Eat the Damn Cake

(image source here)

I am on the phone with the stationer. I hadn’t known that that was anyone’s job title. We’ve been talking for a very long time, and she is unhappy. I am making her life extremely difficult. I am unable to comprehend something incredibly basic about the world, and, as a result, she has no idea what to do with me. We disagree about something so fundamental that we will probably never be able to understand one another. The problem may seem at first deceptively simple: She wants everything to match, and I do not. More than that, she doesn’t understand how anyone in the civilized world can take the stance that I am taking.

No one has ever insisted on not having a dark border on their wedding invitations before. In the history of weddings. It has never happened.

She keeps saying, “But it matches the text. The tones are harmonious.”

She says that a lot. The tones are harmonious. Every time, I think reflexively of one of those color coded xylophones for little kids. Continue Reading »

Sorry if you were expecting the video to involve some cuteness occurring on a nude beach. It’s not like that.

But first, this is Rogue:

I asked her to talk a little about nude beaches, and this is what she said:

I go to a nude beach on Long Island pretty regularly every summer. It is a very social beach with a party atmosphere. Let me preface by saying that even though I am 5’10 that does not mean that I have a model body. I have some cellulite, adult acne and muffin tops when I try to fit into a size 12. However, this beach is my own personal paradise. Continue Reading »

I feel like I should try again. I wrote that piece about not calling myself a feminist anymore, and a lot of things happened at once. A lot of feminists were offended, I was offended that they were offended, and I was abruptly introduced to a community I’d been almost completely unaware of beforehand. I didn’t know there was such a thriving group of feminist bloggers (and the feminists who read those blogs). There are plenty of women who hint at feminism in their writing and comments, or who never use the word, but are obviously interested in standing up for women. But the community I stumbled upon seems much more overt, much more directed, and much more intense. Maybe that’s just because I made them mad.

There are a few things I want to talk about here.

1. In my original piece, I referenced stereotypes about feminists (unshaved armpits, manhating, etc). Some people seemed to believe that I thought these things were true and/or despicable. I made a joke about a pedicure. Someone thought I’d traded in feminism for pedicures, for real. I have this problem a lot. Not pedicures. I’ve gotten two in my entire life.  People don’t recognize when I’m joking, even when I think it’s pretty obvious. This is both a problem of the medium and my failure to be more clear. For the record, I don’t think that the tired stereotypes of feminists I mentioned are true for most people who define themselves as feminists these days (and I wouldn’t really care if they were true), but I also don’t think that they’ve worked their way completely out of the system, as some people suggest they have. I’ve met plenty of people who seemed to believe every one of those stereotypes. But my decision not to actively call myself a feminist isn’t a result of my desire to be accepted by these people (I never will be, in any case); it’s a result of my disinterest in having one problematic word do all the talking for me.

2. Along these lines, I actually think that women should stop saying, “I don’t hate men!” so much. “I like men!” It’s annoying. It’s annoying that women have to start sentences about their feminism with a claim that they really, really love men. Because the unspoken (and too often spoken) assumption is that if they identify as a feminist, there’s a chance they don’t like men. As if that’s the most salient feature of feminism. “Men are great!” is not a solution. And we can’t look at violent crime, religious oppression, sexual offenses, or, you know, frat houses, without noticing that men, as a group, do a lot of terrible things that women don’t, in general. That is just a fact. When I walk down the street and see a group of guys coming towards me, I feel anxious. There’s a reason for that. In my opinion, there should be more feminists (and other women) out there who are willing to talk about this, without first apologizing or disclaiming. Continue Reading »

Blogging can get vicious. I didn’t know that when I started. I was pretty innocent.

OK, that’s not true. I was scared. I knew that the internet was a place where people said mean things to each other anonymously, and I was afraid that some of those mean things flying around would hit me, and I’d fall down immediately.

But I started blogging anyway, because I love to write, and because I wanted to talk about things with real people (not just the future self who will one day read my journal but does not yet exist, and who will still be me anyway, when she does exist). And because I started to get the sense that there were all of these little communities out there, like islands, in the stormy ocean of the internet.

I don’t read the comments on my articles for The Huffington Post, because too often they’re really rude, angry, and aggressive. Not that I don’t get nice ones, too. But there are too many awful ones to make it worth my while.

I’m sensitive. People keep telling me to get a thicker skin. People keep saying stuff about “If you want to be a writer…”

Well, I am a writer. And I’m sensitive. I try really hard to be tough. But when people say mean things about me, it pretty much always hurts. It pretty much always gets through.

Which is why I’m up, at 2:00 a.m., sitting with my computer at the table, staring at a tired bouquet of wilting miniature roses in a blue vase, and back at the screen again. It’s also why, about forty minutes ago, in bed with my fiancé, I said, “Who are these people, who are sitting at their computers somewhere in the world, writing mean things about me, when they haven’t even met me? I’m not writing mean things about them!”

“Honey,” he said, “If you want to write stuff and put it on the internet, you have to get used to this.” Continue Reading »

(image source here)

It was the dead of night. My fiancé was asleep beside me, his expression sweet, his face gentle and unguarded, like a child’s. I pushed the covers back and slid out of bed, overcome by a familiar dark desire. I had learned to hide from it, through all these years, but it always seemed to find me eventually. It was ceaseless and ferocious, with claws like a tiger that clutched my mind, and coils like a snake that wrapped me up and moved me where it willed. And it whispered to me in a voice slick and warm as honey, “Just this once…Just one more time…” But it was never just once. And it was never one more time.

I walked obediently through the living room. The table was strangely ominous in the faint moonlight—its surface washed empty; a huge plane of nothingness that might swallow someone whole. Continue Reading »