Yup. Growing up in the US I always thought I was a leftist. Then I moved to a European country with a normal political spectrum and realized I was just a boring old centrist. A lot of statements that are considered lefty fightin’ words in the US (e.g. bumper stickers that say “healthcare is a human right”) are just…

Yes, this is what I hate about NYT marriage boosterism! When I was in an unhealthy, desperately unhappy relationship I experienced all this “relationships are hard” stuff as an admonition to stay in my awful relationship, and a message that what I was experiencing was normal, which it wasn’t. Now being in a healthy…

i tell myself this, but then i also worry about what harm they can do through voter suppression.

Yes, that episode is awesome! It’s TAL 511, there are seven things, and it’s Sarah Koenig’s mom: http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives…

Oh, if I had a nickel for every time a man has lectured me about the field in which I have a master’s degree and he read this one book once.

I’m the Smart One and my sister’s the Pretty One. Because her label was the one that earned more positive attention, it took me a long time to figure out that, while all daughter labels suck, hers was the one that ultimately screwed her over more than mine (i.e. in the long term it did her life more harm to be…

I’m a writer and scholar, and a lot of my articles are about very heavy topics - war, genocide, literary treatments of war and genocide. I don’t exactly have a large readership, but I do occasionally meet in real life a person who is familiar with my work. On a really disheartening number of these occasions, the…

“She isn’t even a victim because she was asleep” is a great one because any woman or girl who is *awake* is actively doing something to tempt the abuser / cause the abuse, but anyone who’s asleep isn’t a real victim. Great how that works out!

Some of the awesome women in the ex-Quiverfull community have pointed out that when the Duggars say Anna “knew about” what Josh had done, they probably don’t mean what that would mean in the normal world. Apparently, given the low status of women and the way these people don’t really distinguish among different types…

Let me take a stab at the fundy logic of this one: Jessa was a victim of sin, Josh in his fleshly weakness allowed himself to be used by the forces of sin (so was also kind of a victim of sin while molesting her), all people are sinners and the only operative distinction is between forgiven and unforgiven sinners,…

Yes, you’re so right, a free-time bias is totally part of what skews feminist discourse toward the concerns of the rich, the white, and the college-aged - I’d never thought of it that way.

Yes. Too large a share of feminist attention is being devoted to the concerns that fall within the personal experience of college activists, while not enough attention is paid to huge systemic problems that people tend not to experience firsthand until they’re older/unless they’re poorer than these campus activists -…

Hi, I’m a white woman and I’ve also wondered about the special role of thinness in white culture. One thing I can say is that several white boyfriends have told me that there’s a culture among straight white men of (to various degrees of explicitness) shaming/looking down on guys for having non-thin girlfriends, and…

Also, can we just get rid of the statute of limitations for sexual abuse already?

Yeah, but it’s also really interesting for that reason. I think a lot of people in my age cohort are firstborn children in families with early-boomer parents (my parents were born in 1950, I was born in 1978, my brother and sister in the 80s) - if our siblings are Millennials and we were parented by the generation…

Yeah, I hate when people my age and older bitch about Millennial entitlement and laziness - so many older people are so clueless about how bad Millennials have it re. student debt and job prospects. oldscrumby’s definition is interesting to me because it defines a generation by who has Baby Boomer parents, and I think…

We youngest GenX-ers (late 70s) also have Boomer parents and Greatest Generation grandparents. We’re a really weird little low-birthrate in-between generation — in a lot of ways we have more in common with millennials than GenXers (e.g. we’re the oldest people to have been fucked over by a lot of student loan debt),…

How interesting that you put yourself through college debt-free by waiting tables in the summer, Barbara. Gosh, I must just have all this student loan debt because that idea never occurred to me. It could not possibly be that college was way cheaper in 1974 than it is now.

Yeah, I also think that Jim Bob & Michelle come off even worse than Josh (teen molester Josh, not right-wing lobbyist adult Josh) in this story. The incredibly fucked-up ideas about sexuality and gender roles that they instilled in their kids surely played a role in him thinking it would be OK to abuse his sisters,…

Maybe I’m just super naive, having never lived in the Deep South (and only lived in the US for part of my life), but I was actually surprised by the extent of the corruption and absence of the rule of law in Dumfukistan. The part of the story where Jim Bob & Michelle just arranged to run out the statute of limitations…