I have been given personal assurance that today’s Featured Pet is a very good boy. His name is Jeter. His favorite thing in the world is his blankie, which he carries absolutely everywhere with him.
Jeter technically belongs to our reader Callie’s parents, and she is being TORTURED by a no-dogs lease.
He knows every person and every dog in his neighborhood and wants to be friends with every living thing he meets. He's a giant doofus with a heart of gold and a truly excellent snuggler.
Callie, thank you. And thank you, Jeter. Good dog.
Yesterday, I was REAL hormonal and needed to watch something that could not possibly cause emotions in me, so I started watching Vanderpump Rules for the first time and it’s:
Sadly, as a result, I do not have a horror recommendation today. Go watch Vanderpump Rules.
I’ve been thinking a lot about Brendan Fraser’s attempt to hold his alleged abuser accountable, and this Mel Magazine piece really got me (there are details of sexual assault in this piece):
There are many reasons why victims of harassment or physical abuse don’t always come forward right away, depending on factors too numerous to mention. Women will of course be pilloried and threatened by corrupt institutions and misogynist trolls for daring to accuse a man, but these antagonists start from the assumption that she’s making it up or actually to blame. With a man, you can acknowledge the incident as reported — we have no problem trusting a man’s version of reality — while still brushing it off as a joke.
This is happening right now to the actor Brendan Fraser, who in February went public with an allegation that Philip Berk, a one-time president of the powerful Hollywood Foreign Press Association, groped his buttocks and poked his perineum (in Fraser’s telling, his “taint”), even wiggling a finger around in the sensitive area. This was in 2003, in a crowded area of the Beverly Hills Hotel, in public view. The violation had Fraser “overcome with panic and fear,” though Berk gladly related the episode in his memoir, leaving out the finger part and characterizing the ass-grab as a playful pinch.
The HFPA promised to investigate Fraser’s claims; three months later, they showed him their proposed follow-up statement. It read, in part: “Although it was concluded that Mr. Berk inappropriately touched Mr. Fraser, the evidence supports that it was intended to be taken as a joke and not as a sexual advance.” Again: It happened, everyone agrees it happened, but, well, it doesn’t count, because a man touching another man inappropriately can only be a gay come-on or good-humored bonding behavior.
Frankie Thomas takes on Annie on My Mind for The Paris Review:
Here’s the mystery of Annie on My Mind, the 1982 young adult novel by Nancy Garden: I’ve never met a straight person who’s read it. As far as I can tell, only queer women have read it—and yet I’ve never met one who sought it out on purpose. It comes to us only by accident.
I’m generalizing, I know. But test it out for yourself. Ask your favorite lesbian how she first encountered Annie on My Mind, and you may well hear something like this Amazon review from the year 2001: “Someone gave me this book when I was 17 and wondering who the heck I was. I read it in one sitting, flipped it over and read it again.” Or this one, from 2009: “I was walking down a [library] aisle and just had this funny feeling to pull out this book. Call it crazy, but it felt like the book that I’ve never seen before wanted me to read it.” As if by enchantment, the novel finds its way, often in disguise, to those who don’t know they need it.
IF this makes you want to die of grossness, climate change has so much more to offer in the future!
In the spring of 2015, Craig began to notice a few moth-like insects flitting around under the lights outside. They were about the size of houseflies, dull brown in color with long fuzzy wings, big black eyes, and whiplike antennae. With each passing evening, their numbers grew. Soon they became an uncountable mass, a swirling, kinetic cloud that hung over the river’s edge like a new state of matter.
FAREWELL, YOU EVIL CUNT:
Former "Central Park Five" prosecutor Linda Fairstein has resigned from multiple boards after the release of Ava DuVernay's Netflix miniseries When They See Us, which has ignited new controversy over Fairstein's role in the case.
On Tuesday, Fairstein, who is now a novelist, resigned from the boards of the nonprofit Safe Horizon and Vassar College, The Hollywood Reporter has confirmed. She also has reportedly stepped down from the boards for God’s Love We Deliver and the Joyful Heart Foundation.
"I am told that Ms. Fairstein felt that, given the recent widespread debate over her role in the Central Park case, she believed that her continuing as a Board member would be harmful to Vassar," college president Elizabeth H. Bradley wrote Tuesday in an announcement.
When They See Us portrays Fairstein, played by Felicity Huffman, when she ran the sex-crimes unit of the Manhattan District Attorney's office. In 1989, the prosecutor oversaw the wrongful conviction and imprisonment of five teenagers of color after a white woman was assaulted while jogging in Central Park. In 2002, Antron McCray, Kevin Richardson, Yusef Salaam, Raymond Santana Jr. and Korey Wise were exonerated after serving seven to 13 years in prison when the real attacker confessed to the crime. The five filed a lawsuit against New York City in 2003.
Even feminist killjoys can find love if they want it:
In a recent Washington Post interview, my friend Donatella Galella—a theater professor and activist—identified herself as a “feminist killjoy.” She defined the phrase as “a figure who points out how everything is terrible and people blame her for the problem rather than the troubling material.”
As a fellow feminist killjoy, I smile at her definition. I’m the one pointing out the sexist tropes in your favorite movie, complaining about the gender ratio in your workplace, calling out mansplaining among your friends. I’m impatient and restless when it comes to gendered relationship dynamics, and I’m not one to let my partner rest on his feminist laurels.
For a long time, I assumed that my husband put up with this at best and resented it at worst. Then, over dinner one night—as we meandered our way through a typical date-night conversation about emotional labor—he said, “Your feminism is important to me. You make me a better person, and I love that about you.”
I put down my fork. “Tell me more,” I said.
My friend Louis’ excellent newsletter went to see Ma (it’s a subscriber post, so I’ll just share a bit):
When Gay Twitter decides to stan a movie before it’s out, based solely on a trailer or the presence of Octavia Spencer, I get a little nervous. I went into Ma wondering, memes aside, if the film would be gay or queer — a distinction I can explain best in terms of The Babadook, which is not gay but is queer, and now has special edition Pride Month packaging to prove it. But beyond that, I just wanted to know if Ma would be, you know, good. And when it comes to mainstream horror, there is of course a spectrum. The trailer didn’t inspire much confidence that it would be good good, but there is always room in my heart for good trash, a movie I can embrace not in spite of its flaws but because of them. I take no pleasure in reporting that Ma is not good trash. It’s not gay — minus a couple superfluous gay panic jokes at the beginning — and it’s not particularly queer. It’s not really camp either, if we want to reignite that debate, aside from some vague nods in that direction. Ultimately, Ma is… fine.
Danny…Danny fixed The Honeymooners:
ALICE: Listen, Ralph, you can argue all you want, but I want you to get one thing straight: my mother is coming here, and my mother is always welcome in my house.
RALPH [with a mournful tendré]: Your house, Alice? Your house? Ah, I always thought of it as ours.
ALICE: Oh, I am sorry, Ralph. I forgot, it is your house. You really have been very big-hearted, Ralph, sharing it with me and letting me live here with you in the lap of luxury like this. Don't think that I don't appreciate it, Ralph, ‘cause I do. After all, where else would I get a beautiful home like this? This place, Ralph, you know what it is? It's a regular Disneyland. Look, Ralph. Look at this wonderful view that we have from the window. Look, see? Old man Grogan's long underwear hanging on the line, garbage cans in the alley, back of a restaurant. That's all part of my Disneyland, too, you know, Ralph. That's my... [Ralph groans as if the weight of a thousand generations were suddenly pressed upon her] That is my Fantasyland. Now, Ralph, over here, this sink, see? Every time I go near that sink, Ralph, I never knows what's gonna happen. You know what the sink is? That's my Adventureland. That stove and that icebox, that's Frontierland. There's only one thing, Ralph, that's missing from my Disneyland, only one thing: the World of Tomorrow. I have nothing from the World of Tomorrow.
RALPH [Slowly, with a sadness older than the pharaohs]: The World of Tomorrow, Alice? You want the World of Tomorrow? Oh, I’d give it to you, Alice, I’d hide it for you in my fists and spring tomorrow’s world open for you – and your mother could visit us with a full heart and true celebration. I’d – I’d take you to the moon, Alice. I hear the gravity’s not so strong up there, Alice; maybe you and I could be light together on the moon. Free and easy.
Jia is here to explain the Online Wife Phenomenon:
A lot of young people use familial terms non-literally. Around the same time that “my wife” became funny again, teens started calling their favorite celebrities “Mom.” Hot men became “Daddy.” This way of speaking is indebted to queer communities and the informal family structures that ball culture invented and provides. There is, I think, a low-level longing, in this era of atomization and instability, for that kind of kinship. There is also pleasure, often of an ironic sort, in calling someone by a name that connotes indelible connection. The word “wife,” charged with the frisson of a lime-green mankini, quietly exaggerates our dependence on fixed ideas of one another. It highlights a ludicrous aspect of both heterosexuality and our more general desire to possess those we love. And, once you’ve been around it enough, it is fairly irresistible. Four of my wives are coming to see “The Fate of the Furious” with me, I think, selecting a block of seats at the theatre. At a bar, watching a male friend flirt with a stranger, I observe that my cursed father has found himself a bride. Sometimes, out of contextual necessity, I’ll call my boyfriend my partner; more often, in a Borat voice, I call him “my wife.” (The word “husband” has so far proved too stuffy—and the word “hubby” too gross—to really enter the pop-cultural lexicon. There’s never been a wave of husband-based book titles, for instance, although there is a 2016 novel by Jane Corry called “My Husband’s Wife.”)
The figure of the wife has also become an important trope within a specific, baroque type of Internet-based humor, and this isn’t accidental. Like Borat, the online world is profane and disorderly and constantly agitated; the wife, on the other hand, is imagined as sacred, eternal, controlled. When these two things connect, the idea of the wife starts to glitch. It now takes just a minor breeze of Internet attention for a wife to catch fire as a meme. An early example of the phenomenon dates to 2013, when a mysterious photo emerged on the Internetof a suburban garage door on which someone had spray-painted “STOP NOW! don’t e-mail my wife!!!!” (The image is one of the first things cited in an essay by the poet Patricia Lockwood about her experience of the Internet; in a recent piece about “the online wife,” the writer Miles Klee identified it as “patient zero of contemporary wife content.”) Another important wife meme entered the lexicon a few years later, when a man sent a message to a Facebook account shared by a married couple. “—DAVE DO NOT READ THIS—,” it began, and then, after a block of blank space, “Tara…hello.” In 2016, a man tweeted a screenshot of an outrageously confident e-mail he had sent to his “girlfriend’s husband,” insisting that he and this man’s wife had been “bowled over” by “a deep wellspring of powerful emotions” and saying that he was moving to somewhere in their vicinity so that he could be close to her. He added that he hoped she would be able to “grow and explore in other ways that she can share with everyone she loves.” Soon, there were song parodies. (“Is this the real wife / Is this just fantasy,” etc.)
I am now DELIGHTED to announce that two old Toasties, Adele and Harry, whose early dating involved a LOT of sharing our posts (and our link roundups in particular), are to be wed.
Congratulations, you crazy kids. Email me and tell me where to send the KitchenAid stand-mixer and in what color.
I can’t top that, so now I’m just putting on some tunes:
haim
rilo
florence (my fav song, but live)
alabama shakes
civil wars
stan rogers
stan SAVED LIVES
https://t.co/CXlEb448uP
Love you so much. Especially you. ESPECIALLY today.
n
Yesterday I retweeted you update about your period starting because I also am on my period, that's how powerful your influence is, and my husband sees it and asks "who is Nicole Cliffe and how does she have so many followers?!" So naturally I say "she is 'my friend Nicole' who I speak of often, and she...had a website that people loved."
RIP The Civil Wars. I got so mad when people were losing their bloomers over that Lady Gaga/Bradley Cooper theatre at the Oscars. We have been so deprived of real performer chemistry ever since their contentious breakup.