Not a Giraffe I like. Also, not a lion

This is a site that you could waste several minutes of your life at. This post in particular got me to laughing.

More sports awfulness

via Jezebel

R. Kelly Sings World Cup Anthem, I Am Pissed Because Now I Have To Consider Not Watching World Cup

This is so fucking annoying. I was really looking forward to the World Cup. I know that R. Kelly was acquitted, but give me break, he's a guilty mother scratcher.



From The Atlanticc:

In all his modesty, R. Kelly expects his anthem "Sign of Victory" to "inspire world peace and shine a light on global warming." Hence these lyrics:

Now I can see the distance of the journey/High and front with all your might/You open your eyes to global warming/Been through it all, you sacrificed your life.

Sounds kinda like an R. Kelly song with the the phrase "global warming" randomly thrown in.

Looks like R Kelly isn't the only reason to boycott: apparently there are some other people who recognize the hypocrisy of hosting an event that the majority of a population is financially excluded from. Some artists and musicians have called for a boycott of Thursday night's World Cup Kick Off concert, "for including few South African acts and charging steep ticket prices that are higher than what many workers here earn in a week."

I have written extensively about not supporting artists that promote rape culture so I won't go into my theories again, but I can tell you that this creates a serious moral dilemma for me. I might have to settle for watching Invictus and Dhani Tackles the Globe to get my "football" fix.

UPDATE: it was only while watching the time waster that was Invictus did I find out that it was about rugby and not soccer. Seriously, this movie blows.

Please, let me have a son like this

"Colors don't have gender!"



Image care of Sociological Images
Story care of Jezebel

Mike Tyson, former rapist, now fucks up some pigeons

So, you may remember a post I did not so long ago about Mike Tyson, and Hollywood normalizing rape by embracing him and putting him in movies and award shows?
Well, now he's got his own reality TV show on Animal Planet, where he will race pigeons that are allegedly "cherished and respected by their owners".
PETA has a problem with this, and for good reason, but more importantly, EVERYONE should be concerned that a violent convicted rapist is now starring in a family oriented show.
But most people think it's funny instead of indicative of a larger problem in Hollywood.
What does it mean that we let unapologetic rapists have television shows? What does that tell young boys and girl about the consequences and meanings of this crime? What does it mean that the only outrage I can find on the Internet (a series of tubes, btw) is coming from animal rights groups? With a marginal exception of Amelie Gillette of the AV Club's Hater, I see/ hear no commentary from people with a problem with this from a feminist perspective.
While Amelie comments on the similarity (of phenomena and cultural taste) between Tyson's show and O.J.Simpson's proposed reality show Juiced and concludes that murderers should not get shows, she fails to fully come down on the idea of Tyson's show, and sorts of aquiesces to her guest on the Hate Cast who wonders "What else is [Tyson] going to do?"
Right, because the ONLY thing he can do is hope to get on television.
While other sites are putting up pictures to accompany this story of Tyson nuzzling birds, the only acceptable image for me is this one.

No more Animal Planet for me, that's for fucking sure.
Asshats.

The Next Big Thing

School starts tomorrow, and I don't wanna go. Ah, ennui. At least I have my finger on the pulse of the greatest and newest. Check out the next viral video

Twilight is Bad for Women, and Also, Bad.

Look at this poster.


I read the first and part of the second books in the Twilight series. Not because I'm a masochist, but because I love good young adult literature. Well, as a person who finished Finnegans Wake, Infinite Jest and most of William T. Vollman's books, I can tell you, this shit is unreadable.

The writing is bad. Just.Really. Fucking. Awful.

But it has beautiful vampires and is set in the Pacific Northwest and had crazy marketing so teenage girls flocked to this pile of manure in droves not seen since the height of the NKOTB madness of the late eighties*.

But worse than being bad, this series seems dangerous to me.

The thing that bothers me is that those who are rallying behind these books/ movies (due mostly to Meyer's Mormon faith, methinks) continually point out the strength and independence of the prtoagonist, Bella. Because the book tells you she's independent. But her behavior holds up traditional gender norms of women being beautiful, virginal, and submissive. Bella's obsessive thoughts about Edward are normalized in the world of Twilight and the violence between them and around them is normalized because it is surrounded by or associated with traditional romance imagery and props. This reminds me of an amazing article I read this semester written by Jennifer Dunn called “What Love Has to Do with It: The Cultural Construction of Emotion and Sorority Women's Responses to Forcible Interaction". Using the Interactionist perspective, Dunn examines the emotional response to and interpretation of “forcible interaction”, a qualified group of behaviors that run the gamut from “pestering” to “stalking” that transpires between two people when one is attempting to take by force what is normally freely given. What she found was how the “influence of courtship imagery” shape these women's “interpretations of unwanted attention”. This pattern was most pronounced in consideration of men they had been in long-term relationships with, but it was also present in the context of men they had simply dated. There was a “range of attempts” considered: leaving a gift, waiting at the respondent’s residence with flowers, leaving messages, showing up (sans flowers), following and suicide threats. All of these behaviors were understood to be forcible interactions but when they were framed with the “trappings of love” the women were much more likely to ameliorate the behavior into something they viewed as acceptable. Thispresents evidence of how women participate in their increased vulnerability to forcible interaction and how such behaviors are codified as acceptable when in the context of romantic relationships. Sound familiar?

Look at that poster.

A friend posted an article on FB that points out that by all measures, Bella and Edward are in an abusive relationship. Ha ha, Oh wait, no really.
This shit really bothers me. What are we teaching a whole generation of young women? I'm not saying that girls read Twilight and are suddenly spineless, boy-obsessed and sexually chastened morons, but I'm saying it doesn't help to have such a salient cultural touchstone be championed for having a strong woman protagonist when in fact it has the opposite. Bella is not strong, not independent and is kind of an idiot. Also, sex and violence are all mixed up and worst of all, she's made to feel guilty whenever she feels desire. . It really really really really really really bothers me that when Bella expresses physical desire she in punished in some way. Sex is always dangerous or imbued with violence. This is not OK. This is fucking bananas, and bad for women, and also, bad.

So.
Let's not, mmkay?
Thoughts?

* Madness which came to a screeching halt in my elementary school due to my brother circulating the rumor that Joe was rushed to the hospital with a stomach full of sperm. Jordan's sperm. I remember one friend, crying into her pencil box in the girls bathroom at T.A. Hendricks, wailing, "Joe! How could you do this to me!" Not to be judgemental, my first concert was NKOTB with my sister from another mister the night before Martin Luther King Day which her school failed to recognize so she had to get up and go to school while I got to sleep in. Oh, Indiana.

Gendering Christmas: or Apparetly there's only room enough in this town for ONE red suit.

photo from News and Observer / Debra Goldman

from New Raleigh:

Wonder why you didn’t see Mrs. Claus aside Mr. Claus at Saturday’s Christmas Parade at Raleigh? No, it wasn’t something simple like “She was sick”. Instead, Mrs. Claus was banned from dressing up in the red and white by the Greater Raleigh Merchants Association, the N&O reported Saturday morning. It was recently elected City Council candidate for district B and Raleigh Merchant’s Association executive director John Odom made the call.

from the News and Observer

John Odom, executive director of the Greater Raleigh Merchants Association, which runs the parade, said it’s confusing for children to see two people in Santa suits. He said it’s a policy that only Santa may wear the official outfit.

Parade officials even discourage people from wearing Santa hats, Odom said.

It was unclear how common youthful confusion of Santa and Mrs. Claus might be, and what harm might result from the misapprehension. Dr. Joseph Loibissio, a Wake Forest pediatrician, said Friday night that children can generally identify genders by age 3.

Several things strike me about this:
One is just about Mrs. Claus in general. I haven't spent a lot of time thinking about Santa Claus since I was six and figured out that if the chocolates in my stocking came from Molly's Sweet Shop on the circle in Shelbyville that Santa was likely not real (oh the deductive reasoning of children!). But really, Mrs Claus basically represents the worst kind of traditional gender scripts, and becomes increasingly outdated. We do know that Mrs. Claus first appeared in 1890, in a book of poetry called "Sunshine and Other Verses for Children." The book's author, Katherine Lee Bates, also wrote the words to the song "America the Beautiful." That seems apropos, somehow.
From Wikipedia

Since 1889, Mrs. Claus has been generally depicted in media as a fairly heavy-set, kindly, white-haired elderly female baking cookies somewhere in the background of the Santa Claus mythos. She sometimes assists in toy production, and oversees Santa's elves. She is sometimes called Mother Christmas[citation needed], and Mary Christmas has been suggested as her maiden name.[citation needed]

Her reappearance in popular media in the 1960s began with the children's book How Mrs. Santa Claus Saved Christmas, by Phyllis McGinley. Today, Mrs. Claus is commonly seen in cartoons, on greeting cards, in knick-knacks such as Christmas tree ornaments, dolls, and salt and pepper shakers, in storybooks, in seasonal school plays and pageants, in parades, in department store "Santa Lands" as a character adjacent to the throned Santa Claus, in television programs, and live action and animated films that deal with Christmas and the world of Santa Claus. Her personality tends to be fairly consistent; she is usually seen as a calm, kind, and patient woman, often in contrast to Santa himself, who can be prone to acting too exuberant. In some modern adaptations, Mrs. Claus is shown with a younger, even sexier appearance.

So some interesting themes present themselves. She is typically shown doing traditionally feminine tasks (baking cookies, "mothering") and she is almost always shown in the background. She is presented as a foil to Santa Claus (what is not masculine = feminine).She is passive, nameless and depicted as a helper to Santa, as opposed to a person in her own right.
Maybe that's why her presence has faded since her pinnacle in the 1960s.As the world changes, our archetypes likely change too(at least somewhat). Maybe she has become less salient because she no longer represents and ideal. Maybe it's time we liberate Mrs. Claus. I mean she doesn't even have a first name, ferchrisakes.
Updating Mrs. Claus for the aughts ought not automatically mean sexualizing her, however. (say that 3 times, fast) There is some argument that we automatically imbue Christmas with "sexiness" because we tend to sexualize everything. But Mrs. Claus seems to be the magnet for that energy.
But I digress.

By banning Mrs. Claus from the Christmas parade, we are just reinforcing the message that women don't matter: they are faceless, nameless objects that can be used, ignored or shuffled to the background at will.

It sounds to me like Mrs. Claus was usurping some of the attention away from Santa, a symbol of patriarchy, and that shit won't stand, at least as far as the greater Raleigh Merchant Association is concerned.

Because, really? We're worried about confusing the kids? It sounds like we are worried about confusing the kids about who's important.

Apparently there's only room enough in this town for ONE red suit.

MIA

That is, I will be until finals are over I'm guessing.
I miss you!
Tonight I watched some classmates give a presentation on advertising and they had four commercials from YouTube as examples. 3 of the 4 commercials used traditional gender scripts and assumption about the internalization of those scripts. What's scary about commercials is that we see them OVER and OVER and when they use humor we pay attention to them even more, but fail to notice the other, subtler messages they send, like all women should be thin and work out constantly, or all men should be in charge of the grill--because that's the man's domain. Send me your favorite commercials, I want to keep thinking about this stuff. In the meantime, here is something to think about UNTIL I RETURN....(cue scary laughter)



Notice how Nigeria is supposed to be a scary and dirty place? Notice how it's contrasted to the clean, safe white world?
Notice how this commercial only works if that stereotype is internalized?

Send me your links!

UPDATE:
Here are some of the videos friends sent.






Keep sending them in!

"Hit The Bitch": Or how The Danish do Domestic Violence Awareness

From AdFreak

There are subtle ways to raise awareness about relationship violence. And then there's "Hit the Bitch," a Web campaign by a Danish advocacy group. Setting up an interface where you're encouraged to slap and punch a woman seems pretty extreme. It's almost like an advergame, except you're delivering an adverbeating! (You can use the mouse, or connect with your Webcam and swing at the girl with your hand.) Getting called a "100% idiot" at the end doesn't feel like much of a rebuke. Perhaps you're supposed to feel guilty, like a real-life abuser might, for continuing to hit the woman just to see what happens next?

Un-fucking-believable.

From Sociological Images

At the top, a counter keeps track; you start out as 100% Pussy, 0% Gangsta, but your Gangsta rating goes up every time you hit her.
Apparently, though, when you get up to where you’d be at 100% Gangsta, it instead says 100% Idiot, as though this is a real put-down that is going to make you think really seriously about domestic violence.
I am trying to think of any context that would make this seem like a good idea, or an effective way to combat domestic violence. I mean, ok, yeah, I guess people might be made more aware of it after hearing about or playing the game, but is it likely to have any positive effect? It seems more likely that people who don’t already take domestic violence seriously would either be uncomfortable, leave the site, and never think about it again, or find it funny to play for a few minutes just to see what would happen…and somehow encouraging people to slap around an image of a woman for fun seems like a really weird way to get people to think more seriously about domestic violence.

I have no words. thoughts?

New assignement: fake obituary

This piece is for my creative nonfiction workshop.

Former NC Senator Elizabeth “Liddy” Dole, 73, drowned yesterday in a mud bath at a high-scale salon in Washington, DC. The Red Door Salon, attended by many members of the House and Senate, provides many services such as facials, massages and aromatherapy which are covered under the health insurance afforded to member of Congress. Dole was a known opponent to health care reform and the recipient of a failing grade from the American Public Health Association indicating an anti-public health voting record. Had she survived and chosen to sue the establishment her reward may have been affected by her own yes-vote on limiting medical liability lawsuits to $250,000.

Born Mary Elizabeth Hanford in Salisbury, North Carolina, Dole’s origins became a source of contention in her bid for the NC senate seat vacated by the late Jesse Helms. Opponents pointed to her permanent residence, a condo in the infamous Watergate Hotel, which she and her husband, former senator and 1996 presidential hopeful Bob Dole, have owned for nearly 40 years. Her official residence was shifted to her mother’s home in Salisbury in order to seek election. After a comfortable childhood replete with niceties such as dance lessons and a beach house, Dole graduated high school having been voted as most likely to succeed. She then attended the honorary-Ivy League Duke University, as a brother before her did, and majored in political science, though her mother had hoped she would pursue economics. A member of the Delta Delta Delta sorority, she was nominated to the May court and was titled queen. She was also elected student body president and graduated with honors as a member of Phi Beta Kappa, preparing her for post-graduate work at the blue-blood bathed Oxford and also a master's degree in education from Harvard University, no stranger to privilege and political capital of all stripes.

In 1962 Dole began working toward a degree in law at Harvard, one of only 24 women in a class of 550. Her mother was deeply disappointed that Elizabeth pursued her career over getting married and starting a family, despite the fact that her daughter was not seriously dating anyone at the time. Instead of wedding a phantom husband and building an empty house on the lot next to her family home in Salisbury, North Carolina, Dole graduated in 1965 and moved to Washington, beginning her political career in the Department of Health, Education and Welfare under President Johnson. A registered Democrat, while Elizabeth was working for Johnson’s Great Society program, her future husband was voting against it. One must surmise from her later record that the future Elizabeth Dole--staunch conservative and loyal Republican--would have voted against the program as well.

Contradictions and change thus characterized Dole’s political life. After representing poor clients at a public interest law firm in 1967, Dole jettisoned her needy clients as her resume and connections took her to work officially for Johnson in the White House in the Office of Consumer Affairs. When Nixon came into office, the savvy (though not particularly loyal) Elizabeth switched her party affiliation to Independent and remained in the White House, one of a minority of staffers who was allowed to stay after the Republican president took over. The switch enamored her to Nixon and she assumed the position of executive director of the President's Committee for Consumer Interests in what Dole has categorized as the “heyday of consumerism”. Her experience here no doubt led many years later to the rebranding of her husband through dignified endorsements of brand names such as Pepsi and Viagra. Nixon then appointed her to the Federal Trade Commission for a seven-year term. After years of tutelage under Nixon and forgoing the young woman she was when she worked for Johnson, Dole switched parties again, this time to Republican, in 1975, shortly before she married.

Routes of power and the privilege of access brought Elizabeth and Bob Dole together within the insular circles of Washington politics. It is fitting that they were reacquainted at the party of Clement Stone, an insurance mogul and millionaire. Dole was reluctant to pursue Elizabeth romantically due to a thirteen-year age difference, but eventually he asked her to a date at the restaurant of Watergate Hotel, the site of this Washington power couple’s future home and the symbol of corruption that would color American politics for years to come. In a strange twist of fate, the apartment next to theirs would eventually be occupied by another symbol of political corruption, Monica Lewinsky.

Elizabeth, once so ambitious, set aside her own political career to campaign for her husband’s Vice Presidential run on the unsuccessful 1976 Republican ticket with Gerald Ford against Jimmy Carter and Walter Mondale. 1979 she left the FTC for good as she campaigned for her husband again, in another unsuccessful run, this time for president, in 1980.

Reagan’s victory led to renewed ambition and success for Elizabeth Dole, first as director of the White House Office of Public Liaison from 1981 to 1983, and as United States Secretary of Transportation from 1983 to 1987. She broke glass ceilings as the first female Secretary of Transportation and as the first female head of a military branch as the Coast Guard fell under the jurisdiction of the DOT. During this most fruitful political period, Dole began to question the centrality of her career to her life. She had no children though she was stepmother to Bob’s daughter from his first marriage. She was a political anomaly, a conservative female politician who had no children and was known as ambitious and successful. On the precipice of true success, Elizabeth Dole doubted her ambition and stepped back from politics while she had what she has characterized as “a spiritual awakening.” On the campaign trail with her husband in 1996, she could often be seen carrying a turquoise, leather-bound bible with her, winning the minds of conservatives and the hearts of Evangelicals, voters that would stand by her in later pursuits. Though she returned to politics under yet another president as George H. W. Bush’s Secretary of Labor, she left to become President of the Red Cross in 1991. She resigned in 1999 to pursue her own unsuccessful Presidential run. She found victory in the 2001 NC Senate race, filling the seat of the notorious and controversial Senator Jesse Helms after his retirement, like so much milk to his fiery moonshine.

Loyal at last, she voted along party lines, and was often counted on to co-sponsor bills rather than write her own. In fact, out of the 52 bills she authored, 46 never made it out of committee and only two passed at all. Her constituents often remarked on how little she was in North Carolina, in 2006 spending a paltry 13 days in her “home” state, no doubt preferring to stay in her luxury condo at the Watergate than in the confines of her Mother’s home. She was also voted one of the least effective senators, 93rd out of 100.

Despite, or perhaps because of her unremarkable senatorial record, Dole was elected chair of the National Republican Senatorial Committee. Under her watch, Republicans lost the majority in the Senate, and were out fund-raised and out recruited by the Democratic chair. As a result, Senator John Ensign of Nevada soon replaced her.

In 2008, Dole lost her seat to Kay Hagan, a state senator from Greensboro, North Carolina. The convergence of many factors led to this underdog upset of the incumbent Dole including aggressive campaigning in the state by President Obama, galvanizing the Democratic base, and the unequaled spending of Political action committees for Hagan. Despite her pledge to run a positive campaign, Dole appeared desperate to change the momentum of the campaign, and authorized a series of extremely controversial commercials that painted Hagan, a Presbyterian Elder and Sunday school teacher, as an atheist. The ads prominently featured a woman’s voice saying “There is no God”, a voice that viewers were to surmise was Hagan’s. The commercials were largely considered the worst kind of political maneuvering, and routinely criticized as pure mud slinging. An unfortunate turn of phrase, considering. Atheists and agnostics poured money into Hagan’s campaign, exacerbating the worsening situation for Dole. She lost by an 8 point margin, the largest margin of defeat in the last thirty years of NC Senate races. The commercials are her most public failure, in a life that was marked by a series of unsuccessful campaigns, a husband that once backed a rival opponent, and an unwillingness to embrace true greatness whenever given the chance. Her undoing reflects the largest theme of her life; the compromise of self in the pursuit of power. Elizabeth Dole, known as Liddy by her friends but not allowed to be called that by her peers or her constituents; known as a Democrat then an Independent then a Republican. Elizabeth Dole, once a sure bet for the first female president, became a victim of her own inability to make a decision, to decide what was right, and stick with it. Dole’s unfortunate legacy will undoubtedly be tied to the method of her passing, an irony that will be immortalized on late night television, not unlike her former neighbor.

She is survived by her husband, Bob Dole, and stepdaughter Robin.

The Wackness not the Dopeness

The Wackness

1) The commercial for a female heroine centered video game with the horrible horrible awful title of WET

2) 17 hours this semester
3) no time for the gym in over a week
4) my exam tomorrow
5) fat jokes on a friend's Facebook update and The Daily Show
6) cigarettes
7) one of my classmates making me feel dumb b/c apparently reading Marx is sooooo easy for him
8) the healthcare "debate"
9) being broke
10) not sleeping

The Dopeness

1) MAD MEN!!!

2) the chicken tetrazzini Jeff made dor dinner

3) ...

Love, Love Will Tear Us Apart.

Today has been a shit day.
I did have one bright spot, though. My terrific friend Julie, aka, The Beauty Whisperer, owns a great business,Beauty Ethics,that offers services such as haircuts, color and style, brows, waxing, facials, etc. Anyway, the BW is helping me get my skin in line after it has freaked out over being submerged in chlorine three times a week for 45 minutes. Hopefully things will improve with my new skin care routine.
Outside of that I have cried on the phone twice and in altogether separate incidents I have been disappointed by two people I love.
I have issues opening up to people, I'll be the first to admit that. But it doesn't help when people you care about consistently treat you as an afterthought. It also doesn't help when you ask someone to be there for you and they have their head so far up their ass they turn what you need into something all about themselves. This is not about the Bagel, btw as he is nearly a saint and a lovely person all the way around who always puts me first. Except when he drinks too much bourbon, but that's for another time.

I think I'll be glad when school starts again, as being busy prevents me from investing in other people.

Anyway, my giraffe necklaces from ETSY is shipping from Canada so it's going to be awhile. Something to look forward to.

So I've been thinking a lot about the school of Sociology that I went nuts for, Symbolic Interactionism (SI) lately, as my life has changed pretty drastically in the last three weeks, all because of what I am now defining as success and as my goals. Basically the dude who coined the term SI, Herbert Blumer, defined the basic premises as the following:

1) We act a certain way toward things or with things (including people) because of the meaning that has been assigned to them, i.e we do not brush our hair with a fork but rather eat with it because we learned that's what we do from other folks. Unlike Ariel.

2) The meaning that is ascribed those things we interact with derives from interaction in the greater world, or people in society. That is, meaning is not inherent, it is ascribed and that is not done by individuals but collectively.

3) Each of us then takes those ascribed meanings and interprets them through a process that has also been shaped by interaction in the greater world. That is, no man is an island, we depend on others to help us define the world, even when we are privately interpreting something.

All that to say, I really really really believe in this process, and I know that when I interpret the actions of others I try to use this paradigm as it seems to me that it makes what people do a little less deliberate.

So I started reading the textbook for my Gender class last night (yes that is the sound of glasses being pushed up my nose) and read a really interesting article called "Beyond Pink and Blue" in which the precedent of the medicalization of intersexuality was examined and debated. (Intersexed, btw, means those who, as the author Sharon E. Preves says, "...inhabit bodies whose very anatomy does not afford them an easy choice between the gender lines". The article's focus is on contemporary gender studies and how my man Erving Goffman and his theory of stigma or spoiled identity, wherein "Stigma is a process by which the reaction of others spoils normal identity" applies to the development of identity by the intersexed. Needless to say, I love this shit and find it endlessly fascinating. It also reminds me of how we all develop our identities and how we all manage at times with a spoiled identity and what we must do to overcome it.

I am definitely mad at some people right now, and more than that, hurt, but at least they didn't cut off my clitoris when I was a baby for no real reason or make me grow up as a girl when I was in fact a boy. Pat Conroy says "In families there are no crimes beyond forgiveness", but seriously, I am not so sure. Also, he's an alcoholic.

My scale is a piece of shit btw, and I did lose weight last week, three more pounds. From now on I'm only using the scale at the gym and the doctor's office.

It's a Man's World

James Brown said it best. Ugh. Completely disgusted with the world today. It seems like everyone I care about is going through something awful.

First I want to let you know that I am going to be using code names for almost everyone on this blog excepting Jeff and maybe some of my family. I got this idea from the amazing Motorboat McKnickers whose blog is an inspiration and a joy to read.

So I'll begin with my Mom, whom I affectionately refer to as Mamala because I'm secretly an old Jewish lady, who underwent surgery today. It was elective surgery for a breast reduction, and she's fine and will be home tomorrow morning, but it got me to thinking about how breasts, when you don't want them, just seem to ruin everything. It makes me sad that my mom has hated her breasts all her life. They inhibited her as an athlete and garnered her unwanted attention. (When you have big breasts, people often make unflattering assumptions about your character. It's fucking annoying.) My mom has wanted a breast reduction for thirty years. I don't blame her for wanting the surgery, as I have struggled my whole life to find clothes that will fit me in the bust, especially dresses, that don't make me look any bigger than I already am. But I think she hates her breasts because of how other people, particularly men, made her feel about them. Even when it's your own body, you still feel like it belongs to other people. The fact that she looked at a part of herself, one of the fundamental parts of her anatomy that connected her to her womanhood and motherhood, and viscerally hated it makes me really sad. I am proud of her for getting the surgery despite what I have to assume was my father's reticence. Also, here's to looking at breast reduction surgery in thirty years.

I have this friend, I'll call her Ditto because we so often feel the same about so many things, who has been going through a lot for the last year. We've grown even closer in the last few months while she basically has had to start her life over. I grew worried when she told me about this guy she was seeing because he was demonstrating some sketchy behavior. I didn't want to see her get hurt, again, and I was afraid that she was putting her own happiness second to pursuing a relationship with this guy. For every sketchy thing that happened there was some explanation for why it wasn't his fault, it was out of his control blah blah blah. The thing about really good liars is that they create enough doubt to where you can't bust them outright but you know something isn't right. This makes you feel like shit too, as you start to doubt your own instincts, and they turn it around on you for not trusting them. Anyway, it turns out he was playing her, as she found out. Oh, and he was cheating with a friend of hers, who confessed last night What an asshat. I'm glad she's getting out of this compromised and clearly damaging relationship, what sucks is that this guy may have permanently affected her ability to trust men.

All this to say, I'm really glad I have a husband who accepts me for who I am and whom I can trust completely. I hope that if we have a daughter, we can instill in her a sense of worth and self esteem enough so she can grow up to love herself enough not to settle for someone who makes her question her own instincts, and who loves her body just the way it is.