Recommended Reading…
- Amanda Marcotte has some thoughtful things to say today about female friendship (bouncing off Rebecca Traister’s Salon article about same, which is well worth reading in itself). Here’s Traister:
“All it takes is the slightest tickle of recognition, the tiniest tremor in our girlfriend nervous systems, and suddenly all the agony and fury and sadness flood back. It often seems that no one – neither man nor beast nor mother-in-law – can hurt us with the same intensity as our best friends. Whether it happens fast, in a blowout battle, or insidiously, with sniping comments about how our clothes look tight, or imperceptibly, as life drives space between us, the ends of our girl friendships have the power to make us feel more alone, guilty and bereft than even the ends of our greatest romances.”
And Marcotte:
“What I find interesting about these stories of female competition to be the prettiest, sexiest, most willing to bow and scrape before our master, etc. is that the male character that functions as the judge is almost never a fleshed-out character, probably because if you flesh him out too much he ceases to be the stand-in for society, and instead is a falliable man. The most extreme example of this is the judge of who’s the fairest of them all in “Snow White”–not even a flesh-and-blood man for this tale of female competition, but just a two-dimensional mirror.”
- The republicans are not popular. The republicans are really, really not popular. You’d think the Democrats would be able to make that work for them, if only they had spines. Go, Howard.
