titsay
#extradirty
Janaina Medeiros
JBB: An Artblog!
One Nice Bug Per Day
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oozey mess
⁂
Kiana Khansmith
YOU ARE THE REASON
Claire Keane
Cosmic Funnies
shark vs the universe
sheepfilms
RMH
Origami Around
let's talk about Bridgerton tea, my ask is open
Cosimo Galluzzi
dirt enthusiast
will byers stan first human second
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@critiquemydickpic
Who was on trial for the pack rape of X?
Last week, three young men were found guilty of gang raping a 19-year-old German tourist in Auckland, New Zealand. The “exceptionally distressing” case has been covered extensively by the media, so I won’t rehash the details, but as I read the sentencing at 4am this morning between my baby’s night feeds (fun!), I came across an interesting detail I hadn’t seen mentioned in the press.
Read more here.
No, we don't need to 're-enchant' sex
“What you don’t need to do, as far as I can see, is say fucking dead chickens is wrong because sex has a sacred essence.”
I wrote about sexual re-enchantment, cultural death grip, the open secret that rape isn’t necessarily the worst thing that can happen to a woman, and of course, fucking chickens
How to make a 'Sh*t I Do' conversation go well
The kernel of truth to the backlash to Fair Play-style arguments is that the approach by liberal feminists can sometimes be so patronising and unproductive as to be obviously doomed to fail: see, for example, the real phenomenon of women hurling Shit I Do spreadsheets at their unsuspecting husbands, who are often presumed to be oblivious and entitled just by virtue of being men, and to be doing less mental work. They might be, but my sense is that if you count restraint as invisible work, both men and women’s emotional labour is going unacknowledged. At the very least, the conversation becomes a lot more interesting—and potentially more welcoming to men.
A few more thoughts about the invisible work of restraint, efforts you should and shouldn’t raise with your partner, and the best advice I ever received for making these conversations go well
Why relationships are so hard (reason #451)
There I am, (hypothetical me, of course,) standing at the foot of the bed before my husband’s damp towel, murderous rage swirling in my temple, fist clenched, jaw clenched, my tongue moving behind my teeth to form the “L” sound in “lazy prick” before I’ve so much as consciously processed the scene, this habit of a lifetime—to scold and insult—straining at the leash, and can you blame me, really, when this is all I had modelled by my cruel French stepmother after I was orphaned, when I’ve been called a lazy prick (and worse!) one thousand times, yet look at me, look at what I do: I summon patience, I take a deep breath, I retract my tongue and I let it go. My husband isn’t perfect and I love him. This time I’ll simply hang the towel. Some other time, when I’m calmer, I’ll remind him in an impossibly sweet voice that his habit irritates me. That it’s objectively not the most sensible thing to do with a damp towel. We’ll talk about it, broker some rapprochement. Forgiveness, compromise, communication. I am clearly behaving well. No sighing, no tit for tat, no insults. Not even a little bit of murder.
I wrote about invisible work, emotional labour discourse, holding in your nags, killing and not killing your significant other, and more
Does healing have to be cringe?
I guess my problem with stock language is that it’s anti-communication. The more you repeat a phrase, the more stale the meaning becomes. We know this about cliches, that they render the freshest, most profound insights totally ignorable: the best things in life really are free, but you piss away all meaning when you put it like that; you make a thin paste of words. And this is true of therapeutic cliches, too: “sitting with your feelings” is a good thing to do when your emotions are redlining, but why always say it that way? Why can’t you say “let anger course through your veins” or “sadness feels bad but it’s better not to bottle it”? Why make people strain to see that you’re saying something useful?
A conversation about therapy culture.
You probably can't spot a sexual groomer
Real crowdpleaser topic on my newsletter today: why child molesters are so hard to detect and some three-quarters baked thoughts on what to do about it
Does sleeping with lots of men leave you spiritually ran through?
This is a strange way to think about the effects of sex on the body, but it’s an insane way to think about the effects of sex on the spirit, even really bad sex. The human spirit, like the vagina, has a strong bouncing-back quality. This is one of the famous things about it. Armed with a sense of meaning, the human spirit can withstand the Holocaust. It can withstand rape—multiple rapes, gang rapes, anal rapes, rapes that take place when you’re a child. It can withstand every single ordeal a one-night stand can throw at you save fatal violence. It can certainly withstand getting a bit glutted on consensual 69s.
Is there a secular and wholly apolitical reason that body count matters? Is being ‘spiritually ran through’ a thing? I got to the bottom of things in my latest essay for my newsletter
I think this is my favourite TV show
I wrote about a really horrible boss and some very good TV
Will I hurt my baby?
You’re screaming, really screaming. Uvula vibrating and cheeks burning red. You writhe in my arms, inconsolable. The visions start rushing. Babies screaming, parents snapping. Babies screaming, parents snapping. Limbs snapping. Don’t snap, don’t snap, don’t snap. But I’m so brittle.
My brutal first year of motherhood, two years on.
Why I'm going hundies for Matariki this year
Saturnalia, Sol Invictus, Christmas, Matariki—lighting fires, feasting and gathering— decorating with the foliage of evergreen trees—singing, revelling and swapping gifts—looking ahead to the spring harvest: they’re different traditions, but they’re found all across the world, and they point in the same direction: to the universal human yearning, in the dead of winter, to huddle with other people and celebrate light, food and life. In other words, I found out to my delight that Matariki is in my bones.
I wrote about why I'm ~getting amongst it~ this weekend here.
Short reviews of every book I've finished so far this year
Reviewing the complete list of books I’ve read this year feels a bit like taking a photo of my undie drawer and putting it on the internet. Not very sophisticated. Not enough pairs. God, what’s that crap in the corner? Still, I love reading books and chatting about them but hardly anyone in my personal life reads the same books I do (sad face), so here we are.
Read it here!
Send me a goddamn email
On a bad day you might waste 21 minutes of your allegedly wild and precious life trudging through online interfaces in pursuit of an image of your daughter. You could have driven down the road and clapped eyes on her actual, snot-nosed face, then driven all the way home again, feeling two-fifths as fucked off as you are now.
I wrote about an experience that feels exactly like being slowly drained of all life by a cluster of parasites (seeing a portal notification).
Confused about class? This will help
As a kid growing up in West Auckland in the 1990s, I never encountered left-wing reverence for the working class, so it made no sense to fake a lower station. If you were going to tell fisherman’s tales about your dad back then, you’d try to make him sound richer. Twenty-five years later, working in digital media offices in the US, Berlin and Auckland, aglow with MacBook Airs, I noticed something strange. People were falling over themselves to stress not only that they understood the working class, but that they were part of it—including straightforwardly bourgeois people. Trust-fund babies, private school kids, people with cut-glass accents: all would speak with straight faces about their “working-class” backgrounds.
I wrote about how everyone on the internet claims to be working class now, why almost everyone is wrong, and Dan Evans' very good book, A Nation of Shopkeepers.
If you take anything online seriously, the joke's on you
It’s tempting to frame this as an old/young or Millennial/Gen Z divide, and that’s part of it, but it’s really a question of temperament: Can you tell when someone’s trying to get a rise out of you? Can you tolerate or even enjoy the sloppified internet, or does it make you lose your mind? Does the breakdown of truth and meaning have you rocking in a corner or hollering out the sunroof? Who do you think needs to get a grip: shitposters and engagement farmers, or the people who take them seriously?
I wrote about the new temperamental divide splitting the (increasingly unusable) internet, over on my other blog xx
Porn, fist-fights and ASMR: What's English class like at a low-income high school?
‘I don’t wanna get too graphic; it’s like vigorous face-fucking. He’s showing everyone’
Apropos of all the chatter about why young people, and young men in particular, don't read for pleasure anymore, I interviewed seven South Aucklanders about their (non) reading habits.
Babies smoking durries (and other drugs for children, 1750-1980)
Do you ever read a bunch of seemingly disparate books then notice they’re all eerily converged on the same theme? Like your subconscious is sniffing out a message? At the moment, mine seems to be a heat-seeker for historical accounts of extremely lax parenting—especially when it comes to the drugs parents were willing to ply their kids with.
I looked at this theme as it crops up in three books I've just finished reading (Old New Zealand: A Tale of the Good Old Times by a Pakeha Maori, the bone people, Dream Babies: Child Care from Locke to Spock) for my subscribers over on Substack.
I would rather die than ask you to like and subscribe
I started this Substack after I was laid off from my editing job at an online magazine, and I did so knowing I was constitutionally ill-suited to the marketing side. I really mean that: I mulled for weeks whether I wanted to join the ~creator economy~, and eventually took the leap after writing myself a list of fixed commitments, including “Don’t be lame or do lame shit”. I see now that I was trying to articulate to myself the Chapman creed. Laying engagement bait all day long on Notes? Calling my readership “guys”? Telling subscribers I love them? I just don’t do things like that.
I have written about Askers and Guessers, Pumpers and Chapmans, boasting, being a show pony, the ~creator economy~, subterranean personal dynamics, tonal shifts, sighs and dropped eye contact, money, sex and status over at Madeleine Holden the newsletter. I'd love it if you'd read it and even [swallowing] share it—all good if not though!