11.18.2021
The 33 Project
Greetings from the Metro North!
Heading back in to the city and thanks to the wonders of remote wifi here we are.
On to the recs:
1/ I really enjoyed this profile/interview with Emily Ratajkowski. She seems to be on an incredibly bold and overreaching press tour, imo, but this article was great and probably stood above the rest.
There were a few key takeaways:
But the author of “My Body” has no investment in herself as a victim. If the men who hurt Ratajkowski in “My Body” are predators, she does not depict them as predatory. On the contrary, they are small, insecure people desperate to prove themselves, as pathetic as they are powerful. As Ratajkowski is quick to note, her experiences are neither disintegrating, even when traumatic, nor especially unique; her point is simply that they are no one’s but her own.
And this one, too:
For what is wrong with wanting to be beautiful? Pop-feminism, for its part, is so preoccupied with criticizing what we rotely call “conventional beauty standards” that it has surprisingly little to say about beauty. It may be tempting, given the evidence of Ratajkowski’s own career, to deny the possibility of a beauty that would transcend male taste, at least in this world. Of course, the imagined saturation of the beautiful by male preference is immediately disproved by the existence of at least one lesbian (me); but it is further refuted if we acknowledge that the envy that heterosexual women have for one another is indeed an authentic expression of female desire.
Excellent writing from Andrea Long Chu.
2/ This was a great meditation on grief and family and dealing with loss. I found the entire post to be pretty moving and worthwhile.
3/ This piece by Bess Kalb on paid leave was excellent. I love serious articles by TV writers. Humor always helps and adds a layer of bittersweetness, I guess.
A country with enough money to give a single billionaire a $2.9 billion lunar lander contract can afford to let women recover from the highly inconvenient task of perpetuating humanity.
Food for thought.
Thanks for checking her. Feel free to share with anyone you think may be interested.