HELLO and welcome to the 147th installment of Things I Read That I Love, wherein I share with you some of the longer-form journalism/essays I’ve read recently so that you can read them too and we can all know more about Paula Deen! This “column” is less feminist/queer focused than the rest of the site because when something is feminist/queer focused, I put it on the rest of the site. Here is where the other things are.
The title of this feature is inspired by the title of Emily Gould’s tumblr, Things I Ate That I Love.
The Dumbest Person In Your Building Is Passing Out Keys To Your Front Door (September 2014), by Jessica Pressier for New York Magazine – Airbnb is really screwing up the Bay Area because nobody is vacating apartments anymore, they’re just renting them out on Air BnB and moving somewhere new, so I’m not surprised there’s been a backlash in New York. Also the guy who runs it seems kinda douchey? I’ve probably stayed at like 6-7 air bnbs and never once has it been a place where the owner lived, so it’s interesting to me that he claims that’s most of their properties.
Scout’s Honor (June 2014), by Rosecrans Baldwin for The Oxford American – This is a nice long piece about the Boy Scout Jamboree in the wake of the gay scouting controversy and he really digs in and talks about scouts as outsider dorks, patch-trading, the history of scouting, religion, and how people on the ground actually feel about gay scouts.
The Leftovers (September 2014), by Taffy Brodesser-Akner for medium – So now I’ve read two articles about the Paula Deen Cruise. Also, apparently it wasn’t just the racism that got her fired. “Sure, Paula Deen’s mainstream career is over. But now she has her very own digital network—uncensored, y’all—and she’s making millions in a booming new sector: the martyrdom industrial complex.”
The Internet Has a Problem(atic) (September 2014), by Johannah King-Slutzky for The Awl – I’ve really come to hate this word! I enjoyed reading about the history of it.
Meet the College Women Who Are Starting A Revolution Against Campus Sexual Assault (September 2014), by Vanessa Grigoriadis for New York Magazine – This week’s cover story put Emma Sulkowicz, the Columbia student who’s carrying a mattress around until Columbia expels her rapist, on the front page, and spoke to a wide breadth of other activists. Good stuff, I think.
Zimmerman Family Values (October 2014), by Amanda Robb for GQ – Firstly, I didn’t know George Zimmerman’s brother is gay. Secondly, I feel like maybe a solution to this family’s fear of persecution would be for GEORGE ZIMMERMAN TO SPEND THE REST OF HIS LIFE IN PRISON. Just an idea.
The Dying Russians (September 2014), by Masha Gessen for The New York Review of Books – “Sometime in 1993, after several trips to Russia, I noticed something bizarre and disturbing: people kept dying. I was used to losing friends to AIDS in the United States, but this was different. People in Russia were dying suddenly and violently, and their own friends and colleagues did not find these deaths shocking.”
How I Rebuilt Tinder And Discovered The Shameful Secret Of Attraction (September 2014), by Anne Helen Peterson for BuzzFeed – So this is what you all think about when you think about dating each other, and how you make those choices.
That Zimmerman Family one was a weird read. I’m Canadian and while I followed George Zimmerman’s trial (and was infuriated by its verdict), I haven’t heard much else about him and definitely nothing about his strange clan. George and his siblings seem to have been adrift for the last decade and are clinging to the aftermath of “The Incident” as they call it. Maybe they want fame? I am appalled that his family firmly supports him but I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. He is probably (at least somewhat) a product of his environment. I love how his mom thinks it’s unfair how Trayvon Martin’s family has had donations and the Zimmerman family hasn’t. She just doesn’t get it. None of them do. I hope no one ever has to be on the receiving end of a situation when the Zimmerman family has a code black and comes out guns blazing.
Yeah like…they get to have a dead son and donations, you get to have a living (unimprisoned!) son and no donations…wanna trade?
I got really attached to the word ‘problematic’ around 2002 (in my early 20s) largely because it was a way of softening criticism for the sake of diplomacy when dealing with people who shut down when you say, call racism or white supremacy for what it is. It has the potential to describe those grey areas that aren’t intentionally/obviously fucked up but that give us unease on account of insidious implications.
The spike he describes around 2006 definitely put a damper on my usage of it, and yet it still doesn’t bother me as much as ‘call out’ or ‘ally’ and I would probably still use it if it hadn’t been done to death on tumblr.
I did not expect to cry but then I read the words: “When a pretty girl is raped, it’s a tragedy, and when a fat woman is raped, she should be grateful” all I could think about is a friend from childhood how very close that phrase is to what her rapist told her.
And then all I can think about is the attempted stranger rape that occurred a couple years later and how fucking wrong it is that a teenager, a damned kid, knew to document her injuries. How to get the details of what get happen in sequential detail, to not suggestions when asking about features of her attackers.
Those are not things that should be a part of being a woman, but shit they are.
That Paula Deen article was wickedly sassy but also really thoughtful towards the end. It’s now my second favorite cruise ship essay after the DFW masterpiece shared in this column a while back.