Pleasure has always been policed, in some way or another, in cultures across the world. That’s because pleasure is, in a way, a source of resistance.

In her book Vagina, Naomi Wolf argues that women have a special relationship with pleasure in that, when we have the right kind of it, we are feisty, powerful, and strong, and when we don’t, we can lose our will to stand up for ourselves. The way our pelvic nerves translate pleasure from our sexual experiences to our brains boosts the hormones that make us strong and connected and dampen our vulnerability to depression and lethargy.

Wolf argues that dopamine in particular is “the ultimate feminist chemical. If a woman has optimal levels of dopamine, she is difficult to direct against herself. She is hard to drive to self-destruction, to manipulate and control.” On the other hand, when dopamine is too low, which is a known effect of sexual violence, women tend to get depressed, stop fighting back, and become easier to subjugate.

Wolf argues, then, that there is a physiological reason why women have been suppressed for so many generations: the powers that be knew, probably from experience, that if you damage the vagina, essentially, you damage the brain. Mess with our dopamine flow and we’ll stop fighting back. Rape has always gone along with pillaging not (only) because colonizers are assholes, but because when you can quickly and easily shut down half the population, you cut your colonizing hours in half. They didn’t need a scientific study to prove what they could see with their own eyes: rape a woman and she’ll stop resisting.

There’s good news here, too, though, from Wolf’s perspective. The unique vagina-brain connection might also make people with vaginas more powerful. Wolf writes:

I don’t like any kind of feminism that sets one gender above another, so I do not mean this in any way as a value judgment. Neither gender is “better.” But one gender is theoretically able to get more of a certain kind of dopamine and opioid/endorphin activation during sex, which has a very specific effect on the brain and even the personality. We cannot escape what this math implies for female sexuality, in its unmediated, un-messed-up state: nature constructed a profound difference between the sexes, which places women in, potentially, a position of greater biochemical empowerment.

Great sex, Wolf explains, boosts women’s dopamine, endorphins, opioids, and testosterone. It makes us more willing to take creative risks, to give fewer fucks about what other people think of us. It makes us want to take over the world. And have more sex.

Wolf goes on, “So the fear that patriarchy always had—that if you let women have sex and know how to like it, it will make them both increasingly libidinous and increasingly ungovernable—is actually biologically true!” From this perspective, it makes sense that suppressing and policing female sexuality has always been an aspect of patriarchal society. Knowing our sexual bodies and being unafraid to use them might have made us so full of spunk and fire that our subjugation wouldn’t have been possible.

The patriarchal fear of female pleasure was perhaps most salient during the centuries of witch-hunting when mostly women were tortured (often sexually) and killed in brutal ways. The first trials started in the 14th century and hit a fever pitch in the 16th and 17th centuries. Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English put the killings in perspective when they write in their book Witches, Midwives, and Nurses:

One writer has estimated the number of executions on an average of 600 a year for certain German cities—or two a day, ‘leaving out Sundays.’ Nine hundred witches were destroyed in a single year in the Wertzberg area, and 1000 were put to death in a day. In the Bishopric of Trier, in 1585, two villages were left with only one female inhabitant each.

Men were sometimes accused of witchcraft too, but the authors point out that “women made up some 85 percent of those executed.” It’s always been so interesting to me that when we hear the phrase “witch hunt” in our cultural lexicon, it’s usually coming from a white man feeling persecuted after he got caught abusing his power. Why don’t we talk more about the witch hunt era as what it was: a large scale, wide-reaching historical campaign of terror against women?

There’s no evidence witchcraft as a specific religion ever really existed, though as a young teen who would light candles and try to cast spells while blasting the angsty strains of Alanis Morissette, I still can’t help but yearn for a ritualistic practice that literally gave women power. Magic wasn’t really what was being hunted, though: it was any form of power that could belong to a woman, especially if it related to her reproductive abilities.

Before the witch hunts, women were bakers, ale-makers, schoolteachers, doctors, and surgeons. Gynecology was a mostly female profession, with c-sections being performed almost exclusively by women in the 14th century, until male-only universities started popping up to certify men and push the midwives and lay healers out of a job.

The lay healers were mostly women who would provide counsel and a few herbs while, by the 1800s, men were getting certified to perform superstitious rituals like bloodletting and treating leprosy with “a broth made of the flesh of a black snake caught in a dry land among stones.” As Ehrenreich and English point out, a patient would be likelier to die by the hands of a certified male doctor’s bravura than with the “undoubtedly safer” gentle attentions of a female lay healer.

Women were especially targeted if they had any medical knowledge about reproduction or contraception. In her book Caliban and the Witch, Silvia Federici argues that the witch hunts were a necessary strategy to transition from feudalism into the capitalist era. Women’s bodies were needed to create more laborers for the new economy, so reproduction had to be carefully monitored.

“The criminalization of women’s control over procreation is a phenomenon whose importance cannot be overemphasized,” Federici writes, “both from the viewpoint of its effects on women and its consequences for the capitalist organization of work.”

If Wolf’s argument that targeting women sexually is an age-old strategy of war, the witch hunts make no exception. “In community after community,” Wolf writes, “the women identified by inquisitors or by their fellow villagers as ‘witches’ were often those who were seen as too sexual, or too free. And forms of torture were focused on their sexuality,” such as with devices placed in the vagina or with vaginal mutilation.

When women were shamed for their sexuality and even tortured at their genital source, the theory goes, they would indeed be willing to step back and relinquish their rights. It is interesting, however, that this subjugation and control of women in the service of capitalism took almost 400 years. We obviously haven’t been that easy to subjugate.  

Echoes of this sexual suppression and torture continue on today in communities where girl’s clitorises are cut out or burned, ostensibly for religious reasons. Clitoridectomies are hardly an invention of some other land, however, lest we think we Westerners are somehow more civilized. In 1858, the English doctor Isaac Baker Brown introduced the practice that, Wolf explains, made him “famous and sought after for his ‘cure,’ which took argumentative, fiery girls, and, after he had excised their clitorises, returned them to their families in a state of docility, meekness, and obedience.” Even Western doctors, it seems, understood that damaging a girl’s clitoris would somehow amputate her will to rebel.

Then, of course, there’s our old buddy Sigmund Freud. The (in)famous founder of psychoanalysis has a hidden story that is, in my reading, about his betrayal of womankind. In the last decades of the 19th century, Freud and his contemporaries were greatly interested in hysteria—which was, basically, a catch-all term for women’s psychological problems vaguely associated with the uterus (hystera in Greek).

In his earnest attempt to understand this common affliction, Freud sat down with women and listened to them. Jean-Martin Charcot and Joseph Breuer, Freud’s contemporaries, were similarly focused on the problem. In her book Trauma and Recovery, Judith Herman points out that “For a brief decade men of science listened to women with a devotion and a respect unparalleled before or since.

All this listening bore fruit for Freud, at least at first. He discovered that women suffering from hysteria pretty much always had a history of childhood sexual abuse. Freud wrote a triumphant paper called The Aetiology of Hysteria clearly explaining the root of the problem. Instead of being lauded for his discovery, however, he was met with the academic version of an uncomfortable silence. “Hysteria was so common among women,” Herman explains,

that if his patient’s stories were true, and if his theory were correct, he would be forced to conclude that what he called ‘perverted acts against children’ were endemic, not only among the proletariat of Paris, where he had first studied hysteria, but also among the respectable bourgeois families of Vienna, where he had established his practice.

That meant that sexual abuse was a systemic issue, a problem of violence against girl children that defied class. Freud’s society was not ready to consider such an earth-shattering possibility, so his theory was rejected. In order to maintain his prestigious position in society, he recanted. Herman goes on,

By the first decade of the twentieth century, without ever offering any clinical documentation of false complaints, Freud had concluded that his hysterical patients’ accounts of childhood sexual abuse were untrue: ‘I was at last obliged to recognize that these scenes of seduction has never taken place, and that they were only fantasies which my patients had made up.’

Betrayal! Freud’s psychoanalysis went on to create a theory of neurosis that did not match women’s actual experience of reality. He insisted that women lie often and that their fantasies were the source of their problems. He came up with the concept of penis envy, that old canard that little girls hate their mothers forever for not giving them a penis. Not to mention his insulting (and evidence-free) idea that women who can’t achieve orgasms from penetration alone are somehow immature, a concept that caused sexual insecurity and an epidemic of sexually frustrated women that still persists to this day.

Women have inherited quite a history of sexual shame, terror, and torture from our ancestral grandmothers, even if we have no history of it in our own lives. It’s no wonder feeling sexual pleasure is so fraught in our time—not only have we not always felt the right to experience pleasure in the ways that work for us (thanks Freud!), but we have echoes of intergenerational trauma from a history of being tortured, murdered, and violated, at worst, and silenced, at best.

For these reasons and more, feeling pleasure isn’t just a little thing we should try to make more time for in our busy lives because it’s fun. It’s a radical act of resistance against a history of suppression and pain. Taking pleasure, whether by enjoying great sex, going dancing, eating good food, or simply having a hot cup of tea on a cool day, is an act of self-determination and choice. Our pleasure is a tool of resistance against our own oppression and suppression. Our pleasure matters.

Last June, shortly after associate justice Anthony Kennedy announced he’d be retiring from the Supreme Court, Minneapolis-based writer and activist Robin Marty started a thread of tweets about abortion. “FACT: There is absolutely no way that the next Trump appointee won’t vote to overturn Roe,” she tweeted. “That’s inevitable. Work from that assumption.” The thread picked up enough likes and retweets to catch the eye of an editor at the Huffington Post, who asked her to compile her thoughts into a post for the site. After her article went live, it received over 30,000 shares. Things snowballed from there and Marty found herself with a book deal for a one-of-a-kind guidebook on abortion that she’s completed and released just in time for the 46th anniversary of the landmark Roe v. Wade decision, January 22nd.

In a Handbook For A Post-Roe America Marty leans on her decade of experience as a journalist covering reproductive justice—she is a SheSource expert on reproductive rights at the Women’s Media Center and spent five years as a senior political reporter at reproductive justice site Rewire News—to explain the ins and outs of the fight for reproductive freedom in America.

Abortion access in America is dwindling; there are already seven states with only one abortion provider left. “This isn’t a crisis the Trump administration caused,” Marty explains in the book. “This is only a crisis that Trump has brought to the main stage.” Through consultation with abortion providers, lawyers, cybersecurity professionals, and reproductive justice advocates, she has assembled a practical action plan for readers that explains why you should quiz your doctor, how to take advantage of existing abortion care networks, why you should be mindful of the electronic trail you’re leaving, and other invaluable lessons that will help you obtain the abortion care you need.

Last month I spoke to Marty about her new book, and about why we should be worried regardless of whether or not Roe v. Wade is actually overturned.

The book reads like a survivalist guide for an impending emergency.

One of the things that I said when I pitched it originally was that I wanted it to be the anarchists handbook of abortion. What if I want to do menstrual extraction? What if I want to try to do my own abortion with pills? What if I want to go sneak cytotec across a country line and through a checkpoint? I wanted all of that information to be available just because people are going to look for it anyway. At the very least in this way it’s all in one place, and it’s all easily accessible for everybody. In certain cases there’s also caveats to let people know that there are people who have died from using parsley to try and end a pregnancy, or there are people who have been arrested because they tried to induce their own abortions, so all of those concerns can be addressed as well.

What is it about the current climate that made you feel like we had finally reached a tipping point where abortion rights are concerned?

Oh, well, to be fair, I think that we reached that tipping point a long time ago. What’s happened now is that we’ve reached a point where the general public has noticed it. The general public is actually in the place where activists have been for years. We have reproductive justice groups that are run by people of color and women of color that have been fighting this for decades already. It’s just that with Trump getting elected and with this last Supreme Court justice coming on and making it almost certain that Roe v. Wade could be overturned, all of the privileged people who have never really had to think about how this might affect them realize now, we might be in trouble because it might be my abortion that is on the line.

A 2017 study conducted by researchers from Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health at the University of California, San Francisco found that “there appears to be more online searches for abortion in states with more restrictive abortion laws.” Can you explain your concerns about the significance of surveillance in a post-Roe America?

I think that it is something that we really have to watch out for. A really great example is in Indiana in 2015—I think it was when Purvi Patel was charged with inducing her own miscarriage. She was charged with murder and one of the things they used against her was the fact that they looked at her phone records and saw that she’d said that she was not happy about being pregnant. She said that she had researched things online. They used that and the fact that when she showed up at the hospital she appeared to not care enough about the fact that she had gone into labor as signs saying that she must’ve decided that she was definitely going to try and procure an abortion on her own. So, we have to be especially careful with what sort of research we do online, what sort of things we say over the telephone. Are our telephone systems secure? Are we using encrypted messaging to talk to each other? Are you clearing your cache when you go to look up abortion information?

All of the privileged people who have never really had to think about how this might affect them realize now we might be in trouble — now it might be *my* abortion that's on the line.
Click To Tweet

I like the “When in doubt, print it out” motto you have at the end of the book.

Yeah, I firmly believe in that. I have an entire cabinet full of all sorts of information because I never know when it might disappear. It’s really important especially if you look at the beginning of the Trump Administration. They were redefining the definition of ‘person,’ they were going through and removing all of the language around trans rights, all these different things that they just kind of wiped clean and now there’s no backup of any of it.

You worked as a political reporter before going freelance as a writer and activist. When and why did you make that jump?

I was working for Rewire and I spent a bunch of years there basically tracking state-based legislation. I think it just became time for me to go and move into freelance because I wanted to do more than just track state abortion laws. I got interested in what was going on in the anti-abortion movement so I started spending more time looking into what’s going on with their movement, their movement leaders, actually going to abortion clinics, and going to protests and really trying to leave the legal and legislation part behind and tell the story of the people who were being affected on both sides of the divide.

Are our telephone systems secure? Are we using encrypted messaging to talk to each other? Are you clearing your cache when you go to look up abortion information?
Click To Tweet

Time magazine named “Guardians and the War On Truth” as person of the year for 2018. Given the state of media do you think journalists have a responsibility to also be activists?

That’s a good question and it’s complicated. I’ve watched journalism and activism go back and forth. My actual background is as an activist originally. I started out doing a project called the Center for Independent Media. Really for me, coming of age and becoming a journalist was always a form of its own activism.

All the people I interview who oppose abortion, they all know exactly where I stand. They are all completely aware that I’m a pro-choice activist and in some ways they appreciate that because they know that I can’t use a bias towards them. I have to report everything accurately because people are going to be looking for my biases. They already know where I am and so I in some ways have more of an obligation to make sure all of my reporting is the truth and is accurate and reflects exactly what happened because they’re expecting it not to be—they expect that activism to show up. So in some ways, by being an activist, it actually makes me a better journalist because people know that the writing that I do has to be verified and has to be true.

A positive by-product of the advice you provide on reproductive rights activism is that you provide a framework for what white allyship should look like when it comes to activism in general, especially when it comes to performing acts of civil disobedience. Why was it important to you to include this?

I think it’s really important right now, especially in Minneapolis we have a lot of racial injustice that’s happening primarily in our community around police activity. This is happening everywhere but in Minneapolis it’s really noticeable because we are predominantly white, and so with the Black Lives Matter movement happening out here it’s become very obvious that it’s the white allies who need to step up and who need to make this change, because we are not the ones who are being targeted by the police.

We are the ones who can use our privilege without having to worry about somebody shooting us or hurting us or murdering us because of our activism. That’s something that we need to bring to a national scale and I think that’s what a lot of people are doing, but we need to recognize that there’s two parts of white allyship right now that we can really focus on.

1. We have the ability to confront police without usually getting harmed, we usually have more financial means to be able to bail ourselves out of jail, to miss work, things like that.
2. We’re also the people least likely to be suspected of breaking laws if we’re trying to do something that is outside the legal bounds. (Plus, we have an obligation to because we have been getting so many advantages from the system of systemic racism as is.)

You facilitate workshops on reproductive justice activism in red and rural states where many of the U.S.’s “abortion deserts”—regions where a person would need to travel over 100 miles to receive abortion care—can be found. What’s that like?

So, I haven’t done that work as much anymore because in complete honesty there are so many other groups that can do it so much better than I can. People ask me to speak to my own experiences about talking to members of the anti-abortion movement and all of the stuff that I do talking with pro-life people.

One of the things I do talk about with red state people is the fact that there’s this consensus that when it comes to the idea of red states being pro-life that there’s not a lot of common ground we can work on, whereas I find that there is an intense amount of common ground we can work on—maternal mortality, working on more rights for women, more rights for people who want to try to continue pregnancies or support their families.

There’s this idea that pro-life and anti-abortion are the same thing whereas in a lot of cases people who say that they’re pro-life will find themselves agreeing in many circumstances with the decision to abort a pregnancy, it’s just they don’t like the idea of it being accessible and readily available. Anytime you give an example about a woman who is ready to finally go back to work and support her five children and then she finds out that she’s pregnant again they’ll often say well ok in that circumstance I agree with it. Often when you approach them with real life situations they will find that that’s that exception that they’re willing to say in this case it’s ok but overall they still stay that they’re pro-life and against abortion.

Being an activist actually makes me a better journalist because people know that the writing that I do has to be verified and has to be true.
Click To Tweet

It sounds like just personalizing it for people is the key to changing their mind.

Basically. There’s this saying that abortion providers have when they talk about how people who oppose abortion come in and actually get abortions—which is a pretty common phenomenon—they say that there’s this belief in the three exceptions: rape, incest, and mine.

One of the most striking facts in the book was that there’s a lack of abortion training in places where you assume it’d be a given like OB-GYN training practices. According to a 2015 piece in The Atlantic this training problem extends to American medical schools too. Should we be worried about a decrease in the number of trained abortion providers in the coming years?

Definitely, and not just because of abortion itself. Obviously abortion is something that should be part of all medical training in general because it’s another part of controlling reproductive rights, but also because so many of the abortion procedures are used in either managing a miscarriage later on, or should a person need an abortion later to save her life, which is something that happens quite frequently. You don’t want to find yourself at an emergency room at a hospital and find out that there’s no provider inside that hospital who actually knows how to do the type of procedure that you need.

The abortion conversation tends to revolve around what’s happening at the federal level but in this book you make the case that our eyes should really be on local politicians.

I’ve been yelling that from the rooftop for years now. If you look at Guttenmacher and their studies about how I think there are nearly 300 [edit:288] different abortion bans that have passed since 2010, most of those passed between 2011-2013 and that was when we needed to pay attention. We kinda missed that boat. Now they’re coming back around again which is really frightening because a lot of these abortion laws that popped up in the first place—I talked about them a lot in my first book, Crow After Roe—that were meant to overturn Roe v. Wade, now these laws are coming back because they know that they have a different configuration on the Supreme Court.

Can you explain why city councils are, in your words, “abortion clinic gatekeepers”?

I think that in a lot of cases city councils have the biggest influence when it comes to the right to an abortion. A lot of times it’s because if you look at red and rural states they have a very anti-abortion legislature. They’ll do everything they can to make abortions hard to get, but the cities themselves are usually fairly progressive. In a lot of cases even if there’s multiple clinics in a state, there’s only one or two cities that actually have abortion clinics. So if you can be a gatekeeper that is on city council you can pass noise ordinances, make sure that building codes and variances are allowed that will keep these buildings open or allow new clinics to open within your cities — in that way you can gave a huge impact on the access your state has even though you’re just working on a city level.

There’s this belief in the three exceptions for pro-life abortions: rape, incest, and mine.
Click To Tweet

St. Louis is a really good example of this because St. Louis is fairly progressive. Their city council tried to pass a general nondiscrimination act and one of the things they said was that you cannot be discriminated against because of race, gender, orientation, but also reproductive health care choices. The idea was that you could not fire somebody or refuse to hire them, or refuse to let them into a shelter, or refuse to give them services, based on the fact that they had had an abortion or worked for a place that offered abortions, worked for a place that offered birth control, that they were using birth control and they weren’t married, any of that.

That passed and I can’t remember—it was like the Catholic Council of something or other [edit: the Archdiocese of St.Louis]—challenged it because it said that it would force them to give up their religious beliefs. It was never about that. Missouri is obviously not—in any way shape or form—a progressive state, but the city was trying to take action to at least protect where they could and part of  it had to do with the abortion clinic because St. Louis has the only one in the state. So, work on your city. Use your city to try and keep abortion accessible, keep people from being attacked over their beliefs and over their sexual health care and basically hope you don’t get sued because man they sue a lot.

According to the polling numbers the majority of Americans don’t want the Roe v. Wade ruling overturned. Do you think that’s enough to keep Roe intact or is its overturn an inevitability?

I honestly don’t believe that Roe is going to be overturned. I think that on the Right it’s way too easy to organize, to get voters in, to do fundraising—all of their activism basically revolves around this idea of abortion being made illegal. If you make abortion illegal that would take so much momentum off the table for them for preparing for elections. I just can’t see that happening, it’s way too easy of a tool for them to use.

What I do see happening is the Supreme Court either choosing not to take up any abortion bills or deciding that as long as abortion is technically legal it doesn’t matter what kind of restrictions you pass on it. So, for instance, in Iowa—where the heartbeat ban is being debated again because it went up to the state supreme court—I could see the Supreme Court saying, ‘Ok we believe that you can pass a heartbeat ban because you are not technically making abortion illegal in your state.’ [edit: the Iowa fetal heartbeat abortion restriction was declared unconstitutional.] There’s still legal abortion even though it’s almost impossible to get one before six weeks.

If they do that, then all the states that want to can pass heartbeat bans, abortion is almost illegal in the state—it’s technically still legal—but Roe was never actually overturned. I see some scenario like that happening where maybe in Mississippi they will finally allow the admitting privileges law to go into effect—no doctors in Mississippi can get admitting privileges who are working at abortion clinics, the clinic closes down and ok, technically abortion is still legal in Mississippi, you just can’t get one anywhere in the state.

I see that sort of thing happening in all of these red states without Roe ever being overturned and then that way the Right still has the ability to politicize Roe and to do their activism around it, but they also get the added benefit of abortion being made inaccessible in a lot of states.

If you make abortion illegal that would take so much momentum off the table for the Right preparing for elections.
Click To Tweet

And you think that loophole behavior of not overturning it but still creating a de facto ban is going to escalate in the next few years?

I would be highly surprised if we don’t have a state where abortion is either illegal after six weeks or there’s no clinic. Honestly, I think the first thing that’s going to happen is we’re going to have a clinic-free state within the next twelve months. If I were going to put money on it I’d say it’s Missouri.

This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

What do you call your private parts, to yourself, to your doctor, in polite company? There are plenty of slang words for the female genitalia—some cute, some raunchy, some silly, some banal—but none of them, not even the scientific-sounding vagina, is quite right.

The term vagina refers to the canal that connects the inner, non-visible organs—cervix, uterus, ovaries—to the visible, outer part, which is the vulva. Often, when we refer to our pussy, hoo-haw, cooter, or vagina, we’re actually talking about is our vulva. Given that “vagina” isn’t —arguably— the prettiest or most exciting word out there, why is that our collective, patriarchal culture insists on using it?

Swedish artist Liv Strömquist wants women to reclaim the word vulva. Or, more specifically, she wants us to—finally—claim it. The illustrator, whose book of graphic nonfiction, Fruit of Knowledge: The Vulva vs the Patriarchy, was released in English last month, aims to destigmatize the female body, especially the vulva, the orgasm, and menstruation.

The 40-year-old feminist activist felt a lot of shame about her body growing up, especially when it came to menstruation. As an adult, she decided to start looking into the taboos associated with the female body. She started asking pointed questions, like, “Where does the taboo around the vulva come from? Has it always looked the same throughout history? How does the taboo around the vulva affect us women psychologically?” she told me via email in early October. “All these things were very interesting for me. I wanted to investigate why there is so much shame surrounding women’s bodies—and in particular the genital parts—in order to change it.”

And then, in 2012, she started turning what she had discovered into Fruit of Knowledge (originally published in Swedish in 2014 as Kunskapens frukt), a cultural history that explores—in edgy, satirical tones and comic-book form—the pathologies, politics, and oft horrifying punishments that female and trans bodies have suffered at the hands of religion, science, and men.    

The meticulously researched Fruit of Knowledge chronicles—toggling between dead serious and drop-dead funny tones—the female body’s mistreatment and mishandling, starting with Eve and winding through history, medicine, pop culture, sex ed, contemporary advertisements, and more.

As graphic nonfiction gains more of a foothold in the literary world, we see more and more serious subjects conveyed in comics form. Here it brings awesome power to a misunderstood and hushed-up topic.

Where does the taboo around the vulva come from? Has it always looked the same throughout history?
Click To Tweet

“So much is communicated with a well-drawn side-eye, angry eyebrows, etc.,” translator Melissa Bowers told me via email. “The first time I read [Fruit of Knowledge] I was either giggling, cringing, or both. I was so charmed by Liv’s simple, expressive drawing style.” Charmed is a surprisingly accurate response to the way Strömquist conveys information. When asked why she chose the comics form to write about such thorny material, she said, “I’ve always really liked comics, since I was a child. If you see a comic in a magazine you immediately want to read it—and this is why I really like this art form. It’s very appealing, not difficult or pretentious. It’s folksy. Articles about feminism and left-wing politics often tend to be very heavy, academic and serious, so I like to make my work fun to read.”

Fruit of Knowledge certainly achieves that artistic intention, turning a gallery of “Men Who Have Been Too Interested in the Female Genitalia” into an informative yet humorous hall of shame, and, in “Blood Mountain,” poking fun at the superstitions around menstruation, while also digging into ancient times, when it “appears that menstruation was MORE holy and LESS icky.”

For thousands of years and across cultures, Strömquist relays, the vulva and menstruation had been integral parts of the sacred landscape—vulvas made their appearance in Greek myth, Egyptian lore, European fables, and notably, monasteries, churches, and village gates in Celtic culture. It was once believed that the female orgasm was necessary (and thus highly valued) for procreation. Sounds a bit different than the way we treat the female body today, doesn’t it?

Strömquist explains the disparity this way: “The very overt hatred and fixation that the monotheistic religions have with the female body and sexuality [arose because religions]—in their early stage—were in competition with fertility cults.”

During the Enlightenment, and with the rise of medical science (and male doctors), those in power had to come up with new theories for female inferiority.

For thousands of years and across cultures, Strömquist relays, the vulva and menstruation had been integral parts of the sacred landscape.
Click To Tweet

Strömquist continued explaining that:

“Science had to try to find explanations as to why women were different from men and couldn’t have the same access to power and money in society. Before they could say, ‘Women have no power in society because that’s what god wants’—but later they had to come up with scientific reasons. That’s when medical science started to obsess on things like the uterus, menstruation and so on.

“In the debate over if women could enter university in the end of the 1800s, there was a doctor who wrote a book that argued that women couldn’t enter university because of their menstruation. If they studied, their brain would use the blood they needed for menstruation, and become infertile. So if women started to study in the university, it would be the end of the human race.”

This might sound extreme to us now, but considering the contemporary struggle to simply close the gender pay gap or support working mothers—how far have we really come? Society continues to use the female body—and its natural functions—against women.

While much of what Strömquist covers in her work relates to the biologically female body, she also fixes her searing gaze on the binary two-gender system, criticizing the surgeries that intersex babies undergo, often in the first weeks of their life, which only serve to “categorize genitals” and “remove sensitive tissues that the person might miss later in life.”

In “Blood Mountain,” the chapter which covers menstruation, Strömquist explores the fallacy of PMS being linked to a particular gender, illustrating her point with a male figure skater lifting a leg to expose bloody panties, accompanied by the captioned thought that if we didn’t live in a binary two-gender society, “I could have drawn the first page of this chapter like this → Or in some completely different way!! Which I am too socially conditioned to even think of!!!”

Social conditioning plays a strong role throughout Strömquist’s work, and she’s keen to exploit that awareness, not allowing how we culturally perceive biology and gender to dominate her art.  

In all areas of her work, Strömquist explores “provocative” subject matter. Last year, her art came under fire last year when Stockholm’s metro commuters found her subway illustrations of women menstruating “disgusting,” while others insisted it was awkward explaining the red stains to their children.

“There was a big debate over my pictures when they were displayed in the Stockholm Metro-station,” Strömquist says.

“They were vandalized twice so they had to be replaced with new prints. There was a political debate, where the populist right-wing party in Sweden wrote an article criticizing the use of tax money to support this kind of art and promised that if they got in power they would replace this kind of art with pre-modern oil painting. People still have quite strong feelings about [menstruation], which I find interesting.”

Despite the controversy over her artwork, she also “received a lot of support and positive reactions” for depicting menstruation—something that happens to millions of bodies every day—in a celebratory public forum.

Strömquist currently lives in Malmö, where she works for a youth radio station and hosts a political podcast. She has two new books in the works. One, a comic titled “Rise and Fall,” covers “climate change and problems of world capitalism.” The other is “a book about the social construction of romantic love,” which she hopes to see published in English as well.

In her chapter, “Upside Down Rooster Comb,” where she quotes Sartre and The Latin Kings, Strömquist also cites psychologist Harriet Lerner, who has been writing about the consequences of mislabeling the vulva as the vagina for decades. Lerner “likens this misuse of language to ‘psychic genital mutilation.’”

Whereas the vagina is often described in terms of absence, “a ‘hole’ waiting to be filled with a cock,” the vulva is very rarely mentioned—in conversation, and even in biology textbooks.

We are literally discouraged from properly naming the vulva. “If we don’t have the words,” Stromquist says, “we cannot understand what the organ is or how it looks and works. Words are really important. In many languages there isn’t even a proper word for the [female] sexual organ—one that isn’t an insult.”

Imagine being encouraged to call your arm your hand, or being told your entire life that your toes are your leg. This kind of senseless mislabeling encourages confusion, avoidance, and embarrassment, all of which prevent many people from treating the vulva with the respect and veneration it deserves.

If we don’t have the words we cannot understand what the vulva is or how it looks and works.
Click To Tweet

Given the current political climate in the United States, Strömquist’s vibrant, excoriating work is more necessary than ever. Fruit of Knowledge is the kind of self-care Western culture needs—accessible, intelligent, and engaging renderings of culture and history—that provide the encouragement to help us finally name and reclaim the female body.

As I browsed the University of Texas Press’s fall catalogue, a title jumped out at me: The Man Who Wrote the Perfect Novel (October 15). When I read the blurb, I became incensed. It was a biography of John Williams, the author of Stoner, the unlikeliest bestseller of the 2000s. Stoner was originally published in 1965 and reissued by NYRB Classics in 2006, and then re-reissued in 2015 in a lavish hardback edition. It was reviewed and lauded widely. In the New York Times Book Review, Morris Dickstein called it “a perfect novel.”

Stoner is not a perfect novel. It’s not even a particularly well-written novel. You’ve probably read a hundred books like it. It is a methodical, hagiographic piece of fiction about a college professor, a man who plods passively through his life and takes joy only in literature.

William Stoner is born on a farm. He goes to college, becomes a professor at that college, takes a wife, has a child, undergoes professional difficulties, and dies. This is a terrific way to write a novel—to do a character study of a small, mediocre life. But Williams’s mediocrity blurs with Stoner’s until they both lose the reader’s interest. And one or both of them has a frightening carelessness toward women. Stoner repeatedly indulges in marital rape, saying that when his wife shifts against him in her sleep, “he moved upon her.” His wife, in response, “turn[s] her head sideways in a familiar gesture and bur[ies] it in her pillow, enduring violation,” so there is no mistaking these encounters as consensual. Dickstein’s review didn’t mention that. But then, Stoner is aimed toward Dickstein, and not toward me.  

There’s a reason a book like Stoner was re-issued, and a biography like The Man Who Wrote the Perfect Novel was published.  The most elevated cultural conversations favor writing that is traditionally male, subjectively male, overtly male. This may be occurring almost involuntarily on the part of the editors and critics. In Stoner, a male critic might not notice that Stoner’s wife is relegated to the stereotypes of frigid bitch, and later, crazy bitch. A critic without a disability might not notice that the central villains of the book are both disabled, and that the motives for their villainy are otherwise unexplained. A white critic might not notice that there are no educated people of color in the book at all. He might perceive only that Williams’s quiet, scholarly hero does his duty and loves his literature, despite the schemers who endeavor to ruin him—never noticing the common thread among those schemers.

So, of course Stoner is not a perfect novel. There’s no such thing, but if there were, it definitely wouldn’t sympathize with marital rape or demonize characters who are not cisgendered, fully abled white men. To state the obvious, no novel can be all-inclusive. Committee art is rarely of good quality. But a novel that actively shuts out readers because of their gender or skin color? The time for celebrating a novel like that, for glorifying it to the point of biographizing its author, should be long over.

The most elevated cultural conversations favor writing that is traditionally male, subjectively male, overtly male.
Click To Tweet

Yet it still happens. Charles J. Shields, who has also written biographies of Harper Lee and Kurt Vonnegut, has done a valorous job with Williams in The Man Who Wrote the Perfect Novel. But he cannot disguise what’s at the heart of Stoner and what seems to have been at the heart of its author: misogyny, and mediocrity. A recollection of Williams: “He was one of those who felt…that the world is closing in on them, with all these ‘women and minorities’…[taking] the place that they were raised to think is rightfully theirs.”

As a scholar, Williams’s work was backward-looking (despite writing in the fertile 1960s, he had no interest in poetry beyond the time of William Carlos Williams), derivative, and inadequate; a rejecting editor wrote to Williams, “You are overstepping your evidence by about ten thousand miles.” In 1963 Williams caused a minor scandal by plagiarizing Yvor Winters. Shields treats it as delicately as possible. “Williams’ students did know of their professor’s proclivity for borrowing…He had taken shortcuts since the beginning of his teaching career…piggybacking on Alan Swallow’s Wyatt dissertation for his own…compiling a poetry anthology incorporating Winters’ scholarship.”

In the critical segment of his writer’s life, Williams is so unimaginative that he must plagiarize. Meanwhile, as a poet and fiction author, he struggles to find an agent, to find publication, to find a job, to find funding. He often expresses frustration that he can’t seem to get ahead as a writer. Shields tiptoes around it, but the fact is, Williams’s books just aren’t that good. On his first novel, a rejection letter reads, “To us it seems a shame that a writer of Mr. William’s [sic] obvious capabilities and potentialities should have spent so much time delineating a character who is basically not worth it.” Dutton’s feedback: “Unfortunately, we think that…this manuscript is just too long and too pretentious.”

In sum, Stoner is a minor novel by a minor writer. I don’t begrudge its wide readership (people can enjoy whatever they want); I begrudge its elevation, when it is so plainly and seriously flawed, to the point that a single review by a male critic has titled Williams’s biography. The preposterous, rapturous praise, leveled unequally toward mediocre men like Williams, is the problem.

A scan of the NYRB Classics list shows that male names outstrip female names; the same editors who chose to put two editions of Stoner into print within ten years choose mostly men from the annals of out-of-print literature to reissue and promote. Yet the poet Ai, who won a National Book Award, a Guggenheim, and an NEA grant, requires a Kickstarter to come back into print. The Second Shelf, a quarterly publication and online bookstore devoted to out-of-print women’s writing, also needed a Kickstarter to fill the gap NYRB Classics perpetuates. Passing, by Nella Larsen, is obscure (ranked at 10,000 in Amazon sales at this writing), while Invisible Man flourishes (ranked at 1,000).

Twice as many male authors get translated as women; only two houses that commonly publish translated books published more women authors than men in 2017. And just one publisher, AmazonCrossing (!), accounts for 20% of the women published in translation. VIDA continues to shout across the gender gap in publishing for short stories, essays, and particularly criticism—check out the stats for the London Review of Books and, surprise!, the NYRB. As those statistics demonstrate, women writers are reviewed less, and women critics are offered fewer opportunities to review.

The preposterous, rapturous praise, leveled unequally toward mediocre men like Williams, is the problem.
Click To Tweet

Stoner is perfect in one respect: as an example of the heights to which a mediocre white male writer can soar when given proper cheerleading. Williams has netted a biography and lasting fame because of the men in publishing and criticism clustered around him, rooting for him. Compare him to Clarice Lispector, a contemporary, who was exponentially more prolific and acclaimed during her lifetime. It took a 2009 biography to push her work into wider acknowledgment in the US, instead of the acknowledgment engendering the biography. Or compare him to Anaïs Nin, whose work is remembered as supplemental to Henry Miller’s, whose extraordinary diary has been published by smaller and smaller presses as interest in her has waned, whose objectively fascinating life has been biographized only once. Or compare him to Grace Metalious, author of Peyton Place. She wrote bestselling, salacious melodramas that tapped the repressive sexuality of her era and is barely critically studied at all.

Stoner is also excellent as a standard against which every female writer should push. Per Shields, “Williams could build his fiction around thought warring with feeling, which creates tension, and to suggest that emotions are ineffable, beyond characters’ reach.” This sense pervades Stoner, that emotions are foreign and impossible. I think this struggle was Williams’s, that he found it difficult to enter the weak and confusing realm of emotion and nurture (his own children barely appear in Shields’s biography), the realm in which women stereotypically belong. I imagine that Williams would have found a book like My Brilliant Friend as intolerable as I find Stoner, as there is no place for him in it.

Women are half (or more) of the reading public, and yet books like Stoner are what’s thrust upon us—books in which we will never find ourselves, books whose authors were rightly buried under the weight of their own mediocrity. Books and authors whose obsolescence, whose extinction, are overdue.

The ‘Justice Hustlers’ series is turning tired tropes about sex work on their head.

‘Uptown Thief’ and ‘The Boss,’ from Aya de León’s ‘Justice Hustlers’ series

M y miseducation about sex work began early on. In my childhood neighborhood in Oakland, California, young women of color worked the corners, and at least one pimp lived on my block. But while adults called the women stupid for giving their hard-earned money to pimps, they praised the pimps for their “hustle.”

Portrayals in the media didn’t help either. As a Xennial growing up in the ’90s, I noticed that sex workers on crime dramas like Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, NYPD Blue, and Silk Stalkings usually became murder victims. These characters tended to be uneducated and hopeless and only spoke a few lines, if any at all.

In the news, sex workers only made headlines if politicians or married celebrities were caught with them. A woman had to be Julia Roberts in a blonde bob wig strutting down Hollywood Blvd. to get a fairytale ending and the privilege of basic humanization.

In her new book The Boss, the second novel from her “Justice Hustlers” series, author Aya de León ventures away from these tired tropes to explore sex work with the exceedingly rare qualities of nuance and depth. These Set It Off meets Ocean’s 11 books are about a multicultural group of former sex workers who run a New York clinic for women, funding their operations by breaking into the safes of wealthy men who exploit women and girls. Their Robin Hood method is illegal — and I don’t personally condone it — but during these hostile times, there’s also something distinctly refreshing about the storyline. How often do we get to read about the oppressed retaliating against their oppressors?

De León is the director of Poetry for the People, an arts/activism program at UC Berkeley founded by the late June Jordan, the acclaimed Black poet and racial-justice activist. She researched and consulted with real sex workers to address the complexity of the industry and humanize the women who do this work. Her heroines are smart and brave. They provide emotional support to family members. At night they wear disguises, hot-wire cars, break into estates, steal millions, and kick ass. During the day, they’re teaching safe-sex workshops and giving press conferences. They care about the community, but they’re not perfect. Who is? All of the women became sex workers for different reasons. No one has the same story.

There’s action, romance, titillating sex scenes, and keep-it-real humor. More importantly, there’s also a deeper message that resonates today.

“Sex work sits at the intersection of gender, commerce, race, nationality, and socioeconomic class,” de León says. “By creating this sex work community, it became a way to comment on all of that — to comment on sex trafficking, the collusion between corporations and sex trafficking.”

In The Boss, another key plotline focuses on clinic workers helping the dancers to become unionized. De León says she wants her readers to see work as labor, and to understand how much labor organizing there is in the industry. Her inspiration for The Boss was the now-defunct Lusty Lady in San Francisco, one of the only unionized peep shows in the country during the ’90s before it closed in 2013.

The Boss was written long before the recent strike by New York City strippers, but that incident has brought the book’s themes into sharp focus. According the Washington Post, dancers went on strike because they’re losing money to new “bartenders” — actually women with significant social media followings being contracted by clubs. They serve drinks behind the bars nearly naked, and draw in their followers. The practice, it’s been noted, is steeped in racism, as the aggrieved strippers tend to be Black, and the bartenders white or Latina.

Another crucial element of the book is, perhaps, more subtle: a focus on these women’s rich lives outside work, including their complex romantic and platonic relationships. These storylines show readers that sex workers have love and are worthy of being loved; that there’s more to their lives than the work they do, and to which they are so often confined in popular culture.

The Thin Line Between Women Artists And Sex Workers

De León’s books are published by Dafina, which is known for its catalogue of urban lit, or street lit, books — a genre defined by an inner-city setting, Black main characters, and themes like drugs, violence, sex, gangs, and poverty. Sista Souljah, Zane, and Vickie Stringer are successful authors in the genre, which started with Black writers but now includes Latino authors as well. The books — which de León points out have a high readership of young women of color — are sold in Walmart and major bookstores, and can be found in libraries in Black and brown communities.

The genre thrives in the book industry, but is not without criticisms. While fans say the books reflect real life and are entertaining, some Black readers have criticized urban lit for playing on racial stereotypes about Black people. Even de León finds some components of urban lit troubling:

“I take issue with certain things about urban lit. It is full of sexual exploitation and sexism. In many stories, not only is there a lot of violence, but also a lack of empathy for the characters in response to violence — both the perpetrators and the victims.

I don’t choose to portray characters who are desensitized to violence. As an author, I try to create a more rich and nuanced emotional life for my characters. At the same time, I do choose to normalize realities like sex work and other illegal activities because in low-income urban communities, people do what they have to do to survive.”

De León says she sees the bright side to the gritty genre too.

“Urban lit speaks to the erasure of the realities of low-income urban people of color, and the lack of representation of our folks as fully realized characters in the rest of literature. Which is why I’m proud to write urban lit. I want young, urban, brown women to have feminist characters they can identify with, who are sexy and dealing with hella drama, but also taking charge and changing the world.”

Most writers dream of their books landing on the shelves of big-box bookstores. De León’s problem is different. Despite the social justice themes woven throughout her stories, she’s having a hard time getting her books into feminist and social justice bookstores. Sellers can’t get past the series’ covers, she says, which feature a young woman of color in sexy club attire.

Still, she’s excited that her social justice messages are reaching audiences outside of academia.

‘Urban lit speaks to the erasure of the realities of low-income urban people of color.’

“I’d much rather have young women in the community reading the book. I just have to [enlighten] those people who have stigma and prejudice against urban lit and romance, but who actually share my political values.”

De León’s work is reaching readers like who I once was — those not already in the choir, who can learn a lot from the literature they pick up. Gender wealth disparity, sex workers’ rights, racist stereotypes about Black sexuality and bodies — I didn’t learn about these issues until college, when studying race and gender helped me analyze and challenge the ideas I learned about sex work growing up.

There will be four books in the “Justice Hustlers” series, and though I’m not a thief, I plan to steal time away for myself when the third book drops in 2018. I need that literary mental escape where oppressed women bring down wealthy misogynists, take back their power, and share it with the community.

It’s on.

Looking For A Comments Section? We Don’t Have One.

]]> https://theestablishment.co/meet-the-12-year-old-trailblazer-fighting-for-equality-in-kids-books-e57a952c05e1/ Sun, 01 Oct 2017 15:21:38 +0000 https://theestablishment.co/?p=2924 Read more]]> Marley Dias couldn’t find enough children’s stories featuring people who look like her, so she’s working to change that — and getting famous in the process.

This story originally appeared on Narratively, a digital publication and creative studio focused on ordinary people with extraordinary stories — get thee to more amazing tales on the new face of adoptive parents, a series on paperless people, and clandestine love.

Marley Dias, who is 12, arrives in New York’s Fashion District wheeling a suitcase filled with blazers, sneakers, and ten pairs of eyeglasses. She’s traveled in a town car from her home in New Jersey to be photographed for a publication that is presenting her with an award in November, which will debut this winter. She’s wearing a translucent pink plastic pair of glasses, Converse, a three-quarter-length baseball tee, and cut-off jeans.

Dias’s publicist hugs her and steps back like a mother surveying her daughter who’s just come back from college, commenting on how tall Dias has grown. The publicist introduces Dias around to the camera crew, who has been toying with the placement of stacks of books against a stark white backdrop. There’s a lot of chatter at once as the makeup artist and stylist size up Dias and lead her into the dressing room for privacy. The windowsill is lined with clip-on bows and jeweled hair accessories. Tomboy suits hang off the clothing racks. There’s a suggestion that Dias wrap her hair into pigtails, and then some discussion about whether that will look too childish. Dias sits in the dressing chair. As the makeup artist begins dabbing the brush in the liquid foundation, the publicist interjects to say she doesn’t want Dias to wear too much makeup. She should look her age.

Her mother, Janice Johnson Dias, who is the president of the small non-profit GrassROOTS Community Foundation, asked Dias over breakfast one morning what she had learned over the year. Johnson Dias likes to pose the question, “What happens when you see your own problem? What are you going to do to solve it?” Dias, then only 11, said she wanted to attempt to collect one thousand books that featured black girls as the main character. She had been reading stories in school, like Where the Red Fern Grows, that featured “boys and their dogs” and couldn’t relate to these protagonists. In November of 2015, Dias, then in sixth grade, launched a campaign called #1000BlackGirlBooks.

“I thought that was a very big problem,” she says of being assigned books that featured mainly white men and boys, “because kids don’t experience the same thing.”

Kathleen Horning, the director of Cooperative Children’s Book Center, which documents the number of books by and about people of color, found in 2013 that of the 650 young adult fiction books it tracked that year about humans, only 36 featured people of color as the main character, about five percent of the total. Two years later in 2015, the organization found eight percent of children’s books featured African Americans as main characters, less than one percent Native American, three percent Asian Pacific, and over 73 percent white characters. Twelve percent featured “animals, trucks, etc.” which shows there were more kids’ books being published about inanimate objects than about people of color.

Several organizations are trying to address the disparity, including Writing in the Margins, which mentors emerging writers and We Need Diverse Books, which advocates for change in the publishing industry. Its co-founder Dhonielle Clayton, who was a librarian for six years, said she wouldn’t have been able to fill one shelf of books that featured children of color as the main characters. One student, a girl of color, asked Dhonielle to pick out a book for her about a witch, one who looked like she did, and Clayton couldn’t find one.

“We’re looking at stereotyping and erasure as a form of censure in children’s books. You can see how children’s books are a form of programming in this country,” she says.

“It’s exhausting to talk to people who are ignorant and don’t get it,” Clayton continues, speaking about the lack of diversity within publishing houses, as well as in the books they put out — where a 2015 survey by Lee and Low Books showed that 79 percent of people in the industry were white and only four percent black. “You give up, you hit roadblocks, people think you’re trying to dispossess them. Diversity is not about replacing. It’s about enhancing and adding. The pie is not going to be gobbled up by one group.”

Twelve days from Dias’s scheduled deadline to collect her 1,000 books, which was set for the end of January 2016, she had only received 200 books, which she planned to donate to a school in St. Mary, Jamaica, where her mother is from. But the campaign grabbed the attention of the local FOX news station, Good Day Philadelphia — where she was interviewed wearing lime-green sunglasses — and afterward, the media and press requests began pouring in. Shortly after, she appeared on The Ellen DeGeneres Show as her parents proudly beamed from the audience.

The campaign blew up from there, turning Dias into a sought-after mini celebrity. Later that year, the Poughkeepsie School Districted paid her $6,500 to give an hour-long speech to staff and a workshop to fifty students.

“The first time I saw her on T.V., I cried,” says Sonia Fergus, the mother of Dias’s childhood friend, who accompanied her to the photo shoot. “Most people don’t get to do what they love and she’s getting to do that.”

Almost two years since the campaign began, Dias has now gathered over 10,000 books, and about 2,000 unique titles with donations from places like Barnes & Noble. She sent the donations to schools and social service organizations across the United States and Jamaica. Last summer, she was asked to create a zine for Elle.com, which was a big deal for her because her life goal is to become a magazine editor. She interviewed Hillary Clinton, filmmaker Ava DuVernay, and Misty Copeland, who she’s a “huge fan” of and says she models her life after the ballet dancer’s “grace and elegance.” Her first book will be published by Scholastic early next year, which Dias describes as guide for girls over ten that shows how they can change the world “in their own way that’s not just in a soup kitchen.”

Dias wants to keep working on issues of diversity and literacy, hoping one day to perhaps host or produce a show and empower other kids to speak out.

Johnson Dias says her daughter is not afraid to stand up for others, like helping friends who are challenged by schoolwork. Though much of her job requires being in the spotlight, she doesn’t like to draw attention to herself. When she first noticed the lack of diverse books in her school, she kept mum and didn’t appeal to her teachers. However, Dias’s new role has matured her beyond what many young teenagers experience.

“She has changed. I think she’s more serious with the social responsibility. It’s no longer about her and she’s carrying that weight more than I as her mother would have liked,” she says.

Before the four-hour long photo shoot begins, Dias’s makes sure she eats eats lunch. A caterer has delivered salmon, kale salad, and an assortment of cookies. Dias is still hungry for the fish after it’s gone so the publicist slices off a piece of hers and puts it on Dias’s plate. As she eats, Dias takes out her cellphone and starts scrolling through her Instagram page to show off her school friends, who she says are so diverse, they’re like the United Nations.

“Only ten percent of people are left-handed,” she says, changing the topic with a fact she repeats later for the camera crew.

Her first outfit change is a plaid navy jacket under a white collared shirt, pants, white high-top Converse and clear eyeglasses. She’s decided to try the pigtails. They’re secured with little bows.

She sits cross-legged on the floor against the color-coordinated stacks of books, switching between making silly faces and pretending to read. The photographer sits bare-footed a few feet away, directing Dias where to sit, when to stand and how to pose.

As the campaign snowballed, Johnson Dias expected her daughter’s grades to dip, but Dias continued to qualify for honors classes.

“I think there are moments when she likes this and moments when she dislikes it,” Johnson Dias says about her daughter. “It’s uncomfortable when it interrupts her being a kid.”

Dias echoes that sentiment. She doesn’t always like to dress up and prefers not to stay out late. She gets to travel now and meet influential people, but she can’t see her friends all the time and has missed some school. She acknowledges that being in the public eye means her freedom is limited compared to other kids.

“People like to think of me as an author or a personality,” she says during the shoot. “But childhood is a very special time in your life and you never get that back.”

But she’s forging ahead with the pursuit as a means to pave the way for other kids.

“I want to actually change the system we live in,” she says.

Read more great tales over at Narratively.

If women are as good as men at science and math, why aren’t there more female scientists and mathematicians?”

“Women are monogamous; men have a naturally roving eye. It’s just science.”

“Women are more nurturing and better at taking care of children. Science says so.”

Sound familiar? Tropes like these — masqueraded as “science” — have long proliferated the idea that women are inherently different from men. But as outlined in Angela Saini’s riveting new book Inferior: How Science Got Women Wrong and the new research that’s rewriting the story, scientific justifications for why women are perhaps just a tiny bit less clever and a tiny bit more suited to caregiving are bunk.

Tropes masqueraded as ‘science’ have long proliferated the idea that women are inherently different from men.
Click To Tweet

The book’s title takes on a scientific myth that’s been around at least since 1881. That year, a female reader wrote to Charles Darwin asking if women were equal to men. Darwin wrote back: “There seems to me to be a great difficulty from the laws of inheritance, (if I understand these laws rightly) in [women] becoming the intellectual equals of man.”

Darwin’s evolutionary ways, it seems, only went so far.

Science has always been pitted against feminism

Darwin was far from alone — not back then and not even now. Saini, an Oxford educated engineer-turned-science writer is out to prove the deep misogyny behind much of the gender science we hold dear. Her interest in gender differences was first sparked when writing a story about menopause. “I realized that science just didn’t get women. We are not the weaker sex,” she tells me.

Her book exposes the bad science, shoddy studies, and prejudiced research that has long fed these stereotypes.

She adds:

“We always think of science as neutral. But the fact is that science is often full of prejudice, because scientists are so often full of prejudice. There is nothing in biology that says women can’t do anything a man can do. I am not trying to say that one sex is better than the other. But tiny differences between the sexes have been exaggerated to keep women in their place.”

New research, as noted by the book’s subtitle, tells a different story.

In one study at Yale University, over 100 scientists were asked to assess a resume submitted for a vacancy for a laboratory manager. Every resume was identical, except that half were submitted under a recognizably female name and the other half under a recognizably male one. Scientists rated those with female names significantly lower in competence and employability. They were also less willing to mentor them, and offered lower salaries. Most telling of all, male and female scientists were equally likely to exhibit bias against women applicants.

Saini also illuminates the story of Eliza Gamble, whose 1894 book The Evolution of Woman: An Inquiry into the Dogma of her Inferiority to Man took on Darwin. Gamble marshaled a slew of arguments and studies to show that women weren’t naturally inferior; they just seemed that way because they hadn’t been allowed the chance to develop their talents. Gamble’s arguments helped the early suffragettes battle for the vote. And yet, as Saini highlights, she made no impact in the scientific world.

Gamble’s theories were proved time and time again, by female scientists whose research was similarly ignored. In Inferior, Saini analyses a flood of flawed studies, often conducted by men, which were not replicated or too hastily accepted. Repeating an experiment is considered key in science but it’s often too expensive or difficult.

A 2000 paper by Simon Baron-Cohen, a Cambridge psychologist and neuroscientist, claimed to prove that there are noticeable sex differences in the way newborn babies behave.

Baron-Cohen went on to elaborate his research in a follow-up book, claiming:

“People with the female brain make the most wonderful counsellors, primary school teachers, nurses, carers, therapists, social workers, mediators, group facilitators or personnel staff … People with the male brain make the most wonderful scientists, engineers, mechanics, technicians, musicians, architects, electricians, plumbers, taxonomists, catalogists, bankers, toolmakers, programmers or even lawyers.”

As Saini dryly notes about the researcher’s conclusion: “It’s difficult not to notice that the male brain appears better suited to higher paying, higher status fields like computer programming while the female brain seems to fit best with lower status jobs, such as a carer.”

Ideas like this have become inescapable everywhere. In 2005, Harvard University president Lawrence Summers said that the scarcity of female scientists could be attributed to biological differences between the sexes. His “suggestion” was defended by Baron-Cohen and his ilk.

But a later study by Cambridge University neuroscientist Melissa Hines found only the tiniest gaps between the mathematical ability, spatial visualization, and verbal fluency of boys and girls. Her study, though, did not go viral.

Explaining The Perpetual Gender Gap In Academic Science
theestablishment.co

“It’s hard to separate our opinion from the data. The human mind wants to have things that define maleness and things that define femaleness,” Hines is quoted in Saini’s book as saying.

Flawed science has routinely made it into the media and pop culture. The 1978 issue of Playboy had a cover story which trumpeted, “Do men need to cheat on their women? A new science says yes.” Studies, mostly led or conducted by men that showed women as chaste, modest caregivers, have long been latched onto by the media — never mind their accuracy. Meanwhile, studies that have bucked stereotypes, often conducted by women scientists, have often been ignored.

While writing Inferior, Saini traveled the world to dig out these overlooked studies. For years, scientists have claimed that women were biologically more suited to caregiving than men — even pointing to gender norms in other species to support this — allowing human fathers to sneak out of childcare duties. But when California-based primatologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy studied primates and hunter gatherer tribes, she found that childcare was shared by fathers, siblings, and grandmothers, not just the mother. Our ancestors were probably more evolved than we are.

As Saini writes: “The Victorian ideal that Darwin based his understanding of women upon — mother at home, taking care of the children, father bringing home the bacon — is left out in the cold.”

Other female anthropologists, Saini goes on to write, are now busting the myth that males were always the main inventors, tool users, and hunters in prehistoric times. Women are supposed to be “the weaker sex,” but when it comes to longevity and surviving illness, women outlast men worldwide. And compounding new research shows that women can be every bit as polygamous and promiscuous as men, if society allows them to be. If women weren’t as sexual as men, argues Saini in her book, why would so many cultures adopt practices like genital mutilation and keep women “in their place” by harassment and rape?

Culture, not biology

Inferior makes a convincing argument that all these myth-busting studies have been ignored by a sexist establishment that was threatened by the idea of women gaining power. It’s culture, not biology, which has kept women behind.

Recent world events back Saini. At the World Science Conference, physicist Dr Veronika Hubeny was on a “manel,” where a male moderator explained her own theories to her and did not allow her to speak. So blatant was the mansplaining that a female member of the audience got up and protested: “Let her speak!”

“These kinds of manels are so common in science,” says Saini, who says she has often been the only woman in the room at both school science classes, and later at Oxford.

The Disturbing Science Behind Subconscious Gender Bias
theestablishment.co

Even when women do enter science, they usually drop out. Saini’s first book, Geek Nation, was about science in India. India is one of the few countries in the world where engineering classes are full of women. “Culturally women are encouraged to go into engineering because it’s such a respected profession,” says Saini. But, as she points out, most drop out within a few years of graduating, weighed down by family responsibilities. “There is this expectation that a woman should do everything — work, run the house, rear the kids, and look after the elderly…eventually they collapse, exhausted.”

Saini goes on to say, her frustration evident:

“How lazy is it to assume that there are fewer women in science because it’s biological! Oxford only allowed women to graduate in 1920, Cambridge 28 years later. Women are only just catching up after years of being pushed down.”

What’s the solution to sexist, bad science? Saini suggests a social science approach.

“The fact is that when you study humans, it is very difficult to get a clear picture, because we are all complex individuals. Just because one woman is bad at math, it does not mean all of them are.”

Men cry a lot in Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them. They cry while handing over beloved pets to bent-fingered trolls; they cry while saying goodbye to friends who won’t remember them tomorrow; they cry when they are betrayed by a person who claimed to have their best interests at heart. Men, I daresay, cry more than women in Fantastic Beasts. For a movie that isn’t an overt drama, that’s surprising — and refreshing.

The Harry Potter series revolves around the idea of love as a powerful force against evil — which means that it deals with emotion, on some level, but doesn’t require Harry himself to subvert typical boyhood masculinity. If anything, he has a very normal hero’s journey.

Harry is presented as a loving and kind person, refusing to use cruel or dark magic, but his kindness is the sort of kindness that’s allowable within the framework of masculinity: tied to courage and acts of bravery, an active kindness that is associated with a greater good or nobler cause.

Nursing an individual person back to health is not part of this masculinity, for instance, but standing up for someone who’s being bullied definitely is. It’s a positive but narrow vision of caring that still skirts around kindnesses that might be considered feminine — nurturing, mothering, soothing.

---

Empathy and its opposite — callousness, if you want, or ignorance, or bigotry — exist within a typical framework of toxic masculinity.
Click To Tweet

---

In this vein, empathy and its opposite — callousness, if you want, or ignorance, or bigotry — exist within a typical framework of toxic masculinity, a cultural insistence that to be masculine is to be strong and fearless and hard and to never cry, to never be gentle, or vulnerable, or soft, or weak. Empathy — actually experiencing someone else’s emotions as if they were your own — can be part of standing up for someone that’s been bullied, but it’s not required to be; you can stand up for someone because you know bullying is bad, not because you empathize with the target. Empathy is feminized, entrenched innately in the emotional vulnerability that is so anathema to toxic masculinity. After all, in order to empathize with an oppressed person, you have to admit that you’ve felt powerless, and feeling powerless is unacceptable within this framework.

But the core of Fantastic Beasts is a fact, and this fact is the bedrock of its world: Empathy is more valuable, and more powerful, than anything else. J.K. Rowling’s stories tend to reduce the driving force of good to a single emotional truth. In the Harry Potter series, it was love. In the world of Newt Scamander’s beasts, it’s looking like it might be empathy.

There are many different ways to be an empathetic, and therefore good, person in Rowling’s world. The ultra-feminine Queenie can literally read minds, but that power only makes her gentler and more sympathetic. Tina, anxious and more masculine in manner and dress, is removed from her job as an Auror because her desire to protect a boy whose witch-hating mother beats him overrides her professional caution.

Perhaps most notable among the main characters, Jacob Kowalski — a non-magical Muggle, or No-Maj as Rowling is trying to force Americans to say — reacts not with fear or threat to his new magical friends, but with curiosity and open-hearted joy. In a world where magical people have laws against even interacting with non-magical people for fear of oppression and retaliation, Kowalski’s attitude is revolutionary. He cares so much about his friends and their world, even in the short time he’s known them, that when he finds out that his memories of them will be magically obliterated he weeps openly.

Kowalski, and other good men in the Fantastic Beasts universe, are notable for their empathy because it’s usually the domain of female characters.

People expect women to be portrayed as natural empathizers because women are always doing all the emotional labor for other people in their lives; fictional portrayals support the idea that this is not an unfair burden but the way of the world. But if Rowling’s vision for this world is founded on empathy, then her main character, Newt Scamander, becomes the ultimate embodiment of it — and antagonist Grindelwald, played by longtime alleged domestic abuser Johnny Depp in styling and makeup that looks like somebody’s high school OC from a bad Harry Potter Livejournal roleplaying community, becomes its toxic opposite.

Newt, played by Eddie Redmayne, cries several times over the course of the film and gives no indication that he thinks his tears are shameful. In a scene where he must trade one of his companion creatures to a man who runs the seedy underbelly of magical New York in exchange for vital information, he brushes away his tears almost defiantly; he doesn’t necessarily want to cause a scene, but he’s also not ashamed to cry. It’s as if Newt knows his emotions have value and power, and has long been uninterested in denying them. This is a conviction he’s spent a long time cultivating; throughout the film we’re given glimpses of his past, with heavy implication that the people surrounding him bullied, berated, and took from him emotionally. That, and his vehement insistence that humans are the worst and most dangerous creatures on the planet, speak to a vibrant emotional life and sense of self that took time to be certain of. It’s clearly more precious for that.

Newt prefers the company of his beasts to the company of people, and has strong views on what is and isn’t an acceptable way for a human to treat another human. He thinks it’s appalling that American magic folks have laws against marrying, befriending, and even interacting with non-magic folks; he thinks that Kowalski should have a choice between understanding the magical world and being forced to forget it. And he refers to himself as a mother to his baby beasts — their mama, their mum, which makes sense, given Rowling’s interpretation of empathy as a feminine trait. He is unabashed in his love for them, and unflinching in his conviction. He is a true Hufflepuff: loyal, kind, hard-working, and believing in real equality.

Newt is at obvious and immediate odds with the antagonist of the story, an Auror named Graves. Mr. Graves performs sympathy for disgraced ex-Auror Tina and care for the abused boy Credence so well that his reveal as (spoiler!) warmonger and genocidal maniac Gellert Grindelwald in magical disguise is genuinely shocking. Grindelwald is all that toxic masculinity promises. He doesn’t hesitate to use physical violence if he feels it’s necessary. He can’t process his own anger, and so takes it out on those around him. He sees people in black and white — something to be used, or something to be feared. Even if he feels love (and we have vague hints that he does, or will; Rowling has confirmed a romantic relationship between Grindelwald and Harry Potter headmaster Dumbledore), that love doesn’t have a channel through which to be expressed, and so it becomes secondary to his other traits, which read like a checklist of toxic masculinity: coldness, cruelty, violence, anger.

---

Grindelwald is all that toxic masculinity promises.
Click To Tweet

---

More than anything else, Grindelwald wants power. His desire for power, like that of evil overlord Voldemort in the Harry Potter books, is rooted in bigoted ideology, but it differs in that Grindelwald understands the power of empathy can be used to manipulate people. Voldemort never had much use for love, but Grindelwald wants to understand his targets, so he can use that understanding against them.

It makes him more terrifying, and slipperier, but the film doesn’t confuse him for an antihero — his actual beliefs, and the perversion of his empathy, are clear throughout. There is no good in Grindelwald. He is the ultimate avatar of toxic masculinity; he doesn’t truly believe in empathy, because he doesn’t believe in any kind of vulnerability. Grindelwald believes that the other tenets of toxic masculinity are the real goal: power, strength, control.

To have empathy, and to express it, Newt must act in ways that subvert the framework of toxic masculinity. He cries; he is nurturing, and kind; he has no issue referring to himself as “mama” or “mum,” and sees himself as a mother and not a father to his beasts. He is able to do what Grindelwald can’t: he is able to see people as people, and not just as their potential usefulness.

Credence’s abusive adoptive mother has forced him to suppress his magical power, which has curdled into a dangerous, volatile parasite called an Obscurus. Vitally, when Credence’s out-of-control Obscurus threatens Newt’s life, the lives of people he cares about, and frankly all of New York and all of the magical world, Newt does what Grindelwald can’t: he approaches Credence with compassion, with an interest in understanding his pain and saving his life. He almost succeeds.

It’s unfortunate that so much of the art Rowling creates is exclusionary and oftentimes outright racist — Cho Chang’s racist name, Lavender Brown’s recasting from a black actress to a white one once she became an important character, and the more recent frustration and hurt Native people have felt over her history of the American magical community. All of Rowling’s lessons play out through whiteness, despite ongoing themes of oppression and bigotry. It’s a wasted opportunity, considering that Newt’s story, and the lesson at its heart, is even more valuable in the context of today’s political climate. Anyone, after all, can see themselves as a hero overcoming the forces of evil; a bigot believes in overcoming the forces of evil just as much as an activist for social good. In the world of Fantastic Beasts, true goodness comes not from eradicating difference, but from understanding and feeling compassion for it — a lesson I hope Rowling’s fans take to heart.

“I simply shared the many sexist situations in which I had found myself, and how you’re supposed to not complain about them if you want to be considered successful. Soon after the article was published, I received a death threat via Twitter. Then many other abusive comments came through the comment section of the article itself. I decided that my next project would be something designed to empower young women. We’re troublemakers!”

Spread on the Bronte sisters

The nighttime routine of most kids in America looks something like this: Take a bath, (get forced to) brush your teeth, get cozy in bed with a parent, and read story after story of adventure and discovery. The problem? The vast majority of those stories are about male characters. And while parents may want to read books to their kids that feature girl protagonists, they’re faced with extremely limited options.

A study of around 6,000 children’s books released between 1900 and 2000 found that no more than 33% of books published in any given year contained an adult woman or female animal character, while nearly 100% of books contained a male character. And just 17.5% of books published in a given year had titles that contained a girl or woman, compared to 36.5% of titles that included a boy or man.

Here’s the good news — a new children’s book, Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls, is flipping the script and offering up 100 stories of incredible women, from chefs to tennis champs to astronauts. Set to be released in November, the book is chock-full of real-life superwomen, including Serena Williams, Frida Kahlo, and the Brontë sisters.

The brainchild of Italian entrepreneurs Elena Favilli and Francesca Cavallo, Good Night Stories grew out of the pair’s frustration with the way gender stereotypes permeate children’s literature and impact kids’ development.

“Research shows that by the time girls reach middle school, they already have less confidence in themselves than boys. That is why changing the narrative early on is so important,” says Favilli. “Kids begin to notice gender differences in preschool. And between 3 and 5, the consciousness of gender transforms into solidified opinions, informed by the culture around them. That’s why we decided to make this book.”

Each story is written like a fairy tale, making the tone and structure of the book accessible and familiar — but none of the women featured need a prince to rescue them. The creators, who are writing the stories, chose women from past and present and from different parts of the world. Many are from countries underrepresented in children’s media, and who faced challenges in childhood. Favilli cites Frida Kahlo, who contracted polio as a child and had a terrible accident at age 18 that led her to begin painting from her bed.

“Another great story that we recently discovered and that we would like to include is the story of Yusra Mardini, the Syrian swimmer who dragged her sinking boat to the Greek shore and is now training for the Olympics in Rio de Janeiro,” Favilli explains.

Accompanying the stories will be illustrations by women artists from around the world — one artist for each story in the book. Among the illustrators already on board are Helena Morais Soares from Portugal, who drew Frida Kahlo; American artist Erin Marlow, who drew Serena Williams; and Spanish comic artist/illustrator Ana Galvañ, who drew Elizabeth I.

Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls is currently raising money through Kickstarter — the campaign ends May 25 — and is on track to become the most-funded children’s book in the site’s history, raising nearly $380,000 in a matter of weeks. Interestingly, the top two books are also about feisty girls and at least eight of the top 10 books feature female characters.

A book similar to Good Night Stories was released last year, Rad American Women A-Z — though it focuses exclusively on U.S. women who made history (trailblazers include activist Angela Davis, pioneering journalist Nellie Bly, and Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor) — and it quickly scaled the New York Times bestseller list. The recent flood of successful books about heroic girls and women indicates that audiences are hungry for these types of stories. Publishers should take note.

Favilli and Cavallo themselves are rebel girls — they co-founded Timbuktu Labs, a children’s media company, in the Bay Area in 2012, receiving major funding from startup investors despite working in a male-dominated world. They’ve since created Timbuktu Magazine, the first iPad magazine for children, and designed Timbuktu Playground, an architectural marvel that pairs real-life play with mobile app technology. Both grew up in small Italian towns: Favilli is from Tuscany, where she read books and went for adventures with her hunting dog as a child, and Cavallo is from Lizzano, where she was a rebel from a young age, drawing maps to hidden treasure and reading her favorite books, Little Women, The Call of The Wild, and a biography about scientist Marie Curie.

Favilli says she was motivated to start the Good Night Stories project after she received negative feedback on an op-ed she wrote for The Guardian about being a woman in Silicon Valley:

Check out the Good Night Stories Kickstarter campaign for more information and to back the book.

It’s almost here. It happens every year. And every year it catches me off guard: “New Year, New You!” season . . . more commonly known as the first week of January.

Henceforth known as NYNY season, this not-so-magical time is marked by an onslaught of shaming headlines like:

Discover the Shortcut to Making More Money This Year!
25 Quick Ways To Improve Your Marriage!
Vow To Stick With The Gym!
Five Ways To Get Organized This Year!
Three Things You Should Do Every Day!
How To Finally Lose Those Pesky 10 lbs!
10 Ways To Improve Your Sex Life!
How Yoga Can Help You Finally Achieve Your Goals!
100 Ways To Improve Your Time Management!

Well, this year I’m using the underlying sentiment for good and doing things differently. In short, I have three words for the impending barrage of how-to’s and must-do’s: Fuck That Noise.

Over the past several years, three groups in particular have provided a valuable antidote to the surface-scratching, counter-productive, clickbait listicle genre that defines the dawn of every new year. Those groups? My pragmatic friends with chronic conditions, body acceptance activists, and comics.

I have three words for the impending barrage of how-to’s and must-do’s: Fuck That Noise.
Click To Tweet

Thanks to these superior gurus, I am now into the idea of meeting yourself where you are + not having to necessarily LOVE yourself when you’re only at the like or fine with or pretty accepting overall stage + laughing and groaning at the things a lot of us do to sabotage ourselves.

All of these things drastically lessen the self-blame that fuels the NYNY season. And all have helped me fully embrace the fuck that noise sentiment.

On Meeting Yourself Where You Are

We wouldn’t expect someone who just bought their first pair of running shoes to enter a marathon next week; why do we expect to master everything we test out or take on the moment we begin? Meeting yourself where you are is deemed excuse-making in NYNY land, where you can’t ever make adjustments, have setbacks, or measure by sliding scale. Which is, of course, the very reason why so few people stick to new year advice.

My friends suffering from chronic conditions have taught me, thankfully, that I shouldn’t hold myself to impossible expectations — and giving myself a break has become the best anxiety-management strategy I’ve found so far.

“Have you eaten today?” is a question a group of my close girl friends and I drop on each other as a loving check-in. Most of us have anxiety or a condition with anxiety-related manifestations, like the “nervous stomach” that clenches and keeps you from feeling hungry. Because we work from home, we don’t have the reminder to eat that happens at location-centric jobs where you would naturally see co-workers getting up and/or leaving for lunch. So we forget to eat and then crash midday, or have even more trouble focusing than usual.

My friend Amadi Aec Lovelace has perfected the loving, no pressure, self-care/health reminder:

It’s a busy day for many. Time for a #SelfCare check. Have you eaten? Hydrated? Medicated? Need a break? #TakeCareOfYouFirst

???@amaditalks

Thanks to my perfection-required upbringing, I’d prefer to be the kind of person who’s mastered #adulting and doesn’t need friendly check-ins, behavior modification strategies, or reminders to tend my basic needs. But considering that I am learning how to source symptoms, whether or not the current treatment options are helping, and how to coordinate care with multiple doctors — and that I’m also coming out of the most stressful year of my life — I also know that I should take the help and work on getting OK with that.

What I’ve learned, basically, is that I have to meet myself where I am — and that place happens to be very early on in the diagnostic/treatment cycle for a bevy of life-long conditions.

On Being Just OK With Yourself

“We’ve got to help people survive before we can expect them to thrive.”

When I read those words from Melissa A. Fabello earlier this year, it was the start of a revelation. She was writing about a shift for the “body positive” movement, one that could create “an in-between stage for the folks who look at body love and feel daunted by the seemingly insurmountable task.” She called it “body neutrality.” Demanding that people love their bodies sounded unrealistic, “an unfair expectation.”

The parallel for those of us who are dealing with chronic illness or undiagnosed conditions, or who are recovering from abuse/assault — many of us for the first time thanks to finally having comprehensive health care — was striking for me. I can’t expect to love myself every day. I can’t expect anything from myself every day. But finding a way to be OK with myself sounded achievable and anxiety-relieving and a great way to reduce the paralyzing self-blame that I’ve struggled with for almost three decades.

Suddenly, I had a self-talk that allowed me to celebrate something like putting on real clothes and getting to the post office or grocery store. I started giving myself awards for what I allowed our culture to tell me were “the basics” — things any adult should be able to handle. When I forget to do this, I pull up Anna Borges’s list, “19 Small Awards Anyone With Anxiety Deserves To Receive: Some days, you deserve a medal for getting out of bed” and award myself for doing that instead of giving up or checking out.

Fabello’s suggestion may seem narrowly-aimed, but actually hits a very broad target; her hope for creating this “in-between stage” or “base camp” works with nearly any word/issue you swap for “body”:

“And maybe if we propose this to people — if we give them the option to inch toward body love, rather than implying that the only way there is a catapult — they’ll (more comfortably, daringly, courageously!) feel empowered to leave their body hate behind.”

I’m here for it . . . and I’m totally waiting for you at base camp should you want to join me.

On Laughing At Life’s Woes

We are all masters of screwing things up beyond repair — it’s how the colloquialism “you’re only human” came about. The best way I’ve found to date for accepting my failures big and small is to laugh at them, so it’s no surprise that therapy through comedy has been my go-to strategy since I was a kid. Laughing at myself and others constantly gives me perspective and anxiety relief.

The most all-encompassing — and refreshingly cringe-free — source for laughing at life on my current reading/watching list is Josh Gondelman and Joe Berkowitz’s new book You Blew It: An Awkward Look at the Many Ways in Which You’ve Already Ruined Your Life. Because advice books are impossible to write without sounding like a pompous jerk bag, and sincere jerkiness is inherently unfunny and unapproachable, Gondelman and Berkowitz instead tell you how to best and most efficiently wreak havoc on your life.

We are all masters of screwing things up beyond repair.
Click To Tweet

Considering I was starting to write the #ItsTotallyMe dating series as I opened You Blew It, it’s little wonder that the “Love and/or Sex” section hit me with full force. Frankly, they had me at the opening line: “It would be nice if you could bypass dating entirely.” Throughout the book, moments like that attributed what I thought were my off-putting idiosyncrasies to the Human Condition, and created a lot of relief laughter.

Amidst all the venting and self-deprecation, the book also delivers some very good life philosophy that’s a perfect combination of 1/ obvious observations we all miss and 2/ silliness.

For example, the authors ask, why do we treat dating so much differently than a burgeoning friendship?

“Remember making friends? It’s what we did when we were frightened children who hadn’t met other people yet. Try more of that . . . [A date is] less about impressing the other person with qualifications and secret clerical superpowers than it is about determining compatibility. It’s a night out. Have some good old-fashioned fun with your new friend.”

Right. Yes. The juxtaposition of admitting dating sucks and that it’s supposed to be fun had me all in.

By the time I finished “Relationships: The Champagne of Compromises,” the 40-page dating section conclusion, I physically felt better about the #adulting activity that has been my biggest source of self-blame and feelings of failure over the past 20 years. Laughing is mad powerful, y’all.

Gondelman and Berkowitz take on your family, your roommate, your boss, your co-workers, and the people you have to deal with when you leave your house: the general public. They also take you on in a way that makes your flaws digestible and, at times, borderline charming. And while I realize their style is not going to be everyone’s cup of tea (though I’m not sure I want to be friends with those people), sailing through a cathartic breakdown of all the major parts of life reminded me to incorporate humor into my day every day.

Laughing at life may not prevent you from crying at life, but it will feel damn good, and it’s something you can do both on your own and with others. The possibilities are endless.

Mark the end of the year in whatever way is satisfying to you — saying thanks or wishing it good riddance.

If you’re a resolution person, make the resolution most on your mind rather than the one that seems popular in listicles or Facebook groups. Tell New Year New You season to take a flying leap. Buy a guilty pleasure novel and put down the “self-help” book your mom proudly and expectantly put under the tree for you. Take up knitting instead of jogging if what you actually need is an excuse to relax.

In short: you do you instead of listening to others try to fix you.