Maureen. Maureen. Maureen. Google your dosage, man.
Disturbingly handsome couple Jane Marie and Julian on MARRIAGE, which I found really great and open and interesting:
Did you have any fears about getting married?
Julian: No, not really. Deep down in my heart, I always knew I was gonna be a father and get married. I didn’t know it would happen so much on my terms. Like, I thought, “Well, I’m definitely gonna be a dad, but it’s probably not gonna be up to me when it happens and I’ll just have to show up for whatever the situation is.” So the fact that we planned getting married and planned getting pregnant was completely antithetical to everything that I thought. But the difference was before I quit drinking and after I quit drinking. Also my retirement plan when I was drinking was to die early, so that changed too.
Jane: I think I was afraid of getting married. Not to you, but in general, because I had a failed marriage. I wasn’t super confident, but it wasn’t you-specific.
Julian: I remember thinking, “I am not gonna treat this thing like it’s all about me feeling comfortable every day; that’s not what marriage is.”
Jane: I think the same thing: Our marriage is separate from you and me. It’s its own third thing, like the Holy Ghost.
Julian: Exactly. It’s bigger than both of us.
The Wikipedia entry for “casting couch” is depressing.
Tits and Sass on the idea of advocates for the rights of sex workers being “the pimp lobby”:
You might recognize this sentiment: the sex workers’ rights movement is funded by “the industry.” We are “the pimp lobby,” whether we’ve ever been in any sort of management role ourselves or not, let alone whether we’ve abused or exploited other workers. You might think it’s pretty easy to laugh at that sort of thing, but if you’ve ever spent any time going through the e-mails that sex workers’ rights organizations receive, you’ll hear a lot of this, even from people and organizations who are sympathetic. They’ll make assumptions about “staff”—we want to meet your staff”—or they want to meet in “your office.” There are people who try to chat you up about nonprofit careers at events, thinking you have jobs to offer them. And so on. It would be funny if it weren’t so frustrating, and if people with nasty motives didn’t use these assumptions against us.
It’s human to overestimate the resources of others and to underestimate one’s own. But let’s have some real talk.
tl;dr THERE’S A FREE EXPENSIVE CAT IN THE MONTREAL AIRPORT:
Ta-Nehisi Coates on “the radical practicality of reparations,” as a response to David Frum:
A similar moment finds us now. Even if one feels that slavery was too far into the deep past (and I do not, because I view this as a continuum) the immediate past is with us. Identifying the victims of racist housing policy in this country is not hard. Again, we have the maps. We have census. We could set up a claims system for black veterans who were frustrated in their attempt to use the G.I. Bill. We could then decide what remedy we might offer these people and their communities. And there is nothing “impractical” about this.
