Today I’m officially launching a paid subscription to Maybe Baby. The TLDR is: For $5 a month you’ll get my weekly newsletter, my monthly Q&A column Dear Baby, and access to the Maybe Baby podcast. You’ll also be helping keep this space alive and ad-free.
and hehe i've seen that poorly worn slippers meme across the internets, but it was always with the context of growing up in an East Asian, Desi, Latinx, or Black family. I guess some things are both specific and universal!
that normal people essay!!! never have i been so overwhelmingly stricken by something i so whole-heartedly disagree with. it’s so bad that i’m immediately printing it out to keep it for posterity.
Watch the episode about aliens/alien abductions in the Unsolved Mysteries reboot! I promise it does not incite the rage or sadness that comes with an unsolved murder. Also it’s based in the Berkshires, MA where I’m from so obvi biased but nonetheless! It’s a strange and fun stand-alone episode, and worth the viewing. The truth is out there 👽
a question (which is mostly about me, sorry): I haven't written in a long time. It used to be "what I do" - not for work, just for fun. It was who I was, really. (Note: When I went to type "used", I actually wrote "should" and now I feel read to filth by my own mind). But now every word and every sentence feel stuck in my throat, and if they ever make it to the page, I cringe and feel embarrassed that I somehow didn't produce a Booker Prize winning piece of writing in five seconds, when I haven't written in two years. I have been so inspired by Maybe Baby (thank you for writing it by the way, it's always exactly what I need to hear and read), and I've been toying with the idea of forcing myself to put out something like a newsletter, even if I'm the only one who reads it. So my seriously long-winded question is: How can I trust my own voice? How do I know I'm doing something right/writing something of value? Does it ever stop feeling self-indulgent?
Hello! First time commenter. I just wanted to say I appreciated the journey you had with your mother in having your view/idea of your mother expanding after realizing she was much more complex than the basic "live laugh love" decor she kept. I connected with this because I also had a lot of moments where I recognize and acknowledge I have more freedom and access to opportunities that my mom didn't have with her life circumstances, but despite her lack of access/opportunity, that she also is an active and critical thinker. I think that I had been coming from the stereotypical mindset that because my mother is so traditional, her default state is to be very easily placated and to not question or think about things more critically. Learning about my own mother's context has been very helpful and illuminating as it helps me in drawing parallels between our generations.
I think your mom's perspective on the gratitude thing is really interesting, and I think I see what she's saying.
Even before the Bando, Manrepeller, The Wing, Outdoor Voices fiascos, it bothered me that buying cutesy stuff was promoted as if it helped in any meaningful way. Later on it seemed like some Instagram famous CEOs of consumeristic companies thought that by showing their authentic anxious selves they were showing that you can be sad and and like happy cute stuff at the same time. Unfortunately, I think it's very rare for the purchasing of fashion and accessories to be anything emotionally gratifying (there are rare exceptions), and to pretend that it is, is some icky grand rationalization. I love buying pretty stuff, conscious that it's a vanity drug, not because it makes me a better person. The uncomfortable feeling is that these aforementioned anxious CEOs never bothered to figure out the root of their depression and look for external cures and justifications, which are never sustainable. Has anyone ever thought, yea maybe I doing selfish jealous signaling person things, yes I am still redeemable, but am I willing to travel the improvement road?
I think also, in the midst of this consumerism there's quite a lot of pressure to have some great internal pain and produce lots of public introspection and kind of cultivate it rather than try to remedy it.
I promise I don't have it out for Garance but like, she had this diabetes scare a few years ago, that caused her to write a bunch of articles about how in the future everyone's going to be living on, like, acai bowls and health food and so on. But she mentioned her stringent self-improvement regime to avoid eating sugar etc. and she mentioned having like five different kinds of therapists of varying degrees of woowoo (apparently everyone in LA has them - really, Garance, everyone? Everyone in LA?) and I remember thinking I hope she's seeing an actual doctor too, cause people were bullshitting what she was describing, on account of she was being incredibly dramatic about it, but yeah it did sound like insulin resistance. But it's like, neither the scandal, nor the response to it, addressed that. These women are adulated but they're also treated as utterly disposable by their audience.
Another thing that struck me is that there's this "feminist", in many many inverted commas, podcast in France called La Poudre where the host interviews a bunch of Important Women about their internal lives, and she's always kind of pushing for them to have some great internal conflict, like it's this reveal-all hard-hitting thing. And one thing is that she always asks them, following Virginia Woolf, if they have a room of their own. Bearing in mind the content of that fucking essay. Garance's answer was "yes, yes I think I do... inside myself". I'm just struck by this confluence of where food goes in, poop presumably comes out (or just arugula-induced crypt-keeper farts), and all this rich girl internal turmoil goes on.
Another time on that podcast they had Sophie Fontanel, successful novelist, former Elle editor and also known for striking some jauntily flexible poses in very nice clothes on Instagram and also for growing out her grey hair. And she also had to have some Great Internal Pain for the purposes of the interview. Like whatever you've done with your life, published novels, created a website that looks like a complementary airline luxury magazine (sorry Garance), it's always going to be what's coiled up inside of you stinking up the joint that's the most relevant - that makes you a Feminist or an Important Woman.
What also strikes me is that the "therapy" is, as you say, buying more cute things and doing self-care to create more and more coordinates to exactly pinpoint who you are. And then go looking for yourself in other people's work, and sometimes (often) dismiss it as "that's not really me" or "that wasn't made for me". Like don't you see yourself when you brush your teeth every morning? Don't you want to see something else for a change? What bothers me about the response is that we're supposed to be grateful for whoever represents us, which in the end is just a way to be better and more pleasantly targeted by a fundamentally rotten business model.
I just wanted to add a note that it'd be really useful to also add the release number to the adjoining podcast in the title name. I've been listening to the podcast and then returning to the newsletter to get the visual components or click on the links of the list of 15.
hi! as someone who feels like i’m just finally getting into the world of ~being an adult~ (whatever that means) i can’t express how much i love your newsletter, especially the q+a portions! that being said i unfortunately can’t contribute to it monetarily at the moment and would be so so grateful if you could put me on the list of comped subscribers 💗
hi! i tried a few times to reply directly to the email and got support emails back saying they didn’t go thru, so hopefully what i’ve done here (clicking reply straight from the email) will have done the trick. if not please let me know how to fix it!
Hi sophia, I'm so sorry for the trouble! I'm looking for an email reply rather than a comment because I need to ask for your email address in a non-public place! If it's easier you can send me a DM on Instagram! I'm @halemur
Haley, love the content like every week. Felt so identified with the email running out of space and my inability to let go of my precious emails! Best wishes from Argentina.
PD: I would like to please ask you to put me on the list of free suscribers, I cant afford right now to pay in dollars, but i am a huge fan of your work.
Hi fiona! Would you mind replying to the newsletter via email? That way I can get your email address for the waitlist! Thanks so much for your kind words.
Funny, I recently decided to revisit this minimalist / anti-consumerist blog I hadn't read in years, which I have something of a love-hate relationship with because, while I like picking up stuff like the zero-waste recipes (which can actually work out cheap), I find the good vibes completely oppressive, the way these people can go into quasi-religious aesthetic ecstasy over a toilet brush and just, how everything is simple, kind and balanced, and aesthetically perfectly imperfect.
And one of the recent posts I found was a "list of gratitudes", and it basically boiled down to a list of ways to consume - food, home decor, yoga. But through it (and the surrounding blog posts), you can kind of see a person just barely not spiraling off into anxiety due to fragile health, and some traumatic personal stuff that she's shared a little of. It's just weird reading about that stuff through lists of consumables, recipes for hair remedies, etc. and especially, lists of things to be grateful for, which she says she's been drawing up at regular intervals. My first thought was that she could maybe use a list of ingratitudes.
It also drives me nuts because that's one way I - and others - deal with depression when it strikes, is telling yourself all this positive pep talk stuff, all the while raging at it. So it feels like watching people so used to treating themselves like shit, so used to being grateful for the ways in which they've been deprived of anything but consumerism - so that their anti-consumerism manifests as even greater obsession with the things they've got rid of and the new things they've acquired, and how they've acquired, them, and how they're cheap and poverty is a simple question of not budgeting properly - that they're embroidering this depression into cushions or printing it on posters or scented candles and posting it all around their houses, wondering why it makes them want to claw their own eyes out.
Or maybe I'm projecting, and I have a hard time with slogans in the first place. Also I don't think it's necessarily useful to think in terms of generations. After all, Live, Laugh, Love (in whatever order I forget) is the title of Garance Doré's book.
omg had to look up that garance book because I couldnt believe that!! (it's actually "love style laugh," but close enough) I definitely see what you mean about gratitude being coopted by a certain class of (mostly white) people and applied through a consumerist lens...i feel like it's connected to the commodification of everything in modern life. even a feeling is branded now! so depressing
Though to be fair, either Garance has made a grift out of marketing blatant insincerity as sincerity, or she disappeared up her own butt after she lost one of Gwyneth's jade eggs up there - or she's just stuck in the mid 2000s when making a living off your blog was novel.
I find it unnerving about a lot of this kind of lifestyle writing though, that it's all these glammed-up rich white girls with hair calibrated by Nasa engineers to fall exactly just so, telling you about their colon-cleansing herbal tea *and* their intimate relationships and all the slogans about living life to the fullest. Like in terms of influencers, it's fairly racially diverse or actually, hard to tell because you get what you seek out (and I'm not seeking out six-foot blondes with long hair and a PhD in "Parisian chic"). Within minimalism, I can think of a couple of Asians or like, one very specific famous Japanese woman, but also there's a lot of unbelievable racism towards Asians, just treating them as this source of quirky philosophies about cleaning your house.
But specifically in terms of this simplicity, gratitude, everything just so, I can think of mainly rich white women. Also "interesting" (yeah I'm infected too, gonna have to start saying "fascinating" in a Spock voice instead) that these lives of ostentation are marketed as simplicity and making do with the essentials or, more than making do, thriving. Though when someone's hobbies are just stuff you can wear or put in your house and look at, or stuff you can eat, they must be climbing the walls of those beautiful houses - which is the despair that comes across in all those happy slogans.
Plus I doubt most of them are thriving financially that much, I mean it's not a very secure business and a bunch of them beyond the "girlboss" aesthetic are probably dependent on a husband or partner. It's like all those second-wave takedowns of bourgeois womanhood never happened, we talk about privilege now, which is some of it for sure, but it doesn't capture just how fucked-up the whole deal is, in its purest form anyway.
yeah, third wave feminism has split off in so many contradictory directions, it's not hard to see why it's flailed when faced with calls to address urgent economic problems
Yeah I think it's so much about the idea that each woman has a feminism, which is kind of like a soul or a personal brand or a set of moral values, and she acts on it. Which means that if you're a socialist feminist that means you think class is important because of your feminism, it doesn't mean class is important. You can get a few people together whose feminism is that they think class is important because that's who they are, but good luck getting them to ever address urgent economic problems.
Then I think the third wave finally gave up on the crisis at the centre of feminism, which is that feminists tend to work on the basis they know what a woman is and what women's interests are. They kind of have to, because it's supposed to be a movement of women, and if you think demographically rather than subjectively, you need a definition of "women". But that certainty, obviously, gets challenged by, well, life, and groups of women, or people who were assumed to be women but actually want nothing to do with it, going "hey fuck you".
And the final point is that the third wave has been so focused on oppression (as in violence being done to people) and representation, when economic exploitation can be extraordinarily peaceful and also not representable. Previous generations of feminists assumed there were finite ways to be a woman, the third wave extended this finitude to race, class, queerness, etc. as if there were finite ways to not be white, to be poor, to live outside of the nuclear family, etc. And it becomes almost quaint to bring up anything in a feminist activist setting that may involve exploitation, but doesn't involve violence. Unless it's an unambiguous rape or a beating, it might as well be a fingernail breakage. People look at you like you think it's the 1970s.
So I think third-wave feminism is unequipped to deal with class politics, I'm not convinced second-wave was any better equipped, which is, *cymbal crash* interesting because it came more or less directly out of the civil rights movement and the new left. Anyway I'll stop here because this is... kind of both my hobby horse and my academic field so I could go on at (even greater) length.
Haley I was listening to this recent Sam Harris podcast ep called something like “can we pull back from the brink?” I heard it was controversial, but that’s often why I listen to Harris. I agree and disagree with him a lot but I like seeking out content that at least engages in unfiltered monologue/ dialogue. I always leave thinking more critically whether it’s in opposition to Harris or in agreement.
I was curious if you had listened to it that ep and if you had thoughts on it. A big premise of it is that completely abolishing the police is ludicrous and that serious police reform is a better approach. I have been completely on the defund the police side of the aisle but have recently been wondering about what that would actually look like and whether we could replace it with something that could still act as honest public protection. I’m still trying to learn about the history of the police as an institution, and there is so much corruption that abolishing it feels like the only way to correct. I’m just thinking and processing out loud and would love to hear your perspectives on it.
some Black voices that elaborate on Sam's point: Glenn Loury, John McWhorter, Kmele Foster and his podcast, Fifth Column, Coleman Hughes, and I'm sure many more.
and hehe i've seen that poorly worn slippers meme across the internets, but it was always with the context of growing up in an East Asian, Desi, Latinx, or Black family. I guess some things are both specific and universal!
the beauty of memes!! lol
that normal people essay!!! never have i been so overwhelmingly stricken by something i so whole-heartedly disagree with. it’s so bad that i’m immediately printing it out to keep it for posterity.
Lol!! so well said
Already used the docs.new so many times since reading it in your newsletter. Probably mostly because I now know how to do that. lol.
I use it constantly i'm a docs fiend!!
I read the whole email just for reading your greetings :)
thank you Haley!
Watch the episode about aliens/alien abductions in the Unsolved Mysteries reboot! I promise it does not incite the rage or sadness that comes with an unsolved murder. Also it’s based in the Berkshires, MA where I’m from so obvi biased but nonetheless! It’s a strange and fun stand-alone episode, and worth the viewing. The truth is out there 👽
Ok ok I’m sold!!
I would just like to wholeheartedly thank you for the docs.new hack. Genius!
so glad!!! I've used it so much in the last 4 days. thank you to my brother for that one
a question (which is mostly about me, sorry): I haven't written in a long time. It used to be "what I do" - not for work, just for fun. It was who I was, really. (Note: When I went to type "used", I actually wrote "should" and now I feel read to filth by my own mind). But now every word and every sentence feel stuck in my throat, and if they ever make it to the page, I cringe and feel embarrassed that I somehow didn't produce a Booker Prize winning piece of writing in five seconds, when I haven't written in two years. I have been so inspired by Maybe Baby (thank you for writing it by the way, it's always exactly what I need to hear and read), and I've been toying with the idea of forcing myself to put out something like a newsletter, even if I'm the only one who reads it. So my seriously long-winded question is: How can I trust my own voice? How do I know I'm doing something right/writing something of value? Does it ever stop feeling self-indulgent?
Thank you for this question! Adding it to my list, it's a good one.
Hello! First time commenter. I just wanted to say I appreciated the journey you had with your mother in having your view/idea of your mother expanding after realizing she was much more complex than the basic "live laugh love" decor she kept. I connected with this because I also had a lot of moments where I recognize and acknowledge I have more freedom and access to opportunities that my mom didn't have with her life circumstances, but despite her lack of access/opportunity, that she also is an active and critical thinker. I think that I had been coming from the stereotypical mindset that because my mother is so traditional, her default state is to be very easily placated and to not question or think about things more critically. Learning about my own mother's context has been very helpful and illuminating as it helps me in drawing parallels between our generations.
I think your mom's perspective on the gratitude thing is really interesting, and I think I see what she's saying.
Even before the Bando, Manrepeller, The Wing, Outdoor Voices fiascos, it bothered me that buying cutesy stuff was promoted as if it helped in any meaningful way. Later on it seemed like some Instagram famous CEOs of consumeristic companies thought that by showing their authentic anxious selves they were showing that you can be sad and and like happy cute stuff at the same time. Unfortunately, I think it's very rare for the purchasing of fashion and accessories to be anything emotionally gratifying (there are rare exceptions), and to pretend that it is, is some icky grand rationalization. I love buying pretty stuff, conscious that it's a vanity drug, not because it makes me a better person. The uncomfortable feeling is that these aforementioned anxious CEOs never bothered to figure out the root of their depression and look for external cures and justifications, which are never sustainable. Has anyone ever thought, yea maybe I doing selfish jealous signaling person things, yes I am still redeemable, but am I willing to travel the improvement road?
Totally. The beast of late capitalism feeding on depression and also causing it... yikes
I think also, in the midst of this consumerism there's quite a lot of pressure to have some great internal pain and produce lots of public introspection and kind of cultivate it rather than try to remedy it.
I promise I don't have it out for Garance but like, she had this diabetes scare a few years ago, that caused her to write a bunch of articles about how in the future everyone's going to be living on, like, acai bowls and health food and so on. But she mentioned her stringent self-improvement regime to avoid eating sugar etc. and she mentioned having like five different kinds of therapists of varying degrees of woowoo (apparently everyone in LA has them - really, Garance, everyone? Everyone in LA?) and I remember thinking I hope she's seeing an actual doctor too, cause people were bullshitting what she was describing, on account of she was being incredibly dramatic about it, but yeah it did sound like insulin resistance. But it's like, neither the scandal, nor the response to it, addressed that. These women are adulated but they're also treated as utterly disposable by their audience.
Another thing that struck me is that there's this "feminist", in many many inverted commas, podcast in France called La Poudre where the host interviews a bunch of Important Women about their internal lives, and she's always kind of pushing for them to have some great internal conflict, like it's this reveal-all hard-hitting thing. And one thing is that she always asks them, following Virginia Woolf, if they have a room of their own. Bearing in mind the content of that fucking essay. Garance's answer was "yes, yes I think I do... inside myself". I'm just struck by this confluence of where food goes in, poop presumably comes out (or just arugula-induced crypt-keeper farts), and all this rich girl internal turmoil goes on.
Another time on that podcast they had Sophie Fontanel, successful novelist, former Elle editor and also known for striking some jauntily flexible poses in very nice clothes on Instagram and also for growing out her grey hair. And she also had to have some Great Internal Pain for the purposes of the interview. Like whatever you've done with your life, published novels, created a website that looks like a complementary airline luxury magazine (sorry Garance), it's always going to be what's coiled up inside of you stinking up the joint that's the most relevant - that makes you a Feminist or an Important Woman.
What also strikes me is that the "therapy" is, as you say, buying more cute things and doing self-care to create more and more coordinates to exactly pinpoint who you are. And then go looking for yourself in other people's work, and sometimes (often) dismiss it as "that's not really me" or "that wasn't made for me". Like don't you see yourself when you brush your teeth every morning? Don't you want to see something else for a change? What bothers me about the response is that we're supposed to be grateful for whoever represents us, which in the end is just a way to be better and more pleasantly targeted by a fundamentally rotten business model.
I just wanted to add a note that it'd be really useful to also add the release number to the adjoining podcast in the title name. I've been listening to the podcast and then returning to the newsletter to get the visual components or click on the links of the list of 15.
Hi! Sorry if I missed it, but where is the link to subscribe?
hi! you can head to haleynahman.substack.com/subscribe and enter your email (or click any of the green buttons above that say "subscribe"!)
hi! as someone who feels like i’m just finally getting into the world of ~being an adult~ (whatever that means) i can’t express how much i love your newsletter, especially the q+a portions! that being said i unfortunately can’t contribute to it monetarily at the moment and would be so so grateful if you could put me on the list of comped subscribers 💗
hi sophia! thank you for this ❤️would you mind replying to the newsletter via email so I can get your email address for the waitlist? thank you!!
hi! i tried a few times to reply directly to the email and got support emails back saying they didn’t go thru, so hopefully what i’ve done here (clicking reply straight from the email) will have done the trick. if not please let me know how to fix it!
Hi sophia, I'm so sorry for the trouble! I'm looking for an email reply rather than a comment because I need to ask for your email address in a non-public place! If it's easier you can send me a DM on Instagram! I'm @halemur
the in-email reply doesn’t seem to be working so i’ll send you a dm right now!
Haley, love the content like every week. Felt so identified with the email running out of space and my inability to let go of my precious emails! Best wishes from Argentina.
PD: I would like to please ask you to put me on the list of free suscribers, I cant afford right now to pay in dollars, but i am a huge fan of your work.
Hi fiona! Would you mind replying to the newsletter via email? That way I can get your email address for the waitlist! Thanks so much for your kind words.
another HOTTTTT Chrome hack: you can pull up docs from your Google Drive in one step by typing their titles into your Chrome search bar!
WHOA
Funny, I recently decided to revisit this minimalist / anti-consumerist blog I hadn't read in years, which I have something of a love-hate relationship with because, while I like picking up stuff like the zero-waste recipes (which can actually work out cheap), I find the good vibes completely oppressive, the way these people can go into quasi-religious aesthetic ecstasy over a toilet brush and just, how everything is simple, kind and balanced, and aesthetically perfectly imperfect.
And one of the recent posts I found was a "list of gratitudes", and it basically boiled down to a list of ways to consume - food, home decor, yoga. But through it (and the surrounding blog posts), you can kind of see a person just barely not spiraling off into anxiety due to fragile health, and some traumatic personal stuff that she's shared a little of. It's just weird reading about that stuff through lists of consumables, recipes for hair remedies, etc. and especially, lists of things to be grateful for, which she says she's been drawing up at regular intervals. My first thought was that she could maybe use a list of ingratitudes.
It also drives me nuts because that's one way I - and others - deal with depression when it strikes, is telling yourself all this positive pep talk stuff, all the while raging at it. So it feels like watching people so used to treating themselves like shit, so used to being grateful for the ways in which they've been deprived of anything but consumerism - so that their anti-consumerism manifests as even greater obsession with the things they've got rid of and the new things they've acquired, and how they've acquired, them, and how they're cheap and poverty is a simple question of not budgeting properly - that they're embroidering this depression into cushions or printing it on posters or scented candles and posting it all around their houses, wondering why it makes them want to claw their own eyes out.
Or maybe I'm projecting, and I have a hard time with slogans in the first place. Also I don't think it's necessarily useful to think in terms of generations. After all, Live, Laugh, Love (in whatever order I forget) is the title of Garance Doré's book.
omg had to look up that garance book because I couldnt believe that!! (it's actually "love style laugh," but close enough) I definitely see what you mean about gratitude being coopted by a certain class of (mostly white) people and applied through a consumerist lens...i feel like it's connected to the commodification of everything in modern life. even a feeling is branded now! so depressing
Though to be fair, either Garance has made a grift out of marketing blatant insincerity as sincerity, or she disappeared up her own butt after she lost one of Gwyneth's jade eggs up there - or she's just stuck in the mid 2000s when making a living off your blog was novel.
I find it unnerving about a lot of this kind of lifestyle writing though, that it's all these glammed-up rich white girls with hair calibrated by Nasa engineers to fall exactly just so, telling you about their colon-cleansing herbal tea *and* their intimate relationships and all the slogans about living life to the fullest. Like in terms of influencers, it's fairly racially diverse or actually, hard to tell because you get what you seek out (and I'm not seeking out six-foot blondes with long hair and a PhD in "Parisian chic"). Within minimalism, I can think of a couple of Asians or like, one very specific famous Japanese woman, but also there's a lot of unbelievable racism towards Asians, just treating them as this source of quirky philosophies about cleaning your house.
But specifically in terms of this simplicity, gratitude, everything just so, I can think of mainly rich white women. Also "interesting" (yeah I'm infected too, gonna have to start saying "fascinating" in a Spock voice instead) that these lives of ostentation are marketed as simplicity and making do with the essentials or, more than making do, thriving. Though when someone's hobbies are just stuff you can wear or put in your house and look at, or stuff you can eat, they must be climbing the walls of those beautiful houses - which is the despair that comes across in all those happy slogans.
Plus I doubt most of them are thriving financially that much, I mean it's not a very secure business and a bunch of them beyond the "girlboss" aesthetic are probably dependent on a husband or partner. It's like all those second-wave takedowns of bourgeois womanhood never happened, we talk about privilege now, which is some of it for sure, but it doesn't capture just how fucked-up the whole deal is, in its purest form anyway.
yeah, third wave feminism has split off in so many contradictory directions, it's not hard to see why it's flailed when faced with calls to address urgent economic problems
Yeah I think it's so much about the idea that each woman has a feminism, which is kind of like a soul or a personal brand or a set of moral values, and she acts on it. Which means that if you're a socialist feminist that means you think class is important because of your feminism, it doesn't mean class is important. You can get a few people together whose feminism is that they think class is important because that's who they are, but good luck getting them to ever address urgent economic problems.
Then I think the third wave finally gave up on the crisis at the centre of feminism, which is that feminists tend to work on the basis they know what a woman is and what women's interests are. They kind of have to, because it's supposed to be a movement of women, and if you think demographically rather than subjectively, you need a definition of "women". But that certainty, obviously, gets challenged by, well, life, and groups of women, or people who were assumed to be women but actually want nothing to do with it, going "hey fuck you".
And the final point is that the third wave has been so focused on oppression (as in violence being done to people) and representation, when economic exploitation can be extraordinarily peaceful and also not representable. Previous generations of feminists assumed there were finite ways to be a woman, the third wave extended this finitude to race, class, queerness, etc. as if there were finite ways to not be white, to be poor, to live outside of the nuclear family, etc. And it becomes almost quaint to bring up anything in a feminist activist setting that may involve exploitation, but doesn't involve violence. Unless it's an unambiguous rape or a beating, it might as well be a fingernail breakage. People look at you like you think it's the 1970s.
So I think third-wave feminism is unequipped to deal with class politics, I'm not convinced second-wave was any better equipped, which is, *cymbal crash* interesting because it came more or less directly out of the civil rights movement and the new left. Anyway I'll stop here because this is... kind of both my hobby horse and my academic field so I could go on at (even greater) length.
Haley I was listening to this recent Sam Harris podcast ep called something like “can we pull back from the brink?” I heard it was controversial, but that’s often why I listen to Harris. I agree and disagree with him a lot but I like seeking out content that at least engages in unfiltered monologue/ dialogue. I always leave thinking more critically whether it’s in opposition to Harris or in agreement.
I was curious if you had listened to it that ep and if you had thoughts on it. A big premise of it is that completely abolishing the police is ludicrous and that serious police reform is a better approach. I have been completely on the defund the police side of the aisle but have recently been wondering about what that would actually look like and whether we could replace it with something that could still act as honest public protection. I’m still trying to learn about the history of the police as an institution, and there is so much corruption that abolishing it feels like the only way to correct. I’m just thinking and processing out loud and would love to hear your perspectives on it.
some Black voices that elaborate on Sam's point: Glenn Loury, John McWhorter, Kmele Foster and his podcast, Fifth Column, Coleman Hughes, and I'm sure many more.