Ok, when all of the authors I love were leaving en masse I have to admit I thought it might be the end of my Jezebel reading days and I was really, really sad. Though I still have concerns about the way internal promotions are handled - I fucking miss Dodie so I'm not really over that yet - I do feel that Jez's new…

I'm actually really happy to talk about it in a reasoned way and to not have people jump down my throat about it being made up. I didn't talk about it to anyone as a kid because (as I mention elsewhere) it was a really religious community and people already called me a witch. Someone else mentioned normally…

The kids in the town I grew up in already called me a witch - I'm not even kidding - so I spent a lot of energy trying to be as normal as possible to stay under the radar. It was already so bad by the time I was 13 or so that my sister and I had to stop riding the bus because we were being harassed. I can only imagine…

This was my feeling as well. If I had shared a vaginal canal with Patrick Stewart, you can bet I'd be very enthusiastic. Totally/sort of unrelated - Ian McKellan spoke at my Uni last night and a bunch of us couldn't get in due to capacity. He nervously waited for the right moment and when they told us they were full…

One year my roommates and I decided to go out as the stock market collapse. We wore 1920's garb and then covered ourselves in awfully realistic looking cuts, bruises, breaks, etc. Through the course of the night things got a little silly and one of our group got extremely intoxicated. We carried him with us to the…

I had that frog key chain. And the skirt on the right. RIP DeLIA*s you will live on in my velvet embossed heart forever.

She never scared me, in fact, she was really a comfort to me because our family was so ostracized. Jez left out the intro to that story which explained that this all happened in a very rural, religious part of northern Utah. I think that's why even as an adult I'm able to sort of suspend my own disbelief about the…

It still feels sad. Another element of that story that I left out was that for the years that we lived in that house I had an intense and unreasonable fear of my own father. My father never touched me, hit me, etc and yet for the two years we lived there I never wanted to be left alone with him in the house, to the…

Also, even if that were somehow a valid point - isn't 3 or 4 enough to suggest a problem? Like, is there a daily limit of threatening and aggressive comments a woman should allow before it's a real problem?

Yes. Her whole attitude is incredibly off-putting and 'tone deaf' is the exact right word for the language she is using.

Take a bunch of marginalized religious people who create a state so that no one is paying attention to what they are doing anymore, add to that the railroad workers that got dumped in Utah once construction was complete, native people pushed off of their land, anyone who isn't white, straight and male deemed…

I tried at various points to find out more, but it was pre internet days. I should really do that, mostly because I always felt guilty. I know it sounds nuts, but I honestly felt, as a child, that I was leaving her behind.

From firsthand knowledge, I can tell you that Ebola is a horrifying disease. I do not understand how someone who has just seen that kind of destruction does only the minimum required by protocol. You have to take your temperature multiple times a day, you are told to limit contact - so you get on a subway? Take a…

It also shows that even when being cautious, they still exposed other people. Checking your temperature multiple times daily is protocol if you have been exposed; riding the subway is not. Picking and choosing which rules you follow is human, but unfortunately, our health infrastructure is not up for handling an…

The woman who flew was not a-symptomatic, she had a fever. The doctor was out and about with a low-grade fever, nausea and some stomach pain. The point being, people can be really shitty about knowing how sick they really are and when they should just stay home. Case-in-point - the asshole coworker. Health workers are…

Health workers that have been exposed to ebola patients exhibiting symptoms should be quarantined. Period. Not because it's hysterical, but because it is a highly contagious disease that we have thus far demonstrated a poor ability to contain. Self quarantine is a great idea, except so far we've seen that some of the…

As someone who used to do global health work, I have to say, I agree with you here. Look, part of what we do involves exposing ourselves to contagious diseases. The work we do is important, but so is following protocols that are designed to keep communities safe. Should we be thankful for their service? Hell yes! But…

It was really scary to revisit as an adult, to be honest. It's something we don't talk about in my family as ever having happened, but I can remember going between the walls in the basement as clearly as I can remember any other childhood memory. I left out a whole incident in which two friends came to spend the night…

As some of you know, I grew up in a very rural part of northern Utah. My family were transplants from California, and because we weren't mormon, we never really fit in. I spent a lot of time alone as a child and had a reputation for being a bit strange. We had started out in a cabin in the woods, far from everyone…

I went to a mormon wedding as the date of the bride's brother. I had to wait outside while they were all in the temple. It was really, really awkward. The only other people who couldn't go in were small children. Boo. They are divorced now so, I guess the heavenly seal didn't stick.