Madison Metricula

By Laura Leslie

Raleigh, N.C. — Two of North Carolina's top ranking Republicans will appeal the decision of a judge that overturned the state's same-sex marriage ban, a spokeswoman said Thursday night.

Shelly Carver, a spokeswoman for Senate President Pro Tem Phil Berger, said he and House Speaker Thom Tillis plan to go through with an appeal even though legal experts say it is unlikely to succeed.

The court to which any North Carolina appeal would go would be the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, the same court that ruled Virginia’s same-sex marriage ban unconstitutional. That was the ruling that led to North Carolina’s ban being overturned as well.

In a statement on Tuesday, Berger pointed to the voters who approved the North Carolina definition of marriage as between one man and one woman. "This decision is an important step to ensure their voice is heard,” he said.

In order for lawmakers to win on appeal, University of North Carolina School of Law professor Maxine Eichner said, “The 4th Circuit would have to reverse its previous decision. There is nothing to suggest that it would plan to do that.”

Lawmakers could ask the Supreme Court for a discretionary review of the case and an emergency stay, but Eichner predicts the Supreme Court will deny both the stay and the review, based on its actions in other recent marriage cases.

"It seems very difficult to imagine that they would accept review after they rejected review of the 4th Circuit decision before,” she said.

“It is very difficult to imagine that this is not over right now. How long it takes to sign the papers, I don’t know, but this is over,” Eichner said.

Ebola has killed thousands of people in West Africa and seriously impacted the lives of hundreds of thousands more. Stateside, one man has died and two female nurses who cared for him have been infected. Politicians are calling for travel bans, the CDC is scrambling and stock prices have plummeted in anticipation of the tragic outbreak's far-reaching economic impact. But there's one thing Ebola hasn't threatened: crafting.

Etsy's prolific legions have risen to the occasion and preserved, via arts and crafts, the horror of the ebola pandemic of 2014. And—lucky for people with a sick sense of humor or no sense of decorum—the holiday season is approaching. Do with this information what you will.

Ebola virus earrings, $15.50

Their smallish size means they're suitable for almost all occasions when you're alone in your apartment. Their manageable price tag put them in the reach of even the most cash-poor of bauble enthusiasts. A surefire conversation starter.

Bonus: they're hypoallergenic.

Double bonus (10 fouls in one half): if you like the look of them, there are also ebola necklaces available, as well as alternate designs.

Fused Glass Ebola Dish Made to Order, $35

Eating food that has come into contact with surfaces contaminated with the ebola virus is inadvisable unless you're pretty sure you've got the immune system it takes to defeat a disease that kills 70 percent of the people it infects. Eating food off of a plate emblazoned with an "iconic" image of the virus certainly won't kill you, but it might kill the ambience of your meal. Nothing makes a craving for ribs vanish like meditating on a disease that causes agonizing hemorrhaging and and diarrhea.

2014 Ebola Epidemic Cutting Board, $31

On one hand, it's just an Ikea cutting board. On the other hand, it's an Ikea cutting board with images of "Ebola, Salmonella, Swine Flu, Bird Flu, Meningitis and many more!" hand etched onto it.

The seller recommends it as a wedding gift.

EbolaNado, raw virus disease of ebola, outsider horror art brut by Nightmare Tank, $22

Art confronts both the beauty and horror of being alive. Sometimes the horror is best represented via a bloody skull tornado. The tornado represents misinformation. The skulls represent death. The blood represents blood. Writes the artist, "I am greatly troubled by the current path that this infectious disease is taking."

I feel like I get it.

Ebola cross stitch microbe, $19.99

The item, described by the seller as for "doctors, epidemiologists, scientists, and cool people," is a 3-inch circumference hoop holding in place an ivory piece of fabric with the now-famous shepherd's crook virus stitched into it.

If your body's saying "let's go," but your heart is saying "too soon," this highly-rated seller also makes brain-eating amoeba cross stitch samplers, as well as one that instructs visitors to refrain from doing cocaine in your bathroom. Servicey.

Hola Ebola t-shirt

Get it? "Hola" and "Ebola" rhyme, and also Ebola is an unwelcome guest. So it's ironic.

Please do not wear this on an airplane. Please do not be that person.

Ebola Prayer Candle Pray to End Ebola Tea Light and Crystal Gemstones, $39.50

Rule number 1 of preventing people from dying: When medicine fails, always, always, always turn to the power of magic.

This beauty contains such powerful rocks as: bloodstone, carnelian, rose quartz, amethyst, quartz. According to the product's description, each serves an important purpose.

Bloodstone is good for blood ailments, including internal bleeding

Carnelian is good to ward of illness and in ancient times was believed to ward off the plague.

Rose Quartz is a great stone to radiate universal love and peace.

Amethyst is a wonderful stone for healing and protection.

Clear Quartz is a beautiful stone which will amplify these stones and our prayers.

The gemstone are sitting on a bed of stone granules concentrating and radiating the positive prayers.

If the pandemic isn't stopped in its tracks by that murderers row of chill vibes, then there really is no hope for the human race.

Rule 34—the old adage that if something exists, there is a porn version of that something—also applies loosely to Etsy products. Happy shopping.

Images via Etsy

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When Charles Vestal joined the hundreds of Texans who came out to support Wendy Davis’ filibuster last year, he didn’t know that the collection of anti-choice bills they were opposing would pass, would successfully shut down many of the clinics of the state, and would spark a fight that might ultimately end in the Supreme Court. He also didn’t imagine that the legislation would affect his life so personally.

In a piece at Medium, he explains how the 20-week ban in place in Texas, as well as eight other states, prevented him and his wife from saving their child from needless suffering after they found out they’d inevitably have an early term birth. 

The next day, still at the hospital, before we had been able to even begin to come to grips with such a final decision, we talk to another specialist, and we’re told they can’t do it. The bill had passed, and well, it’s just against the law. Sort of. Technically, it’s a a termination, and technically, we’re past the limit. Sort of.

The law itself says 20 weeks “from fertilization” (vs. “gestational age”), and we’re actually only 18 weeks from fertilization–my amazing wife tracked her cycle to a T. The hospital acknowledges it isn’t against the letter of the law, but it is a grey area their policies won’t let them touch. Too risky, too hot button a topic.

We are denied the opportunity to even make a humane and doctor sanctioned medical decision by a bill that we never thought would affect us. I was there at the capitol, fighting for the rights of women. It never crossed my mind I would be fighting for my own.

Our last resort had become a no-man’s land.

We are sent home, to let things happen “naturally”. What this means, practically, was to spend days pacing the house, walking the neighborhood, waiting for our son to be born, so that he could die. We let him taste our favorite foods, we play him our favorite music, we show him Veronica Mars, we read to him, we tell him how much we love him. We wait for days, pace, wait, and wait, and we wait, so our son can be born, so that he can die.

Read the rest here.

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I tell people about my reproductive organs in excruciating detail and advocate for egg freezing on an almost daily basis. 

It's my job as a patient care advocate for a fertility center, and I love it. I see no evil Big Brother plot to control women's lives. I see it as options.

Since I've started planning these egg-freezing parties, we quickly started to see some people lose their minds over the issue. 

One accused us of using scare tactics, another said we were encouraging women to have “bastards” and another claimed we were trying to do away with men.

Enter Facebook and Apple's news this week that they would now be paying for their female employees to freeze their eggs, and the freaking out has reached a whole new level of lunacy.

Let me tell you why these benefits are a good thing -- and not in fact an Orwellian attempt by Silicon Valley geeks to control your fertility future. 

First, let me tell you my story: I met my husband at age 33. We got married when I was 34 and we starting trying to conceive soon after. What followed was years of doctors, invasive tests, various forms of fertility treatment and a lot of heartache and disappointment. By the time we were doing our third in vitro, we had depleted our savings account and only had one embryo. At the time, it literally felt like everything was riding on that lone embryo; our marriage, our finances, our hopes, everything. Through luck and good odds, I was fortunate enough to get pregnant on that cycle. Even though I was more grateful than I could possibly say for our now two-year-old son, I pressed my doctor as to why she thought we had issues. The only explanation was my age.

I never thought that early to mid-thirties was old or even questionable in terms of fertility. In my mind, the forties are when things really go downhill. As I’ve learned over the years, I’m not the only one who thought this way. Dr. Anate Brauer from Greenwich Fertility told me, “What people don't understand is that even at age 30 years old, up to 40% of your eggs are genetically abnormal.”

After going through my experience, I became very active in the infertility community and switched jobs. I've been working as the director of patient care at Fertility Authority for over two years and you would be shocked at how many women don’t know anything about their own bodies, that age is a real factor when it comes to fertility or even how one actually gets pregnant.

My theory is when were in health class, they told us all about how NOT to get pregnant or get an STI but no one really explained how to conceive and the fact that we live in a time where more and more women are delaying having children.

A very important piece of blood work that women should get is called your “day three blood work.” This is when your blood is taken on day three of your menstrual cycle and informs you and your doctor what your FSH (follicle stimulating hormone) and your AMH (anti-mullerian hormone) numbers are. These two aspects will give you an idea of how many eggs you have in storage (so to speak) and the quality. This is an extremely important test and yet, if I left my office right now, stopped a woman on the street and asked her if she knew what her FSH and AMH was, she’d think it was an acronym used on Twitter. Shouldn’t this be general knowledge or part of your yearly checkup? Why aren’t women more aware of this?

Isn't it a good thing that Apple and Facebook are helping more women BE aware? Not to mention helping them pay for what can be insanely costly?

In effect, I look at myself as the “ghost of infertile future” hoping to educate and empower women who perhaps are going to medical school, law school, trying to climb the corporate ladder or who are actually waiting to meet the right partner for them instead of settling out of some biological fear. It used to drive me insane when I was single and people would say, “Your standards are too high!” If you make the commitment to marry and spend the rest of your life with someone, shouldn’t you have high standards? And what does that say about their own marriages? That their standards were low?

Also, if you take into consideration that in the last four decades, there has been a 900% increase in women over 35 having their first baby, it makes sense that companies at least make this offer of egg freezing to their employees should they want to explore it. You also have to be aware that typically, if you’re over the age of 42, most clinics recommend you use donor eggs as the quality of your eggs drop significantly. Basically, companies aren’t forcing their female staff to go through with egg freezing, they are just making the option available if you know you may want to conceive down the line using your own eggs.

This is why I don’t fully understand why so many are offended by egg freezing. It’s not mandatory and in the long run, it may save both the company and their female employee’s time and money. It cost me roughly $35,000 and three years with time in and out of work for my medical procedures to have my son. One cycle of egg freezing can cost around $10,000 and can possibly not only spare you from having to go through years of fertility treatment but save you additional money on exploring other options such as using donor eggs which can cost a profound amount.

I saw one comment yesterday by a man saying that the fact that companies were offering this was unfair to men. After I was done laughing, I commented back to him that this is not favoritism to women. It’s just biology. Steve Martin became a first-time dad at age 67 years old. I’m pretty sure it’s common knowledge that Helen Mirren wouldn’t be able to do this (even as amazing as she is). Men don’t need this option as they do not have limitations on their fertility while women do. We can argue all day about whether or not you believe in Sheryl Sandberg's “Lean In” advice but whether you lean in or not, top female talent at companies like Facebook and Apple might appreciate having the assurance of egg freezing.

And assurance is the key word here. 

As Dr. Fahimeh Sasan, chief medical officer at my company and a gynecologist at Mt. Sinai, said at our event this past Tuesday, “Just because you freeze your eggs doesn’t mean you have to conceive that way! You can still get married, conceive naturally and end up never using the frozen eggs. They are just insurance should you find that you have difficulty getting pregnant and you prefer not to use donor eggs. It’s like car insurance. No one buys it expecting to get into an accident but it’s there if you need it.” 

See? No one is replacing egg freezing with conceiving naturally or even relationships. Even in the best case scenarios, "car insurance" doesn't always protect you from everything so it’s extremely important to note that there are no guarantees with egg freezing. I can't say for certain that it will completely spare you from additional fertility treatment beyond the in vitro needed for the eggs you've frozen. It’s just a back-up plan should you need it. That being said, pregnancy rates from frozen eggs are currently the same as they are fresh eggs, so it is a viable option to explore.

As for the criticism that companies should put the money and energy instead into offering paternity leave for men or providing in-house childcare for parents; my question is why is it an either-or proposition? Why can’t companies offer all of the above? I know many feel that it’s not an employer’s responsibility to accommodate people’s personal lives but I contend that if you value your workers and want to retain them, it’s a valuable investment.

Another major complaint I’ve heard about egg freezing is it encourages women to have babies in their fifties. Again, this is just ignorance. 

Dr. Brauer explains, “We know that carrying a pregnancy at an advanced age increases complications of pregnancy such as hypertensive disorders or pregnancy, gestational diabetes, placental abruption and growth restriction. Because these risks increase as a woman progresses into her late thirties and forties, most clinics have established an age cut off, usually in the late forties.” 

This is true even when using donor eggs. It’s not like there are no age restrictions and that the industry is telling women old enough to be grandmothers to have their first child. There are guidelines.

Here’s the bottom line: If you are a woman interested in having children and are not yet ready for any reason whatsoever, just see your OB/GYN or a reproductive endocrinologist, get your AMH and FSH, tell them your history (do you smoke, have diabetes, etc.) and find out if you are fertile or if you have any issues. Through my job, around 20% of women who contacted us for an egg freezing consult found out they had a fertility issue they knew nothing about. One had blocked fallopian tubes, another was going into early menopause and one in particular sadly found out she wouldn’t be able to have any biological children. All of these women were in their thirties and absolutely had no idea there was any problem with them whatsoever.

Educating women on knowing their fertility health is so incredibly important. Whether they freeze their eggs, whether it’s moral or not is no one’s business. It’s between them, their doctor and whatever god they choose to worship.

I for one "like" this.

Draft 1, 4:00 PM

About the Couple: Mark and Kendra were just two single twentysomethings following their dreams in New York City. Then on January 8th, 2011 a chance encounter at a local watering hole brought them together and they've been a couple ever since. Mark is an industrial engineer and Kendra is a nursing student. They live together with their dog, Patsy, in Park Slope. But of course you already know all this since you're invited to their wedding ;)

Draft 2, 4:36 PM

About the Couple: How does one sum up Mark and Kendra? Mark is an industrial engineer but he's so much more: a best friend, an omelet maker, a dog walker even in the rain, a lover of pink shirts. Kendra is a woman, a nurse, a sucker for Anne Hathaway movies, a lover of dark chocolate and good wine. They're so lucky to have found one another. They live in Park Slope with their wonderfully silly dog Patsy.

Draft 3, 7:50 PM

About the Couple: Mark's a boy and Kendra's a girl. They got drunk, put their privates together, got along well enough, moved in together, and are now getting married because they're both almost 30. To be honest, getting a dog together was a WAY bigger commitment than this whole wedding thing. Like it kinda freaked Kendra out for a bit and they almost broke up, and then Mark freaked out that Kendra was so freaked out and they had a huge fight. But they worked it out and now that feels so long ago. They live in Park Slope.

Draft 4, 10:18 PM

About the Couple: Mark and Kendra are two human beings who found themselves adrift in the bustling metropolis of Manhattan seeking Another Soul to call home. It was an average night when they caught eyes across the dark, candlelit tables of some new speakeasy (HAHA who can keep track?), and after a few rosemary-infused vodka cocktails and hours of sprawling conversation that touched upon everything from philosophy to spirituality to Motherhood and beyond, it was apparent that they had found their Other. They can't help but feel that a Greater Being played a role in their chance encounter. They live and love together with their dog Patsy in Park Slope.

Draft 5, 12:31 AM

About the Couple: Mark and Kendra are two people who are getting married and they're NOT going to apologize for it! They can feel their friends inwardly rolling their eyes every time they talk about their wedding and guess what? It's going to be traditional, she's going to wear white, they're going to write their own vows and cry and cut a cake and you'll all fucking like it! So why don't you just shut up and click the convenient link below and buy us some shit we want at Crate & Barrel and in exchange you can enjoy a FREE THREE COURSE MEAL AND FIVE HOUR OPEN BAR, YOU DICKS!!!!! They live in Park Slope with their dog Patsy who is way better behaved that most of your goddamn kids.

Draft 6, 12:40 AM

About the Couple: Mark and Kendra are two bad little feminists who are perpetuating the patriarchal and outdated tradition that is the modern American wedding. They're spending theirs and their parents' life savings on a big party instead of stashing that money away for something more practical, like a house or grad school or a baby or a car or just a really great vacation and they hope you'll attend even though it would save them a lot of money if you didn't. It's like $175 a head, seriously. They live in Park Slope in a one bedroom for $3,100 a month with their dog, Patsy, who they found out has diabetes and they have to spend $700 a month on dog medicine for that now. They hope you will attend their wedding and spend roughly $100-$200 on a gift, $300 on the hotel, and up to $500 on the flight since we're getting married Memorial Day weekend which is a really popular travel time. OH GOD

Draft 7, 1:38 AM

About the Couple: Mark and Kendra are FAAAAART FART FARTTT FAAAAAAAARRRTTT we shoulda elooooooppppeeddddd I love WINE

Draft 8, 11:08 AM

About the Couple: Mark and Kendra live in New York City. They met at a bar in January of 2011 and have been dating ever since. Mark is an industrial engineer and Kendra is a nursing student. They live together with their dog, Patsy, in Park Slope. They love each other and have put a lot of time and thought into this decision. They can't wait to celebrate with you on their big day!

Image via Shutterstock.

Laura is a writer/actress/improviser living in New York City. She performs weekly at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theater and has appeared on MTV's Hey Girl, Comedy Central's Inside Amy Schumer, and has written for Girl Code, Cosmopolitan, The Date Report, and Nerve. She does all her tweeting via @Laura_Willcox on Twitter.com.

Two bright young women dominated headlines late last week. On the same day that Malala Yousafzai, 17, won the 2014 Nobel Peace Prize, Bristol Palin, 23, was cited in an Alaska police report for getting drunk at a party and punching her host "multiple times."

Bristol Palin's "heavily intoxicated" behavior had already prompted her famous mother to release a statement describing her daughter as "one of the strongest young women you'll ever meet." Sarah Palin went on to praise Bristol's "work ethic and heart for those less fortunate."

Sounds like the Nobel Committee gave that Peace Prize to the wrong gal.

A look at their bestselling books, Not Afraid of Life: My Journey So Far (2011) and I Am Malala: The Girl Who Stood Up for Education and Was Shot by the Taliban (2013), reveals a great deal of overlap, including how they both overcame adversity and barely made it out of high school alive.

Perhaps this side-by-side comparison will prompt Nobel consideration for young Palin next year. After all, it's called American Exceptionalism—not Pakistani Exceptionalism.

All quotes cited from memoirs or appearance on The Daily Show (Malala only) or police reports (Bristol only.)

Photos via Getty.

Nell Scovell is currently writing the movie version of Lean In for Sony Pictures.

We're just six weeks short of Thanksgiving, which means two things: First, if your Thanksgiving/Christmas/New Year plans involve air travel, book your ticket now or suffer the financial consequences. Secondly, if you're looking to get hitched over the holidays and believe in magic, it might be time to bust out the Engagement Chicken.

The stretch between Thanksgiving and Valentine's Day has come to be known as engagement season, a time when the calendar presents us with a slew of special occasions on which your paramour could pop the big question. Jewelry companies know this all too well; before you even sit down to your turkey dinner, you'll be hearing about how he went to Jared. The wedding industrial complex will continue the recruitment for months.

This weekend, a photo bubbled up on Reddit: Somewhere in America, a bunch of girls--decked out in…Read moreRead on

If you're dying to get a ring during this sentimental stretch and willing to do any batshit thing in order to make it happen, then surely you'll want to cook your sweetheart some Engagement Chicken, a legendary dish said to inspire men to propose to the women who serve it. Getting it on the table now is the considerate move — you'll give your beloved a good six weeks to get his act together just in time to pop the question on a Hallmark-perfect holiday.

The Engagement Chicken speaks to two things that many women understand: the desire to enter a contractual arrangement in which you'll file joint tax returns with a man, and poultry. If you're the type to Google "how to get him to propose," you are perhaps already familiar with the Engagement Chicken (or as I like to call it, chicken). The dish hit critical mass in 2011 when Glamour magazine released a cookbook entitled 100 Recipes Every Woman Should Know: Engagement Chicken and 99 Other Fabulous Dishes to Get You Everything You Want in Life.

And what, pray tell, would a woman cook in order to live the life of her dreams? Here are a few examples:

• Skinny Jeans Scallops
• He Stayed Over Omelet
• Forget the Mistake You Made at Work Margarita
• Engagement Chicken
• Let's Make a Baby Pasta
• Bribe a Kid Brownies

(There are 93 other recipes in the book, but these six highlights nicely outline a life plan for Everywoman: be thin, get laid, have a job, get married, have a kid, raise the kid. In that order.)

The Engagement Chicken is the real star, though, and the cookbook put the dish front and center. But the (in)famous fowl has reportedly been around for decades. As Glamour tells it, fashion editor Kim Bonnell gave the recipe to her assistant, Kathy Suder, sometime in the '80s; Suder made it for her boyfriend, and he proposed shortly thereafter. Like magic. Word spread of this romantic voodoo, the recipe made the rounds around the Glamour office, and three more Glamour staffers got engaged after preparing the same roast chicken.

In 2008, Bonnell herself described the phenomenon:

It's like this: 104 years ago, when I was an editor at Glamour magazine, I'd often overhear assistants worryingly discuss what to cook for the boyfriend-coming-over-for-dinner moment in their romances. […] I'd come across, and prepared, a really easy Marcella Hazan lemon roast chicken recipe. Its appeal for me was an amazingly crisp skin, but I also appreciated its ease, subtle flavors, and impressive presentation. I fiddled with the recipe to make it even more to my liking and after serving it on a couple of occasions to men, realized that it was guaranteed guy-friendly: familiar but different, fancier than everyday chicken but not off-puttingly strange or fussy. (Rule: Dishes with more ingredients than you can count on one hand are too much work for you and demand too much fawning from your guests.)

So this chicken popped into my head when assistants worried about their date-night menus, and I shared it with them, spelling out every teeny little step. Success! They'd report back the next morning about foolproof results and rave reviews.

And, it seemed, betrothals. Maybe not that very night but with unmistakably related-to-chicken timing. With an eerie predictability, women became engaged to the men for whom they prepared this chicken. Voila: Engagement Chicken.

Glamour ran the recipe in the magazine in January 2004, dubbed it the Engagement Chicken, and since then some 70 women have ensnared their dream dude by cooking him a bird.

In a promotional video from 2011 – when the Glamour cookbook was released and Engagement Chicken got quite a bit of attention – Glamour editor-in-chief Cindi Leive shares the legend of the chicken. Gather 'round, ye ringless wenches:

Millions of people get divorced, but over 70 engaged couples can't be wrong. The site's commenters sing the bird's praises:

It may take three months or three years, but if you make this chicken, eventually he will propose.

(Follow-up questions include: Will it get her to propose? What about that rare guy who's looking for his lady to pop the big question? And does the chicken work for LGBTQ couples?)

The recipe is suspiciously simple: bird, lemon, salt, pepper. The Marcella Hazan original is alive and well (though Hazan never called it an Engagement Chicken because it had not yet acquired magical properties) and true to form, involves just those four ingredients. Hazan's recipe calls for around 90 minutes cooking time, with the oven temperature starting at 350 and eventually raised to 400 degrees. You are to prick the lemons twenty times apiece.

But the true Engagement Chicken, according to Glamour, is ever-so-slightly tweaked for the busy modern gal – start at 400 for a reduced cooking time, only prick the lemons a little, and throw some extra lemon juice in there – and adds fresh herbs for garnish (this is a fashion magazine, after all, and presentation matters). Eventually celebrity chefs have gotten in on the Engagement Chicken action: Martha Stewart and her SEO team were smart enough to feature Glamour's recipe on their website. Ina Garten, meanwhile, complicates things by adding garlic, olive oil, Spanish onions, dry white wine, chicken stock, and flour. (If you're making Garten's labor-intensive version specifically in hopes of getting engaged, seek professional help.) And the Neelys offer a recipe for Get Yo' Man Chicken, which is an entirely different dish, but the point is the same: Poultry is the butterfly net with which you shall catch a man.

I've been unable to find any wine pairings for Engagement Chicken, but if it's being served to the type of dude who makes a major life decisions based on whether or not someone has prepared a nice meal for him, I'd suggest Heineken.

The Engagement Chicken endures because of women who want to believe in magic. Pop culture presents love to us as a sort of magical experience (see: Disney, rom coms, and every pop song ever) and, frankly, it's not unpleasant to ascribe to such a worldview. The romantics among us want to believe love is an interpersonal magic that exists beyond the reaches of science. Science is full of hard and fast rules; magic is the fantasy workaround. Magic is hope. Magic means anything can happen. Magic means we just might be able to manipulate events to our advantage.

But when we think of casting spells or creating love potions, we veer into complicated territory: newt spleen and valerian root, dragon wort and peacock feathers, roaring fires and ancient chants. The Engagement Chicken, however, is simple magic. All you need is a grocery store and an oven. The only ancient chants you need to recite are those of easy conversation: How was your day? Can I get you another Heineken? Nevertheless, the Engagement Chicken's longevity isn't wholly a result of this simplicity. It's the promise of magic that keeps women coming back.

Unfortunately, for those who actually serve the Engagement Chicken – and get a ring on their finger shortly thereafter – the basic recipe likely serves as a preview of their forthcoming marriage: bland meat, sour stuff, a little spice, and small talk.

Also, it doesn't work.

Illustration by Tara Jacoby.

This is I Thee Dread, Jezebel's website devoted to all manners of nonsense pertaining to the wedding industrial complex. Got something worth sharing? Email me. Horror stories welcome.

Richard Brittain is a champion on Countdown (a British gameshow) as well as a self-published author. He's also, apparently, very good at being a complete and utter creepy stalker.

A friend of mine on Twitter linked to one of his blog posts and I have to admit, it is one of the most chilling, creepy depictions of stalking I've ever read. In it Brittain blithely torments and stalks a woman who he invited to be on his BBC University Challenge team in college.

The post, entitled "The Benevolent Stalker" (*full body shudder*) reads like something out of Stephen King and it's horrifying that it isn't fiction. Brittain details inappropriate advances he made toward this woman, how he relentlessly sent her letters and gifts and traveled all the way to Scotland to see her, all in the name of love. You see, he thought he was being romantic.

Determined to impress her and get our team onto TV, I intensively revised my general knowledge. I also frequented the student bar where she worked. I figured out what hours she did each day and went at those times.

A couple of weeks before our University Challenge audition, she unfriended me on Facebook. I was a little shocked and asked her why.

"You're kinda freaking me out," she explained. "You're a good guy but you're being far too forward."

Our Casanova is not deterred! She just don't understand how much he cares about her!

I wrote love letters to her. I still had her address from the forms that she filled out for University Challenge. I felt a bit guilty using that information, but I wasn't turning up at her door or anything. I sent a few love letters through the post, rose-themed cards containing poetry and drawings. I also left messages on her phone.

That might seem a bit much, but it felt like I would be denying my love if I did nothing. Eventually, she contacted the police. I was called by a policewoman and told that I had to stop contacting her.

Jesus. Fucking. Christ. On. A. Stick. But wait, it gets even worse!

After that, I thought long and hard about what I was doing. I think that is when I first accepted that I had become a stalker. Before, I had been an admirer. But what does stalking really mean? It seems to mean that you truly love someone who does not love you back.

Every great romance is about two partners who are utterly obsessed with each other. Romeo, Juliet, Tristan and Isolde are people who are so passionately and powerfully in love that nothing else matters to them. But what if that feeling was felt on only one side? What if Juliet had rejected Romeo? Would he become a stalker?

It seems that modern society drools over depictions of this intense, obsessional love, but only when it is mutual. When it comes from just one side, it is suddenly deemed a terrible thing.

YES, YES IT IS, BECAUSE IT'S FUCKING STALKING YOU CREEPY MOTHERFUCKER. He goes on to use Sting's "I'll Be Watching You" as an example of something that MIGHT be stalking but is clearly just obsessive love "which is both natural and beautiful". This is absolutely terrifying.

Benevolent stalking is different to malevolent stalking. The latter is intended to cause harm or induce fear, but the former is purely an expression of affection.

He goes on to describe how she tried to PHYSICALLY ESCAPE HIM at their graduation ceremony and how she became his "muse", becoming the main character in his self-published work of fantasy fiction.

This poor woman! She is clearly terrified of him and he keeps going, completely sure that she must love him somehow. It gets EVEN WORSE because he travels to Scotland to ask her IF SHE WANTS TO BE KIDNAPPED.

Seven months later, when it was complete, I decided to try to make my book known by getting into the national news. I found out that she worked in Glasgow, so I travelled there with a plan. I was going to tell her that if she came with me, and we faked a kidnapping, we would both become famous. We would go into the hills and camp out for a few days while the nation searched. I had brought the necessary supplies.

I would like to reiterate that I was not plotting to kidnap her. I was planning on asking her if she would be interested in pretending to be kidnapped, so that we would make the news and people would learn about our story.

Yesterday, I saw her on the street and approached her, and called her name, but she freaked out.

"How?" she said. "How are you here?" She turned and snapped me on her phone before hurrying away.

I didn't even get to tell her about my plan. I didn't want to make a scene because people were staring. I also realised that I didn't have the heart to ask her if she would like to be kidnapped.

I left Glasgow, and I think our relationship is finished now. I gave it my best shot. I really thought that we would both become famous. We would have disappeared for a few days, people would have read my book, and she could have played the lead role when The World Rose is made into a movie. But alas; I'll have to find another way.

YOU THINK YOUR RELATIONSHIP IS FINISHED NOW?! You never had a relationship in the first place you crazy, deranged WEIRDO!

I would love to believe this is fiction (oh god, I so very much want this to be a really bad writing assignment or something) but he even tags the post as "Real Life". I can't. Brittain has absolutely no idea what he's done to this poor woman and casts himself as a downtrodden romantic hero instead of a deeply disturbing stalker. It's a frightening look at the mental hoops a stalker jumps through to rationalize their behavior.

Brittain sounds like a real winner, as his other "Real Life" blog posts detail him getting fired from various jobs (including as a hospital employee who randomly gave out patient x-rays), living in a tent on a golf course and how he doesn't believe in living indoors.

Forget Slenderman creepypasta, this stalker's manifesto is the most terrifying thing I've read in years.

More evidence that Jimmy Johns is the quite possibly the worst company to work for in America: they force their employees — even those at the bottom rungs of the ladder like sandwich makers and delivery drivers — to sign non-competes that would seem overbearing to a governmental espionage agency.

Huffington Post obtained a copy of a Jimmy John's non-compete agreement that all employees are required to sign, no matter where they sit on the corporate food chain. The agreement states that after leaving Jimmy John's for any reason, the employee cannot work for two years at any Jimmy John's competitor. That would be crazy enough, but it gets even more Banana Town when you consider what Jimmy John's apparently considers a "competitor": any business that makes at least 10% of its revenues from sandwiches within three miles of ANY Jimmy John's.

Basically, any former Jimmy John's employee can't work at ANY restaurant or even any business that provides food as a side service (10% of their revenue, remember) within three miles of any existing Jimmy John's. A company spokeswoman refused to comment, because Jimmy John's doesn't give even a semblance of a fuck about basic human decency, and they're scared that if they have to publicly comment on this issue, that'll become blatantly obvious.

As HuffPo points out, ordinarily non-competes at companies like Jimmy John's exist for executives who could potentially reveal company secrets to their chief competitors. Unless "company secrets" has been broadened to include "that guy at 1321 Pine Boulevard is a non-tipping asshole," it's hard to see how that case could be made here. Luckily, the non-compete is now part of the same proposed class action that alleges systematic wage theft at the company.

Obviously, this has nothing to do with the divestment of company secrets and everything to do with putting workers in as desperate a situation as possible where they're terrified to lose or leave their jobs. Jimmy John's seeks to control its employees lives, treat them as crappily as they feel like, and prevent them from seeking out any better situation. To say it's an actively, heinously evil practice would be a profound understatement.

Let's also make it abundantly clear that any conservative who expounds upon the importance of free market capitalism and who isn't up in arms over this bullshit is a fucking hypocrite. The entire purpose of that economic system is supposed to be that one rises to the level of one's ability (even if that's not how it usually works in practice) — this includes the notion that a competitor can lure you over with a better job offer if they so choose. But if you are prevented from taking any better job by a ludicrously restrictive agreement you have to sign if you want the first job, we at least need to stop calling it the "free" market, because that's become a total misnomer.

Can you imagine the nightmare if numerous companies started doing this? Unemployment would skyrocket, the economy would tank due to a lack of spending — we'd be completely hosed. While I'm pretty sure a non-compete like this is actually legal (especially considering the US's repeated insistence on placing the needs of corporations above those of actual human beings), the amount of economic harm for which widespread use of this practice could theoretically be responsible could be catastrophic. What does Jimmy John's care though, right? Moar profit for their dickhead founder who donates to human skidmark Sheriff Joe Arpaio, mandates that employees be fired for unionization, and hunts endangered species for sport!*

We can get mad at Chick-Fil-A all we want over their stupid, regressive stance on marriage equality, but at least that's not an issue with the potential to poke a giant hole in the bottom of the shared boat of the US economy. I don't just want Jimmy John's non-compete agreement gone, I genuinely hope that whoever came up with it winds up in a federal penitentiary.

They never will, because this is the US, where might (in the form of wealth) makes right, but we can dream.

* No, seriously, click that link. Dude has pictures of himself murdering so many big animals that Teddy Roosevelt would be like "hey, now, hold up a sec."

Image via Jimmy John's Facebook page, and I feel dirty that's now in my search history.

As people react to the Jennifer Lawrence Vanity Fair article that I blogged about yesterday, I’ve noticed a troubling theme.  People have not quite criticized her — I’m mostly talking about comment sections and social media and I’m not going to linkfarm that — for the sexually provocative photos that accompany the article, but sort of implicitly criticized her by suggesting that it is weird or inconsistent that she complains about feeling violated by the theft of her private nudes and also relates to her audience in a sexual way.

This is the epitome of not getting it.  Or, rather, it is the epitome of trying to take an issue that is about autonomy and consent, and stuff it back into a Commodity Model framework that aligns her in a whore/madonna dichotomy, where she has to be somehow “consistent” in either demanding to be sexually available or sexually unavailable.

She does not owe us consistency in how she wants to be sexually available to her audience.  Instead, we owe her consistency, in that we need to accept that she can present herself as sexual to her audience when and how she’s comfortable, and not when and how she’s uncomfortable.  That’s what autonomy means for an actor managing a public persona.

She has said not to look at the stolen photos, because they were private and not meant for us.  If she said, “I’m pissed that those were stolen, but I like the photos, so I’m releasing them,” that would be fine, too.  If she said that, she wouldn’t owe us an explanation.  Since she hasn’t said that, she doesn’t owe us a performance of “aggrieved virgin,” any more than she owes us a replacement for the pictures that we’re all not looking at because she said we shouldn’t.  If she now wants to put out work that is sexually charged (as she has before — certainly there was a lot of sexual energy in her American Hustle performance),  work that she controls and that she’s okay with all of us looking at, that’s her choice.

The only consistent theme is that she doesn’t have to be consistent in what she consents to.  That’s how consent works.  I saw one comment that said it was strange that she said both don’t look at my breasts in the stolen pictures and here are two thirds of my breasts in Vanity Fair.  There’s nothing wrong with that.  If a sex partner says, “I don’t want to fuck, but if you want, I’ll give you a blowjob,” that’s a perfectly valid choice.  Why would it be any less valid to say don’t look at the stolen nudes, look at the seminudes I’m okay with instead? Having sex with someone once isn’t the same thing as agreeing to have sex with that person for all time.  Having sex with lots of people isn’t agreement to have sex with every person.  Having one kind of sex isn’t agreement to have another kind of sex.  That’s how consent works.  It’s not a ratchet.  It’s not “once you do this, you can never go back.”  I don’t think that consent is a matter only for people having sex with each other in private.  I think that it also goes for the sexual relationship, such as it is, between performers and fans.

Think about the logic as it applies to someone who, unlike Lawrence, has been naked for an audience.  Someone whose genitals appear on film, like Kevin Bacon or Rosario Dawson.  If someone hacked their private nude photos, would that be fine because we’ve seen them completely naked?  No!  That’s absurd!  They would be harmed in precisely the same way as Lawrence has been, and not any less!  People who think that the harm to Bacon or Dawson from hacking their personal nudes would be less serious are adopting a mode of thinking not differentiable from saying that when a virgin gets raped it’s worse than if it’s a sex worker.  That’s fucked up.  That’s wrong.  That’s both factually and morally indefensible.

Lawrence doesn’t owe it to us to be a “good girl” or a “bad girl” or any kind of “girl” to stand up and demand her right to keep her own property, to not have people invade her privacy.  That’s not a cookie we give her for good behavior.  It’s a right, and not one she forfeits because the way she presents herself confounds our expectations.

Years ago, a close friend of mine tried to shame me for peeing in the shower. Apparently my tinkling habits were a barbaric way of life and I should simply use the toilet before I step in the shower. So it's good to know that I'm somewhat vindicated by the recent "Go with the Flow" campaign at the University of East Anglia, where students are being encouraged to go number one while washing up.

Slate writes:

The shower-cum-loo initiative is the work of two of the university's students, Debs Torr and Chris Dobson.

Mr Dobson said: "We've done the maths, and this project stands to have a phenomenal impact. With 15,000 students at UEA, over a year we would save enough water to fill an Olympic-sized swimming pool 26 times over. Imagine how big an impact it could have if we could get everyone in East Anglia, or even the UK, to change their morning habits."

So basically I'm a Planeteer.

Saving the planet is a cool bonus, but this is just a matter of efficiency. The scenario that warrants a good shower whiz is simple: You step in the shower. You feel like you have to pee. Getting out of the shower doesn't make logistical sense. There's a drain there, so you use it. I'm also not against premeditated shower peeing. I've tried peeing beforehand as a habit, but efficiency always wins out.

Is this unhygienic, you're wondering?

"As long as the water is flowing there is no hygiene risk as urine is sterile but we would encourage that every person using the same shower consents to the challenge and if not that they don't take part," Dobson told the BBC.

I'm no scientist, but I haven't died from it yet so I think I'm fine. Do what you want, but this is what it means to take a shower: to get all the dirt off of you. Dirt is literally being washed off of your body and into the drain. Look, it just washed over your feet. You walked around the dirty floors in your house with your bare feet and hopped in the shower.

Pee is nothing. You know why? You're in the shower. Soap is right there. You're gonna do this again tomorrow because this is a first world country. Men do it, and women do it. Children, too. And there've been plenty of polls about your preference. This is another case where the idea of shower peeing is more gross than the logic behind it.

Out of respect, the one thing I won't do now is pee in the shower of a friend or person whose house I'm staying over. Can't say I haven't done it before though. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

It becomes more of an issue when there's more than one person using the shower in the home (I live alone), but even then I'm not freaked out by someone else's potential piss. The suds will do their job.

I rest my case.

Image via Shutterstock

Not Nigel. (Keith Allison)

His owner isn’t sure where he went or what the African grey parrot did while he was away, but apparently he came into contact with Spanish because that’s his new language of choice, reports the Daily Breeze in Torrance, CA. He also likes talking about someone named “Larry.”

He and his owner were reunited last week, after a veterinarian who’d been running ads for her own lost parrot was contacted by a grooming business that thought they’d found the missing bird at their house.

“I heard somebody whistling and saying, ‘Hello? Hello?’ ” said the grooming business owner, adding that the sound brought her to the door. No one was there.

It happened again, and this time she saw the parrot.

“I own a dog-grooming business so we put him in a little cage and brought him with us to the store,” she said. “He was the happiest bird. He was singing and talking without control. … He was barking like the dogs. I’m from Panama and he was saying, ‘What happened?’ in Spanish.”

She and her husband started looking for his owner, and spotted the vet’s ad. The microchip didn’t match her bird, leading her to track down Nigel’s owner in a bit of a complicated chase.

Nigel’s owner was surprised to find his bird after all those years, and it seemed Nigel was a bit surprised too — the reunion was a bit bumpy at first as the bird bit his owner at first.

Things are smoother now, his owner said.

“He’s doing perfect,” he said. “It’s really weird, I knew it was him from minute I saw him.”

Talking parrot missing for four years reunited with Torrance owner [The Daily Breeze]

Imagine with me, for a moment, the setting: The year is 1969. The Canadian Prime Minister is about to have an affair with Barbra Streisand; hair is long and flowing and is also a musical; and, one day in May, contraception, abortion, and homosexuality are all legalized at the exact same time. (Surprise! ‘Summer of 69’ actually could be about the year.)

The journey to get this point, where folks could procure both birth control and (some) abortions without legal consequences, indirectly involved a Royal Commission on the Status of Women. For those unfamiliar with Canadian political history, let me explain a Royal Commission: basically, every time there’s an issue the incumbent government doesn’t really want to deal with, they hire independent researchers (who aren’t paid very well and so never get anything done on time) under the Queen’s authority (who doesn’t even go here, who gets anything done when their boss is out of town) to take a year (read: several years) to look into things, basically so they can delay the issue until the next guy gets into office. Lester B. Pearson enacted this strategy in 1967, and by the time Pierre Trudeau pirouetted his way into office in 1968, there was already enough research done to show that women were gonna start some shit if something wasn’t done about their rights.

For example: four days before Pierre Trudeau took office in 1968, a woman named Norma Ellen Verwey (pictured left) proposed to the Royal Commission that since men insisted on being in charge of everything, instead of legalizing contraception for women, why don’t men take charge like they do with everything else and just all get vasectomies?

Boy howdy, did the men ever get scared.

The Commission itself, admittedly handled mostly by women who might’ve also seen this as a good idea, took her suggestion surprisingly well. Since her assertion was that vasectomies are reversible, there probably didn’t seem much wrong with her idea. The main comment from them at the time actually had nothing to do with the logistics behind compulsory vasectomies, but instead was that vasectomy was mostly being suggested over a male birth control pill because it’s much harder to forget about a vasectomy than it is to forget to take a pill. 

The media, on the other hand, had a field day. A few newspapers in particular seemed to get a real panic brewing. The Toronto Star published an article right after Norma made her suggestion titled, “Sterilize ‘unready’ males at 16, woman doctor urges.” It was on the front page, so it probably caused a riot somewhere. Meanwhile, the Ottawa Citizen didn’t bother to contain the sentiment to Norma – instead, all women “wanted men sterilized,” which was probably accidentally a more accurate statement than intended. Most strikingly, in Montreal, La Presse published Norma’s photo with the caption, “Men Beware!” The accompanying headline said that all men were going to be sterilized.

Yes. All. Men.

(Vancouver Sun, April 18 1968)

I would love to be able to tell you that Norma Verwey, MD, had a completely serious plan to solve the problem of birth control and that this plan actually was compulsory vasectomies.  She would have had support; some guy called Ken Huband, who was actually a civil servant, approached the Commission six months later and said he thought that compulsory vasectomies were a great idea. However, he also thought that people should be able to marry themselves to whomever they wanted, wherever they wanted — “on a beach, at a party or in a church, I don’t care.” Probably this thing about marrying yourself to people at parties made everyone realize that he was not the best guy to be giving advice, so the newspaper coverage just called him “courageous” and then described how colourful his outfit was. 

(From this ‘courageous’ descriptor, I, a historian and therefore an expert, surmise that a man stating his views about contraception to a room full of women has always been a very dangerous thing to do, and strongly advise that men should not do that thing in order to avoid certain peril, possibly unless they are wearing a really pretty outfit.) 

(Vancouver Sun, April 20 1968)

Still, the point stands that more than one person in 1968 suggested compulsory vasectomies in order to solve the birth control problem, and Norma started it, and if the colourful courage man hadn’t fucked it all up by talking about party marriages she might’ve changed this nation’s history and there might’ve been vasectomy centres on street corners now.

The thing is that the media was wrong about a few things – actually, most things – and Norma Verwey, as it turns out, was just a tremendous prankster.

First of all, Norma Verwey did not have a medical degree. She had a doctorate; she was, as she explicitly stated both aloud and in writing, a sociologist. Accordingly, this entire thing was a massive social experiment to see just how mad people would get when she suggested that men be the ones to have an invasive procedure to control family sizes.

No – I know what you’re thinking. I doubted it at first, too. Couldn’t she have been serious about this? Some of us might be a little bit serious about this now. Fortunately she wrote a book in 1991 called Radio Call-Ins and Covert Politics that was mostly unrelated, but thanks to the subject of covert politics she managed to sneak in a couple pages about her time trolling the nation about vasectomies.

Listen – I think it’s pretty clear that Norma was at least partially serious. I personally want to believe that Norma was sitting at home at her typewriter positively crying with mirth as she thought of all the shit she was about to start. She acknowledges that this plan was mostly to generate media attention for herself just to see how many radio shows she could get herself on – also a worthy goal – but she also characterizes the vasectomy idea as “an extremely anti-male suggestion,” and if that’s not an acknowledgement of her true motives then I don’t know what is.

This theory that she was partially serious is supported by her statement that she “wished to ‘smoke out’ medical opinion on the question of vasectomy reversal. Male doctors had always been very reluctant to suggest vasectomy,” she writes, “and even more reluctant to admit that it was reversible.” So basically what I am reading here is that she wanted to find out if her vasectomy plan was actually viable, and therefore completely considered this idea to be a potentially reasonable solution to the problem of birth control as she knew it.

Everything, according to Norma, went exactly as she’d hoped. After being called onto talk show after talk show – “as expected, the moderators who contacted me were either impolite, chauvinistic and sarcastic, or patronising and full of good-humoured male upmanship,” she writes – she eventually got more than one medical doctor to call in, amidst the vulgar phone calls and personal attacks aplenty, to admit that, even in 1968, vasectomies had 60-70% reversibility. Some men phoned in to admit they’d had a vasectomy, and that they were happier for it, while others phoned in to express a wish to get a vasectomy; and soon, the conversation about vasectomies began to change.

By the end of it, she says, no matter what else you wanted to say about it, “No listener in the Vancouver area, male or female, could claim that they had never heard of reversible vasectomy.”

So please, never forget, if you are Canadian or even if you are not, this courageous woman who almost single-handedly changed the landscape of the Canadian birth control story with what began as a social experiment. She endured a great deal of ridicule in order to give this gift to us; the threatening phone calls did not end, though she received several in her support as well, and she was a topic in the papers for years to come. 

In the end, one sociologist – who referred good-naturedly to the positive outcome of the experiment as the fact that women were now able to convince their husbands that his “tiny tubes were more easily cut” than any invasive procedure she might have to endure to stop the damn babies already – simultaneously pranked the men of the nation and gave women a new set of ideas to work with when considering whether or not to get her tubes tied, all a year before contraception and abortion were even made legal.

I think we all know that the vasectomy suggestion directly caused the legalization of birth control for women with the sheer amount of fear it generated in the hearts, minds, and ballsacks of the nation’s leaders, so I won’t bother to prove the connection here. But I do hope from now on, if you’re ever having trouble convincing someone – you know, legislators, your best friend’s horrible boyfriend, the queen – that birth control should be both free and absolutely everywhere, consider pulling a Norma and arguing for compulsory vasectomies instead. You never know; you might trigger the nation’s next big push for more comprehensive birth control.

Recently, Hwa Chong Institution, a secondary school in Singapore, held a sex ed workshop. Educating teens about sex is great, right? Well, turns out the whole ordeal was sponsored by our good friends, Focus on the Family. And Agatha Tan, a student who attended the workshop titled "It's UNcomplicated" was pretty taken aback by the rather sexist and bigoted approach to her education.

The open letter Tan wrote to her principal (which she then posted to Facebook with accompanying pictures) starts out with a bang. Not even a full paragraph in, she writes:

While sexuality education rarely manages to teach me something that I have not already learnt through past sessions or mainstream media, this booklet was different. From merely glancing through this booklet, I learned a simple yet important lesson: that bigotry is very much alive and it was naïve of me to think I could be safe from it even in school.

YES. THIS IS AWESOME. AND IT ONLY GETS BETTER. She mentions some of the material that was distributed, including this lovely graphic attempting to poke fun at the idea of consent. Apparently the facilitators led a discussion about what a girl "really means," comparing it to the alleged directness of guys.

That's right, they're teaching high schoolers that a girl's words are not enough. They teach that girls are always emotional, but that they can't be trusted to know how they feel about sex. LOL WIMMIN, AMIRITE?

Granted, the facilitators did make clear that these gender stereotypes they were promoting were subject to "some exceptions" and that they should be taken lightly, as a sort of joke. While it is reassuring to note that they have apparently realized not everyone fits into their binary model of a nuclear family that in their opinion youth should be actively working towards, not only did they ignore the presence of these people whenever it was inconvenient to them, but they also adopted an extremely damaging attitude.

Tan also epically tears down the bogus binary the workshop presented, portraying girls as strictly emotional and needy. But seriously, look at this shit:

Oh Focus on the Family. Go fuck yourself.

Tan's graceful conclusion:

I do not mean to imply that the school management has to take a supportive position in the struggle for LGBTQ rights, though in my opinion this would be ideal. Yet even so the school has a responsibility to the diverse school population; even if the school is unable and unwilling to provide inclusive sexuality education for students, it has a basic responsibility to ensure that it is a place free of bigotry where students can at least feel safe to study in without fear of being persecuted for who they are or are figuring themselves out to be.

By engaging the services of groups such as FotF to teach sexuality education in school, the management hence indirectly participates in promoting rape culture, tells students that we should conform to traditional gender roles instead of being our own persons, demonstrates that the acceptance of diversity in people is unimportant, and erases minority groups in the student population.

Tan's post is lengthy, but totally worth the read. Meanwhile, Focus on the Family Singapore has responded with a pretty standard faux-apology, à la SORRY U SUCK LOL:

"It's unfortunate that what was meant to be a light-hearted workshop to engage students was taken out of context and misinterpreted. As an approved service provider, we definitely do not promote a rape culture," said the CEO of Focus on the Family Singapore, Joanna Koh-Hoe.

"We acknowledge that the workshop in question was not perfect, as with even the very best of our workshops, there is always room for improvement. However we believe that the facilitators did their very best in this challenging situation," she added. "Our facilitators' efforts to stay on track may have been misunderstood as imposing certain views and that the facilitator is unconcerned with students' questions."

Oh yes, belittling young women while telling them that they are responsible for their sexual well-being as guys can't be held responsible for their own unstoppable sexual impulses ON TOP OF completely brushing off any LGBTQ interests at all whatsoever (not that that's surprising) was a total and classic misunderstanding. Sure.

All images from Agatha Tan's Facebook.

I was watching the Karate Kid run down a hill, still dressed like a shower, when the pain advanced to “festival of machetes” stage, and I decided that might warrant a trip to the ER. It was 2:30 in the morning. 

Since I was only 21 weeks along, there was nothing that could be done. After my son was born, I held him as his tiny face contorted, and he took two or three snuffly little breaths, and then breathed no more. And the abstraction that had been in my belly was now a perfect, tiny little boy, limp in my arms. And for the first time I realized how much I loved him.

They always say that losing a child is the worst possible thing that can happen to someone. But no one ever elaborates on what that really means. Like, you cry a lot? You’re just sad forever? What if you don’t like kids that much? What if on the spectrum of sad and pissed off, you tend toward the pissed off side? What if, just maybe once, you yelled ‘Go Away!’ at your poochy belly when you figured out just how much a year of daycare was going to cost? And then the universe listened, and he really went away? What then?

Grief is weird -- It’s horrible, awful, sad…and also weird. Life immediately after my son was stillborn was slow, awkward, imprecise—like trying to dance in water. When I wasn’t sitting around replaying my son’s birth and subsequent death over and over and over and over in my head, I was crying. For days, I lay in bed and flexed my hands, wanting to hold my son. It seemed as though someone had come in the middle of the night, and had drained out whatever it is that lets me read, count change, and carry on a conversation There was a lot of guilt, a lot of anger and bargaining, and because we don’t enter into such grief alone, a lot of people struggling to do and say something—anything—to make me feel better. 

Dealing with grief is a learned skill. You can’t really prepare for grief. In the abstract, knowing that bad things can happen, and they’ll make you way sad in no way prepares you for the reality of it. It’s a minute-by-minute, visceral experience. 

Also, because we don’t live in a vacuum, we have to experience the grief in relation to other people—and they, in turn, have to relate to us. A term that gets kicked around a lot is, "the new normal." You’re kidding yourself if you think you can just get over it, so instead you incorporate the experience and all of the fallout into your life—and by association, into everyone’s life who deals with you. It strikes me now as a lot like learning how to have a good romantic relationship. The feelings have a life of their own. They are overwhelming and new and constantly changing. Making it work requires patience, respect, and a fairly decent sense of self. That can be really difficult, because…

Grief makes us wildly uncomfortable. Maybe it’s because we don’t like seeing others sad or in pain. Maybe it’s because we like stories with happy endings.In any case, we have a hard time expressing how the grief affects us, and we also have trouble being open to hearing that information from someone else. We are terrified of saying the wrong thing, but I think most of us are so used to stories that wrap up neatly in the end, that we’re convinced that there is that magical thing to say, that pearl of wisdom that will make the music swell, the tears disappear, and the bereaved exclaim, “You, sir, are brilliant!” I’m thinking it probably never happens. 

A few things NOT to say:

•It’s all part of God’s plan/God needed another angel/God must have wanted this.

I know that your faith brings you comfort, especially the notion that there is a grand plan out there, but not everyone has it/wants it/believes in it. And even if they do, it’s cold comfort thinking that your kid was chosen for God’s Great Baby Die-off.

•Now you can understand why I’m not pro-choice.

Keep your anti-choice propaganda away, please. If you’re against abortion, don’t have one. The whole experience made me even more pro-choice than I already was. In a very real sense, I can imagine what it’s like (and how infuriating and wrong it would be) to have someone else making decisions about your body and your life.

•He must have been deformed/had something horribly wrong with him.

If you’re not a doctor, and you don’t know what happened, please don’t speculate.

•You should have been on bed rest.

It might work for some, but bed rest is no panacea.

•You can always try again/You’re going to try again, right?/Don’t worry, it’ll happen.

Yes, OK, maybe I can try this whole deal again. But this is not like dropping out of a 5K

•Better luck next time.

Better luck next time? It was so bad it was funny, and I laughed for a good 10 minutes. It felt good not to be sobbing for a bit.

To be fair, most of us aren’t working with enough information to offer up truly helpful advice, because we don’t seem to know a ton about how babies get made, or how often miscarriage and stillbirth happens, or why. When I told people my baby died, many people related stories of miscarriage or stillbirth—either they’d experienced it, or knew someone who had. Our bodies are complicated, and a lot can go wrong. But nobody talks about it openly. 

People really want to be helpful. Our friends and family lifted us up, in every way possible. They were there for us. They listened to us. They made sure that we had food to eat, and that our son had a funeral. They were steadfast and understanding, all while I was angry, and sad, and generally awful to be around. That meant the world.

This is not meant to be just about babies dying. The Big Grief can sneak up on any one of us, for a whole host of reasons. This just happens to be mine.  

I can only hope in the future I can be there for others like they were there for me.

Obama recently joked to a newly married woman that it takes 10 years to train a man properly for marriage, and patience is required. It was a real humdinger: a Sad Trombone Moment of Inadvertent Sexism that reinforces the idea that men don't grow up until women make them grow up.

The joke happened at a recent stop at an Indiana steel plant, and was tweeted by political news editor at the Washington Post, Rebecca Sinderbrand:

Obama, on his advice to a newly-married woman: "It takes about 10 years to train a man properly, so you've got to be patient with him....

— Rebecca Sinderbrand (@sinderbrand) October 3, 2014

More Obama, on men: "Eventually we learn, but it takes us a little longer, because we're not as smart"

— Rebecca Sinderbrand (@sinderbrand) October 3, 2014

(Yes yes, I know that "married person advice" bit from POTUS is so old it can probably buy its own beer..)

— Rebecca Sinderbrand (@sinderbrand) October 3, 2014

She's right — that joke is as stale as your grandpa's beer farts, which wouldn't be so bothersome if it weren't for the fact that men still haven't been trained super hot for domestic life. As Kelsey McKinney notes at Vox, recent surveys show women still do more housework than men, and double the physical care of children daily (if the children are under 6). McKinney writes:

What President Obama is suggesting, really, is that women — on top of dealing with internet trolls, domestic abuse, higher rates of sexual assault, and being paid less than men for the same work — must also deal with the mighty task of reforming all of the world's males into decent husbands.

Hey, what's one more menial task around the house, ladies? The 10 years you should be 'training for marriage' are called childhood," Jezebel's Erin Ryan wrote to me in a chat earlier, "which is the same time that you should be training to BE A FUCKING GROWN UP."

Amen. Learning how to be, at bare minimum, a decent, contributing person in a relationship/household shouldn't have anything to do with gender, but unfortunately we still build this into girl play as if women are the only people who need to know how to be good at it. Dolls, little kitchen sets, helper roles that pair girls with mommies to navigate domestic life make what should be considered good future adult traits into good future wife traits. What are we teaching boys? To be polite and nice, sure, but what about the everyday shit—the ironing, the scheduling, the laundry, the grocery shopping? This is not a man or woman thing. It's a person thing.

And is this not 101 Adult stuff at this point? My husband is in his early thirties and was raised to clean and split household duties, so I am always disappointed to learn that men's time investment in housework has not significantly altered in nearly 30 years.

I know, right? Everything is better, men are doing all the things! They cook now! They wear their infants! They stay at home! But apparently they still will not scrub a floor without supervision. I wrote about this before and will reiterate the sentiment again: Any man physically capable of cleaning who does not clean due to anything gendered is full of shit. Or old. Or both.

What is to be done? Of course, a popular solution often issued to deal with the problem of men not cleaning is that women should simply clean less. The old even-the-score approach. Stephen Marche argued for it once, on the premise that men simply cannot be bothered to do it ever and so this is the woman's only real recourse. And more recently, over at the Telegraph, Reni Eddo-Lodge says:

Have you ever wondered what amazing things you could have done with all the energy you've dedicated to housework, propping up the lives of people who don't even notice that you're doing it?

It's why today, as we absorb the news that women are still doing the lion's share of work in the home, I'm urging you to stop. Stop giving. Let the dishes accumulate. Stop sacrificing your time. Stop waking up that little bit earlier to do the laundry. Down your tools. Walk out. Go to the pub. Go on strike. It is only through a collective withdrawal of labour that those who rely on us will realise how vital our work is.

I think there is some merit in revisiting how clean a house really needs to be. There is functional cleanliness and there is Pinterest, ok? And yes, I believe most of us could let the place go for a bit and everything would not descend into the utter chaos we imagine. I also think many people could live in smaller spaces with less stuff and reduce the amount of upkeep a house takes, too. These approaches benefit everyone rather than just making it easier for the household Bartleby.

But overwhelmingly, simply cleaning less still lets men off the hook and doesn't really solve anything. Care must be taken. Families must be tended to. And suggesting that we merely stop caring as much also diminishes the value of domestic life, which is, by the way, a worthwhile, valid thing to participate in. The issue is the way what is still largely considered women's work is valued, or rather, not valued at all. Women are not better suited to cleaning, they are simply trained to do it from an early age. Like learning a foreign language at birth, anyone exposed enough to the mechanics of it will pick it up just fine.

The fault here is any parent who doesn't feel this is essential training for boys, too. Women should not have to convince men of the merits of cleaning anymore than they should be convinced of the value of being able to change a tire. It is a parents job to raise self sufficient children. I'm looking at you previous generations, who for whatever reason, felt your sons did not need to know or take pride in — an egalitarian, clean, well run home. The sooner we teach men and women to both to be autonomous and self sufficient, the less we rely on beer fart stereotypes about our differences in the domestic realm. And the sooner we can all get shit done and focus on where the genders are truly divergent: puppeteering.

Illustration by Tara Jacoby

In any other of the 49 states, a football fan might express his admiration for the game with a bumper sticker, a custom jersey or—at the very most—a festively painted beer belly. But in Florida, the home of nude beach blow job jet ski fights, nothing less than a psycho full head tattoo will do, like the one seen here on St. Petersburg's Victor Thompson.

Thompson, who's previously spoken with Deadspin about his permanent Tom Brady tribute, was arrested last month for alleged possession of Spice, the synthetic marijuana favored by teenagers and hungry dog murderers. In an arrest report obtained by The Smoking Gun, police made note of this most distinguished of distinguishing features, describing it as "Tattoo Head-Patriots Football Helmet."

It took four different booking photos to fully document Thompson's impressively accurate tattoo. The Smoking Gun notes it even includes "the small green dot indicating that a helmet is equipped with an electronic device allowing its wearer to receive plays from the sideline."

Of course, as Thompson's choice of headgear suggests, the New Hampshire native isn't originally from Florida, but (as is the case with many of the state's crazy-eyed colonists) was drawn there like a bat-shit moth to a bonkers flame.

[Image via Pinellas County Sheriffs Dept.]

A human fedora hat in Chicago posted an open letter to Craigslist reminding the women of his city to smile and dress pretty so he can assault you with this unwanted advances. You know, helpful, necessary advice.

It reads:

Dear Single Women of Chicago,

You hear that, ladies? Just the single ones. Because if he doesn't have a a shot at sleeping with you, you don't exist. Also, apparently this asshole has some sort of special creep power where he is able to tell whether or not a woman is in a relationship simply by the clothes she's wearing.

Fall is now upon us, bringing aspects that make it among my favorite times of the year: when you ladies break out the sexy boots, don stylish flared skirts with leggings, and wrap yourself in lush wool or cashmere sweaters that coyly accentuate your bosom.

The only appropriate response I have to that drivel is:

I'm dying to stop you on the street and pay you the occasional compliment ("You're really rocking that tweed dress today - I love your style."). But I can't - because you're always walking around with your damn earbuds in ("Don't talk to me!") and your sunglasses on, even when they're not necessary (which incidentally doesn't make you look cool or sexy, only unapproachable). I can't speak for my male brethren, but for this guy? So. Frustrating.

Little does this idiot know that he's confirming to women around the globe that the tactics we've developed to avoid street harassment are working. They're wearing the earbuds to ward off men exactly like you, genius. You ever notice how women don't wear earbuds when they're out to brunch with friends? Or when they're with someone they actually like? Maybe there's something to that.

You'll note that our Pickup Artist Academy dropout made note of his deep frustration. This truly is the crux of street harassment and most unwanted attention women receive: men thinking that anybody gives a god damn about their frustration.

That women exist for men—for their personal enjoyment and visual pleasure and that we must all find a solution when a man is not getting exactly what he wants.

That ending street harassment requires men to just exercise some fucking impulse control and they simply don't feel that they should have to.

A greater effort needs to be made to inform men that the world is not concerned with pleasing you. Random women on the street are not concerned with pleasing you. Women owe you nothing. I understand that having grown up in a patriarchal society, this is difficult news to process, but you are irrelevant to the vast majority of women you come in contact with and the sooner your realize that, the better.

The level of presumptuousness and self-involvement that one must possess in order to believe that women you don't even know should alter their behavior to please you is the height of penis delusion.

So, take my unsolicited missive here for what it's worth. I just hope it improves the odds going forward that at least one of you will be in a better position to hear me tell you that I love the way that scarf matches your eyes.

Your unsolicited advice is worth nothing and none of those women give a fuck what you think of their scarves, you Tucker Max blowup doll.

He signs the letter:

Your 40 Year-Old, Male, Single, 5'10", Fit, Bald, Caucasian, Hazel-Eyed, Overeducated, Nice Dressing, Wine- and Food-Obsessed, West Loop-living Secret Admirer

You can't even make fun of that! That description, much like this man's entire existence, in and of itself is a glorious, nightmarish joke.

P.S.: Oh, and by the way, it'd be nice if your default expression was a smile - or, at worst, a merely neutral expression - instead of a scowl that says, "I'll cut you off at the knees if you try to talk to me." C'mon, is life really that bad? Just sayin'.

Ah, yes, truly no attempt at policing the behavior of women is complete without telling them to smile.

This guy is clearly a moron and in many ways his letter is funny, but this type of behavior really is dangerous. A woman just died because she refused to give a man her phone number for Christ's sake.

While those spoofs and videos about an alternate world where women are the ones who street harasses men are funny, they miss the point. Street harassment isn't just uncomfortable or annoying. It can be very scary. Why is this guy stopping me? What if he doesn't take no for an answer? What if he follows me home? What if he tries to grab me? These are questions that women ask themselves every single day as they just try to get to work or pick up a carton of milk. Behavior like this is a direct threat to our ability to go about living our lives without constant anxiety.

Finally, to the menace to society who wrote this letter, I want to say one more thing: perhaps the reason all those women are scowling is because men like you won't leave them the fuck alone.

Image via Shutterstock/Laborant; gif via.

For women, it is not uncommon to be on the receiving end of a typical catcall, wolf whistle, or “damn, girl!” from a male stranger. All too often, we get these unwarranted “compliments” simply because we are females walking down the street. 

I found myself in this all-too-familiar situation walking to my car last Friday. It was about 8 o’clock in the evening, and thanks to the sudden onset of fall, it was relatively dark. Having just gotten my hair done (blondes have more fun, amiright?), I was wearing comfortable clothing and a bare face. Who wants to get their makeup hosed off by the hairdresser when they wash your hair? Not this gal!

 My hair in all of its chemically-enhanced glory.

I stepped into my car, made sure my doors were locked, and turned the key into the ignition.

Out of NOWHERE emerged a group of several boys, probably all around 11 years old (some were wearing T-shirts with the local middle school logo emblazoned on the front). Immediately, they descended upon my car, pounding on the windows, jiggling the door handles, and making obscene thrusting gestures with their hips. One of them stuck his tongue out and proceeded to lick my window.

I froze. 

My first reaction was not one of anger, or even irritation.

It was fear. Yes, that’s right, I was afraid of a group of boys significantly younger than I.

What if they get into the car? What will they do to me? Can I overtake them? Should I call someone? WHAT SHOULD I DO?!

Not wanting to peel away in my Honda for fear of running them over and being convicted of murder, I laid down on my horn. The noise, surprising the little shits, sent them scurrying away -- laughing all the while, mind you. Heart pounding, I pulled out and drove home as quickly as possible.

Not only had my poor car felt violated, but I had as well.

I didn’t tell anyone about the incident, because I was (and still am, to an extent) embarrassed. Embarrassed that a group of schoolboys could incite fear within my heart, leaving me breathless and filled with dread. The idea that these boys posed as a serious threat to my safety, in my mind, is humiliating. 

 What I now keep in my car to fend off further harassers (or middle-school boys)

“Boys will be boys.” A phrase most commonly used to justify the behavior of male youth. Is this what I can pin their actions down too? Boys simply “being boys”?

Or does this run deeper? Is the rape culture that is so prevalent in our society making its way to younger generations? Are young boys becoming so influenced by the misogyny found in today’s media that they feel in a position of power to harass females? If they deem it acceptable to sexually harass older females, what could they possibly be doing to girls their own age?

I shouldn’t have to see a group of grade school boys walking around my suburban neighborhood and feel afraid. But now I do, and in all honesty, that shames me.

And I hate it.

Have any of you readers ever been involved in a situation like this before? How did you react?

The great state of Kansas is $200 in the hole, but not to worry. A creative maneuver aims to fill that hole and a few more by auctioning off some sex toys from a seized business.

Governor Sam Brownbeck is facing both pressure and ridicule after his tax cuts landed the state in some major debt, leading the administration to start selling assets seized from various businesses who failed to pay taxes. Pretty normal, right? Um, almost! As the Kansas City Star reports, it looks like one of those businesses was an adult store, so there are some pretty sexy items up for sale at the moment:

"The online site lists about 400 lots — individual lots contain can dozens of items — that include the Pipedream Fantasy Love Swing, books, hundreds of DVDs, sex and drinking games, a wide assortment of sexually oriented equipment, the carrying cases for devices, the Glass Pleasure Wand, bundles of lingerie and the Cyberskin Foot Stroker."

I guess you could call Kansas a swing state. Because I was curious if the Foot Stroker was a foot-shaped stroker or some device that strokes your foot, I looked it up. It's a foot-shaped sex toy. Nice.

Unsurprisingly, Democrats have been taking some pretty gleeful potshots—this shit is just too easy:

"Brownback is so desperate to fill the massive hole in the state budget caused by his reckless income tax cuts that the state of Kansas is now in the porn business," said Senate Democratic Leader Anthony Hensley. "This is the same governor whose supporters spent this past week attacking his opponent for a strip club incident that happened 16 years ago."

(The strip club incident in question? Kansas gubernatorial candidate Paul Davis, Brownback's opponent went to a strip club one time when he was 26. That's it.)

Anyway, great job, Kansas. Glad to see you're taking this one head on. OR SHOULD I SAY DILDO ON?

Image via Shutterstock.

Ever get the feeling that the general lack of pockets on your lady clothing is a conspiracy designed specifically to keep you from advancing by rendering you less effective? You were right. The jig is up. No pockets = sexism. But this may all finally be changing thanks to an unexpected factor: The size of the new iPhone.

The iPhone 6 Plus, at 5.5-plus inches, is "unpocketable" for many, but especially for women, who've complained about the size being too big for both pants and hands. It's also definitely too big for wearing on arms during exercise. Glamour reports that some brands are looking at changing their clothing to accommodate it, even if no one has a firm pocket plan quite yet. Writes Leah Melby:

Mashable connected with some of today's retailers to ask whether they were working on a pocket solution. "We try to consider every aspect of the way our customers live their lives, and changing mobile technology is no exception," J.Crew's Tom Mora said. "We think about all these details, whether it's new tech accessories or special interior pockets to carry the various generations."

A representative from American Eagle said that the current pocket of men's jeans already fit both sizes of the larger iPhones and "women's is still being evaluated."

Hesitation noted, American Eagle. I have beef, though, that has nothing to do with the size of the new iPhone: This is far from the first reason we've had to consider adding real pockets to women's clothing. This is a longstanding problem all women have endured for our entire lives. Women going pocketless is an under-addressed, silent epidemic that has infantilized us all and given us a big giant baby's purse to deal with in its stead.

Humor me: I want you to remember the last time you bought a piece of clothing with pockets. Real ones. Usable ones, ones that actually fit things, like the standard night out's keys + phone + ID + lip gloss/compact. It is a rare thing, no? Maybe an A-line dress or skirt, something vintage with a full-bodied lower half. And the moment you discovered that not only was the fabric perfect, the fit amazing, but here were ACTUAL FUNCTIONING pockets, let me ask you: Was it not the greatest moment of your life? Did it not add a skip to your step? Were you not astonished each time you reached down and slid your hands into the outrageously useful fabric compartment? When women complimented you on the outfit, did you not reveal to them with exclamatory glee that it also possessed something unexpected and lovely? And was that thing not pockets?

And then: Did you not also try to tell a man about these pockets, and did he not mutter something indifferent or ignorant, such as, "Oh cool," or, "Sounds great," because he has had nothing if not pockets on everything he has ever worn his entire life and could not even comprehend your joy? And did you not shake with rage at the thought of it? I know I'm not alone; I just spent 10 minutes on chat with friends lamenting the lack of pockets, and all of us agree it's a lifelong battle.

The occasional H&M dress or Anthropologie skirt might have them. A jersey dress at Target. And make no mistake: It is sexist to assume all women will carry a pocketbook, or that for all women in nearly all situations, that aesthetic matters more than functionality. Don't get me wrong: I love purses. I love them. I also happen to not want to carry one most of the time.

Over at the Atlantic, in a piece called "The Gender Politics of Pockets," author Tanya Basu has my back:

This isn't a new problem for women. Our skinny jeans have pockets, but there is no way an object bigger than a standard issue ID card fits in the front, and everyone knows that slipping a phone in your back pocket is an invitation for a treacherous dive into a toilet, or a backflip resulting in heartbreaking shatters. Purses have enclosures that were once suitable for the flip phone generation but have since become too snug for newer models. Throwing it into the main compartment seems risky, at best.

But the biggest problem might be the lack of pockets in the first place: women's slacks, dresses, and blazers often have no pockets, or worse, "fake" pockets that serve no utilitarian purpose besides sartorially leading the wearer on to believe they have a handy wardrobe aide, until it's too late.

She asks, point blank: how could any industry purporting to cater to women actually serve them so poorly? The fashion industry, at least in the mid-range, is male-dominated. Their concerns are design and drape, not form and function. Basu spoke with Camilla Olson, creative director at a fashion firm:

"I honestly believe the fashion industry is not helping women advance," Olson said. And the lack of functional designs for women is one example. "We [women] know clearly we need pockets to carry technology and I think it's expected we are going to carry a purse. When we're working we don't carry purses around. A pocket is a reasonable thing."

Basu also speaks with Sara Kozlowski at the Council of Fashion Designers of America, who blames fast-fashion for copying higher end designs but omitting the functionality. That would be reassuringly simple as answers go, if pockets ever were a priority, and in my lifetime, that has never been the case. (They are, interestingly, more prevalent in clothes for my preschool-age daughter, which is great for her to collect rocks, bugs, and leaves in).

Back to Basu:

Olson says that some designers have deemed pockets "too ugly" for clothing, while others simply don't think women need them. And these decisions, she says, have created a chasm in women's fashion, and hold women back.

A man can simply swipe up his keys and iPhone on the way to a rendezvous with co-workers and slip them into his pocket. A woman on the way to that same meeting has to either carry those items in her hand, or bring a whole purse with her—a definitive, silent sign that she is a woman.

Take a minute and consider this. It is a real amount of extra energy and work to manage your stuff when it must be carted around in this way. Everything takes longer: You remember your purse in the first place. You get stuff out of your purse, you put it back in. You find a place to put your purse. You pick out a purse. You buy purses. Pockets—real, usable pockets—would change our lives.

And while it's great that the iPhone 6 is forging this potential shift, Basu says not to expect any swift change (or at least not before Fall 2015 given the typical design-to-street timetable).

And even then, there is the issue of the aesthetics of adding pockets, or rather, balancing them with functionality. Pockets are not always "the ideal solution":

Women's pockets are often located near the hip area, where many women would prefer not to attract attention. For that problem, Olson thinks a holster-type of product would work best—a compromise between having a purse and placing an unsightly bulge around what is culturally perceived in the West as a "problem area."

But this is not a pocket, it's an accessory, and I don't want to carry a purse for the same reason I don't want to wear a holster or a fanny pack. Do not mention the cross-body purse to me—it's a terrific boob separator, but it's still a purse! Kozlowski tells Basu that active brands have come up with clever ways to incorporate storage into women's clothing that manages to remain elegant — always with the elegance — and perhaps they can offer insight. I submit that in this area, we can have both form and function more often. But the real reason is that pockets are just not considered super feminine.

Camilla Olson tells Basu:

"Things are just more aesthetically driven to silhouette and embellishment and approach to design in general," she said. "I have to remind my students [if they're designing a] $5000 coat that they might want a pocket."

But as long as we go without pockets, we are stuck holding the literal bag.

Illustration by Tara Jacoby.

It all sort of happened by accident, working in games and technology. I’m really a novelist, but a friend of a friend was looking for someone to write a new game and it sounded amazing and exciting, and… here I am. And I love it.

There are different kinds of sexism in literary publishing and technology. I mean, they’re both sexist, it’s just that publishing is female-dominated and technology is male-dominated, so the sexism in publishing is the type where women have femininity forced upon them: “Be a proper woman, write about love and have a flower on your book jacket” and the sexism in technology is of the deny-femininity type (“be a man and if you’re not a man, at least pretend”). Of the two, I actually find the sexism in technology mildly less offensive.

But I think the fact I never really intended to have a career in tech has helped me there: At least I didn’t go in with any wide-eyed shiny ideas about how amazing things were going to be. And, after all, I’d come from a background as an Orthodox Jew—where I literally had to sit behind a curtain with the other women in my synagogue—and then went to Oxford University, which retains many of the charms of the 17th century, including a misogynistic attitude to women and occasional period-authentic anti-Semitism.

I think these things made me strong. Seriously. No one in tech has ever been as sexist toward me as teachers and rabbis before I was 12 years old. But I’ve come to notice more and more how working within the particular masculine sexism of the tech industry has nudged the way I present myself, just a little. I’ve noticed how, very slowly, I’ve started to acquiesce into playing roles that get assigned to me. I’ve noticed how I disappear behind these masks.

What follows is not a horror story. It’s a series of moments.

They’re not accusations. They’re just my stories.

In my very first games job, I ended up being lead writer for an innovative, futuristic game called Perplex City.

I had a series of interviews, and did some test writing. The task was to come up with a set of new characters to join the existing roster of four men and three women. So I thought, just to be equal, I’d balance it out with three men and four women. After all, it was set in a technological future-utopia.

And I had a feeling—just a little bit of a feeling—that this was going to be a thing.

I had my meeting with the bosses, Adrian and Michael. They were complimentary. I longed for this job. And then Michael ran one hand through his mop of hair and said: “Just one thing… we thought this was a bit… women-heavy.” Adrian nodded.

I’d come prepared. I pulled out of my bag a chart on which I listed all the characters in two columns, men and women. You could see — I pointed out — that they were exactly, precisely equal.

I was terrified. If they thought I was a troublemaker, if they felt that I’d made them uncomfortable, if they had been somewhat less than decent human beings, this job—the job that I really, really wanted—would be gone.

“Oh,” said Michael.

“Right,” said Adrian.

And, to be fair to them, they gave me the job and never brought the subject up again.

I actually love being this kind of Strident Feminist Who Takes No Shit. She’s not exactly me, but she’s pretty close to me. I wanted equality, I got equality, I risked something I really wanted in order to get it. Go me.

But people are often scared of this kind of woman; more scared than actual feminism warrants. Talking about the patriarchy tends to have a slightly terrifying effect. I don’t really mind; I quite like being scary. But I know that partly I pretend to be this cast-iron SFWTNS because it protects the tender self within; my actual feminism worries as much about men as about women, and comes from compassion not anger. But, well, sometimes being scary is easier than exposing one’s soft-heartedness.

Oh yes, I’ve done this one. More times than I can count, I’ve found myself not mentioning the games I like to play around gamer dudebros, because if I talk about Diner Dash that’ll make them notice that I’m a woman. I’ve slogged my way through hours of playing games that did nothing for me, and I’ve attempted to take part in conversations about games that bored me senseless.

In fact, though, being One of the Boys haunts me more in shame than in success. I can’t do it very well, and I feel guilty about all the ways I fail at it.

I’ve felt ashamed of the fact that I really have no spatial awareness (God, it’s so female of me) and can’t aim a rifle for shit. I’ve attempted to conceal the truth that when I play Mass Effect, I’m mostly limited to getting lost and only finding the battle after my henches have already fought and won it.

I feel ashamed of these things because they’re things that are associated with being a woman. Masculine culture, you see: It’s not OK to admit to not being good at things. I find myself backed into that corner, attempting bravado, pretending at competence.

Of course sometimes it’s downright dangerous to pretend to understand what’s going on. You might be convincing. It might not bite you on the backside. Or you might get yourself into really serious trouble, promising things you could never deliver.

In general, I’d rather ask questions and look stupid than keep quiet and not understand what someone’s talking about. So, even if I’m the only woman in an otherwise male group, I stick my hand up and go, “Could you just explain?”

And that’s where a thing happens… not always, but some of the time. I feel a shift in the atmosphere. There’s something mildly gleeful about it. A man has been asked by a woman to explain something! Yes! This is the right way round! Poor her, she does need it explained to her! We should go slowly! We should check frequently to make sure she’s got it now!

It’s related to the phenomenon that occurs when I meet people — both men and women — and tell them I write games. “Write games?” they sometimes say, “You mean you do the programming?” “Well no.” I say, “I have done a tiny bit of coding in my time, but no, I come up with the ideas and write the stories.”

Sometimes, at that moment, I detect a microexpression of relief. It’s odd. I think about it now and feel a pulse across my temples. It makes me feel that I’ve admitted to knowing nothing, or at least nothing that would be surprising, nothing that would cause a re-evaluation of my skills. Somehow it’s easier to bear me if I know less.

This is my most hated persona of all. It’s so female to be a victim, it’s so everything I was always taught to be afraid of, it’s so see what happens when you walk down that dark alley?

But I have been a victim. I’ve been paid less than men I worked with who contributed less to the project. I’ve been sexually harassed by weird men I met through work who, despite my requests, would not stop sending me vagina-related texts.

I remember one particularly bad day at a games conference. The event was, as is typical, about 10 percent female. At the start of the day, one of those “I’m just really touchy-feely” men put his hands where I had not invited them when we were crushed together in a crowded corridor. Then, in a talk, one dude took it upon himself to give a very detailed and enthusiastic account of a “rape game” he’d invented—where you had to stare deeply into the eyes of the “other player” while describing to them how you’re going to rape them, until they tell you to stop. It was genuinely traumatizing to hear the glee in his voice as he talked about it. Shaken, I went to sit in a quiet, empty room to regain my composure. A well-built man at least a foot taller than me came in, sat between me and the door and said: “You know, I messaged you on OKCupid but you never messaged me back.” By this point I genuinely felt too afraid to tell him to just fuck off. So I played nice and smiled and apologized.

And then I left, and went to sit in a park, and never went back.

I spoke to the event organizers afterwards. They, of course, were horrified. They wanted to help. Did I want to name names? (I did not.) Did I want to suggest ways this event could be different? (I could not.)

“Woman as victim” is such a familiar persona. I can feel it settling on my shoulders (even as another voice in my ear, the voice of shame, says “For god’s sake, nothing bad happened to you, stop complaining”). I become a thing. People want to feel good about how they respond to a victim. It becomes important for the problem to be fixed, and for me to acknowledge that they’ve done well and sorted it out and now it’s all OK. But being the victim of something doesn’t mean I have all the answers about how to stop it.

I hate men coming to my defense. I hate having to tell these stories. I hate admitting that I was shaken and upset. I hate the look in people’s eyes when I tell them these stories. I hate being put into this position and I hate talking about it. This is the nature of masculine sexism: Vulnerability is wrong.

And that leads me to the last role I’ve ended up playing: the woman who tells her male friends, “Yeah, there are bad dudes out there, but you’re OK. Many men are beastly, but you’re one of the good guys.” It’s amazing how hard it is for me even now, even writing this piece, not to tell you all that if you are a man who is reading this, you’re probably OK.

The truth is, none of us is OK, not really. The best, most dear, most thoughtful and engaged and open and feminist men in my life have occasionally come out with some statement that’s made me gasp. Then again, so have almost all the women.

I’ve finally come to realize this simple fact: Sexism is not a quality of individuals, it is a quality of the society we live in. It exists in every cultural product, in every grouping, in every brain in our culture. I know, I know, that’s not what you want to hear. It’s not comforting.

It’d be comforting to believe that we could take those damn sexists (or racists, or transphobes, or ableists) and send them away and make a society of beauty and wholeness without them. But that’s not how it goes. We all grew up in a society that ascribes particular attributes to men and women, and ascribes men a higher value than women.

I’ll tell you a secret: I’m sexist, too. When I write Zombies, Run! I routinely find that I’ve put in more male characters than female. Even me. Even with all that I think about this stuff. Then I count the women (because the only way to pick up on this is to count) and I gender flip some of the male characters and make them women. And then—and this is the kicker—when I read back over those newly-female characters, even though I was the one who made them, even though I know I just did a little “turn the outie into an innie” on them, even despite that, I judge the female characters more harshly. The clever science professor suddenly reads as fussy and petulant when she’s female. The badass James Bond–type dude reads as a bitch when she’s a woman. Even to me. That’s what we’re working with here.

It turns out that this has been one of the hardest pieces I’ve ever written. I didn’t expect it to be, because I write and talk about feminist stuff all the time. But it is, because I, too, am a sexist, and I think it’s better to be strong (masculine value) than to be vulnerable (feminine value). This is why I feel more comfortable in the enforced masculinity of tech than in the enforced femininity of flowery novel jackets. Writing this piece, I realized that I didn’t want to admit to what I don’t know, to the little tricks I use, to the women I pretend to be. It feels like laying down my weapons and entering the world unarmed.

However. Perhaps that’s what we have to do. If a problem in tech is that we all have to pretend to be so damn masculine all the time, perhaps a little bit of vulnerability is just what we need. Perhaps these things only start with someone laying down their weapons. Perhaps sometimes you have to trust that if you do that, no one’s going to just pick up a broadsword and eviscerate you. I guess we’ll see.

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When I found out I was pregnant, Milly, our nine-year-old cockapoo, was the first to know. She was sitting at my feet in our bathroom, waiting rather impatiently to go outside for a walk. As I squinted, anxious to see if a second line might appear on the pee stick, it occurred to me that I was probably more sure about getting a dog almost a decade ago than I was about the idea of having a child now.

The very first time my husband and I saw Milly, she was curled up in such a tight ball that we couldn’t tell where she began and where she ended. She was a little circle of black and white fluff that made us squeal like school children. Her saucer-shaped puppy eyes and inexplicably long eyelashes peered out from under her old-man eyebrows and our hearts went from solid, functioning muscular organs to oatmeal-grade mush.

She was our dog. 

I dare you to look at this face for more than 5 seconds and not melt.

We took her home one year after we were married, and people would often ask if she was “practice” for having a child. The answer, truly and honestly, was no. We just really wanted a dog. And Milly wasn’t practice for anything at all. She was a real-time floppy embodiment of our heart and souls and from the minute she pranced through our front door she has filled our lives with an unreal amount of happiness.

So as my eyes darted back and forth from her pathetic, take-me-on-a-goddamn-walk face to the second pink line that was slowly revealing that there was a teeny human growing in my uterus, I kind of freaked out and. As I am wont to do when it comes to Milly, I asked her opinion.

“Doodlebug! What do you think about a baby?!” I expressed this to her with the same zeal I applied to treats and walks, which riled her up enough to circle my ankles and bark at absolutely nothing in general.

A little time passed and we began sharing our news with family and friends, and it surprised me how quickly Milly’s name and, apparently, her place in our universe, was thrown into the conversation. Here are a few gems that stuck in my craw:

“Oh, once that little baby comes, you’ll forget you ever had a dog!” (Correct! I will promptly erase the last nine-plus years of my life so I may better focus on the raising of my child.)

“Don’t be surprised when whole days go by and you don’t even walk her!” (I’m assuming that the person who said this spent those “whole days” either ankle-deep in all sorts of dog excrement and/or gingerly leaping over massive piles of canine mess.)

“I had a friend who gave her dog away one week after having her son. She couldn’t stand having that thing around.” (That “thing”? Couldn’t stand? Gave away? Wait, what? Find new friends, girl.)

“If you think you love Milly, just wait until you meet this baby!” (Because I couldn’t possibly find it in my shriveled, frigid raisin heart to love two adorable things at once!)

It goes without saying that being pregnant often brings about a slew of unwanted and unnecessary advice from people you know and strangers alike, but it shocked me (and grated on my hormone-riddled nerves) that people were so quick to discount our poor pooch and write her off forever. It seemed to me akin to telling parents who were about to have a second child that their first children were like the first batch of burnt pancakes. Just go ahead and toss ’em! You have new, shiny babies coming! Who needs the old ones?!

As long as we were there with her, she found her new nooks and settled in. Her philosophy has always been, “You guys hanging out? I’ll hang out.”

When we bingewatched “House Of Cards”, I’m pretty sure she formed major opinions about Francis and Claire’s relationship.

Milly’s personality is, at once, fiercely loyal and shockingly contrary. There is a chance that when I call her name and pat the empty space next to me, she will stand up and pointedly walk away to the furthest corner possible. Or, she might walk right over and curl up next to me so tight and with such loving conviction that I vow never to move from that spot. I have spent many an afternoon risking severe nerve damage from various limbs falling asleep as well as borderline-fatal UTIs because I’ve had to go to the bathroom but don’t want to move for fear of losing snuggle time. 

I find such great comfort in Milly. I’m not sure if it’s simple familiarity or the fact that she looks like a stuffed animal come to life, but I’ve always felt calmer with her around. Having spent a great deal of time in hospitals, a place where dogs are strictly forbidden, I can tell you that the thing I missed most, more than the comfort of my own bed or the idea of not being woken up at 3:30 a.m. to have my blood drawn, was my sweet, little dog.

When she isn’t in the house, there’s an emptiness that is completely unsettling. I’ll listen for the jingle of her collar or the clicking of her paws on the hardwood floor and, when I hear neither, my heart sinks a bit. This feeling has existed for almost a decade and I doubt it will go away just because another person enters the picture.

I fully recognize that things will change. For example, I probably won’t have time for our regularly scheduled conversations where I ask her, repeatedly, why her nose is so delicious or who made her so cute. (All valid questions, people). But Milly will continue to be, as she has been, a very important member of our small clan.

So next time you see a pregnant woman walking her dog down the street, keep all your dog-and baby-based opinions to yourself and stick to awkwardly petting her belly like the other strangers. Or, better yet, just pet her dog.

*In her defense, the packing tape had it coming. It had the nerve to deny her access to her toys and food. Not cool, packing tape.