#meghan daum

[dhaaruni]

I wonder if my real problem with young feminists—with young activists in general—is that many of them are insufficiently awed by toughness. They didn’t boast about it as children. They don’t value it inordinately as adults. They refuse to be shamed by vulnerability. In fact, in a brilliant move of jujitsu, many have figured out how to use their thin skin as their most powerful weapon. My particular brand of toughness, it turns out, no longer holds much currency.

I’m reading Meghan Daum’s The Problem With Everything and well, I absolutely agree with this

[janersm]

“I’m tempted to say that my grandmother damaged my mother on an almost cellular level. But then again maybe some of my mother’s damage was her own. She freely admitted that from the age of 14 until she left her parents’ house after college, she stopped speaking almost entirely when she was at home. In the outside world, she won piano competitions and twirled the baton, but inside the house she offered nothing more than an occasional mumble. I think the idea was that her mother was so unwilling to listen to her that she was no longer going to waste her breath.”

— Meghan Daum

[tyin-cherry-knots]

16 y/o me was really going around saying “oh yeah I can’t go out with him because it makes me feel like I’ve ‘betrayed a basic premise of my existence’ but no I’m still 100% straight.”

like what was I on?

[pithia]

Our culture is so obsessed with the idea that you're going to go through a crisis or some difficult event and come out the other side a changed or improved person, and I just think that if you're honest, that often does not happen, and in fact, it shouldn't happen.

Meghan Daum

[the-final-sentence]

And maybe that is what is unspeakable in our culture - admitting to mere fallibility, humanity.

Roxane Gay, from “Discomfort Zone (The Unspeakable by Meghan Daum)”

[campgender]

from Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again (2021) by Katherine Angel

But the uses to which critics such as Roiphe and Kipnis put their misgivings about campus consent culture are telling. They acknowledge the injustices and injuries that women encounter, but suggest that the solution to these lie in an idealized figure: the strong woman who can overcome it all – who can shrug off injuries and be tougher; be, frankly, less of a baby. Their critiques express perfectly, in other words, a confidence feminism.

For these critics, ‘grown’ women know how to move on from the inevitable ups and downs of sex, instead of crying assault. The trope of ‘bad sex’ does important work in these conversations. Young women are encouraged, Kipnis argues, to deploy bureaucratic measures ‘to remedy sexual ambivalences or awkward sexual experiences’. For her and her peers, sex, ‘even when it was bad (as it often was)’ was ‘still educational’. Journalist Bari Weiss expressed a similar stance in her response to allegations against comedian Aziz Ansari in 2018. The allegations, published in an account on babe.net, provoked a furore (not least because the apparently rushed publication of the story seems to have fallen short of standard journalistic methods, such as giving Ansari the right to reply). ‘Grace’ (a pseudonym) told of feeling pressured into sex, and of trying to give signals – verbal and non-verbal – of not being keen, which she alleges Ansari repeatedly failed to respect. For many, her story resonated as an example of an entitled and bullish man, intent on acquiring sex, with little interest in the woman’s pleasure (or even perhaps his own?). For others, Grace was expecting Ansari to mind-read, and had failed to make clear either her own desires or her lack of enjoyment: she had failed to say yes enthusiastically, and failed clearly to say no. There is, Weiss wrote, ‘a useful term for what this woman experienced on her night with Mr. Ansari. It’s called “bad sex”. It sucks.’

Weiss acknowledged that women are socialized to ‘put men’s desires before their own’. But the solution to this problem is not, she claimed, to resent men ‘for failing to understand their “nonverbal cues”. It is for women to be more verbal. It’s to say, “This is what turns me on”. It’s to say “I don’t want to do that.”’ Weiss admonished ‘Grace’ in finger-wagging terms: ‘If he pressures you to do something you don’t want to do, use a four-letter word, stand up on your two legs and walk out his door.’ Similarly, Kipnis, on Jessa Crispin’s Public Intellectual podcast, laments the fact that students ‘can’t get over’ thirty seconds or fifteen minutes of bad sex. And Meghan Daum, in the Guardian, wrote about a gap between many women’s public support of #MeToo and their private conversations. ‘“Grow up, this is “real life”, I hear these same feminists say.’ There are strong intimations here of weak, wounded children versus confident grown women, and it’s clear who we’re supposed to want to be.

[champagnemoon]

It’s so wild that this was written in the 90s and not 2023

[yes-svetlana-world]

For example, in “Armie Hammer Breaks His Silence,” the journalist James Kirchick revisits the case of an actor whose career was destroyed when he faced accusations of extreme sexual misconduct. Although Kirchick’s reporting doesn’t resolve anything definitively, it includes significant facts that readers of the original coverage ought to know as updates, as they give very different impressions of what might have happened. As yet, however, publishers of bygone coverage have not updated their articles. (Kirchick has expounded on his reporting process for Meghan Daum and The Fifth Column.)

[cozycoffeereads]

Read about my book haul on my blog here!

The books:

1. The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches by Sangu Mandanna

2. Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed: Sixteen Writers on The Decision Not To Have Kids by Meghan Daum

3. Childhood Disrupted: How Your Biography Becomes Your Biology, and How You Can Heal by Donna Jackson Nakazawa

4. Unwinding Anxiety by Judson Brewer, MD, PhD

5. Tripping Arcadia by Kit Mayquist

Have you read any of these? Tell me what you think!

[noneofthisisreal]

artists’ proper role, not even now but especially now, is to be un-political, trans-political, to remind us of everything in our experience that can’t be captured by the categories of the moment. Three weeks after sending in the piece, I came across a perfect example of what I was talking about. It was an essay by Meghan Daum, called “The Broken-In World,” about life after divorce, life in middle age, life in the wake of life’s inevitable fuck-ups and regrets. “[A]s your story joins the chorus of stories being told and listened to in as many versions as there are broken people to tell and hear them,” she writes, “you slide into a new kind of world.…It’s a world built on scar tissue, which turns out to be a surprisingly solid foundation. And at some point, without quite realizing it, your life goes from broken to broken in.”

Thirteen Ways Of Looking At Art - Salmagundi Magazine

[gtunesmiff]

I am convinced that excellence comes not from overcoming limitations but from embracing them.

~ Meghan Daum || “I Am Not A Foodie,”

[dhaaruni]

It's really telling that women's toxic behavior is mostly them SAYING mean things (or even thinking mean thoughts and "being manipulative") while men's toxic behavior is them DOING mean things (Brett Kavanaugh being an attempted rapist is one example used in this book).

That aside from the very relevant point that despite higher rates, intimate partner violence among lesbian couples a tiny percentage of all intimate partner violence and the overwhelming majority of intimate partner violence is still enacted by men against women.

(From Meghan Daum's The Problem With Everything)

[lesbiancosimaniehaus]

I don’t have a particular opinion on Dianna’s exhusband (except that I think he wrote the m&s song woman which is a high point in a record I did not care for) but him becoming a content creator in the heterodox public intellectual space is really funny because… I’ve heard him on a couple of podcasts and it’s not like he says much of anything.

I think that the field is becoming so… idk. Filled w contrarians who don’t have a particular stance on anything, as long as it’s against everything. Or else they verge on the super-abstract nonsense. At this point the only ones who don’t give me a headache are the fifth column guys mostly bc they crack jokes about weirdos (and idk what they’re talking about half the time), or John McWhorter. And Meghan Daum on her solo podcast.

[fivedollarradio]

I am probably the last person on the planet who can say this now, but I finally saw the Barbie movie... and I didn't like it. I mean, I didn't hate it. It was entertaining, but it wasn't this big, life-changing feminist moment that a lot of women made it to be. (Plus my dork brain got a little hung up on the whole alternate universe without any conventional ties to the kind of science fiction I knew as a kid who liked time travel and many worlds theory, at least the pop culture version of it, not the quantum mechanics one -- I'm not quite Sheldon Cooper.)

I haven't seen much negative criticism of the movie that hasn't come from a place of anti-feminism. Meghan Daum did this whole thing on her podcast where she rewrote America Ferrera's speech from the point-of-view of a man to "prove" that it's more universal and equally applicable to men, except that it's not, but I didn't think it was particularly enlightening either. (Meghan used to be a fairly benign person essayist and now she's based or something.) I don't know. Maybe I'm just being a gender trader.

[swiss-life-select-slovensko]

"Ženy 👩 sú obeťami svojho pohlavia. Možno máme rovnaké práva ako muži, ale príroda nám bráni v tom, aby sme ich využívali rovnakým spôsobom. Svoju úlohu tu zohráva biologický determinizmus, od ktorého sa nevieme odtrhnúť. Môžeme a musíme zmeniť podmienky, ktoré stále hádžu ženám polená pod nohy v súvislosti s deťmi 👩‍👧‍👦," hovorí v rozhovore o sebarealizácii a sebauvedomení Meghan Daum. Spisovateľka, ktorá ide často proti prúdu patrí medzi najpopulárnejších autorov v Spojených štátoch. Prečítajte si odvážny rozhovor 👉