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#a feminine homemaker is who I am supposed to be
texasobserver · 1 year
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From “I Am a Trans Texan” by April Maria Ortiz in the Texas Observer:
It strikes me, and may strike you, as a bit crazy to come out as transgender in an essay like this. I’m publicly revealing myself to be a member of a marginalized community in the midst of a moral panic targeting our very existence. Ascribe it to my defiant streak, if you will.
If you’re not aware that there is a moral panic about trans lives, then you need to pay attention. As of now, according to the list maintained by activists Alejandra Caraballo, Erin Reed, and Allison Chapman, over 400 bills targeting trans people have been filed with legislatures nationwide this year—more than in the past several years combined. Texas is at the vanguard with about 30 bills and counting. If the frenzy continues, it won’t end there, as former President Donald Trump’s recent speech and Michael Knowles’ rhetoric at CPAC on eradicating transgenderism make clear.
I’m hardly an ideal spokesperson. I’m 43, and I’ve lived my entire life up to this point (with fleeting exceptions) in the gender assigned to me at birth, which is male. Think of my biography as a cautionary tale. It’s painful and messy, and I’m going to tell you some of it. You may find this unpleasant, but I have no other way to say what I need to say. Only bear in mind that my experiences, though common, are not normative. I don’t speak for anyone but myself.
Growing up at the edge of San Antonio’s south side in the 1980s, I learned the usual things about gender and sexuality: Boys are boys and girls are girls and all that. My dad was a biology teacher. I knew the differences. But something seemed to be awry in me for, as far back as I can remember, I felt that I ought to have been a girl, or that in some strange way, I really was a girl, even though everyone treated me as a boy.
Adults policed my gender expression conscientiously, and I inferred that my feelings were unnatural and shameful. Still, I would sit in the pew at church as my parents took communion—we were Catholic—and silently rank which of the women who passed me I would most like to grow up to be. As a small, less-than-masculine child who hated sports, I became the target of bullying once I went to school. But I would lie awake every night, imagining myself becoming a girl—my only refuge from my strange alien existence.
Environmental factors didn’t make me this way. My parents were present and involved; my mother a caring, feminine homemaker and my father, a loud, masculine teacher and artillery officer who was sometimes frustrated by my unmanliness. Expecting me to grow up and marry and follow the same pattern, they enforced the “natural” gender norms they espoused every day of my life. Far from becoming trans through exposure to modern “gender ideology,” I was, simply and naturally, a trans child, even though everything in my upbringing went toward imposing a gender binary that itself represented an unacknowledged ideology. There is no “real me” beneath my transgender self. I have learned to mask it, yes, but if I were somehow to remove it, there would be no me left behind. No more could you remove the flour from a loaf of bread.
As soon as I was old enough to be left home alone, I began secretly wearing my mother’s clothes. Experimenting with femininity launched me into a deep and pervasive calm tinged with a fear of being discovered. After some years, I was found out through a misplaced blouse. I lied my way out of the tribunal that ensued—standing, panicked and alone, before my father and mother. My parents’ eagerness to accept my lies made up for their implausibility. The alternative was believing me to be some kind of queer, which I suppose is what I am.
My junior high coach, a morose sadist who later got fired and went on to a career as a campus cop, compelled boys to shower together in a dimly-lit subterranean cell. A small, undeveloped sixth-grader, I was thrust in there with big, masculine eighth-graders, their eyes ever-roving for some weakling to abuse. My unboyishness and isolation made me easy prey. As a transgender person whose brain was telling me that my body should be female, it’s hard to describe just how traumatic such experiences were. What made them unbearable—to such an extent that I began to self-harm and eventually to plan my own death—was that I had no words or concepts to describe or understand what was going on with me. I was simply a freak of nature, an abomination who had to hide in plain sight, surviving from one morning to the next, hoping that no one would discover my secret, dying a little each day.
You may believe that the problem here was not my being forced into a simplistic gender binary that left me vulnerable to abuse and trauma, but rather my gender dissonance, and that I should have been made to feel at home in my assigned gender. In other words, I should have been coerced into being a normal boy. If you think that, survey the research: It shows, overwhelmingly, that attempts to “convert” gender nonconforming people into traditional gender identities and other forms of rejection are ineffective and traumatizing—in fact, the scientific consensus is that all forms of conversion therapy aimed at altering a person’s sexual orientation or gender identity result in long-term harm—while care that affirms gender identity results almost universally in positive outcomes. It’s also clear that what negative outcomes do occur owe largely to hostile environments.
But since we’re in the middle of a panic about transgender people “invading” sex-segregated spaces, let me add this: Far be it from me to make anyone feel uncomfortable or unsafe, but I have never felt comfortable or safe in any male space. Nor, I believe, would I have felt better in a female space. I prefer privacy for doing such things as defecating and stripping naked, and I find our regime of communal showers and toilets just a little weird and, yes, oppressive. Perhaps that’s one aspect of the problem we should be examining?
There hangs in my parents’ home a circle of my annual school portraits, which show me becoming progressively sadder from year to year. My body was turning into an alien thing with the onset of biological manhood. By the time I graduated, my mounting dysphoria and social problems—I also had an undiagnosed autism disorder—led me to begin planning suicide. In secret, I painted a picture of a girl cutting her wrists. I was the girl, you see. In recurring dreams, I was a young mother. Despair held sway over my waking life.
It was either leave home or die, so I moved across the state for college. My plan was to wait a few weeks and, if nothing changed, to kill myself in a shower stall. Something did change: I found love and acceptance in the woman who became my best friend and then my wife. Several years later, I was still alive, presenting as female in the privacy of our home and as male when I went out. This made me happy. For the first time in my life, I began to approach peace.
It was the turn of the millennium. I was a shelver at the university library, which often left me alone in the stacks at night. Sometimes, I would work in the gender and sexuality section and take down books to try to understand what I was. Many of the books were out of date for that time, and much has changed in our understanding of transgender people since. In them and on the nascent Internet, I encountered terms and categories that didn’t seem to apply to me, reflecting a time when researchers developed theories with little input from the trans community itself. So my gender confusion persisted.
My fragile peace was disturbed when someone to whom we’d entrusted our key entered our home without permission and went through our things. I felt certain that my secret self must have been detected. Mortified and afraid of being outed, I threw all evidence in the dumpster. I grew a beard as a bulwark against “temptation” and began two decades of self-contradiction and mounting desperation, which brings us to today.
“You have to go the way your blood beats,” James Baldwin said in an interview. “If you don’t live the only life you have, you won’t live some other life, you won’t live any life at all.” Belatedly, I’m coming to grips with this. My attempts to cope with gender dissonance have consumed much of my life, taking hours away from each day, isolating me from loved ones, alienating me from my body, leading to bouts of depression, ideations of suicide, and alcohol abuse. It doesn’t go away. In middle age, I’m forced to recognize that nothing short of being who I am will resolve my profound inner conflict. The word “transition” is terrifying but, however catastrophic the process of coming out may be, I’ll not be much good to those I love if I’m burned out, incapacitated, or dead.
Read more on the Texas Observer.
(🎨 Image by FocalFoto on Flickr)
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pandoricpies · 9 months
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An Old Sin
“You should really stop bringing me these.” “And why is that?” “You could get in trouble, John. Conspiring with a witch is a sin of the highest degree.” “Well I suppose I’ll be damned to hell then.”
The young man gazed upon his beloved admiringly, her eyes flittering across the page of a book he had brought her.  “Fa- fas- te-,” she mumbled, her brunette eyebrows scrunching in confusion and concentration. “Let me see Rosa,” John placed his hand behind her and scooted his sitting position on the grass closer to her side. Her cheeks flushed as he placed a hand on her opposite shoulder to lean her closer to him. “That one, it’s spelled funny,” the woman placed her finger on the troublesome word.
“Oh yes, fastened,” the man spoke with ease. Rosalinda closed the book, looking up at him with a raised eyebrow. “Oh I’m sorry I’m not a man, my insignificant feminine brain could never understand such readings.” “Well of course, I understand that. Although ‘insignificant’ is quite a big word for a woman,” he smirked, meeting her stubborn gaze. “You cheeky bastard.” Rosalinda placed her hands on his chest, pushing him back onto the ground as she pulled herself on top of him. “Now Rosalinda Jane Silverglade, that’s not very ladylike of you,” said John as he shuffled underneath her, placing his hands on her waist. “Neither is this,” she finished as she lowered her head until their lips touched. Passionately, the two lovers kissed, heat and desire flooding their veins. There was no where in the world either of them would have rather been.  The woman sighed contently, moving herself to the side and gently settling onto the grass. She gazed up, admiring the rare crystal blue cloudless sky amongst the usual gray Jorvegian rainy season. “It’s beautiful out today,” she spoke quietly, relaxing into the crook of her lover’s arm as he wrapped it around her shoulders. “It is indeed,” he responded, but he wasn’t looking at the sky.
The two stayed like that for awhile, embraced on the soft green. The sound of a horse’s whinny or clopping hooves painted the calming silence. Rosalinda’s breath stilled as she drifted off into a dreamless sleep. John could feel every breath, the quiet, steady thumping of her heart against his side. He loved this woman more than anything else in the entire world. He hadn’t thought it possible to love anything to the extent that he loved her. Loved, admired for her tenacious bravery in a world that was never designed for such an intelligent woman as she. But now he was part of the local council, now he could fight to change that. Run out the religious hypocrisy and cries for damnation of any woman who dared to read, write, engage in any other activity besides homemaking and childbearing. Deemed ‘witches’ - he didn’t believe in magic or any higher power for that matter, and thought it absurd that anyone would. The crime of witchcraft was simply a cover for the extermination of a woman who dared to challenge a man. Some time had passed, and the thunderous clouds began to rear their ugly head against the once clear blue. “Rosa, darling-” John spoke quietly, planting a soft kiss on the top of her head. “Hmm..” she mumbled, awakening and sitting up to stretch. “We should be going now, the rain is coming in and your mother will be expecting us for dinner,” he sat up alongside her, brushing off his trousers. “I suppose. We need to do this more often. Just you and me,” she smiled sleepily, looking over at him. “I am getting busier now with the council meetings, but you know I’ll always make time for you.” “I expect nothing less,” Rosalinda stood up, walking over to collect her satchel and the book she was brought. The two began down the dirt path, hand-in-hand. The noise of the village grew louder as they neared. “We really should find a spot not on the other side of the fields away from my home,” Rosalinda grumbled in annoyance, fanning herself with her free hand. The air was hot and humid as the rain clouds gathered. “Hold this for me,” she reached up to take off her shoulder shawl, handing it to him. The sound of heavy, fast hooves sounded on the now cobbled path behind them as the entered the village. A stout man on a large, draft breed looked down at the couple as he passed, nearly knocking Rosalinda over in the process. He quickly snatched his right rein, turning in front of the pair. “Do you think it is proper to walk around this village dressed like a whore?” The man bellowed rather loudly, gathering nearby attention. She could feel John’s hand tense in her own. “No- no sir I do not. I was simply very hot you see, the summer’s here are quite brutal-” “Enough with you. Cover up your bosom,” he turned to John, “you should teach this girl to have more respect for you.” “Fu-” “John,” she whispered harshly under her breath, gathering her shawl back from him and wrapping it back around her shoulders. “Good day,” John spoke gruffly, grabbing Rosalinda’s hand to walk around the large mount. “I’d be careful consorting with her, son. You know there is talk.” Rosalinda shuddered. “I’ll decide who my company is,” John returned, not looking back. “Don’t let him bother you, de-” “They treat you with no more value than the dirt beneath our feet. You can’t expect it not to bother me.” “I don’t,” she sighed, squeezing his hand in her own. The two continued through the village and off on a side road up the hill to the higher part of town, where the larger estates were planted. They hated her because she had money, because she was intelligent. The Silverglade family had, for decades, infamously refused to bow to religion. They publicly shunned the practice of ‘witch’ torcher. They believed an educated woman was a useful woman.  “Never leave your family’s company without me, please.” “I won’t.”
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lightthewaybackhome · 2 years
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I posted 298 times in 2021
97 posts created (33%)
201 posts reblogged (67%)
For every post I created, I reblogged 2.1 posts.
I added 388 tags in 2021
#homemaking - 54 posts
#hearthkeeper - 53 posts
#traditional femininity - 51 posts
#trad wives - 51 posts
#housewife - 48 posts
#homesweethome - 37 posts
#domestic artist - 37 posts
#prose - 27 posts
#tending hearth and home - 19 posts
#band of brothers - 11 posts
Longest Tag: 59 characters
#i will not bring more books home than i am bringing to sell
My Top Posts in 2021
#5
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Homemakers, housewives, housekeepers. All different terms to describe a woman whose main calling in life is to create a home. Their main delight is found in the warmth and beauty of their families and making a place for them. They harness décor, culinary delights, nutrition, budgets, education, entertainment, machines, and more to create dwellings. They stand beside their men. They support their men. They raise the next generation of homemakers and they raise the next generation of providers and defenders.
I love this. I love homemaking on every level. This speaks to my soul in a way nothing I have ever done ever has.
HearthKeeping to me is something older, stronger, more courageous than the ‘50s housewife, which I’m not disrespecting. I love the ‘50s housewife because she creates beauty, she works clothed in beauty. She takes her job seriously and does everything with her husband in mind. She respects him and he respects her. But for me the woodstove, drying herbs, bread, soup aesthetic is more appealing. 
HearthKeeper.
All this the world wants to take away from us. It tells us that raising children, serving our husbands, creating our homes is a waste of our time and talent. Homemaking just shows what a boring lazy person you are. The world tells us that we are not only fit to do everything a man does, but we can do it better. We don’t need men, though men are obviously so stupid they need us. It takes all our grace and glory and throws it in the trash.
I don't want that. I love and respect my husband, appreciate his provision, and love the challenge of being a resource manager.
I am a homemaker. I am a HearthKeeper.
65 notes • Posted 2021-05-15 23:01:06 GMT
#4
Home is For Us Too
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What makes you smile? What delights you? Our work should delight us! We shouldn’t run around complaining. What delights us? Is it a piece of art? Unique lighting? Cottagecore? Goblincore? Books, plants, toys, everything? Our tools should not only be functional but beautiful.
Ladies, how are we supposed to fill our homes with a sense of comfort, enjoyment, nesting, and beauty if we hate it all and don’t see ourselves in it? If we don’t cook food we enjoy, don’t have decorations that we love, and organization that works for us, we’re going to fill our homes with constant complaints. Don’t make the work harder than it needs to be and don’t think you’re somehow more holy if you’re more dour.
Laugh! Sing! Dance! Take joy and delight in your home!
This whole building and the things in it are our tool chest to care for the people who live here, including us. What makes you feel rested? A cup of tea or wine in the evening? What starts a day well? A cup of coffee or tea? A big breakfast? A shower with pleasant-smelling soap? There is nothing shameful about feminine softness and smells and sights. Each of us comes at this uniquely. One of us may love silky robes and another cowboy boots. One of us may love the pool and the other chill autumn days.
Delight in your home.
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73 notes • Posted 2021-09-20 13:26:36 GMT
#3
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I've worked outside the home, basically with a career, even while I considered myself a homemaker. A homemaker is all I've wanted to be since I was a very little girl. I can't remember a time in my life I didn't want to be a woman in her home. I did the career thing in my 20s. It wasn't without its profit, but it took me close to 4 years after I came home to re-buy into homemaking, to understand it as a glorious work instead of feeling put upon. It took me that long to start viewing it as my vocation.
Never once in my 'career' did I feel the invisible connection with women of the past. Not once did I feel rooted. Not once did I--in a Christian way, not a pagan way--feel tied to my ancestors, to the earth, to myself. I always felt like I was pushing against my purpose, even if I couldn't put it into words.
Now, when I cook, clean, do laundry, hug my husband, make our lunches, beautify my home, run errands, bake, laugh with my sisters, share coffee with my Mom, spoil my nieces and nephews, and enjoy my home I feel connected. Hundreds of women, back to the dawn of time, related and unrelated, have done this exact same work. Hundreds of women have passed down wisdom to me. Hundreds of women have kneaded bread, scrubbed clothes, pondered over dinner, sought to manage a budget, grown flowers, and raised up the next generation while honoring the last. Women after women have done this work. I feel like I've found my place, my sisterhood, my purpose. Not outside the home, but in it. Not in loudly demanding everyone's attention, but in quiet mornings set straight and ready for the day, long lingering breakfasts, grilling in our backyard, our stories, our life. Not in focuing on me, but in focusing on him and us. It's simple. It's incredibly hard. It's challenging. It's calm. Look back, down the line of women, going back to the beginning, there do I see my mothers, my sisters, my kin. And here, in my home, is where I belong.
101 notes • Posted 2021-07-16 12:05:00 GMT
#2
There is something uniquely, femininely satisfying about being up early before your family doing dishes, tidying up, preparing lunches, making things ready for the day.
139 notes • Posted 2021-07-15 13:05:33 GMT
#1
The crazier this whole world gets the more I think about getting beehives, chickens, planting gardens, learning to can food, and digging a celler. It's like my childhood is rising up out of the past to remind me that I once knew how to milk goats and gather eggs and make jelly.
275 notes • Posted 2021-10-17 12:12:36 GMT
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recallingrealities · 4 years
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Aligned, Chapter 2 (Zelda Spellman x Reader)
For Chapter 1, click (here)
Chapter 2: Selene 
Zelda Spellman x reader 
(momentary inferred NSFW)
You typically had no issue feeling grounded. Masterfully artful in your practice of quieting the mind, you found serenity. In this moment, you found yourself entranced by a surge of new energies. There was so much unseen and old resonance among the Academy’s grounds. It excites you to be surrounded by so much beautiful unknown. It was a dream. As if your stomach was full of dragonflies; buzzing and ricocheting against one another  within your chest. You had decided you would take up Ambrose on that tour, but you kept it very professional, not wanting the young man to get the wrong idea and waste away the evening. Your room had already been prepared in the sense it was ready for you to retire to it. Your boxes awaited you on your desk. However, you felt secure they could wait until after you’d explored the grounds to organize their contents properly.
After a lovely dinner with a small collection of faculty, you deemed it time to return to your things. You have come to the decision that one part you enjoyed particularly with homemaking, was the opportunity to reinfuse your space and belongings with fresh energy. There was a power in everything having a place, and so, you decided to collate each book in accordance to its author. If they were nameless, you placed them accordingly before A, by title. Was it necessary for you to acknowledge each book with so much intricacy and care? Likely not. A spell could do the trick, and the packing would take significantly less time. Alas, you found yourself tied to the intimacy of tracing each cover, and honor the care it took to bind it. After placing the last text and observing your work, you took time to arrange your candles particularly. 
You were becoming overly aware of how many of these tasks you could have completed with magic. Down to the smallest action, like striking the match and taking care to tend to each flame. It was the intention, you affirmed. The collection of small, intense energies, that had been a piece of your personal growth. You discovered this in meditation. Yes, any witch could use magic to accomplish the same task in quicker time, but even with the small amount of items you had placed in the room, you undoubtedly felt the fresh surge of energy; bustling and reverberating in your new space. It was indulgent, and relaxing. Even if you had only unpacked a little, there would still be plenty of time tomorrow. 
Though you had decided to move in darkness, it wasn’t unlike witches to hold strange sleep schedules. The thought had crossed your mind several times that it was destined; your intuition that willed your wakefulness. The Goddess herself had intricately weaved and planned for your exact placement of each item, at its precise moment in time. Perhaps it was the intensity of your faith. But even if it had not been her will entirely, it was her trueness to her own divine femininity, her own divine self that aligned the wills of those who followed her in Serendipity. Your trueness and dedication to what the Goddess had taught you over time, has you feeling as if you are glowing. You are honored enough to witness and note her teachings around you, and it is then you feel how much you’ve grown.
You felt a warm hum of humility pass over you, such wholesome and fully embodied realizations were so satiating to you that you couldn’t help but swell with gratitude. It was that energy that fed back into the space around you; you detected. It charged your spirit and drifted to your candles so they held tall, steady flames.
You realized that you had no idea what time it was, the moonlight pouring through the space between your rich velvet drapes. It could be late that evening still, or early the next  morning and you would be none the wiser - completely content with being guided through the unknown of your intuition.
After a beat of harmonious silence there was a sharp knock at the door. Not necessarily loud, but distinguished enough to send a wave of energy towards you, breaking the silence you were swimming in. It was then, the sight hit you hard. Your fingers gripped the side of the desk, catching yourself as your legs buckled. All under a startling vision of the High Priestess, which was now filling up your entire consciousness.
 She gave you a fiendish grin, running her tongue across her teeth before dragging her manicured nails down your inner thigh. Her left hand was gripping you with a bruising force, your thighs trembled beneath her touch. The graze arose in stinging red lines, hot and aggravated with prickling pleasure. She smirked before her lips moved towards the hem of your skirt, her hot breath just below your rear before the second knock rang through your chamber, breaking the vision.
You clear your throat and turn to face the door, leaning against your desk in a quick attempt to ease your composure.You realized now that the back of your thighs were in fact trembling. You had... felt her somehow. The sight was enrapturing, but this electrified you. 
“Do come in”
Your words chime in sync to the Directrix’s entering. The way she commanded the energy of the room to fall on her was impeccable. You were empathic, no doubt. Intuition was a part of the sight, but her energy was as clear to you as a demand you might have received from the Goddess. A level of intensity to this day, you haven’t grown used to.
“I came to check on the status of your new office - it has been some time since its last resident lived here.” 
She touched the wallpaper observantly, her firm powerful voice, directed towards you. She turned and gently shut the door with the back of her right heel..
“Does everything appear to be in order?” 
“Yes, High Priestess” 
You said clear and softly. You knew your appearance remained cool and collected, but you were finding it difficult to find your words with the sudden heat that was knotting in your throat. 
“I see you’ve begun moving into your office. How charming.”
Her words articulated quickly and carefully. To be honest you could hardly keep up. You couldn’t tell if she was being sarcastic, but you preferred to sense it as genuineness. At this point you were focused on solely regrounding yourself.
“And your living quarters, is it to your pleasure?”
At that you attempt to soften a hard gulp, as the word pleasure escaped her lips. ‘Holy fuck’ you think to herself. You realized the insanity of these few moments. Just a beat ago, you were fine, and even now appeared so - and yet, you feel as though you can’t get that… premonition? out of your mind. It was making it insatiably hard for you to focus. You had never had a vision take you like this before. Though they were sudden, yes, you had learned to try and ignore them, just long enough so not to impose your will on the situation. Though you knew your relaxed shoulders and calm breath disguised it, you knew you were distracted. Wondering how and when does that happen? You hardly even knew her-.
It was then you realized you had not replied.
“If I am being honest with you Ms. Spellman-”
You pause, standing from the edge of your desk, walking towards the bookshelf that held the classic “hidden room” behind it. You rested a hand on the aged, ashen wood before giving her a breathy smile.
“I hadn’t even thought to look. I am sure it’s marvelous.”
You felt your cheeks warm slightly. 
Zelda held a cigarette fashioned to her holder, and leaned over to light in on the candle next to her. A smile subtly showed on her lips as she held the cigarette to it. 
“Thank you. For checking up on me. It is… incredibly hospitable of you to check in on someone you barely know. Tell me… what time is it? If I am being quite frank with you, I have lost complete awareness of the time”
You let out a slight chuckle, one you felt escape from you residually. Between the dim floating lights of your candles and the moon’s gaping rays, it was beautiful in here. Of course, you were content, between getting lost in the ambience, and now, the beauty standing by your doorway. You did however, feel it would be best, contextually to know when Ms. Spellman decided to check in on you. You cock your head to the side, allowing yourself to smile, your teeth grazing the side of your cheek.
“Please, sit down. You have no reason to loom at the door.” 
Your feel as though you’ve finally relaxed, now swimming in this mysterious energy that was your new Priestess. As she breathed twirls of smoke, the room smelled of Mahogany, Tobacco, and warm cinnamon. It intrigued the Spellman the way warmth seemed to radiate off you now. It had seemed she wasn’t the only one with keenness for consideration. 
“Well, tell me this. Do you think yourself a wolf, or a hungered cat?”
Zelda moved to sit on the arm of the leather chair. The question seemed nontraditional at the very least.
“I suppose a cat; but I’ve always felt drawn to the moon. What do felines have to do with mornings?” 
You smile. You are enjoying watching her statured composure relax as the hours weaned. She was still the same composed woman as before, but it was as if you saw her muscles relax around her neck and shoulders among the warm glow of candles. The blanket of serene moonlight was bouncing off her skin, you could almost see her heartbeat pulsing in her neck. Were you staring at her and had she noticed?
“A hungered cat knows when to find the early bird”
Her eyes met yours, as she pulled another long breath. The crackling embers reflected in her softened gaze. She was so intense… but so were you, and she noted the reflection of your eyes, only a steps distance from her. She didn’t feel as though you were reading her memories this time. Only that they were beautiful. 
You couldn’t help but grin yourself, moving to tuck a displaced lock behind your ear, shaking your head before returning your eyes to her.
“To answer your question” she purred “It's early. Before the birds but I suppose at a perfect hour to admire the moon as well”. 
You felt your breath waver as you watched her lips relax into a smile. You had never seen her smile before. And though this moment came without warning, or formality, it was simple… and utterly romantic. You took a moment to exist in the quietness, only hearing the gentle wind and the waving maple apexed below your window.
You allowed your mind to wonder if the Goddess had planned this timing so beautifully. Or perhaps Lillith knew you would set the mood yourself, a fan of letting your candelabras burn low almost every evening.
Zelda couldn’t help but let her eyes drift across your silhouette as you gazed out the window. Your head was turned away just so, to let the moon drape your figure and fair skin. She couldn’t tell if it was the moonlight, or your aura that entranced her. A faint hue of indigo drifted from you in her mind's eye. She wasn’t fantastic with reading aura, one of her less polished skills, but it had seemed to radiate off of you, almost obvious. She had noticed it earlier when you had first stepped foot in her office.
You both sat in silence for a few minutes before she flicked the cigarette into the wastebin beside her. The quiet tssst, drew your eyes drift peacefully back to her. 
“I should allow you to make up your room - I am extinguishing any chance of you getting sleep before the sun rises. Though I must say, I am grateful-” 
She restored her posture, and voice to that of a more astute regality. 
“to have enjoyed a moment of peace with you. I feel as though enjoying peace and quiet can be a rarity in this day and age, let alone quiet with accompaniment.”
Though she didn’t say it, you knew she had felt in those minutes, she had gotten to know you better, and you her. The brashness of your vision had faded from your mind for that moment, and you felt grateful to have witnessed a glimpse of what you think had been her unaltered self.
“It is said in silence one learns more about the world than in a lifetime of study” 
You stand gently, ambling past her to open the door in courtesy. It was now you realized, you felt honored to have seen her like this, to have spent more than a moment, bewildered in her presence. 
“I see now how meditation has been so enriching for you now”
 She sighed gently and drifted towards the threshold, before pausing. She was only inches away from you.
“Goodnight Y/N”
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isfjmel-phleg · 4 years
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July 2020 Books
A Pocket Full of Murder and A Little Taste of Poison by R. J. Anderson (reread)
Reread on a whim, and as delightful as ever.
Jane Austen’s Manuscript Works by Jane Austen
While I have read Lady Susan, I wasn’t familiar with the rest of Austen’s early or unfinished work. The Watsons and Sanditon have so much promise! Alas.
Dandelion Wine by Ray Bradbury (reread)
It’s like reading poetry. I don’t always grasp it, but it’s beautiful.
Farewell Summer by Ray Bradbury
At first I was reasonably okay with this one--the prose is lovely, and while it didn’t resonate the way its predecessor does, it wasn’t bad...until that ending, which completely ruined it. I hadn’t expected Bradbury to Go There--haven’t really encountered that side of him in the other ones I’ve read--and now I’m kind of mad at him and will need a while to cool off before I start I Sing the Body Electric.
Avatar: The Last Airbender: The Art of the Animated Series by Michael Dante DiMartino and Bryan Konietzko
Beautiful and detailed. I especially appreciated the closer look at some of the various costumes as they change with setting.
The Middle Moffat, Rufus M., and The Moffat Museum by Eleanor Estes (reread)
I missed out on these as a child, beyond a few excerpts that turned up in elementary-school readers, but even as an adult, I found them charming, an excellent example of the slice-of-life-with-four-children genre. (Although Sophie’s marriage as a teenager to a man explicitly stated to be twice her age hasn’t held up especially well.)
Linnets and Valerians by Elizabeth Goudge (reread)
Goudge’s prose is gorgeous and her characters striking. This plot had some odd elements that I’m not sure how I feel about, but the character interactions are memorable.
Dear Theodora by Florence Irwin
An abridgment of a 1920 novel originally titled Poor Dear Theodora. Began with some promise in the old-timey romance vein but devolved into some heavy-handed attempts at social satire (Irwin seems to really have a problem with women’s suffrage; also eugenics is bad--true enough--but Breeding is very Important?) and moralizing (there is literally a long passage late in the book that spells out what Theodora has learned from each incident). I found the original text and compared it to the abridgment; the original is even more soapboxy, while the abridgment (done by a Christian publisher) added some wording to make certain parts more overtly religious. The book was interesting in terms of its era and the rhetoric presented (WWI was good and right and found on moral grounds, darn it, and all good decent people are going to do their part in it!--???), but as a story I found both plot and characters lacking and am not surprised that the book has not endured much past its time.
The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate by Jacqueline Kelly
I wanted to like this one. It has a beautiful cover. Kelly’s prose is polished and evocative, especially in its descriptions of biological studies. But I didn’t much care for Calpurnia. Her interest in biology is fun and her relationship with her grandfather was frequently touching (although not without problems), but her not-like-the-other-girls attitude is very overdone in historical fiction characters, and in this case not handled with nuance. She is not only negative toward anything her society designates as feminine (constantly describing it in terms of imprisonment) but also disdainful of those who embrace it (her mother, even her supposed friend). I don’t toss around terms like this lightly, but internalized misogyny, so much. Her frustrations with the limitations placed on women in this era are understandable, but she turns it into a dichotomy between science/masculinity/admirable traits and homemaking/femininity/weakness. This black-and-white thinking could have been a place for her to grow from toward a more complex understanding of gender roles, but she never does. Never puts together that cooking requires chemistry and textile work math, and that these are respectable skills for anyone even if she doesn’t enjoy them, and that if she chooses she can combine doing science with having a family as many actual female scientists of her era did. The pieces were all there (her grandfather’s tales of cooking and knitting for himself during the Civil War, the book titled The Science of Homemaking or something like that), but...nothing. For a book whose title indicates a change in its heroine, there was regrettably little character development.
Puck of Pook’s Hill by Rudyard Kipling
Kipling is an excellent writer (the poetry in this book might be the best part), but these stories didn’t especially draw me in. I was more curious about the children in the framing device, but since most of the book was their being told random stories by figures from Britiain’s far past, there was never an opportunity to get to know them or allow them to do much.
A Wind in the Door and A Swiftly Tilting Planet by Madeleine L’Engle
I really enjoyed the former, which maintained a similar tone and feel to A Wrinkle in Time. Planet was clever and ambitious but less resonant for me.
The Lost Crown by Sarah Miller (reread)
The best work of historical fiction on the Romanov sisters. Miller has done her research far beyond readily-available basic facts, and she provides a glorious bibliography and author’s note and glossary and character index. The attention to detail not only grounds the prose but also allows the sisters to develop beyond the smart-bossy-sweet-and-mischievous stereotypes they’re often reduced to. Miller alternates their POVs with each chapter, giving them equal voice and equal dignity, and demonstrating their bond instead of pitting them against each other. Highly recommended for those interested in these historical figures.
Gemma and Sisters by Noel Streatfeild
Streatfeild introduces a plot complication in this one that would have been fascinating to explore--would have given the (rather obnoxious) character whom it would have affected a chance to grow and reevaluate some things...but then the problem easily resolves, the character’s all like “did you really think I would let it happen any differently,” and it was just a temporary inconvenience. What a pity.
The Magic Summer (The Growing Summer) and Family Shoes (The Bell Family) by Noel Streatfeild (reread)
I liked these both better this time around. Streatfeild is in her element with both (although not having a character who dances in Growing Summer is rather a departure for her), capturing sibling/family relationships with humor and believability.
The Girl Who Raced Fairyland All the Way Home by Catherynne M. Valente
A fitting ending for the series, although I’m not sure how I feel about it (how does September’s family factor into the new direction her life takes, or did I miss that?). Valente’s prose remains distinctive, and she makes the most of exploring the wildly different angles on leadership that the nature of her Fairyland makes possible.
Detectives in Togas and Mystery of the Roman Ransom by Henry Winterfeld (reread)
Light-hearted, which is unusual for a lot of historical fiction, especially set in ancient Rome, and places more emphasis on plot than character (a lot of the boys are difficult to tell apart).
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Will I ever really be happy?
I hate being in a world that makes me feel bad for looking young naturally. I can't help it if I look "baby-faced". I surely didn't ask for this.
I thought I'd made relative peace with it after a very rude and ungrateful woman insulted me, by telling myself at least I'd look 25 when I was 40 if I took care if myself.
This worked for a while, but I've been on a YouTube kick lately and after coming across a YouTuber who is mostly the happy homemaker sort who discusses random topics but focuses on femininity.
I'm looking at her thinking "Okay, she's about 32 or 33." Nope, she's a 23. Younger than I am.
Can. I. Just. Go. Die. Now.
Few people like the cards they've been dealt, but come on now. Really? Really, Universe? Must I be mocked in my leisure time as well as at work? At this point I am calling B.S. on the Universe. I don't care what bad things I may have done in the past, but enough is enough.
-It's fucked up enough that I every single time I think I've met someone who wants a stable relationship, I get fucked over despite the fact that I'd trade my soul for an engagement ring.
-It's fucked up that my first love chose and ugly, older bitch over me, a younger more intelligent woman with more potential than working at Domino's, because I was 19 and he was 27. I was TOO YOUNG for him.
-It's fucked up that I've never got pregnant because neither of the two men I've truly loved would c#m in me.
-It's really fucked up how I lost my virginity.
-It's fucked up that I spent a year unemployed when I DESPERATELY needed a job.
-It's fucked up that it took to me till age 21 to find a female best friend who doesn't treat me like shit or spread rumors about me.
-It's fucked up I'm the oldest unmarried woman that's been in my main family line since 1930.
-It's fucked up that I am STILL living with my parents DESPITE going to school, getting a job, and trying to do everything right.
-It's fucked up that I did the college thing like EVERYONE wanted me to do only to hate every minute of it and nearly commited suicide in the process.
-It's fucked up that I'm not getting interviews to get away from a job I'm embarrassed by 75%of the time. I'd rather lie than tell a perspective date that I'm a librarian because of my pitiful income.
-It's fucked up that I have PCOS and carry all my weight in my stomach, have trouble losing weight, grow unwanted facial and body hair without meds to stop it, and may very likely have trouble getting pregnant.
-It's fucked up that my mom has....I can't even type it.
-It's fucked up that my father's a drunk and an ass.
-It's fucked up that that I'm agrivatingly short despite my efforts to male peace with my height.
-It's fucked up m that I barely know my half siblings.
-It's fucked up that that my cousins are religious and political bigots.
-It's fucked up that everyone around me is getting married and having kids and I'm supposed to smile and pretend I don't want to drive my car off a bridge when I hear about it.
- It's fucked up that I've tried so fucking hard to do everything right only to be as far in life as if I'd never done any of it.
-It's fucked up that I can't sleep and instead am on here writing this instead of sleeping for work in the morning and my alarm goes off in 4 hours.
I hate the woman that I am.
A woman with nothing and no one.
Had I the faintest idea I'd still be a single and childless waste of life back during my suicidal period, I'd have ended my life. No question about it.
I just need 1 single thing that genuinely matters to me to work out. I can't be in the exact same place a year from now. I can't be single and childless on my next birthday. If that is to be my fate I'd be better driving my car off the bridge today.
Enough is enough. I shouldn't have to go through so much shit at once.
Is there any real happiness out there for me?
I need to know this.
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toongrrl-blog · 4 years
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“The Mommy Myth”: Revolt against the MRS (Part One)
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MRS: As explained, “Today we acknowledge that women inhabit many identities throughout the day, and they can be in conflict with each other, so we are constantly negotiating among them. But what the feminine mystique exposed was that all women, each and every one of them, were supposed to inhabit one and only one seamless subject position: that of the selfless, never complaining, always happy wife and mother who cheerfully eradicated whatever other identities she might have had and instead put her husband, her children, and the cleanliness of her house first. Once you grew up, you were supposed to encase yourself in this subject position as if it were a wetsuit, and never take it off. This asphyxiating and disciplining subject position might best be called Moms ‘R’ Us, or MRS, the wife/mother...”
The Women’s International Conspiracy from Hell (WITCH), Mother’s Day, Cleveland, 1969. Broadsides were posted on telephone poles reading:
Today, one day of the year, America is celebrating Motherhood, in home...church...restaurant...candy shop...flower store. The other 364 days she preserves the apple pie of family life and togetherness, and protects the sanctity of the male ego and profit. She lives through her husband and children. She is sacrificed on the alter of reproduction...she is damned to the dreary world of domesticity by day, and legal rape by night...She is convinced that happiness and her lost identity can be recovered by buying--more and more and more and more.
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“Wages for Housework”
We clean your homes and your factories. We raise the next generation of workers for you. Whatever else we may do, we are the housewives of the world. In return for our work, you have only asked us to work harder...we are serving notice to you that we intend to be paid for the work we do. We want wages for every dirty toilet, every painful childbirth, every indecent assault, every cup of coffee, and every smile. And if we don’t get what we want, then we will simply refuse to work any longer. Now you will rot in your own garbage. We want it in cash, retroactive and immediately. And we want all of it.
Gloria Steinem’s hopes for the future in U.S. News and World Report, 1975
Responsibility for children won’t be exclusively the woman’s anymore, but shared equally by men--and shared by the community, too. That means that work patterns will change for both women and men, and women can enter all fields just as men can.
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The late 1960s for women:
Men got paid more than women for the same exact job.
Women could get credit cards in their husband’s name but not their own.
Many divorced, single, and separated women found it hard to get credit cards at all.
Women could not get mortgages on their own and if a couple applied for one, only the husband’s income was considered.
Women faced discrimination in education, scholarship awards, and on the job.
The collective marriage property was legally the husband’s.
Women kept out of various jobs, like: doctor, college professor, bus driver, business manager.
Knocked out in the delivery room.
Birth Control options were limited (and abortion was illegal).
1960 statistics (it’s not all Leave It To Beaver)
40% of the work force were women, even with young children.
It was not reflected in the law or the media.
“Yeah flirting is fun. A man opens a door for me, I thank him, he smiles---and electricity ripples through us both. A year later I’m flushing out a diaper and he’s opening other doors.” Carold Hanish and Elizabeth Sutherland, Women of the World Unite--We Have Nothing to Lose But Our Men!
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In March 18, 1970. Several feminists came into the offices of Ladies Home Journal to stage what would be an 11 hour sit-in to suggest changes to it (and after that, all women’s magazines) where they asserted as the magazine was a magazine for mothers and wives, they needed to establish an on-site childcare center for employees with young children and it’d be run entirely by women and that “the magazine seek out nonwhite women for its staff in proportion to the population”, then added minimum wage and worker participation in editorial decisions. The Editor in Chief, John Mack Carter agreed to an eight-page insert in the August 1970 issue.
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The insert contained articles and sidebars entitled “Housewives’ Bill of Rights” (demands for paid maternity leave, paid vacations, free 24 hour childcare centers, social security benefits for years of labor in the home, health insurance”. “Help Wanted: Female. 99.6 Hours a Week. No Pay. Bed and Bored. Must Be Good with Children” talked about the inequities of homemaking and the less glamorous parts of homemaking and with all the work to make the home comfy they are greeted by smirking husbands asking what they have done all day. 
“Babies Are Born, Not Delivered”, the writer/new mom documented what happened in the maternity ward (to Susan Mayfield, Karen Wheeler, Mrs. Sinclair, Claudia Henderson): pubic hair shaved off, being wheeled into a room on her lonesome, being told by a resident when she would actually have the baby, being told her pains weren’t real and she’d have to wait for the doctor, when about to deliver an anesthesiologist appeared and gave her a spinal despite her protests, doctor pulled baby out with forceps.
The articles spoke to the readers like they are comrades together rather than “I am the expert and you’re not” tone. 
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In 1972 (first appearing as an insert in the NYT in 1971), Ms. Magazine was born. Letters to the Editor had women of all ages and backgrounds flooding the section with letters about their grind with sexism. Jane O’Rielly wrote her famous essay “The Housewife’s Moment of Truth” with her “click” moments where she writes that:
I thought that most of my clicks were behind me, but tonight, as I cleared the table, I had a new one. I was complimenting myself (since no one else had) on a meal I’d gone to some trouble to prepare. I began to wonder why so many of us wait trembling for “the verdict” at every meal; why my mother and so many others risk antagonizing their families by asking outright if everything is okay.
I decided it’s not just neurosis. We really know they’re judging even when they don’t say so. Housewifing is an occupation in which every single waking act is judged by the persons who mean the most to you in the world. Is the house clean? Is the food good? Are the children well-behaved? 
A thousand times a day our contracts come up for renewal. No wonder our nerves are shot.
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Here are some following article titles from actual Ms. articles:
1973 had “Job Advice for ‘Just a Housewife’” in the November issue and it’s May issue devoted to motherhood with Letty Cottin Pogrebin writing “We care deeply about children whether we have our own or not. We work to improve educational curricula, child-care facilities, health services, and the childbirth experience. We are saying that men are parents too; that fatherhood need be no less important or time-consuming than motherhood...Truly, feminists are talking about choice: about making the decision to become pregnant and choosing a motherly role that is right for ourselves and our children.”
1974 had articles titled “New Help for Mothers Alone” (February), “How the Economy Uses Housewives” (May), and “Surviving Widowhood” and “Must We Be Childless to be Free?” (October). 
1975 had “Kids in the Office, and What-Else-Is-New with Child Care” in March, “How Hospitals Complicate Childbirth” (June), and a special section on mothers and daughters in June. 
Earlier that decade, writer Alix Kates Shulman (of works like Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen, the ultimate Karen Wheeler book, and planned the 1968 demonstrations outside of the Miss America contest) wrote about that her previously equal companionship with her husband deteriorated when they had children. 
Now I was restricted to the company of two demanding preschoolers and to the four walls of an apartment. It seemed unfair that while my husband’s life had changed little when the children were born, domestic life had become the only life I had”
His work demanded more travel and late nights, so they wrote a marriage agreement where they asserted that “each member of the family has an equal right to his/her own time, work, values, and choices...The ability to earn more money is already a privilege which must not be compounded by enabling the larger earner to buy out of his/her duties and put the burden on the one who earns less, or on someone hired from outside” and that domestic jobs be shared 50/50 and any “overtime in any domestic job, she/he must be compensated by equal extra work by the other” and had a job breakdown that included childcare duties like: waking, getting clothes ready, making lunches, seeing notes and homework and money and passes and books must be collected, getting babysitters (hours of phoning), calling doctors and checking symptoms and filling prescriptions, staying home with sick kids, providing activities. Shulman and her husband became happier, she wrote more books for adults and children, and her husband after 4 months of the agreement heard their daughter say “You know Daddy, I used to love Mommy more than you, but now I love you both the same.”
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Soon magazines started writing sample marriage contracts with even Glamour magazine featuring an article how to write your own contract. There were also men staying home as househusbands with one telling Time magazine in 1974: “I love my son Adam, but I can see how taking care of a kid can drive a woman up the wall.” Dr. Spock (and other childcare experts) were taken to task for assuming that whatever happened with kids was Mom’s fault and her responsibility. Gloria Steinem cited Department of Labor stats that put the value of a housewife’s work value to be around $8000-$9000 a year because that is what would cost her husband to pay for the services of a housewife, including prostitution (see Marital Rape and faking orgasms). Naturally people cried “Communism!” or “offensive to middle-class sensibilities”. McCall’s magazine citing a study from Chase Manhattan Bank economist noted that for a man to hire a cook, laundress, nursemaid, chauffeur, and gardener he’d be paying $10 grand a year back then and nuns did about the same work as housewives but were entitled to Social Security. Clare Booth Luce, in 1977 for The Saturday Evening Post, wrote that the work of housewives and mothers was now worth $20,000 a year. 
Childcare became a hot topic, even though President Nixon claimed there was no need for national child development programs and such a program was anti-family. Also the idea of artificial pregnancies became attractive sounding to some (hey think about it, maintaining dress size and drinking booze and eating whatever and riding roller coasters?). Shulamith Firestone, author of The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution, argued women will always be kept down until they were freed from “reproductive biology by every means available” and until artificial wombs were created, moms should be compensated for labor and dads be involved, Ted.......Also that children would benefit by being cut loose from dependency on parents who’d pass their issues on to their children and more kibbutz style households over the nuclear family model. In contrast, Jane Alpert, wrote “Mother Right” where she insisted motherhood was a source of female power and be harnessed in service for liberation and that mothers can pass on the values of empathy, pacifism, cooperation, intuition, protective feelings towards others to counter competition, individualism, and aggression.
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topmixtrends · 6 years
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This week on Dear Television: Phillip Maciak, Jane Hu, and Aaron Bady get drunk, ride the subway, and take the microphone from a spoken-word poet in order to tell you about Amazon’s new series, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel. There are some spoilers below, so if you don’t want to get arrested, don’t say the f-word on stage. 
Perfect Manhattan
by Phil Maciak
Dear television,
The other day, Aaron (who will join us below) tweeted this: “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel is way better than you guys are admitting.” I don’t have data to support his claim, but it had also occurred to me that the critical community was a little less excited about this new series from Amy Sherman-Palladino than I might have expected. It got great reviews, of course, but the buzz seemed a little less buzzy maybe than I would have thought. Part of this may have to do with the fact that the pilot was already old when the show appeared. (This, to me, is the most annoying aspect of the Amazon system: that their early pilots don’t generate excitement so much as create a condition where viewers can essentially forget about a show months before they ever actually see it.) And part of this is probably a result of its debut in the midst of year-end-list mania. The hottest take I can possibly imagine—and, mind you, I don’t necessarily agree with this take, but I want to consider it—is that the response to this very very good show has been slow because it’s possible (possible as in it could possibly be the case) that Mrs. Maisel is better than Gilmore Girls. And, if that were true, it would be a very hard thing to say out loud.
I have no idea why I am saying all this. It is not in my self-interest to do so. Especially because what I really want to say is that I’m crazy for The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel. I think it is a perfect vehicle for Sherman-Palladino’s rhythmic, ratatat dialogue; it has half a dozen spectacular performances in it (I mean, Rachel Brosnahan especially, but all the leads minus the guy who plays Joel and plus Kevin Pollak and Luke Kirby as Lenny Bruce); it looks and sounds great; and, beyond all of that, it feels like it’s really just clearing its throat to begin. The eight-episode series is a masterpiece of pacing, and not just because it moves briskly forward, but because that briskness occasionally speeds up or goes in slow-motion. There are a few montages that feel like dance numbers, and the show builds to Midge’s first two stand-up sets in such a way that they seem to take place in the split-second after Wile E. Coyote runs off a cliff, but before he drops. The show is pleasant and warm-hearted and funny, but I don’t think I expected it to be as dizzily thrilling as it is.
Here’s the thing about Mrs. Maisel, though: it’s perfect. I don’t even mean that in a strictly evaluative way. Like, I don’t think it’s the best show of the year (hey, The Leftovers!). What I mean is that perfection is a compositional quality and aspiration of the show. Its arguments, as Aaron has also tweeted, are “symphonic,” its visual aesthetic is flawless, the casting is so sharp it feels like Harry Potter for Jewish American character actors, the stand-up sets are exactly as solid and charming as they are diegetically supposed to be, everybody says either the perfectly right thing or the perfectly wrong thing, its complications are precisely calibrated, its surprises are precisely spring-loaded, its best jokes all have call-backs, and Midge Maisel’s ankles are always the same circumference.  There’s nothing messy or ragged or loose or baggy about this show. And that makes it good, but that also makes it a very particular type of show.
Gilmore Girls, for instance, was not perfect in this way. Neither was The Leftovers. Neither was Friday Night Lights. Frasier was perfect. So was Breaking Bad, and so was The West Wing. In other words, perfect and not-perfect are aesthetic categories here. Perfect shows do what they’re supposed to do; not-perfect shows do what they’re going to do. Not-perfect shows can be better than perfect shows and vice versa, but it’s a risk to do either. There were moments when The Leftovers did something so seemingly ill-advised that it could have derailed the whole series. But, in the—frequent—case that The Leftovers pulled it off, the show was transcendent. On the other hand, the perfect shows operate at such great heights and require such high-wire execution that, when they falter, it’s very very noticeable. Gilmore Girls was a long, meandering, free-associative, sometimes rapturous monologue; Mrs. Maisel is a tight ten.
The other thing, though, is that Mrs. Maisel is a perfect show about perfection. (Just as Gilmore Girls was an aimless show interested in the redemptive and recuperative power of its own aimlessness.) It’s about the (often-stereotyped) cultural pressures surrounding domestic and professional perfection in a mid-century Jewish American family, it’s about the laborious grind of seamless gender performance, the dress that needs pearls, the office that needs quiet, the marriage that needs children. And even when Midge cuts loose, when she goes out drunk in a housecoat, she remains perfect. Her improvised set becomes something so good, so what we need now, that the season transforms into one long training montage of Midge and Susie perfecting her act. A show about the oppressive weight of feminine perfection at midcentury becomes a show about the obsessive quest for artistic perfection. Swap out the punchlines for crystal meth, and Midge Maisel is the one who knocks.
So I guess my question is: does that make Mrs. Maisel easier to appreciate but harder to love? Are the internets not exploding the way we think they should because Amy Sherman-Palladino’s new show is a tailored Chanel suit rather than a care-worn hoodie, an immaculate macaron rather than your sixth cup of coffee on the day?  
[Lenny Bruce Shrug Emoji],
Phil.
Late Style
by Jane Hu
Dear Television,
I had planned to write this drunk at my local bar (a la Midge), but then remembered my local bar doesn’t have WiFi so am now typing this (beer in hand) on my giant red couch. It looks kind of sort of like this:
It’s funny. When I had loosely proposed that we Dear TV The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, I had no clue that I’d find it so… impossible to write about. So impossible, in fact, that it almost begs the magical ease found in a bottle of red and a loose nightgown to make it feel like I’m not really writing at all. Writing is work, and watching The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel is, in many ways, all about play.
My relationship to Maisel is inevitably shadowed by my history with Amy Sherman-Palladino’s first TV series, Gilmore Girls—a show I religiously followed from elementary school to the end of high school. It was a show, in other words, very much associated with those years in which the balance between work and play is continuously being renegotiated. This was moreover thematized by the very content of Gilmore Girls, in which Rory Gilmore seemingly reflected my own bildung. Except, you know, richer and hotter and whiter. But that was beside the point. The point was that I had found an aspirational portrait of how a young woman might be. And on network television no less!
We did, in fact, see Rory study a lot on Gilmore Girls. But she played more. And while my 14-year-old brain believably converted Rory’s lifestyle into a blueprint for acceptance at Yale, I had no fantasies that what I was doing when I watched Rory live her life was anything but play. Looking back, it was a complex form of identification—the kind of imaginative or bad-faith identification that often happens when engaging with fiction, though recent reactions to “Cat Person” suggest that many are only just learning this. In most ways, I was nothing like Rory. In other ways, she was the closest thing to me on television. Perhaps it’s less of a problem for those who see themselves more directly reflected in popular culture, but I forgive myself any childhood Rory cathexis that adamantly ignored (as the show often did itself) the class and racial privileges that made Rory’s flourishing possible.
The Gilmore Girls reboot was considered a hostile disaster. Rory is (was?) insufferable. But the reboot was perhaps not so much a disaster at all if we understand it as an allegory for the show’s own contemporary impossibility. Everything is falling apart in Rory’s life in 2016; she is the paragon of promise unfulfilled, privilege unrewarded. Yet, it seems hard to imagine a television drama today in which someone like Rory continues to rise, not just because Rory doesn’t work in the political climate of 2016 liberal TV dramas, but because Rory simply doesn’t work as an adult. To logically follow Rory’s arc from Stars Hollow to post-Yale is to get, well, something pretty close to what we got in the reboot. It might have left a bad taste in many a fan’s mouths, but I also can’t think of a more satisfyingly anti-climatic ending for a show that I always believed to be more realist than not. The Gilmore Girls reboot works because we see Rory struggling to work.
Enter Midge Maisel, who, as Phil explains above, comes to us already perfect. While the Gilmore Girls reboot falteringly plays out the irrelevance of its own initial premise, Maisel, writes Phil, “is a perfect show about perfection.” This is made perhaps all the more problematic given that comedy—and representations of stand-up comedians especially—is often about conflict. Jerry Seinfeld and Louis CK couldn’t make it through a day in New York without causing a scene. “In Maisel,” writes Lili Loofbourow, “Sherman-Palladino creates a comic out of thin air — and introduces her to you first as the stand-up comic’s greatest natural enemy: the fussy, perfectionist, rich, and happy homemaker.” Always there with another twist of the conventional knife, Sherman-Palladino also makes our homemaker surprisingly and effectively funny.
What do you do with an un-problem like Midge Maisel? Well, as with Maria Von Trapp, you let her sing. Rachel Brosnahan is not only already perfect, but, as Loofbourow writes, “brimming with enthusiasm already” as well. Part of what makes writing about The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel so difficult, I suspect, is because watching The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel is so aggressively… comfortable. Phil is right: this isn’t The Leftovers. It’s a whitewashed 1960s musical redone in a coral palette, if Sherman-Palladino’s reuse of “I Enjoy Being A Girl” is any evidence. Even more than the utopia that was Stars Hollow, Midge’s historical New York City might as well be itself a neon Broadway fantasy.
Part of me suspects that an Amy Sherman-Palladino show today works best if it’s somewhat historical only because none of the classic “contemporary” ASP worlds (Stars Hollow or, the town of Bunheads, which is coyingly titled “Paradise”) feel remotely plausible in 2017. Sherman-Palladino had to go period vintage in order to keep her world from not seeming too white. But, of course, Maisel’s 1958 New York City is contextualized not just through its “historical” textures and set dressing, but in how it tropes on an already fantastical aesthetic landscape of the postwar American musical: The King and I (1956), South Pacific (1958), Flower Drum Song (1961).
As with Gilmore Girls’ Lauren Graham and Bunheads’ Sutton Foster before her, Brosnahan is impeccably cast as Sherman-Palladino’s archetypal Adult Brunette With An Early Mid-Life Crisis. And their triangulation (you could honestly play ASP bingo with these three characters) was also a kind of late revelation for adult me. It’s not that I hadn’t already processed that Lorelai is as much—if not more—the protagonist of Gilmore Girls than Rory, but Maisel makes this unmistakably clear. In Bunheads, Foster’s character is much more firmly the protagonist than the Rory avatars of Sasha Torres and Ginny Thompson (the latter who reappears as Midge’s best friend Imogene). But in Maisel, the specter of Rory is entirely erased.
Instead, what we get are two young children—a boy and a girl—who barely register on the show as sentient beings. Children are not work in Maisel. They don’t even really occur in terms of playtime. Midge’s attachment to both—if indeed we can call it that—seems founded solely on the fact that they provide material for her stand-up bits or as excuses to score her husband a better open mic time slot. We don’t know if Midge’s daughter is going to Yale; we do know that she has a giant forehead. I’m not sure what future seasons hold, but in this one, Rory’s presence must be erased in order to make life possible again for Midge. Maisel is, in many ways, Gilmore Girls backwards: Midge begins life by presumably doing everything right, and Lorelei begins by doing everything wrong. Except, it seems, Rory. Lorelei’s second chances—her missed childhood—are inextricable from Rory’s perfect successes, which are, in turn, inextricable from the fact that Lorelei is a working single mom. Midge’s second chance—her “revivifying fall,” as Loofbourow puts it—is conceivable insofar as her children and more importantly childcare don’t factor into her life. Rory, as the Gilmore Girls reboot suggests, represents an impossible aspiration—a figure that doesn’t so much embody futurity as balk it.
Revelations of how Maisel diverges from Gilmore Girls also lead me to give Joel some airtime. Has Sherman-Palladino ever featured such a male lunkhead to play the romantic partner of one of her heroines? Dean was a lunkhead, yes. Christopher was pretty bad. Luke’s grumpiness wasn’t always charming. And similar to the twist ending of Maisel’s pilot, Sutton Foster’s new husband dies at the end of the Bunheads pilot. Against all these male romantic leads that one could at least plausibly ship, Joel is so exaggeratedly bad that he becomes an almost unrealistic character. I get that the show plays up the contradictions in their union, but I’m pointing out the extremes of Joel’s unlikability partly because I wonder if he becomes the apology for all that is so perfect in Maisel.
So it was a surprise to me that in the show’s finale, my favorite scene (perhaps of the entire season) revolved not around Midge, but Joel. You probably know what I’m talking about: Joel arrives at the Gaslight with a hunch that Midge will be performing. He’s already drunk when he sees his comedy hero Lenny Bruce introduce his wife who, unbeknownst to him during their separation, has been honing—yes, perfecting—her set. Flask in hand, Joel takes swigs while witnessing Midge tell some particularly lacerating jokes at the mercy of their private life. In the middle of her performance: some hecklers. Midge shuts it down all rather effortlessly, but Joel has an ax to grind, so he follows the hecklers out where he proceeds to beat them up—presumably in defense of Midge’s honor, but also, of course, because Joel is mad at Midge. He tells the hecklers, “She’s good!” And then again, to himself, stumbling away, “She’s good.” This is my favorite scene! In the angry repetition of “she’s good” partly expected from Joel, while nonetheless also disappointing, we get the first glimmers of his redemption too. Because “she’s good” means two things here: 1) “she’s good, so don’t insult my wife,” but also 2) “she’s good; she’s really good; she’s better than me,” that is the culminating revelation Maisel has been building to all season. When I started watching Maisel, my partner noted in an early episode: “I can’t wait for Joel to see her perform.” In season two, me neither.
I’ve got to get a job,
Jane
Not-Perfect Manhattan
by Aaron Bady
Dear Television,
Like Jane, I’m finding it strangely hard to write about a show that I found easy to love. “This show is perfect!” was my first thought; my second, which took me longer, was “But why?” Though now that I think about it—and since Phil has entered it into the permanent record—let me note that after observing that the show is, like, totally great, I went on to tweet, “Also, why aren’t we talking about how The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel is in subterranean battle with Woody Allen?”
So let me start there. I haven’t watched anything by Woody Allen since 2014—the year you could no longer live in denial—but I found it really hard to watch The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel and not think about the times when I did, when the drop of a hat could launch me into arguing about the cavernous gap between the good ones and the bad ones, when I’d watch the new one as soon as it came out, and when I even put forward my argument that Vicki Cristina Barcelona is a great movie (which no one ever bought). I used to have thoughts about Woody Allen’s movies. I used to live in a world where having thoughts about Woody Allen’s movies was a normal thing to do. Woody Allen was an Important Filmmaker That You Had to Know About (and I did!).
It seems like a long time ago. Dylan Farrow’s op-ed was not that long ago, really, only February of 2014, but the fact that we can use phrases like “post-Weinstein” to describe the historical epoch that opened up… wait, that was only 2 months ago? It seems like so much longer ago. And that says something about the strange temporality of this moment, how rapidly even the past seems to be changing. That’s important, that this has been retroactive movement: it’s not just that the present is changing, such that the future will be different than the past. No, the “new” revelations—precisely because they are never quite as new as they seem—force a destructive re-evaluation of the past. What is the family sitcom without Bill Cosby? What is indie cinema without Weinstein? What is stand-up comedy and cinema without Woody Allen? What is the present of culture without the things that used to be the past?
Of course, the irony is that Woody Allen isn’t in the past; he’s in the present, still a presence in American cinema, and not just as an abstract example or historical influence. He still makes films, he still gets financing for them, and actors still fight to appear in them. Allen is going to keep doing what he does until the day he drops dead, and the industry will keep letting him. Amazon gave Allen a lot more money and leeway for Wonder Wheel than they gave Amy Sherman-Palladino for Maisel, as a few people have caustically observed. Before she was cast to play Midge in Maisel, for example, Rachel Brosnahan played “Ellie” in four episodes of Allen’s Crisis in Six Scenes.
More to the point, Woody Allen is a presence for Amy Sherman-Palladino. There were three references to Annie Hall in Gilmore Girls, because Sherman-Palladino is a big fan; “I would worship at the altar of Woody Allen,”  she once said; of her creative process, elsewhere, she once described having “Woody Allen going on in the background, that it’s, somehow, it’s music to me.” They are, perhaps, the two Great American Auteurs of patter.
Woody Allen has been playing in my background, as well; my reaction, too, was that we were watching “Gilmore Girls Banter Meets Vintage Woody Allen, With a Feminist Twist.” And it’s a shame, in a way, that I’ve already mentioned his name so many times (in a post ostensibly about The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel). It’s a shame because it changes the frame for appreciation, makes it hard to describe the things that this show is doing. If I try to talk about how Sherman-Palladino orchestrates combative conversations between multiple characters—or how her fight scenes are “symphonic”—am I comparing Midge telling her parents that Joel has left to Gilmore Girls or to one of Woody Allen’s “four people talking at once, spiraling out of control”? When I try to describe how the camera moves, or how the city is portrayed—or the jazzy set-piece tone poems that link it all together—I find myself reaching for Allen as a point of comparison, placing her in relation to the Great Works of the past.
Woody Allen is an obvious point of comparison, of course, for several reasons. They both enjoy long, conversational shots, letting scenes filled with rapid-fire dialogue also stretch out and breathe. What Phil called the “imperfection” of Gilmore Girls also describes a pleasure of the Woody Allen oeuvre; in their sloppy proliferation, you could watch them like a TV show’s many episodes, different but united by a recognizable voice. And, of course, I find myself thinking about Woody Allen because Maisel is a period piece about a Jewish comedian in mid-century New York, a show in love with a grand old city of the past—like so many of Allen’s movies—but also the scene of Allen’s own comedic bildung. Though he didn’t actually start doing stand-up until the early sixties, Woody Allen could almost be a character in the show, like Lenny Bruce; here he is, for example, performing at The Gaslight Café in 1962. Like Bruce and Maisel, Allen was of the generation of comedians that went beyond mere jokes and schtick and built a character out of a coherent personality, when comedians performed alongside folk artists and beat poets and took on that burden to expose yourself and tell the truth.
The irony of all this, of course, is that The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel is a show about Woody Allen’s milieu, but with no Woody Allen in it. The culture gives up its icons slowly and with great reluctance, locked into old critical habits and traditional patterns of appreciation; even me, as the last paragraph shows, with my refusal to not frame Sherman-Palladino’s show in relation to Allen. But Maisel is not shackled to the past, and neither is this show, and I think that’s why it works. If the similarities force the comparison, the differences emphasize the contrast: In her stunningly total confidence and omni-competence, there is perhaps no comedian that Maisel resembles less than Allen. There is some Joan Rivers in her performance—and Brosnahan clearly learned a lot about delivery from Rivers—but the core of the character is something very different than the neurotic, compulsive, inadequate nebbish that Allen rendered more effectively (and insistently) than any other artist. Annie Hall is built on that one joke about the eggs and the chicken, and the lesson that our inner worlds are mysterious and unknowable, that since we bumble through life without plan or purpose, we must get what we can get while we can. Indeed, Allen’s entire oeuvre is arguably built on the self-centered urgency of demanding that since there is no God—and life has no meaning—the only truth is that the heart wants what it wants. Who are we to question it?
The answer is: Maisel questions it. Maisel calls bullshit on her husband’s attraction to an unexceptional woman and sees it for what it is, an egotism too weak to be honest with itself. Joel turns out to be more decent, and more nuanced, than a typical Woody Allen character, but his boringly predictable fling with his secretary is exactly as boring and cliched as it appears. There is no deeper meaning, or underlying mystery to be unearthed. Joel is just what he seems to be, and what Abe Weissman identifies him as from the start: a weak man who needs a powerful woman to build him up, and who resents her for it. What’s difficult about the world is not that we can’t know it; what’s difficult is that we’d prefer not to. This is the truth that Allen rarely told.
The thing about Maisel is that life is hard but not mysterious; it’s painful, but not cruel or tragic. Life is filled with challenges and opportunities, and you work hard to make the best of it, with whatever materials you have to hand. If you suffer, you also love. It is what it is. And as it was in Gilmore Girls, patter is not a mask for the soul’s absence, but a load-bearing wall, the closed door to the break-room where you can rest from the incredible labor of being an adult by shooting the shit with your friends. And while Allen once declared that “comics are childlike” (and “I’m more at home with kids because I don’t trust adults”), Maisel’s hilarious disregard for its children helps clarify how central that work of adult self-making is to the show: she has always known what she wanted, and still does; she doesn’t hide behind the unknowability of the human heart, she explores it. She grew up, a long time ago.
A career suicide set takes down an icon,
Aaron
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