HELLO and welcome to the 120th installment of Things I Read That I Love, wherein I share with you some of the longer-form journalism/essays I’ve read recently so that you can read them too and we can all know more about endometriosis! This “column” is less feminist/queer focused than the rest of the site because when something is feminist/queer focused, I put it on the rest of the site. Here is where the other things are.
The title of this feature is inspired by the title of Emily Gould’s tumblr, Things I Ate That I Love.
Jennifer Lawrence and the History of “Cool Girls” (February 2014), by Anne Helen Peterson for Buzzfeed – In the beginning of this I made a face because I was like, I just wanna love Jennifer Lawrence forever and not think about why, you know? Why do we have to analyze this. But then it gets into all this history about Clara Bow and Jane Fonda and I learned so many things I didn’t know about the starlets of film history and it was just delightful!
About The Human Hymen (Disambiguation) (March 2014), by Emma Bolden for The Rumpus – This is really something. It’s about the gynecologist, and being sick all the time and not knowing why, endometriosis, hymenorrhaphies, and pelvic exams and sex and growing up and pain and blood.
Traveling While Black (January 2014), by Farai Chideya for The New York Times – “For those of us blacks who travel — domestically or internationally, with financial ease or by saving for years — the world can be our playground, our teacher, our beloved. We just have to remember one thing I was lucky enough to learn as a child, and one that I was reminded of in Beijing that fall day. This world can be our place, too.”
Reaching My Autistic Son Through Disney (March 2014), by Ron Suskind for The New York Times Magazine – This one took a long time for me to get to because I didn’t think I was gonna really be into it, but I was wrong, it’s great.
Is This Pickup Artist Actually Helping People? (March 2014), by Sharon Adarlo for The Awl – Um. I don’t know what to think about this one. It’s about this guy JT who teaches pick-up artist classes primarily aimed at Asian men.
Street Fighter The Movie: What Went Wrong (March 2014), by Christ Plante for Polygon – I tend to find these things interesting just as any higher-level view of how large complicated things involving lots of different personalities and unexpected challenges can converge into some kind of disaster. Also I did not know that Jean Claude Van Damme had a drug problem, so I’m a smarter person now.
Sacred and Profane: How Not To Negotiate With Believers (March 2014), by Malcolm Gladwell for The New Yorker – This is about the Waco / Branch Davidians siege that happened in 1993, which I remember happening. Firstly, I really feel like Gladwell let David Koresh off the hook regarding the fact that he took many wives including children which means Koresh is a serial rapist, but obviously this is a huge story and it’s always interesting to hear new takes on it. Also I found, oddly, a lot to connect with? Because of my experience “negotiating” with people who are having psychotic breaks who believe strongly in The Book of Revelations, and how it’s important to engage with that if you want to have a productive conversation. And that’s kinda what happened here. Anyhow!
Why is it So Hard For Women To Write About Sex? (March 2014), by Claire Dederer for The Atlantic – “The consensus that female lust is normal and real has been a long time coming—so long that any acknowledgment that our desire is adulterated by doubt can still seem anti-woman, or anti-sex, or anti-sexual-woman (or just a downer). The challenge that the new group of memoirs converges on is to show otherwise: to get at what feels true, which is that the endless internal oscillation that happens during sex needn’t sabotage our sexual experience, much less our autonomy. If questioning can’t be part of expressing female desire, that is a diminishment.”
the one about disney and autism was really amazing. i was initially a little skeptical at the title and was afraid that the entire thing would read like an advertisement for walt disney, but it was actually really well-written and good. and made me realize how many old-school disney movies i actually haven’t seen.
also i didn’t know any of the “cool girl” history in the jennifer lawrence article; as someone who has worked a lot with older adults and talked with them about older movies and popular culture, it was really interesting reading about clara bow and carole lombard (and to a lesser extent, jane fonda, who i really only know, as the article said, “as the hero of [my] mom’s aerobics videos”) and about the ways they stood out from other actresses of the time.
as always, excellent reading picks.
yes! I also knew jane fonda as the hero of my mom’s aerobic videos! i remember we did a little parody of a jane fonda workout tape at the 6th grade talent show, we found ourselves HILARIOUS.
and yeah i also thought the disney thing was gonna be about a trip to orlando that made this guy’s son really happy and even though i love disneyworld, i didn’t really wanna read a huge article about it, and i was very pleasantly surprised by what the story turned out to be
Riese, how do you always know exactly what I want to read? Sometimes I hesitate to click on these articles because I know it will be a tab-splosion and nothing will get done for the rest of the day.
I second the Malcolm Gladwell critique. I’m not a fan of his. Mainly because he doesn’t critique sexism/crimes against women, his main focus tends to be solely with racism (lack of awareness of intersectionality), which a lot of male writers do and it drives me crazy.
I love these roundups so much, they are highlights of my week every single week.
Although when your parents ask you what you’re up to on a Friday night and you say “reading about the Branch Davidians while I wait on the cookies to finish baking” they might get a little weirded out.
I really enjoy these features! After reading the Dederer article, I added a few things to my personal reading list.