Yeah, someone else commented that that's a pretty exclusively Minnesotan term. I think I remember reading about it in a book once...

I think it's a kind of casserole? I'm from Illinois, apparently we have been Midwesterning incorrectly. No one here makes anything called a hot dish.

HAH. I mean, I definitely went to England to steal Benedict Cumberbatch, but it didn't work out. That's weird, though I suppose when I went wandering around the UK by myself I never had to get my passport checked. Maybe if I'd gone to another country alone they would have thought that was strange (fortunately I was…

Maria Tatar wrote a book called Lustmord, about a similar fascination with violently murdered women in Weimar Germany (male artists even depicted themselves as the murderers of their models). I studied serial murder for my master's, so I'm familiar with the obsession. Interestingly, I used to just be intrigued—and…

Really?! That's so bizarre. I guess they've never bothered me too much about it because my answer is always "School" or "home on break." But...seriously, women go to college and grad school far away and on business trips and all kinds of places alone. How is this so alarming to people?

I'm like 90% sure they've translated that one, I've been meaning to do the same thing. I know for sure they've done War and Peace, Crime and Punishment, Brothers Karamazov, and a book of Tolstoy's short stories.

Volokhonsky and Pevear have the best translations from Russian I've ever read. The translation makes a huge difference for me.

Me too. Sometimes I'll even revert to an accent from somewhere I've lived just on a phone call with someone from there. It's weird.

Yes, I am disputing that. Any first-year anthropology student could tell you that. What you consider savage is hardly the objective standard— and when an anthropologist in the 1960s visited one of those tribes in New Guinea, who engaged in literal headhunting from other tribes, a practice he found abhorrent, he found…

Yeah, weird how the pro-choice side is always talking about our duties to respect each other, how all children should be loved and wanted, and the need to protect the rights and physical and mental safety of citizens whom laws are making increasingly vulnerable, and the anti-choice side is always talking about their…

It is 2014 and you've just referred to some people as civilized and others as savage. Please examine your life choices. Also, who gets to decide what qualifies as moral decency? Or civilization?

Christians have not consistently believed that since the first century. They may have believed it then, but since? Life was for quite some time believed to begin with the "quickening" of the fetus in the womb, about four months into pregnancy. This was Church teaching in the Middle Ages, and it was also secular…

I just got back to Chicago from a year abroad and the first thing I asked when I got off the plane is when we could get hot dogs. Chicago hot dogs are manna from heaven.

I do think women saying that to each other has a different context than a bunch of guys showing this room to a woman and saying "We call this the rape room." Also, the students aren't at work.

When someone does give a compliment and you act like they don't exist, all it does is just perpetuate the very thing women are fighting against with catcalls and that's being called a "bitch".

I think MissNormaDesmond had a valid point about whose voices get privileged on threads like this. As I said, though, I don't think these comments or opinions should be banned, or that we need to be insulated from them. I just don't think they need to have pride of place.

That's all true, but none of it really relates to what I actually said. Are you sure you're responding to the right comment? You'll note that I said sometimes people do want to respond and read the responses to asshattery, and that I never called Jezebel feminist. Or you could just get all in a lather over straw men…

But some of us are tired and don't find it amusing to hear this shit on a website aimed at women as well as in our daily lives. I think the point here is, if you like watching that, you can go look for it, but under the new system, it automatically shows up at the top because Mark responded. Which is...sigh. I wish…

For serious. We definitely roamed in unsupervised packs at 8 and even younger, and our parents were often like "take your younger sister with you and make sure she doesn't get into trouble." We played in a vacant field and climbed on fallen trees and played in the street and ran from house to house depending on what…

That's nothing I didn't do when I was 8, or even a few years younger. And at 8, we weren't considered old enough to baby-sit, but old enough to take the younger kids with us to—not even a park, but basically an empty field full of fallen trees, mounds of dirt, streams, and whatever people dumped there— for a few…