(Some of) The Best of The Toast, According to Autostraddle

Today The Toast has closed its doors, but these perfect pieces will live in our hearts forever. We love you, Mallory and Nicole, you beautiful fucking geniuses. Thank you for everything.

If Cate Blanchet Were Your Girlfriend

“If Cate Blanchett were your girlfriend, she would try to resolve every single fight by doing the same funny high-pitched voice. You would end up using the same technique yourself at work, but after your boss said, “What the hell, are you a child?” you would realize that some things work only for Cate Blanchett.”

Everything What’s Wrong Of Possums: It’s All Of Them

“MY FULL ENTIRETY OF A REACTION TO YOU CAN BE SUMMED UP THUSLY AND FOLLOWING: SHAVEN’T, NOT AS IN SHAVE-ENT BUT RHYMES-WITH-HAVEN’T. SHAVEN’T. I SHAVEN’T YOU. SHAVEN’T. YOUR WHOLE ENDEALMENT, I DON’T PRIZE.”

My Real-Time Response To Learning What The Rock Eats Every Day

“you ever eat just like a piece of fruit my lad?? it’s good as hell, it’s what happens to flowers if you leave ’em alone for long enough, don’t let me tell you what to do though, you clearly have your house in order, just a suggestion”

Two Monks

MONK #1: how tall are most women
MONK #2: tower sized but normal heads
MONK #1: cool thank you
MONK #2: here to help
MONK #1: ooh while i have you though
most dogs look –
MONK #2: emotionally destroyed
MONK #1: got it, ty

On Motherlessness

“It never really hurts, except when you allow yourself to imagine: what if things had turned out differently? How would it have been if she’d lived, if she’d been lucky? You would have had a mother, which is to say that you’d be a different person entirely. You would be someone who could believe in the notion of luck as something within your reach; of yourself as a person who might be lucky, or blessed, or even just normal.”

Watching Awful Gay Movies With Autostraddle: Lost and Delirious

Mallory: Who was your Tori? How much do you still irrationally resent her?

Rachel: Kill, fuck, marry: Paulie, Tory, and Mouse. I feel like by virtue of having a Paulie, that makes me my Tori.

Riese: Rachel is her own Tori.

Laneia: If I have a Tori, I don’t resent her.

Rachel: And/or every girl in college ever.

How to Spot a Witch

“Any woman who has ever owned the Cucumber Melon body spray from Bath & Body Works, even if it was only a Christmas gift when she was thirteen and she hardly ever used it, is a witch.”

Cartoon Characters Who Were Significant In The Development Of My Queer Identity And Current Inspirations For My Weightlifting Routine

The fox version of Robin Hood, Robin Hood

Influence on queer identity: Roguishness
Weightlifting inspiration: Endurance, cardio

Wildly Inappropriate Internal Responses I Have Had To Perfectly Innocuous Statements

[My cat looks at me]

i dont love you at all

Letter to My Mother After Charleston

“Remember when they were beating Rodney King? You yelled at me in the morning from the living room while I was trying to get ready for school. Come out here you said. They’re beating this man on television. Hurry up. But I didn’t want to hurry up. I was a teenager. You can’t hurry when your mom says hurry when you’re a teenager. You have to take your time. You have to act like everything she says is the stupidest, most unnecessary and most annoying thing in the history of people. You have to believe she’s exaggerating, mom. There’s no way they’re beating a man on television.”

A Meat Processing Professional Reviews Snowpiercer

“I am also pleased by the jelly-like appearance of the blocks – while I deal with the more traditional mammalian gelatin in my professional life, the gelling agent has also been successfully extracted from insect sources. I truly wish, dear reader, that I could leave it there, and congratulate Mr. Bong on his choice.”

Transmisogyny And Disc Golfing Round Table: A Chat With Mey Rude, Frances Lee, Gabby Bellot, and Brook Shelley

MALLORY: I’m trying to qualify my statements because these are not, like, hard and fast rules, and I realize I have only an imperfect understanding of these dynamics.

MEY: Yeah, there’s sometimes the idea that trans men were “socialized as women” and trans women were “socialized as men” which is an idea with so, so many problems

MALLORY: as if socialization stops when you transition!

BROOK: and there are some trans men I’ve known who are cool with that, and the sex and community they get from those attitudes. And some who are like “Whoa, that’s disgusting. If you won’t date a cis guy, you can’t date me.”

The Fanciest Genderqueer You’ll Ever Meet

“But “fancy” is more than just aesthetics: it’s elaborate. Why can’t they pick one or the other? Midwest Power Gay was asking. Why do they have to configure their gender in such ornate ways, with spectrums and genderbread people and brightly colored hair? Why do they need pronouns that aren’t grammatically correct, or have unexpected “z”s? In short: why can’t they just be like everyone else?”

The Entire Collection of Dad Magazine

DADMAG31

Ayn Rand’s Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone

“Malfoy bought the whole team brand-new Nimbus Cleansweeps!” Ron said, like a poor person. “That’s not fair!”

“Everything that is possible is fair,” Harry reminded him gently. “If he is able to purchase better equipment, that is his right as an individual. How is Draco’s superior purchasing ability qualitatively different from my superior Snitch-catching ability?”

“I guess it isn’t,” Ron said crossly.

Harry laughed, cool and remote, like if a mountain were to laugh. “Someday you’ll understand, Ron.”

Reasons Ryan Atwood From The O.C. Was a Lesbian

7. Always wearing thin leather necklaces; in love with a straight girl

In Celebration of Old School LiveJournal

“After I sent out my messy TinyLetter, readers and friends responded with emails and texts. I stood in my dark driveway and read them on my phone, feeling the same small lift that a bold 1 comment link gave me in the LiveJournal days, a feeling so familiar and specific that it swayed nostalgic, like listening to a mix tape I’d made as a teenager.”

The L Word, Fixed

“Also, no one dates Lisa.”

Suffragettes Who Sucked: White Supremacy and Women’s Rights

Wait, What: “Mr. Douglass talks about the wrongs of the Negro; but with all the outrages that he to-day suffers, he would not exchange his sex and take the place of Elizabeth Cady Stanton.”

Gleeful Mobs Of Women Murdering Men In Western Art History

“They’ve already ripped off the entire lower half of Pentheus’ body and they are not calling it a day. Gotta rip up the top half too. The official word for “Dionysus-crazed women ripping men and animals limb from limb,” by the way, is sparagmos. The ancient Greeks had a NAME for what happened when women tore men to pieces! Truly it was called the Golden Age of Civilization for a reason.”

If Kristen Stewart Were Your Girlfriend

4. If Kristen Stewart were your girlfriend, you would be the only person in the world who knew how often she really smiled.

Share your fave Toast pieces in the comments!

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50 Comments

  2. Did you see that Hillary Clinton wrote a goodbye article though? I’m now going to imagine that HRC is a secret commenter on all my favourite websites.

    • It’s you, isn’t it?
      It’s cool Ms. Clinton, you’ll always have a place at Hogw..I mean autostraddle.

  3. “That Kristen Stewart Video, Though”, hands down. My best friend and I still quote that to each other daily.

  5. I am heartbroken over the closure of the Toast because it was one of my favourite internet spaces, along with Autostraddle.

    I didn’t have the heart to comment on this in their HRC piece, because I respect the fact that she means a lot to a lot of the readers over there, but my least favourite thing about the Toast was the lack of space for legitimate critique of Hillary Clinton in the comments section.

    There was a lot of talk about the evils of Bernie Bros but mostly silence on any kind of criticism of Clinton coming from a feminist, antiracist, or leftist perspective. It really felt like if you weren’t a fan of HRC you didn’t belong there and that always made me really sad.

    • I think you make a good point, and there are many valid criticisms of Clinton which I believe could have been discussed with a lot of subtlety and compassion for opposing views among the readership. I guess I also feel like the toast was a safe space to just BE EXCITED about the fact that we might have a woman president after 240 years of dudes, without having to temper that excitement with apologies.

      I was really impressed with how the “controversy” over that week of ALL THE GOD PIECES was handled among the editors and commentariat, and I hope that if they do sporadic work leading up to the election, there might be room for that critique. I think toasties recognize that people contain multitudes, and that you can be skeptical about Clinton’s intentions without being a misogynist asshole. (That said, she’s by far the most qualified candidate, and I will be thrilled to vote for her against Trump.)

      • I really don’t think there was room for that critique, to be quite honest. I felt perfectly comfortable voicing discomfort with Obama’s drones and deportations and various policies of his that I didn’t agree with, without fear of inspiring knee-jerk defensiveness. When it came to Clinton however, it felt like walking on eggshells, and this was in contrast to virtually every other issue I ever commented on during the Toast’s tenure, including the religion stuff. For the most part, I chose not to comment because I was afraid of being resented by the commenters of one of my favourite sites. I have never felt this way at Autostraddle.

        It seems that to be a safe space for Clinton supporters, The Toast marginalized everyone else, including a lot of feminists and anti-racists who aren’t keen on a centre right neoliberal Democratic agenda. I remember watching people, some Sanders supporters, some not, trying to have nuanced conversations about why they didn’t support Clinton. Others often dismissed them while refusing to engage with their points. To be clear, I am not referring to Nicole Cliffe or any of the moderators, who are the loveliest.

        • I am so sorry that happened to you- tbh I migrated from the toast’s comments to autostraddle’s a year ago (intense debate always bugged out on me anyway) so I haven’t followed the discourse too closely for the last few months. You are totally right in that Autostraddle does a better job at creating safe spaces for all voices, especially those outside the “dominant” narrative of white feminism, and that’s one of the reasons I gravitated away from the Toast. I think the fundamental aesthetic of the Toast is apolitical (except #banmen obviously) but it’s pretty impossible not to discuss the election in link roundups, etc., and the toast does skew pretty heavily privileged white ladies in readership, if not authorship.

          (FWIW, i look forward to hearing your analysis of Clinton over here on Autostraddle. )

          • Thanks so much for this reply, it makes me feel a lot better. I do think there was an effort at openness among the Toast readership when it came to checking privilege re: class, race, and disability but a line was drawn at Clinton. People were generally opposed to American foreign policy in Iraq/Iran/Syria/Afghanistan, for example, but critiques of Clinton’s implication in hawkish policy weren’t welcome. I am guessing that there are Clinton supporters at Autostraddle (especially now that it’s her vs. Trump) but I have higher hopes for the discourse here.

          • There’s plenty of ways to legitimately critique Clinton, but if anyone isn’t voting for her or is voting for Trump that shuts down any meaningful conversation, IMO.

        • As a now-ex-Toastie who is also not a Hillary supporter (nor was I a Bernie supporter; I hate both major parties), I feel you on this.

    • Yes – that is the minute that I was like well, The Toast reached maximum White Feminist in this post and this is one of the few things that could make me feel less sad that it is gone today.

      • I don’t doubt that a lot of Autostraddle readers support her, especially at this point in her fight against Trump, but I doubt that many people here would get away with implying that anyone who isn’t excited about her is a misogynist Bernie Bro…

  7. As someone who recently escaped from four years of constant passive-aggressive event planning via email, text, and Facebook with boring straight women, the entirety of the Hey Ladies series gives my life purpose. That is all. RIP The Toast.

  8. I’m going to miss The a Toast so, so much.

    I loved Femslash Friday – especially the Bend it like Beckham one. I haven’t seen the movie but something about that piece really moved me. As did Diary of a Baby Queer.

    And all the silly pop culture stuff. The discussion of Jupiter Rising (I’m sure I have the name wrong but I don’t have time to look it up) got me to see that delightful and ridiculous space opera.

    The one about how to tell if a contestant is about to get chopped on Chopped.

    How to tell if you’re in a ____ novel.

  11. OH FOR FUCKING- I was ready for a slew of Mallory Ortberg article and you drop the damn Motherless one on me!? This was already a heavy day, I was not prepared

    • for clarity, I’m very frustrated with my own feels, not that As made me have them right now

  13. Rereading some of these, I’ve fallen down a Toast wormhole and I never want to leave. Someone please reassure me that their archives are gonna stay up for a while, at the very least!?

    • archives are up in perpetuity, just disabled comments to prevent spam! If you want to see the periodic new pieces, you can follow their RSS feed or Twitter.

      • OH THANK GOD. I though this was gonna be another Television Without Pity scenario, and that would break my heart.

  14. As a father of daughters and I’d love to help my wife but I’m trapped under something.

    • As someone who could rant for hours about why I’ll never remove my pubic hair again (I did it once twenty years ago), I found this hilarious!

  18. Two monks is one of the funniest things to ever grace the internet. I didn’t become as dedicated to the toast as much as I would have liked, but damn, two monks was incredible–makes me lol time after time.

  20. I shaven’t accept this whole endealment! So long, farewell, to my second most favorite website in the world. xoxoxo

  21. fake Cate Blanchette is probably my soulmate.

    Also, I feel like because I saw Lost&Delirious for the first time at 14 instead of much later, I was impressionable and amazed a movie about two girls actually existed in my world and did not hate it the way everyone who saw it at a more reasonable age seems to. It’s far more cringey as an adult though.

    • Same about Lost & Delirious. I saw it when it came out, I was 17, and it’s the first movie I remember seeing about queer girls. And as a teenager, the part of me that longed to be Overdramatic about everything was much stronger…

  24. Mallory’s re-telling of The 6 Swans in her “children’s stories made horrific” is one of the most beautiful pieces of writing I have ever had the pleasure of stumbling across. It’s one of those pieces of writing that, rather than be intimidating and out of reach, inspires one to pick up a pen and attempt to reach similarly lofty peaks of prosery, even though the risk of failure and falling to one’s death is more certain. Ugh, Mallory. Just, UGH.

  25. Also the one about Emily Gilmore being a late in life lesbian

    Also also the one about finding out Emma Watson was in the Panama Papers

  27. I love, love most of the Toast. Sometimes, the articles are slightly too artsy and alternative for my taste, but the awesome stuff really outweights and outshines the other parts.

    Some of my favourites:
    – Femslash friday(http://the-toast.net/series/femslash-friday/), especially the The Big Bang Theory one (http://the-toast.net/2015/09/25/femslash-friday-the-big-bang-theory/), BECAUSE EVERYTHING THERE IS SOO TRUE (esp re: Kaley Cuoco).
    – If X were your Y (http://the-toast.net/series/if-x-were-your-y/), especially “If Blake Lively Were Your Girlfriend” (http://the-toast.net/2015/08/03/blake-lively-girlfriend/) or “If Natalie Dormer Were Your Girlfriend” (http://the-toast.net/2015/04/07/natalie-dormer-girlfriend/) or “If Barack Obama were your dad” (http://the-toast.net/2016/06/27/if-barack-obama-were-your-dad/).

    I’m gonna miss the Toast and I’m gonna pour one out for them. Thanks for everything!

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