The Art of The Comment

Dear Millicent,
I have been thinking of your profile of Jezebel and its evolutions, and agree with the tensions you noted between taking things to task and supporting everybody. It is a problem when every viewpoint is humanized (though, isn’t that an accomplishment of empathy, or just a distracting use of pathos?), and echoed in pop [...]

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Judging Jezebel

Dear CF,
What a delicious problem you’ve brought to our picnic table. Of course feminism shouldn’t be divisive. It should be like being pro-human, or pro-kid. BUT. By the time I finished this post I realized I was defending divisiveness and having a problem, not with feminism, but with how it gets tacitly defined (or rather [...]

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Ladytalk: Slate’s XX Factor Can Suck It

Dear Millicent,
As I bet you know, Slate revealed XX Factor yesterday, its lady blog, with the tag line “What Women Really Think.”   The tag line irks me.  It reminds me of some scotch ad from the sixties, where a sultry woman has an eyebrow raised at a man in an ascot holding up his drink.  [...]

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Penvy Is A Bad Word, I Swear I Know

Dear Millicent,
In a surprising gesture of affection, my cat has decided to take a nap on my back while I type.  It is really a gesture for warmth, but I am interpreting it as affection, and that she thinks of me as a really big cat.  Queen cat.
Onwards! As the wise have said since the [...]

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Bildungsroman BigFun!

Dear Millicent,
I just finished reading Lessing’s The Golden Notebook, and the ending very much reminded me of an old Jezebel post from this summer about the quarter life crisis versus the return of Saturn.  You know, how everybody in their twenties tends to have a moment where their world breaks a bit, and it is [...]

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