My favorite hit piece! http://www.themillions.com/2013/06/modern-life-is...

I loved this piece, I held my breath the whole time I read it.

I'm very sorry to have hurt your feelings isabelcooper and Ethylbenzene.

Your anger at the message "put up with shitty treatment that degrades you" is completely correct. You are also angry and shaming another human who believes in the message (that it's ok for her to be silent about her own degradation). You can distance yourself from the message without distancing yourself from the human. Her belief system is so so sad, shunning her won't help her overcome it and it won't keep you safe either. We all have to support each other in becoming whole enough to live a fully actualized life.

It puzzles me that the article about the advice from the female scientist was written with anger towards the female scientist. It also puzzles me that her employer seemed to shame her by pulling her advice and apologizing for her. Her perspective and advice reflect her reality. Probably they also reflect the reality of many other female scientists. It would have been better, I think, for both Quartz and Science to take this conflict between an advice column and the "twitter storm" it produced as an opportunity to open up a dialogue.

The dialogue I think would be about the profound doubt many women (and men) feel about the right they have to their own bodies. It's not as cut and dry as you don't own your body (the scientist) and you do own your body and shame on you if you don't know that (the twitter hoard). Probably many of us purposefully own our bodies as much as we are able and relinquish that ownership when we feel like to put up a fight might threaten our safety. How do we learn to express our rights when we don't feel safe? Why do we think only our own definition of safe is acceptable? For one woman challenging a leering gaze by saying "stop looking at me like that", might feel within her sphere of safety, for another it might not. If we allowed everyone to weigh in with their experience without shaming them for what they tell us we may find that we all feel safer to say no.

In my experience, when Person A implores Person B to, "have some self-respect", what Person A actually means is, Person B, please respect the inner norms of Person A so Person A can maintain their feeling of security (this is because Person A's concept of self and other isn't appropriately delineated and Person A is probably repressing some fear and grief).

You are doing the right thing, I am very glad to know you are taking such good care of yourself.

I don't get it, Wolf Hall was so offensive to me, I don't understand the appeal. I mean Henry was a murderer, like a real one, and he killed Anne. And then this book, it's like Anne is the bad one, and all those poor young men, who actually had to feel real fear and walk up and kneel down and be beheaded, they are also the bad ones, and especially Mark (in real life this poor young kid who really was tortured) and Hillary is all, Mark is a dick and Cromwell didn't really torture him, he just locked him in a room with a pointy tree. It's like a whole book about how awful all these innocent people were and how they probably got their just deserts, when actually Henry was a psychopath who murdered innocent young people and Hillary makes him out to be human. Both books were just the worst kind of victim blaming. Henry killed Anne for adultery when he was the one actually cheating.

And I am struggling to say the bigger part of what I feel is the true problem with the books, it's like an invisible, insidious lie Mantel is promoting that you have to pay attention to or else it could reinforce harmful beliefs that are instilled in you, and the lie is something like, "if a bad thing happened to you, you must have been bad to deserve it" and whenever I work with young women in therapy, they more times than not, come in believing that their traumatic pasts are because there is something bad about them, and it's a lot of work to undo that belief, to help them understand they didn't deserve what happened to them and they weren't abused because they were bad and when I see this belief forwarded (invisibly) in historical literature I am very disappointed and very sad.

<3 <3 <3 <3

Ehmgeebee I am so sorry for your loss

For real