Althouse |
- "See that smile? Ron had slipped up. He knew it and I knew it."
- "The thing that’s complicated about the body positive movement is it can be for the privileged few who have a body that looks the way people want to feel positive."
- "The syndicate has set the level of expectation..."
- "I have COVID-love shame. I don’t tell anybody about this … A lot of my dread is purely, for lack of a better word, selfish."
- I didn't plan for yesterday to be so momentous.
| "See that smile? Ron had slipped up. He knew it and I knew it." Posted: 05 Apr 2021 10:19 AM PDT
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| Posted: 05 Apr 2021 09:03 AM PDT "We want curvy bodies that look like Kim Kardashian has been up-sized slightly. We want big beautiful butts and big beautiful breasts and no cellulite and faces that look like you could smack them on to thin women. I have a big stomach, I always have. That's where I gain my weight — especially after early menopause, I have a straight-up gut, like an old man —and that's not where anybody wants to see flesh. It's not like if I posted a sensual nude of myself on Instagram, people would be marveling at my beautiful derrière.... There's so much judgment around bigger bodies, and I think one of the judgments is that bigger women are stupider. They eat too much and don't know how to stop. Thin women must be discerning and able to use their willpower. Bigger women must be limited in their understanding of the world, and they keep doing things that are bad for them. The amount of people who have written to me on my page: 'You're promoting obesity. Don't you understand you're killing yourself. Are you stupid? Why are you doing that?'" Said Lena Dunham, quoted in "Lena Dunham and the Spanx Liberation Movement/The actor-writer-director-controversy creator is back with a new project: a plus-size clothing line. The whole body positivity thing? She has thoughts" (NYT). I was interested in this concept of negativity within positivity — that the much-vaunted "body positivity" isn't really generally accepting the full range of fatnesses, but only okays manifestations of fat that fit a feminine ideal of voluptuousness, curvaceousness. If the fat has overtaken you in the way it would beset a man — "a straight-up gut, like an old man" — the radiations of positivity do not reach you. ***  |
| "The syndicate has set the level of expectation..." Posted: 05 Apr 2021 08:42 AM PDT Notice posted in the window of a tavern on State Street in Madison, Wisconsin (click to enlarge and read):
*** There is no comments section anymore, but you can email me here. Unless you say otherwise, I will presume you'd enjoy an update to this post with a quote from your email.  |
| Posted: 05 Apr 2021 05:11 AM PDT Said a man ("William") who got Covid — nearly symptomless Covid — and loved the solitude and inactivity it imposed on him. Quoted in "A Great Excuse to Do Nothing': The People Who Don't Want to Return to Normalcy" (Intelligencer). More from William: "I've had explicit permission to just stay home and I have got my own self-sustaining ecosystem here … work, food, exercise, recreation. I just feel so much more control of my experiences. I'm just dreading traffic, 'meet me at the coffee shop at three,' 'I'm ten minutes late,' baby showers, [gender] reveals. Like, I don't want to do any of that fucking shit." Do you think they just made up that quote or are men these days actually beset by baby showers and — why are these things not yet politically incorrect? — "gender reveals"? But it's sad if people have so lost the capacity to protect themselves from the hurly-burly of the shallowest manifestations of social life that they find relief in catching Covid. More stories at the link about individuals who didn't understand how much they wanted to be left alone and couldn't figure out how to get what they needed... until Covid. Is it really solitude that they want, or is it a more satisfying social life? It seems to me that William had a lot of frivolous, annoying, time-consuming interactions with people. The real lesson to be learned might be that you shouldn't do things with other people merely to have something that can be called a social life, but that you should reserve your social self for genuinely worthy occasions. And don't throw occasions that are not worthwhile for your targeted attendees. You don't certainly don't need a "gender reveal." And reconsider your showers — the party kind of showers — and even — it's hard, but let go! — your weddings. *** There is no comments section anymore, but you can email me here. Unless you say otherwise, I will presume you'd enjoy an update to this post with a quote from your email.  |
| I didn't plan for yesterday to be so momentous. Posted: 05 Apr 2021 04:01 AM PDT It certainly wasn't an Easter idea. Who am I to step on Easter? I had a post — put up before sunrise — about a column by a bishop who spoke of "recovering the strangeness of Easter," but he wasn't saying make your Easter Sunday strange — do something strange in your life. He wanted you to engage with the strangeness of the Christian belief in the resurrection of Jesus. That was no call to perform strangeness in the drama of my own little life. I went out for my usual sunrise run. It wasn't a big showy sunrise, but there was a gentle softness on the lake that translated into luscious strips of color in the photographs. I ended up posting 8 of the photographs, lined up chronologically. I don't think I've ever presented the sunrise photographs like that. And those 2 posts together, with nothing more, could have made a solid Easter Sunday on the blog, a change from the usual day on the blog, with more seriousness and beauty than the usual style. There's much more to the day than what shows up on the blog, and it's good to have some days when the blog side of life is minimal. But the blog side of life turned maximal, because I put up one more post. I'd come back from my sunrise run, and running gets me thinking and putting my thoughts in new order. As soon as I got back home, I put up the post, "I'm considering changing the approach to comments on this blog." I spelled out a few options and started a conversation. The results of the poll were very clear:  "Keep it the way it is" — that is, let comments flow into new posts unmoderated and deal with problems as they come up by deleting the trolls and the spam and so forth. I like the free flow too, but unlike the rest of you, I have to continually tend to the problems, and whenever I step away from the blog to go about my life in the material world, I have background static: I wonder what's happening in the comments. Do I need to get in there and deal with a troll infestation? There was an open door to anyone in the world to make a mess of a place that I had bound myself to protect and that I had protected for 17 years. I didn't try to skew the poll by telling you about the burden it has become for me. I just wanted to see what you thought, and it's nice to know that the majority of poll-takers were happy with the experience I had worked so hard to create. The behind-the-scenes work for me isn't something that should concern you. Quite the opposite. The backstage labor isn't part of the show. I was interested to see what people would say in the comments. That's the up side of comments for me. I like to read what people have to say. I'm used to the sense of seeing the readers and feeling the camaraderie. But somewhere along the way in that thread that is now up over 600 comments — many of which are from me, responding to people — I could see that there is only one answer that gives me what I'm afraid I must take for myself. And that is the end of comments. I've chosen the least popular option — if you don't count the "Something else," which wasn't any specific option at all. You can email me by clicking here. If you email me, you need to say if you don't want to be quoted on the blog, because I may select quotes from the email to use in updates to the blog. But the freewheeling chattiness of the comments section is gone. I'm sad to lose it. In that long thread yesterday, a lot of people told me that they come to my blog not for me but for the comments. They seemed to think that argued in favor of my continuing to carry the burden of moderating the comments. It cut the other way. I didn't plan for yesterday to be so momentous, but it was that argument — augmented with the threat that I would lose traffic, the all-important, precious traffic — that pushed me toward decisive action. So now, here I am, blogging on alone, without the hefty support of a comments section under this post. I'm writing this paragraph, and that's it. It's not a kick-off to a conversation. It stands on its own. You've read it — now, you're free. There's nothing more to do. No remarks to make. You'll see — if you continue on as a reader — what difference it makes in me as a writer. That's something I want to see too.  |
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