i’m so done with the way girls in twenties are treated. i’m so done with people who literally create timetable for us. 20- 24 find a guy, 24-26 make him propose to you, 27-29 get married. i’m so done. i’m do not want to get 2 a.m texts from my best friend who is freaking out that she is gonna die alone. i do not want see my 20 years old friend wasting her time on some guys who are not even interested in her. i do not want see us falling for every nice guy who does not look creepy. i do not want to see girls get sad or paranoid just bcos they do not fill in the schedule. you are ok. you should enjoy your life at its fullest and one day you will find 10/10 so do not pursue 6 just because you do not want to be single. it is ok and one day you will find someone. do not split your love with people who does not deserve it. keep it for yourself and when time will come you will know. i know it hurts. i know you wish u could just open part of yourself and release the buzzing love. but not every kind of love is romantic. show it to your family, friends, plants, yourself.
Not a real criticism, just an expansion really, but … it’s not just the timetables we need to get away from, but the goal itself, I think. “One day you will find someone,” sounds comforting, but the reason it doesn’t lay fears to rest is because we are all smart enough to know it’s not necessarily true.
My aunt is over sixty, never married, and never, so far as I am aware, ever even had a great romance. She dated a lot, but never clicked and now seems to have given up. My mentor is over seventy, divorced her asshole husband more than half her life ago and has never found anyone since.
We all know women (and men) like these. And because we know them, we know that “one day you will find someone,” is just … hogwash. Because sometimes you just … don’t. Or sometimes you do, but he turns out to be a cad. Or you do and the universe rips you apart in the most unfair way possible. And because society has us so fixated on finding “our other half” or whatever, we view these women as cautionary tales.
But …
My aunt trains dogs. Her schipperke is the national champion for his breed. She spent so much of her life as a librarian, nurturing the love of books in kids, myself among them. I ride horses because of her, and it’s one of the very few things I do that makes my soul feel at peace.
My mentor is one of the best criminal defense attorneys in her state. She has devoted her life to fighting to ensure that everyone gets a vigorous defense. Because of her countless people have had the opportunity to turn their lives around. Because of her, they’ve had a life to turn around. Because of her, the prosecution and the police in her jurisdiction are forced to behave ethically and adhere to the rule of law. She’s still, even now fighting to abolish the death penalty. It’s because of her that I am pursuing the life I am.
These women’s lives are not nothing. In fact they are a whole lot of something, and it makes my heart hurt that I ever, in my dark 3 am’s, thought of their lives as something to be avoided at all costs.
So love your family, your friends, your pets, your gardens. Love your job or your hobby or your raison d’ etre, whatever it is. Love sunsets and the smell of rain and yourself, and don’t love these as something to do as a placeholder until the buzzing, romantic love comes, but love these as things worth loving all in themselves.
It’s fucking hard some days. The dark 3 am’s still come sometimes. But most days, I am so much more at peace knowing that I am not incomplete or waiting, but that my life, if it ended today, is worth it because of the platonic, familial, friendship love I have shared. And if the other kind does come someday, that’ll be nice, but it won’t make any of the others less. It’ll just be caramel sauce on a sundae–tasty and wonderful, but the sundae was perfect without it too.
so you’ve seen gifs of simone giertz’s shitty robots, right? of course you have.
she’s amazing. she’s hilarious. she’s a woman in STEM, kicking ass.
she just found out she has a brain tumor.
the doctors are pretty sure it’s benign, but it’s big, and she’s gonna have to have pretty major surgery which is gonna keep her from making videos for a while.
while she’s recovering, her patreon is pretty much gonna be her only source of income, so if you enjoy the gifs of her videos, or just want to support a pretty awesome chick who needs some help, you might want to kick a few dollars over that way.
(i’m not associated with simone in any way, i don’t know her – other than the fact that she favorited one of my tweets once! – but i absolutely adore her personality and her work and i haven’t seen any posts about this, so i figured i’d put something up.)
“40 is good, 50 is great, 60 is fab, and 70 is fucking awesome!” ~ Helen Mirren 💪🏻
missed some greats!
I can’t believe Julie Andrews is not on this list guys.
“It’s fucking outrageous. It’s ridiculous. And ’twas ever thus. We all watched James Bond as he got more and more geriatric, and his girlfriends got younger and younger. It’s so annoying.” – Helen Mirren on the bullshit that is (sexist) ageism (source)
Whenever you need a positive role model to help you remember that aging is NATURAL, aging is BEAUTIFUL, there is NOTHING WRONG with aging, and if you’re LUCKY will you live long enough to experience it – look long and hard at every single one of these these Queens.
So, while for some reason everyone here is engulfed in one of tumblr’s periodic debates about whether or how to police writing done largely by women for women for free, in the world of contemporary fiction there’s a meltdown going on right now over men who get paid for writing literature, and the men who give them money and prizes for it.
Specifically, Junot Diaz, author of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and This Is How You Lose Her, has been accused by multiple Latina writers of a wide range of asshole behavior toward them, ranging from sexual assault to verbal abuse to deliberately trying to destroy the careers of women who challenged him on any of it. This story is complicated by the fact that Diaz recently published an essay in The New Yorker in which he writes about being sexually abused as a child and the effect it had on his sexual and romantic life as an adult. It’s a good essay, and it was greeted with universal admiration; but now, the possibility arises that it may have been an attempt to pre-empt the critique he knew was coming. Mary Karr has also pointed out that Diaz is more vulnerable to these charges because he’s Latino; the literary world has known for years that Karr was abused and stalked by David Foster Wallace, author of the critically acclaimed mega-novel Infinite Jest, who suffered no consequences fbecause, Karr says, Wallace was white. For all of these reasons, it’s worth pointing out up front that what Diaz is charged with doing is not unique amongst contemporary American male writers; and when you go farther back in time, things get worse. Just off the top of my head, William S. Burroughs shot and killed his wife Joan Vollmer and Ernest Hemingway was an abusive husband.
Below, I’m going to talk about men, writing, and the history of contempt for not only women writers but women readers.
Honestly, the good that’s already come for me, reading pieces like this, is confirmation and reassurance.
When I bounced hard off most Literature with a Capital L, in my teens, it wasn’t primarily because I was low-brow or too sensitive. Though arguably I’m both of these things, the main reason I hated most Serious Literature was because it was unpleasant, off-putting, created antipathy in me for the POV characters I was presumably supposed to identify with, and the stories made me feel emotionally nauseated before I could finish them.
I’m a writer who only took the bare minimum lit courses, and in my twenties I’d felt that I should force myself to read these books like exercise, like medicine, but I never could. Instead I embraced being a Not Serious Writer, and I looked to fandom for mentorship and inspiration in the storytelling art.
So I avoided the poisons in the water table, as it were, but I still struggle with the legitimacy of my work. It’s something to think about.
I honestly always find the term ‘spinster’ as referring to an elderly, never-married woman as funny because you know what?
Wool was a huge industry in Europe in the middle ages. It was hugely in demand, particularly broadcloth, and was a valuable trade good. A great deal of wool was owned by monasteries and landed gentry who owned the land.
And, well, the only way to spin wool into yarn to make broadcloth was by hand.
This was viewed as a feminine occupation, and below the dignity of the monks and male gentry that largely ran the trade.
So what did they do?
They hired women to spin it. And, turns out, this was a stable job that paid very well. Well enough that it was one of the few viable economic options considered ‘respectable’ outside of marriage for a woman. A spinster could earn quite a tidy salary for her art, and maintain full control over her own money, no husband required.
So, naturally, women who had little interest in marriage or men? Grabbed this opportunity with both hands and ran with it. Of course, most people didn’t get this, because All Women Want Is Husbands, Right?
So when people say ‘spinster’ as in ‘spinster aunt’, they are TRYING to conjure up an image of a little old lady who is lonely and bitter.
But what I HEAR are the smiles and laughter of a million women as they earned their own money in their own homes and controlled their own fortunes and lived life on their own terms, and damn what society expected of them.
Queer Fiction Writer 