Can we please stop saying that men like Elliot Rodger “love” women? They love women like I love cheeseburgers. I think the correct word is WANT.

Thank you, Stassa! This is brilliant and timely! SO SO SO helpful to have terms for all the fucking gaslighting we receive.

I like America Ferrara’s take on #metoo.

Good for you. I find the insistence that victims of every kind of crime forgive “for themselves,” and usually asap, such bullshit. It is one more burden to put on people who don’t need any more. This idea that the only options are forgiveness or being eaten up inside thinking about the person who wronged you for the…

As for me, I’ve started asking, “How come you want these victims to ‘get over it,’ yet if anyone suggested the same about 9/11, you’d blow a gasket?” I’ve never gotten a response.

Another element of himpathy is the push for forgiveness and healing — sometimes literal days after the action. But when people say “forgiveness,” what they really mean it moving on, being over the transgression, and never mentioning the incident again. We’ve become so focused on that, that we don’t realize that…

Thanks for this excellent interview and for bringing this book to my attention. I agree that Trump is more misogynist that sexist, but he wears an evil coat of many evil colors, and his general need to be the gender rigid alpha male in any situation means he uses misogyny against women who say no, and belittling…

I thought #notallmen was first, and #yesallwomen was a response to it, as in maybe not all men do bad stuff but all women experience bad behavior from men at some point. Was anyone else under this impression?

Looking forward to reading this book. My library doesn’t have it yet!

In short - men aren’t taught most of those things. Acceptable emotions for most American (and to a large degree - Western) men are only anger and aggression. Even happiness is to be neatly contained and not expressed often outside of sports or some other type of aggression-associated ‘win.’

That jumped out at me too. She lived in terror every day and quietly went about her life taking precautions to reduce risk and strategizing every move to try to keep herself and her kids safe. By herself, or with family help only. She, and so many other women, know that a restraining order doesn’t deter their violent…

the problem is who is the “we” you’re referring to? no doubt most people (not saying you, specifically) expects the burden of the work to be done by women.

A sense of entitlement.

why.

There is a direct link between older men and their offspring having much higher risks of autism - autism rates are 66% higher among children born to dads over 50. Not all children who had mothers who drank alcohol while pregnant end up with FAS - science on it is underdeveloped due to difficulties with controlled…

And that commentary on FAS always ends up as an instruction to women to modify their behaviour, but commentary on autism never seems to mention that older men should refrain from siring children.

As much as I appreciate your nasty condescension, it didn’t really occur to me that the CDC might be personally singling out me. The medical community does backwards-looking studies about pregnant people all the time, despite the difficulties, and yes, I know it’s made more difficult by self-reporting issues, but if…

It’s not a resistance to science. We all KNOW that alcohol damages your baby. The problem is that ALL these studies actually just show that drinking a shit-ton of alcohol or alcohol early on in your pregnancy harms your baby. No one bothers to study what amounts at what times in your pregnancy actually have any…

My son was born in 2015, when it was okay to drink up to a glass a week. I had only a couple swallows of wine while cooking with it- maybe two or three? And he had a stroke at birth that was completely unrelated to that, probably caused by the induction and pitocin. It’s all a fucking lottery and there’s so little you…

But how does stigma help? There are reams of literature on how stigma does harm. And people don’t generally drink (at harmful levels) during pregnancy for shits and giggles—they’re doing it as a coping mechanism, because they have an alcohol use disorder, etc. And we know that stigma around addiction does a lot of…