I think it's funny — as jeans approach footless tights/yoga pants, it seems like a tacit admission that I was right all along and jeans were never comfortable.

I'm voting for the 2010s.

I am so old that I learned to dread long rambling voice messages when they were left on tape. Actual literal magnetic tape. Whoaaaaaa. Anyway, I often respond in kind — VM gets a call, text message gets a text message, email gets an email. But VM is not a very effective way to convey actual information.

Yes! Confirmation bias plays a huge role here. Any large dog that isn't obviously some other breed gets misidentified as a pit bull as soon as it attacks someone.

Really? I think weird and difficult books like Ulysses and Gravity's Rainbow are there to be enjoyed just like everything else. It's just that people enjoy different things.

I always like to point out that when Jane Austen wrote Northanger Abbey, novels — all novels — were considered a lowly and sensationalistic sort of reading compared to poetry and history. And Shakespeare wrote his plays for the masses and thought his sonnets were his "real" art.

As a heterosexual woman, I won't date homophobic men, because I see their fear of men who regard them sexually as a projection that indicates how they see the women they regard sexually.

"It is not fertile; it does not do what Jesus does with his church: he makes it fertile." Yeah, Jesus really set the tone for that, with all the many, many children he had.

Something I've been thinking about — and it might be important — is that women tell ourselves, because we're told by our society, that we're afraid of being in urban environments at night because we're afraid of *actually* being attacked, which isn't very likely. But general street harassment is extremely likely. So…

<blockquote>I'm asking why this is specifically gendered in our society that women are socialized to think of themselves as victims (people in here are mentioning stories of their parents telling them not to wear heels at night so they can run faster, for instance)? Why is it that we're assuming that women will be…

I think it's just confused about how babies are made, and imagines something that would be done in a kitchen.

Yep. Red "licorice," also known as "Tears of the Devil."

I love beets. What I hate is red vines. I find them so intensely disgusting — flavor, smell, mouth feel — that they actually make me feel like throwing up. But my own dear husband actually likes them. He bought a big Costco-sized bin once and everybody who came over to our place had one or two. But every time the lid…

I don't particularly like sugar, and it doesn't particularly like me, either. As an adult, I've always hated the sheet cakes that tend to get served at festive occasions. Based on the amount that seems to go uneaten, I assumed everyone else hated them too — that people were just engaging in it for the ritual. I…

How do you feel about savory chocolate? Like, would a really chocolatey mole do it for you? And have you tried cocoa nibs? Or 100% no sugar gourmet chocolate bars? They're pretty bitter, but if you are eliminating sugar in general, your tastes might acclimatize.

"Debate with some clueless feminists"? Debate what exactly? Whether or not a guy who turned out to be an actual mass-murderer was a creep? His actions prove that everybody who ever suspected there was something deeply wrong with him was, in fact, correct.

Plastic surgery simply freaks me out. My visceral emotional response does not make a distinction between "regular" plastic surgery and extreme body modification ala Hellraiser Cenobites, except to find "regular" plastic surgery even freakier because it's supposed to make you look "better." The Cenobites, at least, are…

Two things. One is pop culture. We like the narrative — borrowed from the revival tent — of having been lost, then found, having been wandering in the wilderness of the shadow of death, and suddenly coming into the light. We like there to be a food Satan that was holding us down. Right now that food Satan is wheat.

This comment is soooooo revealing — that he thinks there's some kind of essential difference between men cooking and women cooking, and that women chefs are "nurturing," which is somehow less impressive and interesting than whatever it is that men do.

Most "foodies" I know cook as well, but I think you're right that "foodie" doesn't actually mean that. So what we need is a sex-independent word meaning "foodie who cooks."