round-up: 3/02
Happy Saturday!
Here’s what I have for you today:
Housekeeping
What I’m reading
Quotations
Tweets
& a disclaimer, again: Things are mostly terrible right now, and the violence is appalling, and there are many people out there who have addressed and do address it better than I ever could, so I’m not getting on a soapbox here—this will just be your weekly round-up featuring what I’ve been reading and thinking through, like usual.
Things to read:
Housekeeping:
I’m back in school and also working and very busy and tired and boring.
Here are a few things I want to buy:
What I’m reading:
Here’s how to get free Paxlovid as many times as you need it
What the 5 love languages get right, and what they get very wrong
The point of life is to live (& die) for something greater than yourself, for liberation
Quotations:
We normalize the misery of women as wives, especially — and motherhood. Although I think a lot of the rage of motherhood is a rage of wifedom that we translate onto the children.
It's always the wife. And if your idea of marriage is predicated on one partner working really, really hard while another partner occasionally vacuums a rug, then that's not a partnership. That's servitude.
Divorce cuts at the heart of our social order. If you set up your society around heterosexual marriage, then women realize that society relies on their unpaid labor, that's destabilizing.
There are studies out there that say, "If you want strong relationships, if you want marriages to last longer, if you want to decrease the rates of domestic violence, if you want kids to stay in school, then you liberalize divorce laws." When women have options, they make better choices, but that's getting lost in this discourse. Right now, it's incredibly hard to get a divorce—a 16-year-old has an easier time getting married in America than a 42-year-old woman does getting divorced. Divorce is political, but it's also personal, because it's where our politics meet the bedroom. It's really hard to parse out.
We would love to believe that we could love our way out of fundamental inequality, but we can't.
Nothing makes our society more uncomfortable than a liberated woman.
Marriage is a conservative institution that upholds social order, so whenever I see someone saying, "People just need to get married," or, "Marriage is hard work," my challenge is, "Who are you asking to sacrifice?" You make it sound egalitarian, but what you're asking is for women to give up their careers and take on additional labor.
The average man adds seven hours of labor to a woman's weekly workload. So what are you actually asking? "Marriage is hard work"—hard work for who? Who's making the therapy appointments? Who's hiring the babysitter? Who's cleaning the house and making dinner? I don't like to be gender essentialist, but when people say, "Marriage makes you happy," I do think it's important to ask, "Who? Why? How? Who is being made happy, and who's actually being made miserable?" A happy marriage makes you happy, but happy singlehood makes you happy, too. The whole discourse is so anti-intellectual. I just wish we would think harder and have smarter conversations about it, but this isn't anything new. If shoving people into the institution of marriage fixed our society, we would have a fixed society. It's not about empowering people to be happy; it's about men being happy and women existing to support that happiness. I want better for my life. I want better for my children's lives. I was not put on this earth to be the crutch for someone else. I don't think you need a romantic relationship to live a full, happy life; you can find connection and joy in so many other ways.
Your freedom should not rest on other people's unfreedoms. Your happiness should not rest on someone else's unhappiness. Men will feel alienated by that. Female liberation is always blamed for male alienation, but I refuse to believe that this is true. Again, the data shows that when women have freedom, everybody benefits. I hate this discourse because it's designed to shame women for being free. I think being happy is the most radical thing you can do.
Men's good feelings are not my job. My job is my liberation, and you can either get on board or not.
It's these tiny violences. It's not the big things. I talked to so many women and, yes, big things can and do destroy marriages. But I wanted to write a book about how he wasn't violent. He wasn't Charles Lindbergh, with a second family in Germany. I wanted to write about the ways these small violences, like not paying attention to housework, leaving that bag of trash, really add up. The trap in the dishwasher doesn't empty itself. The laundry doesn't fold itself. That bag of trash doesn't get taken out to the trash can by itself. That is a person who does that, and I am that person. Like you said, it takes this psychic toll.
We're told marriage is hard work. But who's doing that work? If it was both doing the work, then maybe. But who's hiring the babysitter, hiring the therapist, reading the books about how to better communicate, making the date night plan, and making sure we have clean clothes for the date? I don't think any relationship should be predicated on my inequality. Call me crazy.
Men say, "we're so lonely." Well, you might be lonely because you suck to be around.
Marginalized people have always existed in subcultures, since true subcultures always begin on the margins. And fashion has always been a way to denote subcultural belonging, and—in the case of certain symbolic markers in hip-hop, punk, and solidarity movements—a commitment to radical politics. (It is always a surprise to me when, in rare instances, someone who dresses like a punk isn’t actively involved with radical organizing/thinking.)
“I don’t need guns, I need fire extinguishers!”
Well, ain’t that a poem?
One of my earliest human memories is mass murder of brown people on TV perpetuated by the empire that houses my body and not my spirit. Lifelong dissociation.
In a world sewn in chains, may we remember suicide is a route we have the right to take. We have a right to free ourselves by any means necessary.
Suicide is not something to pity. It is the ultimate form of agency in a society with a ruling class dead-set on looping us all into its bloodlust, its dark magic, deciding this will be “normal”. Bloodlust is “sanity” on Planet Earth in 2024. I invite you to fully lose your mind with us. Let that soft animal burn something down, let that soft animal kill a cop, especially the one in your mind. Let that soft animal kill itself, if it so pleases. You do not have to be good.
It’s happening, the system is eating itself. Military are setting themselves on fire in the name of the oppressed. There is no coming back from this, and the establishment knows that. We know how our ruling class reacts in fear: gunfire and intimidation. They know this can’t last.
I think if you’re going to put yourself out there, and if you’re going to earn money, then you’re positioning yourself as a leader in this domain, and you should take responsibility for the repercussions.
My mom loved being on vacation, if it meant she could sit by the pool and drink bottomless margaritas, or go shopping. She hated sightseeing, history, nature, museums, stuff like that. She didn’t even much like being with our family, not really. If she could drive out with us and then we’d leave her alone with a frozen drink on a float in the sunshine, those were the times she was truly at ease. But, I mean, what was I going to do? Contact the Hyatt Regency Hill Country Resort and Spa in San Antonio and ask to scatter her remains in their lazy river?
Tweets:
That’s all for today!
As always, thanks for being here. Thanks to those of you who like reading this enough to pay me $5/month or more. And, if anyone ever wants to buy me a coffee just cus, you can do that here.
