it has a specific racial dimension. The police do seem to protect and serve middle-class communities—and the rich. Indeed, most middle-class white people have infrequent interactions with the police; and when they do, those encounters rarely result in criminal records, incarceration, or police violence. Moreover, it is undeniable that the epidemic of police and vigilante shootings and killings clearly targets black males.”

One more, in honor of proving that White women can research police violence on the way to forming critical thought: In an article in Contexts, researchers Kramer, Remster, and Charles analyzed police incidents with civilians in New York City. They found that “Black people are more likely than Whites to be subject to police violence—regardless of whether they are doing anything illegal, the time of day, their height, their age, their gender, their behavior during the stop, the police justification for the stop. . .” etc. Also, Black women are more likely than White women to experience police use of force.

Playing with the idea of police in America says to people of color, “I don’t have to care about this thing you have to care about.” More specifically, “I get to treat something as light and silly that you have to take seriously.” Black parents in America often train their children how to interact with police. I am White. My parents never gave me a talk about cops.

At one point when I was writing, I was arguing that Sabrina Carpenter’s Black fans shouldn’t have to watch their favorite pop star make light of police violence. And honestly, I still think that. Granted, I usually side with inoffensiveness over being provocative; I’ll contort myself to avoid the margin of the edge of the possibility of hurting someone’s feelings. This is not always useful. But in this context, isn’t it? The Espresso video isn’t offering anything profound. You could cut the cops, change the plot to anything else, and still end up with hot people having fun in the sun. 

But still. I keep bumping up against myself. It’s me that feels uncomfortable playing around with cops. It seems like it’s just me. This writer called the video “feminist.” This writer focused more on description than analysis, only hinting at the strangeness of the police plot.

Here I am, writing about White, female music videos. This is rather specific, especially considering the copaganda of larger-reaching media like the limitless roster of scripted police TV shows. But “Espresso” is bothering me in a different way. And I think it’s because I feel like white-girl music videos are, theoretically, at least, for me. 

In her TED Talk, Niya Picket-Miller says that race “is a significant social construct. It’s a communication tool. We’ve all used it to categorize people.” And although the “White race” is invented (see Nell Painter’s The History of White People), Picker-Miller’s point stands, because we live in the world that invented it. When I cringe at play-cops in “Espresso,” I am using race to categorize myself and Sabrina Carpenter in the same group: White women. Holders of (some) power. 

Police are power. And only a White singer would be arrested for sillies in a music video. Only someone who has never faced police violence, has never feared police violence. Cops appear in the music of Black artists, but often as protest rather than play. See Kendrick Lamar, Beyonce, H.E.R., Childish Gambino, and more.

In Carpenter’s fifties (sixties?) wonderland, you steal a credit card and use it to pay for beachside massages. You get arrested and giggle. You ignore the fact that in the actual sixties, the Black beachgoers would have been kept from the beach or beaten for attempting to visit the ocean. 

I cannot see police as a vintage aesthetic. Police are not a neutral way to represent power, not in America. When I see police, I see this and this and this. I know too much. I thought we knew too much. I wanted the little White girlies to be better than this.

Everyone can’t care about everything, sure. Sabrina Carpenter is not who I go to for wisdom about racism in America. But if your music video is just a neon sign announcing your White privilege, it’s distracting. I would say dismissive.

And definitely tasteless. 

Here’s the thing. The Black community has a long history of advocating against racist police violence. In The Fire Next Time, published in 1962, James Baldwin wrote, “For the horrors of the American Negro’s life there has been almost no language. The privacy of his experience [...] is denied or ignored in official and popular speech” (69). What is a music video, if not “popular speech?” I don’t want Baldwin’s words from sixty years ago to still be true. In recent years, especially since the national protests against racism in 2012 and 2020, the violence of cops towards people of color has moved into wider view. White-er view. And yet, we still get White pop girlies playing with cops for fun.

Discussing trigger warnings in Bad Feminist, Roxane Gay writes, “I don’t believe in safety. I wish I did. [...] When I see trigger warnings, I don’t feel safe. [...] Instead, I am surprised that there are still people who believe in safety and protection despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.” (152-3). Sabrina Carpenter feels safe. This video is a paean to feeling White and invincible.  

And yet. When I was in high school, a cop pulled over one of my White female friends on a back road at night and said, “I could do anything I wanted to you right now, and no one would know.” White women may be more safe from police than Black people, but they are not fully safe. I, too, am surprised that there are still people who believe in safety.

The question of how to maintain order in America has many answers, few of them plausible, none of them easy. Many people smarter than me have written about this. It’s something our nation will be working on for decades. But in the meantime, I don’t think it’s too much to ask pop singers to avoid making light of something so dark. 

There is very little power in saying what I’m spending this article saying, which is essentially: “Ew, Sabrina.”

But as Claire Dederer says in Monsters, when we wonder what to do with certain artists and their work, when we think about boycotting, we’re “putting ourselves into a static role—the role of consumer. Passing the problem on to the consumer is how capitalism works. A series of decisions is made—decisions that are not primarily concerned with ethics—and then the consumer is left to figure out how to respond, how to parse the correct and ethical way to behave” (238). I am not saying to avoid Sabrina Carpenter. When I watched “Espresso,” I got the ick. I thought that as I wrote about it, I would find issues with the ethics of the thing. But sometimes, it isn’t a question of morals but a question of vibes. 

I’m not here to prescribe consumer behavior. Watch Sabrina Carpenter’s videos or don’t. I wrote about her music video because it made me feel things. It made me feel the opposite of what it wanted me to feel. I poked around that, I found some thoughts.

I declare, with the power vested in me by my thoughtful Whiteness, that the vibes of “Espresso” did hereby fail the girlie test, in violation of the code requiring intersectional feminism and a solid understanding of the role of racism in America’s past and present. 

I am White. And I am cringing. And I would like to say this: Thou shalt not play with cops.

1962:

“[A]ll policemen have by now, for me, become exactly the same, and my style with them is designed simply to intimidate them before they can intimidate me. No doubt I am guilty of some injustice here, but it is irreducible, since I cannot risk assuming that the humanity of these people is more real to them than their uniforms. Most Negroes cannot risk assuming that the humanity of white people is more real to them than their color. And this leads, imperceptible but inevitably, to a state of mind in which, having long ago learned to expect the worst, one finds it very easy to believe the worst. The brutality with which Negroes are treated in this country simply cannot be overstated, however unwilling white men may be to hear it.” 

James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time, 68.

2015:

“Black people comprise 13 percent of the U.S. population. And yet, in 2015, Black bodies accounted for at least 26 percent of those killed by police. Unarmed black bodies [...] are about twice as likely to be killed as unarmed White bodies.” 

Ibram X. Kendi, How to Be an Anti-Racist, 73.

I moved to Birmingham for college. Birmingham, as in Alabama. Till then, I had lived in Tulsa, Oklahoma, for my entire life.

I was seventeen. I was young.

When I got there, I realized: I had never been to the South before.

Birmingham is Deep South. BBQ restaurants serving white bread for free in baskets before the food comes, monogrammed initials on t-shirts and backpacks and rain jackets and backs of cars, White people south of the mountain Black people north of the mountain, segregation by neighborhood and topography Deep South.

It was new. I had grown up in Oklahoma, which, if anything, was Texas-adjacent, and though no one doubted Texas was included in “the South,” no one would have doubted that Texas considered itself superior to the general region. Texans considered Texas to be one of one, which made Oklahoma two of none. Unimportant.

If you’d asked me what region Oklahoma was in back then, I might have said the South. I’m not sure. But once I got to Birmingham, I learned that Oklahoma was nowhere near The South, culturally or on a map.

The people were different—softer and warmer and strange. The land was different—hilly and humid and green. Chicken salad was a food group. Words had an extra one or three syllables. Kind adults would meet you and offer “dinner and a warm bed.”

On t-shirts with images of the South, of which there were many, because the South is proud of itself as a region, Oklahoma was always excluded. There would be an Oklahoma-shaped hole in the graphic. Texas was included, Arkansas was included, every state all the way east to Florida, but Oklahoma was left out. Sometimes they’d put the words in that little Oklahoma-shaped hole. My home was reduced to a canvas for bragging about the region that didn’t want to claim it. Ow.

When you’re a little baby new to college, you’re swimming on what everyone else says is solid ground. Where do I put my feet? Where have my feet been for the past seventeen years when I didn’t have to think about them at all? I could recognize an Oklahoma license plate from fifty yards away. I sat alone at breakfast restaurants watching Oklahoma football because the Big 12 was high school football compared to the SEC. I learned my way around a city whose roads weren’t a grid. I found the only cheap donut shop and went twice a week.

I made it work.

But I never stopped wondering where Oklahoma was.

Where had I lived?

In February of 2020, I moved to Chicago. I am a proud permanent resident of central time zone, the most humble time zone, home not only to Tulsa but also to Birmingham and Chicago.

But I was in a new region: the Midwest.

People in the Midwest say “ope.” They have at least five family members in Ohio or Michigan or both. They eat scotcharoos and keep snow tires.

I love the Midwest. I love Chicago.

But ask any self-respecting Midwesterner, and they will tell you that Oklahoma is the West, or the South, or nothing—but it’s certainly not Midwest. I had someone tell me only part of Missouri was Midwest, they didn’t even want the whole thing. Kansas is included, but only as an afterthought.

Oklahoma, though?

No chance.

Back in the day, Europeans bobbed across the Atlantic, landed on land, and called it “discovery.” People already lived here, of course. Europeans called them “savages” and loaded their rifles.

This began in Virginia, Florida, New York. Places that had other names before, in languages besides English. 1492, 1619, 1776, and on and on. Power craves land and churns through people to get it.

In 1830, Andrew Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act, forcing Native Americans to walk dozens and hundreds of miles west to probably die from exposure on the journey but potentially survive to live in a small lot set aside west of the Mississippi: Indian Territory.

Yes: The federal government genocided thousands of people into a rocky, hilly, flat bit of land that no one wanted. Well, no one at the time; if they’d known about the oil under the red dirt, they’d have hoarded resources even harder. The states of the union continued to form around this hole—Missouri in 1821, then Texas, then west to Nevada and Colorado in 1864 and 1876. Roughly, the states become states from east to west. Except Oklahoma.

It took me a while to put these puzzle pieces together. Oklahoma isn’t no-man’s-land and region-less because of an accident. It’s no-man’s-land because Native Americans were no-men, were not people: they were savages. “Savages.”

The White man wanted to rule. They removed the Native Americans from their land. They also wrecked their language and customs, which you can read about here. To the White man, land was power. To the Native Americans, land was home, something to work with and care for. When I see things like fracking and creeks buried into culverts, it’s easy to wish that the ocean swallowed all the colonizers’ ships and that the bison still ran and ran and ran across states that never existed and lines that were never drawn. It’s easy to wish guns and barbed wire and also the inventions I love hadn’t marched from east to west. I wouldn’t have been born, sure. But the prairie would still be alive.

Regions are often defined by geographical features. The Great Lakes. The Rocky Mountains.

If we tried this with Oklahoma, its region would be “the Great Plains.”

The Great Plains ecosystem was destroyed for agriculture. Agriculture and towns and cities. The Great Plains are great no more; they largely are no more. The prairie used to be buffeted with wind and burned with wildfire and bright with wildflowers trampled by bison.

You can consume a prairie and turn it into money.

You can call people “savages” and force them onto land you don’t want.

Oklahoma could have been in the Great Plains region: North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma. Maybe Iowa. North Texas, if we’re feeling generous.

The Great Plains.

But it’s not.

Oklahoma is nowhere.

Further Reading

This article barely touched on the genocide of Native Americans. For a full exploration, try The Rediscovery of America. I haven’t read it, but I think it’s the tome for this.

One of the best books ever written is about Oklahoma. If you don’t know what the phrase “land run” means, buy Boom Town. If you do know what the phrase “land run” means, you have even more reason to buy it.

More Great Plains literature: The Round House, My Antonia, Killers of the Flower Moon, and Love is a Wild Assault (out of print, find it on eBay).

The closing sentence, “Oklahoma is nowhere,” references Ralph Ellison’s essay “Harlem is Nowhere,” which you can find in this remarkable collection of his essays. Ralph Ellison grew up in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma.

After writing that sentence, I started re-reading “Harlem is Nowhere.” You should go read the whole essay—read every essay in the collection, actually—because some of what he says about Black Americans fits tongue-and-groove into what this essay says about Native Americans and Oklahoma. I picked a quote that you can read in both directions. Remarkable. It’s upsetting, how racism applies its illogic and violence so consistently across different groups of people.

Ladies and gentleman, Ralph Ellison:

“For this is a world in which the major energy of the imagination goes not into creating works of art, but to overcome the frustrations of social discrimination. Not quite citizens and yet Americans, full of the tensions of modern man but regarded as primitives, [Negro] /or/ [Native] Americans are in desperate search for an identity. Rejecting the second-class status assigned them, they feel alienated and their whole lives have become a search for answers to the questions: Who am I, What am I, Why am I, and Where?” (Shadow and Act, 297).

And it’s not because I wasn’t a math girlie in high school, not because I majored in English and love to read. Math-and-science vs. reading-and-art is a false binary. And I’d guess that for most people, it tracks back to which teachers were competent and skilled and made them feel seen and smart. But anyway.

I don’t think numbers communicate much that’s interesting.

Ask me how many books I read last year. I know the number, but I’d dodge the question.

Generally, we understand that a high number is impressive. Say, fifty books. But is that impressive? What if I only read Ivy and Bean?

Generally, a low number is less impressive. Say, five books. But what if the five books were The Count of Monte Cristo, The Power Broker, Infinite Jest, War and Peace, and Anna Karenina?

If the total number of books wasn’t informative enough, you could break the number into smaller units. How many pages did you read last year? Ivy and Bean is 120 pages. If you read fifty Ivy and Bean books, that’s 6,000 pages. The five chunky books I listed above are 5,966 pages total. Well, okay. Ivy and Bean wins again.

So that didn’t work either! Most people would consider the five really long books to be more impressive. Ivy and Bean is smaller, and there’s pictures. Also, there’s only twelve books total in the series, so to read them four times each would be strange.

You can chop the numbers smaller and smaller, but you’d be wasting your time. If you wanted to talk about books, just talk about books.

Numbers invite comparison.

I don't think comparison is helpful all that often.

We talk about numbers like they tell us something objective.

Say we found out I read more than you. More books, more pages, whatever. What would that tell us?

Honestly? That I have more time than you? That my job is less busy, that I don’t have kids, that I choose to read instead of choosing to do anything else?

I’m happy to point that out. These numbers don’t matter! They don’t measure anything meaningful!

But I’d rather skip the counting. I don’t want to tell you how many books I read. I don’t care how many books you read, unless you care and you want me to say I’m proud of you. I’m happy to, truly. But so often, in conversation, numbers create tension.

I prefer harmony.

Conversation is creative. Collaborative. I don’t want to sound impressive. I don’t want to talk to someone who’s trying to sound impressive. I want to create something. I want to give and receive. I want to know what you care about. I want to compare notes on the wild winds of the world.

Superlatives are like numbers—numbers in language. A superlative is anything with “-est” after or “most” before: smartest, cleanest, prettiest.

Everyone understands that superlatives are not used literally. Someone brings you coffee, you tell them they’re the nicest person on earth. You have a best friend and another best friend in another city and another best friend who’s your sister. We use superlatives in ways that are numerically impossible but fit the situations of reality.

I’m comfortable with this. I think it makes sense. It’s low-stakes. I am able to translate people’s use of a superlative as friendly enthusiasm—I, who notoriously take everything literally.

The problem with numbers is that they give the aura of literal truth, of objectivity. We know that higher numbers are better for most things—football, social media followers, income. Fewer is better if you’re playing social solitaire, or golf, or looking at a scale before you’re read Fat Talk.

More things can be measured now than ever before. The abundance of number-data leads us to think that whatever numbers measures must matter. And so often, it doesn’t.

I don’t remember how many Instagram followers I had before I deleted my Instagram. It was 2015, so it was before half the people you knew had a few thousand. It was the beginning of everything in our life becoming quantifiable, the year Spotify launched the first iteration of Spotify Wrapped. There’s numbers everywhere, and sometimes they’re interesting! I’ve linked Invisible Women in my writing more than almost any other book, and it’s about how data shows us how inequitable the world is.

But sometimes numbers distract us from what actually matters.

And math was hard for me growing up.

So this is a reminder, from your friendly neighborhood bookseller, to be suspicious of numbers.

One more thing—asking someone their “favorite [something]” is a temptingly easy question. But it’s pretty hard to answer, and that’s because it asks for a pure, literal superlative.

“What’s your favorite movie?” is a hard question. The more someone cares about movies, the harder it is.

One question I ask instead is “What surprised you about [this thing you care about]?” It’s more specific and thus easier to answer. There’s also the more-general-but-still-not-as-tricky-as-favorite “What’s a [movie/book/song/part of your job] you love and why?”

Those will get you to the core of conversations faster: ideas, creativity, passion.

And they’ll keep you far, far away from numbers <3

-mp

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Once upon a time, a little white girl found Bad Feminist in a bookstore in Aspen. Yes, Aspen. A very white place, and not because of the snow.

She had just learned that feminism wasn’t a bad thing in Dr. Julie Steward’s literary theory class, a class that increased her empathy by at least 15%.

If the church taught literary theory, she thought, Christians would be actually empathetic and much less defensive. 

Simultaneously, someone decided that Christians should fight critical race theory with a well-organized moral panic. The dusty ideas that had sat peacefully in English classrooms since the seventies were pulled into sermons and labeled as the next weapon of Destroying All Things Right and Good. 

She was me, and I was confused. 

At that time I did not have this Substack, with its many millions of followers, nor did I have another platform or griddle on which to roast this strange and disturbing development.

But thankfully, earlier that year, I had found Bad Feminist. I had read it. I had received my bullshit immunization.

Writing is powerful and reading is powerful.

Marginalized people are kept from power: oppression.

Oppressors have always controlled writing and reading as a crucial way to hoard power.

Thus the act of writing as a marginalized person is powerful. Thus reading books written by marginalized people is a privilege.

It is no mistake that James, which at its top level tells the story of the slave who fled with Huckleberry Finn, is at a deeper level a novel about exercising authorship. To write is to study the most interesting parts of your own mind, and to publish your writing is to share your most powerful thoughts at scale.  

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To write is to study the most interesting parts of your own mind, and to publish is to share your thoughts in their most persuasive form at scale.

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To write is to study the most interesting parts of your own mind, to edit is to shape your messy thoughts into their most persuasive form, and to publish is to share at scale. And though there is power in each step, it’s publication that allows one person’s thoughts to reach thousands of people. Publishing preserves thoughts, so you can read something written by someone long dead, which makes reading a kind of time travel. 

And traveling back to 2016, in that bookstore in Aspen, I bought Bad Feminist, and it changed my life.

So you must start with Bad Feminist. Even though it came out ten years ago. Even though there’s many other, more recent, essay collections you want to read. You must start with Bad Feminist, because all the essay collections since Bad Feminist were created in reference and debt to Bad Feminist. Roxane Gay wrote about the intersectional experience of being Black, female, and queer in the United States. She wrote about violence and gender and pop culture and power. She wrote fifteen paragraphs about Orange is the New Black that are a stronger seed of wisdom and nuance than the entire self-help section of a suburban Barnes & Noble.

There are parts of my mind and my wisdom that are inextricable from what I learned in Bad Feminist. So that is where you will start. And once you finish, if you want Roxane Gay’s commentary on more recent happenings, Opinions is there for you. If you want Roxane Gay to compile 29 essays by other writers about rape culture, Not That Bad is there for you. But Bad Feminist is where you must start.

After Bad Feminist, you will read Hunger. Not immediately after. That may destroy you. But you will read Hunger after, certainly. 

The first time I read Hunger I wasn’t someone who bought books for myself. I didn’t know why independent bookstores mattered. The first time I read Hunger, I was visiting my older sister, and I pulled it off the shelf and started. After my second or third visit reading what I could while I was there, I left a bookmark in my spot. The book was destroying me and rebuilding me and I read it one hammer, one brick at a time. 

I cannot tell you anything about Hunger. Except that it is required.

In case you’re in the mood for fiction now, I’ll jump to a middle grade book. I saw this book had “Birmingham” in the title and a Newberry Honor medal on the cover and I snatched it to the top of my TBR. 

It’s The Watsons Go to Birmingham—1963.

Turns out, it’s delightful. Kenny is the middle child, and his sibling relationships feel real, from bickering to cookie-throwing to saving each others’ lives. There’s character transformation in every chapter, starting with Kenny making a friend, continuing through a serious talk with his dad and running around with his older brother. These small pieces of growth work together so that the ~event~ in Birmingham feels totally earned. Remarkable.

We’ll stay in fiction, but we’ll return to the themes we encountered in Roxane Gay’s work—race, gender, violence, and growth. Meet The Color Purple.

I knew nothing about this book before starting it. The movie was about to come out and I knew it was a classic so I read it. Alice Walker’s mastery of the craft of writing is at the level where you’re convinced she was born with the ability to print perfection straight out of her brain on the first try. Like. Logically I know she has to “try” and “edit” and put forth “effort,” but when I’m reading it, it feels effortless. 

The novel is epistolary. Like James, The Color Purple is another book that explores the importance of authorship. Letters are a way to share a specific sentiment with a specific person; in The Color Purple, Celie writes the letters to God and then switches and begins writing them to a character. The book stares unflinchingly at violence, but every bit is shunted down lovingly-designed paths towards character transformation and, dare I say, redemption. It’s like the ocean, or a shooting star: it must be experienced to be believed.

Back to nonfiction!

Clint Smith is another Black author who controls both individual words and overall structure with incredible finesse. In How the Word is Passed, he studies how slavery is remembered today at seven places where slavery happened in the past. The structure is simple—one location per chapter. Then, a few chapters in, I realized that his supplemental research moved chronologically, a second level of scaffolding strengthening his text. I can only imagine how much work went into the writing’s tone—he talked about how he felt in so many heavy moments, but never let indignation dominate the logic or feel of the writing. His tone was curious, gentle, and the work was stronger for it. I was so impressed for so many reasons.

Next, buy anything by Ross Gay. He’s a friend of Clint Smith, for what it’s worth. I read A Book of (More) Delights, which was precious and sharp and perfect. Gay wrote down things that delighted him every day for a year. Then he only used 81 for the book, which I found surprising and very clever. This process of selection, I’m sure, enabled my second surprise: each delight goes somewhere, it “essays” in the original sense of the word. He writes deeply into the everyday, deep enough to find the profound, the connection between one thing and everything else. His poet’s discipline in selecting detail shines through—each scene is bright and each digression trimmed (or lengthened!) perfectly. There’s lots of run-on sentences, which only sometimes got confusing—rarely enough that I was happy to blame myself and push through. Ha.

Lastly, for now, is Thick. First you ought to read this article, which wasn’t included in the book for some unknown reason. Then you may read. And read. And photograph multiple pages because you are on a plane and forgot your pencil. Not to brag, but my copy is an ARC (advanced reader copy), which Megan found and gave to me before I knew who Tressie McMillan Cottom even was. Before I knew she was best friends with Roxane Gay. It’s an icon, an artifact, and it’s all mine.

My two favorite essays from this are “In the Name of Beauty” and “The Price of Fabulousness.” I cannot say anything else because if I open the book I won’t put it back down, which happened earlier when I was writing about Hunger. Actually, let’s trade: I send you this article, and then I get to go open Thick and not close it.

It’s January 31st. Your TBR is now stacked. 

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Books go on the counter. Sweaters and laptops and boxes of cookies go on the counter.

Cups go on the Counter, unless you’re sitting on the Floor and will be finished with the cup right after, in which case the cup may go on the Floor, as long as you take the cup immediately to the sink once you get up.

At which point you will also dust off your pants, because they were on the Floor.

Feet go on the Floor. Feet do not go on the Counter.

Before I get in bed, I rub the bottoms of my feet together, hanging them off the edge of the mattress, so Floor debris doesn’t get in my bed. Is it more imaginary than effective?

I do not care. The Floor is off.

Megan showed me a TikTok years ago of someone’s dad doing the exact same foot-dusting motion on his way into bed. That man is the intended audience for this article. The enlightened.

But also, this is for the unenlightened.

Floor items may not travel through Counter airspace. For example. If you have a dog toy (Floor) in your hand, you may not hold it above a Counter. It has Floor on it and could drop Floor onto Counter. And Floor and Counter may not cross.

Another example. You are lying on the ground. You have on socks. You would not take your socks off over your face, probably because you are not that flexible. The secondary reason (or my primary reason) is that Floor might shed onto your face.

“My floor is not that dirty,” you think.

Floor is not a state of fact, it is an ethos.

More accurately: this is how I conceive of things; this is my writing. I do not care about your floor. I do not care if you agree with me. Unless I’m on your Floor.

There is a complication. Or, more likely, an intermediary:

The hard chair.

A hard chair may accept both floor items and counter items. You may briefly put shoes on a hard chair while you run the vacuum. You may put books and binders on a hard chair while you organize your table. A hard chair is where Floor and Counter come together.

But only on Hard Chair.

A pluffy chair, or a wooden chair with an attached cushion, or the swivel bamboo chair with a cushy white seat I stole from Reble—these accept Counter items only.

There’s a trend that puts stadium seating indoors. My darling alma mater just implemented it in the new student center:

This is sleek. It’s casual. It can hold a large range of people.

Look! Northwestern’s fancy MBA building did it too! Off to the left, see:

Cute!

But this design violates the rules of Counter and Floor.

Look again at the Samford picture. Where that couple’s feet are, someone will soon come sit. Where the couple currently sits, someone’s feet have just been. When a coffee cup or phone is set on this seating, it touches Floor. Then it continues to move through the world as though it is a Counter item.

We must take a stand.

Sometimes don’t sit on stadium seating.

I didn’t say it was much of a stand.

But at least it’s a stand with my feet on the Floor.

If you just need more to read, check out my previous cleanliness article, which is about trash cans </3

If you want to read one of my least popular articles, the one I wrote when I got my new computer and suddenly created better habits is still here <3

There’s no dramatic middle or end to this story. It’s not a TV episode. I suffered. I tried to limit my trips to the bathroom and stay by my desk so I could answer the phone for them. It’s not that interesting. 

But what is interesting to me is this: every story about my period involves not only me handling physical illness but also me hiding it. 

My boss could have stepped in and taken the calls. He would have, actually; he was that kind of man—helpful and trustworthy. Then I could have gone home. I was sick. 

Yet as I type that, I know that I would never have explained what I needed. I may have wanted a bed, but I needed to get my work done.

No, wait—that’s backwards.

I didn’t see my pain as something to be cared for. I still don’t; I’m cringing right now as I even consider the possibility of asking for help at work for period pain. 

I was on my period, therefore I hid my pain. 

It’s a fallacy so common it tastes like logic and like truth.

If there were more period stories in media, then maybe we’d tell more period stories in our lives. If we shared more period stories in our lives, maybe there’d be more period stories in media. Give me both, and maybe there’d be fewer people hiding in pain. Here’s Maisie Hill, the author of Period Power: “We need to share our stories because it’s conversations that will keep moving the menstrual movement forward. The more we talk about our experiences and issues, the less they can be ignored” (7).

Periods involve blood and cramps and exhaustion. They also have an internal layer—I must manage my pain, my nausea, my mood swings, and I must maintain my employment and personal relationships while doing so. Like I wrote last month, periods are perfect for fiction. But they’re actually reality.

A few months ago, I was looking at the pile of tampon boxes in my bathroom. One was on the window sill, which you can reach from the toilet, and another was on the floor in front of the toilet. 

And I realized: periods are not included in bathroom design. 

The defining feature of a menstrual product is that you need to be able to access a diversity of options while sitting on the toilet. Toilet paper, the other thing you need to be able to access while sitting on the toilet, always has a dispenser, right within reach. But there’s no equivalent piece of technology or design to have tampons or pads right by the toilet.

We know from Invisible Women and also from being alive in the world that the world is designed as though men are the default human being. Men have historically designed more things and gotten more funding for their designs than women.

Until that day in my bathroom, I hadn’t ever imagined menstrual product holders, but once I did, this omission in functional design seemed so obvious. Many toilets aren’t near a shelf or counter. Period products shouldn’t have to go on the floor. You shouldn’t have to waddle across your own bathroom trying not to drip blood on your bath mat just to get a pad.

In-home menstrual product holders!

I mostly imagine these holders being used in home bathrooms. They could be removable, where you stash them in a drawer when you’re not on your period, or they could be permanent. In case your friend needs a tampon!

Someone, please make these.

Speaking of things being designed for women, a few years ago, I discovered the period disc. It changed my life.

Teddy had me try a period cup at some point in 2019, and I used it a few times. I got used to pushing my finger up my vagina with the little cup, and I tried it for a few months, but overall I didn’t really like it.

Later, I heard about period discs. I bought a box of disposable ones and tried them. I got used to it. I fell in love. I switched to a silicone aka reusable option. I haven’t looked back.

Here’s the thing: You don’t feel a disc when it’s in. You barely have to mess with it. It empties itself when you pee! It sounds like magic, but it’s real.

A disc holds the the equivalent of four to seven tampons.

Twice each day—once in the morning, again at night—you remove it, rinse it out, then put it back in. At the end of your cycle, boil it in water on the stove. That’s it!

No guessing what tampon size you need. No getting a pad stuck or un-stuck. No thick cottony feeling when you walk because your tampon is too big. No switching products every two hours. No trash.

People also claim that discs reduce cramps. I think this is anecdotal rather than scientific, but it’s me! I am the anecdotes. The idea is that if your pelvic muscles are cramping, and you have a tampon in your vagina, the muscles are crowded and cramp worse. Or something. The disc, on the other hand, sits at the base of your cervix, and your body has more room to contract and get your uterine lining out. Or something. Anecdotal. But maybe!

The disc journey:

1. Buy these discs. I love that there’s a disposable version of discs, so you can buy one box and try out the system. You don’t have to commit to a reusable silicone one unless they work for you.

2. Wash your hands before inserting one. Duh, but also, I have to say it.

3. Read the instructions and try one out. One of my biggest issues with new period products is that when I’m on my period I absolutely, positively do not feel like trying something new. I’d recommend waiting until the middle of your cycle, when you still have a consistent flow, but you’re in less pain.

   1. If you’re in severe pain for your entire cycle, you might have PMDD, and you should talk to a gynecologist who is familiar with it and will take care of you. You could also get tested for PCOS, endometriosis, la la la. It takes an average of ten years for women to receive a diagnosis of endometriosis in the United States. DO NOT SUFFER NEEDLESSLY.

4. Expect it to leak a bit the first few times you use it. Wear a liner or period undies.

5. Some people have to tuck the disc back up behind their pubic bone after each time they pee. That’s fine! I don’t; it just goes back into place on its own.

Eventually, if you love it like I did, you’ll need a reusable one. I’ve had this one for almost two years and it’s great. It’s the first one I tried, but there’s other brands you can try if it doesn’t work for you.

There’s some research about women’s bodies, but not nearly enough. Often, researchers exclude women from studies because the hormonal shifts of our monthly cycles complicate the data more than they care to sort out. Often, men have the positions of power that decide how research dollars are allocated, so male-centered health issues get the funding, and female problems like dysmenorrhea (the medical term for period pain) are dismissed as inconsequential. Read it and weep.

But today, a story about hiding my pain, a way to un-hide menstrual products, and all the deets on the best menstrual product out there.

Stories matter. Stories change minds.

Periods matter. Because people matter. And people have periods.

Below, I’ve linked my other two articles about periods. Thank you to everyone who shared them, chatted with me about them, and more! Since starting these pieces earlier this fall, I’ve found that I’m so much more comfortable talking about periods in real life. I’ve polled people to see if anyone else can think of non-male-adjacent periods in media, and I’ve chatted cycle syncing with male and female friends, but I still haven’t been able to ask for accommodations for period pain when I’m experiencing it. Maybe next month!

Period article #1: Where are all the periods?

Period article #2: It’s a good story, period.

I will always argue that what we pay attention to indicates what we value. Why are we paying so much attention to pretend murder? Why aren’t we talking about periods?

Okay. So we don’t tell many period stories, and the stories we do tell don’t have range. Today, though, something more fun: Here’s a few of my favorite times periods were not ignored!

Periods in Music

These are the two best articles listing songs about periods. In the latter, Beulah Devaney says, “I have a lot of affection for songs devoted to menstruation, periods, and PMS. In a world that’s constantly deeming periods gross and shameful, any track that free bleeds over the music industry is an instant classic in my eyes.” There still aren’t many options—you might listen to all of them and not find one in your preferred genre—but listening to them as an intellectual exercise even just once through is interesting.

Here’s a playlist on Spotify that compiled some of the best period songs, many of which are mentioned in the articles above. A few of the most noteworthy:

• Mary J. Blige’s “PMS,” which is everything you want it to be, perhaps the ultimate period song in that I would actually want to listen to it when I’m on my period shuffling from the kitchen to the couch

• Dolly Parton’s “PMS Blues:” Yee-haw comes for periods and I have never broken a dish on purpose but now I kind of want to

• “100 Tampons” by Marcia Belsky, which is about NASA and that’s all I’m going to say because listening to it for the first time knowing nothing is a delight. I immediately added this to my Weird Jams playlist

• “Crimson Wave” by Tacocat, a surf-pop bop that has the goofiest beach-themed music video and a peppy, friendly vibe

Periods in TV

I told you it was coming last week: This is single instance of a regular-month period being used as a plot device in any media that I could think of. Find it on Netflix—it’s South Korea’s hit show, The Extraordinary Attorney Woo.

In The Extraordinary Attorney Woo, the main character Woo Young-woo is a new attorney at a law firm. She works in a cohort of four young professionals: her female coworker Choi, an annoying male lawyer, a kind male paralegal, and herself.

> Scene <

Coworker Choi’s boss tells her to go wedding dress shopping with the annoying male lawyer to snoop for a case. She asks if she can go with the cute, kind paralegal instead. It’s awkward, but shoot your shot, I guess, and it works—her boss says yes.

I was worried. Our main gal Woo and the cutie paralegal are supposed to end up together, I could just tell, and trying on wedding dresses together would be a great way to speed up their relationship’s development. Choi, girl, get out of Woo’s way!

But then, Choi is sidelined by stomach cramps.

She

has started

her period.

Choi made it all the way to the wedding dress shop before ducking into a bathroom stall in the building and getting stuck there.

The ambiguity of that is exactly right. Is she stuck until she gets a tampon? Is she stuck because she needs to poop intermittently for the next half hour? Is she stuck because a bathroom is the only place she can hide from the social inappropriateness of showing period pain? I don’t know, but she’s stuck!

Choi asks Woo to go to her apartment and bring her new pants. Eventually, she realizes that she can’t feel better fast enough, or she doesn’t have clean work clothes, or both, and she resignedly tells Woo to go fake wedding dress shopping/snooping in her place. Woo gets all dressed up in a wedding dress, and the cute, kind paralegal realizes that he’s a simp for her.

Choi, still stuck in the bathroom, overhears the store’s staff discussing a secret. Which helps crack the whole case later. Then she changes into the pajama pants from Woo and goes home. At the end of the episode, the law team goes to a super fancy restaurant to celebrate, and Choi orders porridge because, cramps.

Being at work while on your period! Having something you’re excited about ruined! Enlisting help from a (usually female) coworker! This is how you do periods in TV shows!

Because this is how you do periods in real life.

Thank you, Moon Ji-Won. You have proven my theory that periods are conducive to moving forward a plot. May you have every success in your future screenwriting and general life endeavors.

Periods in Sports, etc.

Last week, I mentioned that celebrities don’t talk about their periods. That’s why I was surprised and excited when I read this ESPN interview with Mikaela Shiffrin in 2023:

If Shiffrin wins two slaloms in Spindleruv Mlyn, Czech Republic, this weekend, she could match Stenmark on Sunday.

“Technically, it is possible,” Shiffrin said with a laugh. “We’ll see if I can put the energy on my slalom skis for two more races.

“It’s been busy, and I am in a kind of an unfortunate time of my monthly cycle, so I’m more tired right now. We just normalized talking about that,” she added.

The interview with Shiffrin is longer and talks about other things, namely skiing. At the time of the interview, she was on the verge of beating Ingemar Stenmark’s record for the most World Cup wins by an alpine skier ever. But I remembered the interview because of her comment about her period. And her justification for saying so: “We just normalized talking about that.” Yes! Yes. You just did.

There was a woman named Kiran Gandhi who ran the London marathon without a tampon in and bled on her leggings. She wrote an article about it. She still does period advocacy; she’s also a musician and looks super cool. Her website led me to this article, a brief but interesting index of celebrities talking about their periods.

Periods in Nonfiction

I referenced both of these books in the last post. I’m only halfway through Maisie Hill’s Period Power, but so far so good. Invisible Women is is remarkable; it’s about women’s health at a system-level. And if you know you’re aren’t likely to read either book soon but like audio, check out 28ish Days Later, a well-researched BBC podcast. The episodes are fifteen minutes and each features various stories and experts and parts of life and I really enjoyed it.

Finally, Maddy commented this on my last post: “There’s an episode of This American Life from a few weeks ago called ‘How Are You Not Seeing This?’ that involves people trying out a period cramp simulator and it is surprisingly very emotional, highly recommend.”

I listened to it and she was completely right. Start at minute six!

To see other media—legends like Are You There, God, It’s Me, Margaret? and a new middle grade book called Free Period—check out my post from last week. I bought Period Power when I started researching this episode, but I’d be curious if anyone has any other nonfiction books about periods you liked. Let me know!

And, as always, thanks for reading!

It’s also autumn in the cycle of my body, which means I’m in my luteal phase, and my period is coming later this week.

A few years ago, I read an article about cycle syncing. It’s the idea that you’re aware of all four phases of your cycle, not just your period, and you learn how your body feels and functions differently depending on each hormone shift. Which, cool, but the first step for me was simpler: knowing when my period would start, and avoiding scheduling any activities that day that would require energy. 

Now, I’ve gone much further in the process, and each month during my luteal phase, I sleep in a cave under the moon and babysit little wolf pups. Teddy, I’m kidding. (Teddy is vaguely worried that I’m getting too woo-woo with all of this. Which, considering I now choose my daily jewelry based on where I’m at in my cycle, I won’t fight her about.)

My mom taught me to track my period, which in 2010 meant that I dragged images of each month onto a Word document, printed it, and kept it updated with a Crayola marker in my bathroom cabinet. But I didn’t think much about my cycle beyond that.

Till now! Well, till the last few years. 

I listened to India Rakusen’s award-winning podcast 28-ish Days Later. I bought Masie Hill’s book Period Power. 

I got a period disc, which I’ll tell you all about in another article.

And!

Crickets.

Oh, I finally read Are You There God, It’s Me, Margaret.

And!

That’s about it.

Art connects us with other humans. Sometimes it shows us something we already know, and that’s why we love it. Sometimes it shows us something we didn’t know, and that’s why we love it. 

Sometimes it’s just pretty or just historically important or just entertaining. Sometimes it connects us to other people who share our experiences. It can delight us or upset us or lots of other things. It’s ineffable and encompassing, and this isn’t a treatise on art! Also, I hope you’re feeling chill, because for the sake of this article, art = music and TV shows and movies. I didn’t get into paintings or experimental plays or highbrow sculpture. For today, art = media, and I use the term media more. Heads up.

I read and watch movies and listen to music. And you know what? I can think of basically no media that represents my monthly experience of having a period.

Which is strange, because I spend a huge amount of time dealing with my period, relative to the amount of time I spend on other topics that books and movies and music cover over and over and over. Do you know how many times a year I bleed? Twelve times. Five days each month, so you could also say sixty times. Do you know many times per year I fall in love or trip in the cafeteria or find out I’m the princess of a small country? Not sixty times, that’s for sure. Honestly, not even twelve.

Let’s start with music. So many songs are about romance. There’s also songs about friends, work, and parties. When I started this article, I couldn’t think of a single song about periods. Off the top of your head, can you? 

I did some research. The first few articles were lists of sad songs to listen to on your period. Sad songs about romantic love, not blood. But Pitchfork had an article that covered all the bases. I learned about Mary J. Blige’s song “PMS,” which got A-side placement on No More Drama, her fifth album. Dolly Parton has a song called “PMS Blues,” which includes this gem of a line: “Nothin' fits me when it hits me / Rantin', ravin', misbehavin' / PMS blues.” There’s thirteen total songs on Pitchfork’s list, which is . . . just not a lot. 

Taylor Swift, who’s written about physical experiences as specific as eating disorders and miscarriage, has not once mentioned periods. She’s written almost 300 of the songs that make up the modern music scene. And no periods! What is more tortured-poets-coded than period cramps? I mean, look at this album cover: 

Celebrities almost never talk about periods. Are they all skipping their period via birth control? Are there other ways to avoid it that are top-secret and ultra-expensive and only available to people who know about a certain doctor behind an unmarked door at an office park in Burbank? Is there a magical, Raya-cleared-only cure-all that makes periods restful, relaxing, and fun? Is that what the smoothie from Erewhon is actually for?

What about movies? Well there’s Carrie, obviously, says the internet; I’ve never seen it. Vulture’s article “A Brief History of Onscreen Periods” wasn’t comprehensive, sure, but it only listed six movies, one per decade, starting with Carrie in 1976. Megan remembered the tampon scene in She’s the Man. I’m sure there’s more movies, but I couldn’t think of any.

And TV shows! Belle thought of two times periods were mentioned in Swedish TV shows she’d watched, but then she pointed out that neither time was the female character actually on her period. Megan found online that The Queen’s Gambit had a period scene, but it was generally skewered for being lazy writing. 

The more I hunted, the more I found there’s a sort of funnel. Here it is:

And here’s the zoomed-in view of the bottom of the funnel:

First, there’s media without periods. Which is, as we said, most media. 

Then, there’s media where the female character is talking about her period because she might be pregnant. These are male-adjacent periods. The moment is less about periods and more about sex. It’s about a period as the opposite of pregnancy. It’s Daphne waiting to see whether she’ll get her period in Bridgerton. It’s books where periods = not cheating on your wife and periods = incentive for abusive men and periods = respite from abusive men. I mean come on: if the woman is pregnant, this is still media that doesn’t have periods!

Then you keep thinking, and eventually you think of non-male-adjacent period media, which for me and Megan and probably you was, first and foremost, Are You There, God, It’s Me, Margaret?. It’s the classic period book. Megan remembered The Poet X. That reminded me of Redwood Court. You’ve got Tracee Ellis Ross and Marsai Martin as a mother-daughter duo killing it in Black-ish. But interestingly, these stories are all about the first time a girl gets her period. 

First-time period stories are important, yes. The whole point of this article is that it’s useful to see your experience reflected in art. But the first time you get your period is different from the regular experience of having a period each month forever until menopause. And, as Caroline Kitchener explained in her article about the Queen’s Gambit’s period scene, first-time periods are often a cheap storytelling shortcut. The main character Beth talks to her crush, feels a stomach cramp, runs away from her chess tournament, and finds blood streaming down her leg. Are you trying to tell me she’s…grown? So cool. So realistic. So subtle.

But even first-time periods are rare. Periods at all are rare. Except, like, in real life!!

I couldn’t think of a single fiction book for adults that discussed a period solely in relation to a woman’s monthly experience. Let me show you the funnel once again.

The closest thing I could think of was a brief line in Emily Henry’s Happy Place, where the main characters are talking about scheduling and their apartment calendar, and Miles says, “ ‘Could you by chance be referring to the wall-sized whiteboard where you track your paychecks, your phone calls to your mom, and your menstrual cycle?” (80). Which, three cheers for having no shame around your period even when your roommate is a man you hardly know. Also, are Daphne and I both cycle syncing? Maybe she takes a shift caring for the baby wolves when I’m in the other phases of my cycle. Periods being normal, even with a male roommate—this is what we’re shooting for! But really—one tiny mention in one book—that’s it? 

Periods are a perfect story tool. There’s the external layer of the situation—blood is flowing, and a method of staunching it must be procured. There’s lots of pain and discomfort. This could so easily catalyze almost any action you need in your plot.

And yet. Where are all the periods!?

Sometimes when I’m on my period, I try to go out into the world and end up keening over. I feel crummy and hungry and nauseated and worn out. Often my legs give out for a bit, and I have to lie down or just, like, catch myself on a nearby counter. There’s back and stomach aches and pains. Trying to do normal, daily tasks and then having to swallow my bile or stifle a moan during a violent cramp. 

Periods deserve representation just for existing, but beyond that. Periods would be great for plot development, but beyond that. Think of the symbolic meaning you could create, in your A24 films and art-house vibes-only literature, just from monthly bleeding! I’ll get you started:

• Regeneration

• The need for rest

• The importance of fallow as well as pregnant spaces

• The cycles of seasons and energy and bodies

The way art looks now, periods don’t matter. 

But in real life, periods do.

Next week, I’m writing about a period that was used as a valid, interesting plot point in a TV show. It’s the single example that I could think of where media represented a regular period as a regular experience. It’s one of the things that made me start thinking about all this in the first place. 

In the comments, I’d love to hear what period media you thought of. I know I missed bunches! And give me your perspective on it—where does it belong in the funnel? Is it creative and generative or basic and reductive, or somewhere in between? If anyone comments the example that next week’s article is about, you win! I’d love that.

And finally, a book about a period was just longlisted for the National Book Award in the kids/middle grade category. I heard about it too late to include it in the research for this piece, but I’m excited to buy and read it. A school-themed pun for the title? Yes, please. Congratulations to Ali Terese! It’s time for Free Period.

The illustrations are gorgeous, the kind of art-inspired, brand-aware, brightly creative drawings that didn’t exist very often in children’s books until millennials started writing them. They’re a next-level riff on Blueberries for Sal. They’re enchanting.

The book argues that being smart is more than just being smart at school. Here’s one example of a thing it says is smart:

I bought the book. I like the book! It’s colorful and cheery, and the illustrations are, like I mentioned, gorgeous. But I don’t think it communicates its point very well.

The book lists almost every way a child could spend time: drawing stars, prancing like a horse, blowing bubbles. It calls every one of those activities smart. Here’s some examples:

“Smart at drawing things with claws . . . smart is kindness when there’s crying".”

“Growing, throwing, bubble blowing. Smart is knowing where you’re going. Finding treasures, flower picking. Ukulele! Finger clicking!”

I mean, precious! But.

Most of those things aren’t actually “smart.” Not trying to be picky! Hang with me.

Most often, “smart” means academic intelligence. Sometimes it means shrewd intuition (“street smarts”) or snappy clothes (“a smart suit”). This book is interested specifically in the “academic intelligence” definition.

Our culture values school-smart smartness. Thus, “smart” is always a compliment. The value of “smart,” like the value of “beautiful,” is so widely accepted that it’s required. You’re beautiful! You’re smart!

Which is great, until we run into someone who is not beautiful, not smart. What happens when your face is pockmarked, when your essays are nonsense, when your grades never crest a C?

One option is to jump into the meaninglessness of the word “smart,” which is what this book does with aplomb. Per the book, “smart is not just being best / at spelling bees, a tricky test.” You can be “smart at sharing, caring, scaring, / smart at picking what you’re wearing.” And on and on!

There’s a second option that is, I think, better. Instead of calling everything smart, we could value other traits equally, like creativity, empathy, and bravery. Being smart at school is not the only skill you need in life. Are you good at “mixing things in mugs?”This is a sign of creativity! The ability to have fun! Maybe an early indication of a predilection towards baking! Are you good at “squeezy hugs?” This is a sign of empathy! Interpersonal physical awareness!

If the book wanted to say something important, it should have couched its argument here: every person has different skills. Although some skills and people are more frequently praised than others, every skill and person matters. You are valuable even if you cannot excel academically. There are other virtues. There are other ways to be.

You might struggle in an academic environment. Unfortunately, you still have to go to school. You will feel insufficient. Hopefully you will learn perseverance. Hopefully you will have kind classmates, helpful teachers. You might instead be bullied by classmates and belittled or ignored by teachers. School is tough! Get help from your grown-ups when you need it.

Nevertheless, you bring value to the world you live in.

That bit of nuance is powerful.

There’s a movement in the disability rights community to reexamine our cultural obsession with usefulness. Dr. Devon Price says not to use the phrase “high-functioning autism,” because there’s a value judgement attached to it: it implies that an autistic person who can drive and chat and cook is more useful than someone who needs care from other people all the time. The Puritan, individualist idea that work is a moral good and the only way to contribute to society is being sent to the cemetery, and I’m dancing at the funeral. Our cultural value system should encompass all ways of being. You don’t have to be able to hold down a job to deserve to exist in the world.

It comes back to the idea of virtue. This book accepts the superiority of “smart” whole-cloth; its entire adorable poem is based on that premise. But virtue—crucial to a healthy society, to a developing kid, to a collective conscience—is so much more than smart.