Display Purposes
Or, And This Is Mommy’s Snatch.
Yes, I’m reading Scary Mommy, where exclamation points abound, and where ladies of a progressive leaning share their political radicalism. In this case, Ms Kate Auletta, the publication’s editor-in-chief, is thrilling us with tales of her domestic nakedness:
It seems, then, that the nudity is not so much shared, a gift to the world, but more something inflicted. Specifically, on the author’s two small boys. I’ll spare you the lengthy description of Ms Auletta’s various physical imperfections – the rolls of excess flesh, the big, sagging bosom, and the whole Fat Upper Pubic Area thing.
I’m assuming she means naked in the changing rooms, though any observance of such boundaries is not made clear.
At which point, sharp-eyed readers may be attempting to reconcile this,
With this:
Come to think of it, I’m not entirely sure what loving one’s body might mean, beyond the obvious off-colour jokes. But apparently, it’s something that one is supposed to proclaim as an accomplishment, a credential of progressivism. I have, however, noted that it tends to be announced by people whose declared triumph in this matter is not altogether convincing, and whose basis for doing so is generally much slimmer than they are.
Still, there are the obligatory noises to be made, and empowerment to invoke:
There we go. Because, clearly, it’s a blow to the Patriarchy, a radical act. A feat of progressive heroism. Not just some incongruous crack and badger. Come up onstage to collect your certificate and enamel badge. Everyone applaud.
That’s quite enough. You can stop now.
No, really. We have everything we need, madam.
So, again, it’s all about empowerment and “body positivity,” you see. Oceans of self-love. Or at least the intermittent appearance of such. Something done “without a care,” except “on most days.”
It must be quite strange to go through life feeling a need to boast in print of some pointed behaviour – specifically, “showing my sons what a real woman’s body… looks like” – as if this feat of not wearing knickers were somehow radical, empowering, and a basis for applause. And to then have to justify this lifestyle affectation in ways that are somewhat contradictory and not particularly convincing. As if no-one would notice. It seems a lot of effort.
When not treating her small boys to the sight of her arse and undercarriage, Ms Auletta offers other educational experiences:
Those lucky, lucky kids. How the time must fly.
Previously in the world of Scary Mommy:
Empowered woman dreams of Donald Trump, has panic attacks.
Empowered woman, user of Xanax, suffers from internalised capitalism.
Another empowered lady and her mood-stabilising medication.
A tale of laundry and resentment.
On auras, emanations, and paranormal parenting.
There’s more, should you want it, if you poke through the archives.
Update, via the comments:
Regarding the six items linked above, Aitch adds,
Not an unfair question. What with the recurring motif of mood-stabilising drugs, the existential trauma of hearing differing views, the lurid fantasies regarding Mr Trump, or the obsessive thoughts about babies heads spontaneously falling off. To say nothing of how often these preoccupations bedevil ladies who are employed, or have been employed, as public-school educators.
I should add that the links at the end of the post are but a small sample. I can’t monitor Scary Mommy around the clock. And frankly, I wouldn’t care to.
It’s rather like the now-defunct Everyday Feminism, a publication once very popular among the super-woke, with over four million monthly visitors, had an extraordinary number of articles, several every week, on the subject of living with mental illness. From delusions of witchcraft to serious Cluster-B personality disorders.
But among progressive women, there is, I think, a pattern. One that’s fairly hard to miss.
Though doubtless many try.
The Joe Biden Experience. A short video. The wandering pupil in the first bit is my fave.
So far all I’ve won are tornado, flash flood, and severe thunderstorm warnings.
Over the years, I’ve had any number of exchanges in which the other party has made clear, often unprompted and quite emphatically, their position on some topic – who to vote for, how vigorously to endorse some currently modish cause – while being much less clear on why. This has sometimes involved the other party teasing out my own view – and then seeming surprised, something close to bewildered, even scandalised, on hearing that it differed. As if divergence of any kind, for any reason, were inconceivable.
As if it were A Thing One Mustn’t Do, Lest It Be Heard By The Others.
I wonder about this mindset. It doesn’t seem to be tethered to raw IQ but rather to severe status anxiety.
Perhaps also impairment in the ability (willingness?) to entertain the idea that people think what they think for a variety of reasons, most of them benign: family influence, friends, area where they live(d), profession, innate disposition, life experiences.
They don’t seem to comprehend that if you’d been raised like that guy over there and seen what he’s seen, you might share his political beliefs, and vice-versa. They can’t imagine that others’ reasons for their beliefs are just as good as their own.
Is that really so hard to comprehend? Or is it fairly easy but not convenient for status-seeking purposes?
I don’t see it as an IQ thing. The people I’m thinking of are quite clever. Just not, it seems, accustomed to articulating exactly why it is they hold the views they do, and which they themselves bring up, and seemingly not accustomed to mixing with people, any people, whose views diverge from their own.
I find this quite odd, as I can’t offhand recall a time when I could count on some default uniformity of opinion throughout my entire social circle. A time when I could just assume that whatever the contentious issue, pretty much everyone I’d encounter would just happen to agree with me. That’s not at all a familiar experience.
Hence this blog, I suppose.
Or indeed better. If only insofar as those reasons exist independently of prevailing in-group fashion.
Isn’t it most likely that this naked gallivanting is something she attempted precisely once (or perhaps contemplated without ever daring to go through with it), but in her writing it transforms into a daily habit? In other words, this is the sort of thing she wishes she had the courage to do, but would never actually do?
Much like her readers, I suspect.
It’s a possibility, certainly. Though if so, that again raises the question of why a progressive mother would feel obliged to tell tall tales of “showing my sons what a real woman’s body… looks like” – as if this feat of not wearing knickers were somehow radical, empowering, and a basis for applause.
I mean, lying about it – boasting of having done it, even if one hasn’t – in print, where one’s family can see – seems scarcely less odd than actually having done it.
@FMM
“Correction, it is a front and back hole in the wall…”
A Double Glory Hole
Damn! We missed International “Non-Binary” People’s Day.
To atone, let us hear from a ” non-binary UK based writer, thinker [sic] and activist” vegan on the topic...
Of course, as usual, the world must change just for you.
Only needed a disability to have touched all the bases.
I am sure he didn’t mean absolute worst, just worst adjacent..
Some people really do need telling that their craving for pretentious victimhood is both morally obnoxious and psychologically disgusting.
They can be told this in between slaps if necessary.
OT but a local story of unimginative local councillors and planners; https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cnl0x7889nno
OK, it’s probably dubious why a change of use from agricultural is necessary but the comic implications amuse.
Just imagine: Phree Pharsand Phucking Feasants producing a pharsand potential Phucking Feasants a day. A reasonable percentage of the birds (avian sense, not social) must be guys else the aforementioned PPFs will not be viable. They must have a short but happy life.
If nothing else, it strikes me as a failure of imagination, a shrinking of the world.
It occurs to me that if someone is accustomed to such an ideologically homogenous and mutually affirming bubble, in which The Views One Ought To Be Seen Having can be assumed in advance of much actual thought, it may be somewhat disconcerting to venture outside of it. And to encounter people who can’t easily be dismissed as stupid and who nonetheless disagree.
And worse, can explain why.
And in things-that-never-happen news:
His pronouns, since you ask, are he/they.
Also. And.
Calls to mind:
Band name.
See, you don’t get this kind of quality entertainment at any old blog, you know.
Cameron Downing, looking its best.
https://www.nationalgalleries.org/art-and-artists/248807
It says here you’re “brutal”, David. 😀
Heh. But not, I think, unfair.
Best behaviour everyone.
Shouldn’t it be obvious to this woman (to herself) that she’s lost the plot. Her attempts at self-confidence are grasping, flimsy, and desperate.
For all the left-wing talk about “self-knowledge,” “self-care,” and “self-reflection” they can’t even manage to pull of a decent attempt at self-deception.
At *some* point, don’t they say to themselves, “Well, despite all the bafflegab, my life is a disaster and nothing I’m doing is changing that, so – maybe – just maybe – I’ll reconsider what I’ve been doing and try something different?
But no. They just double down on what’s failed.
[ Recalls the dread Correction Booth. ]
Hit the century mark but humidity had dropped to 33% by that time.
We’re supposed to hit 102°F today.
[ Winces. ]
Thank God for refrigerators and air conditioners.
The Countess of Tyrol has competition.
Some people really do need telling that their craving for pretentious victimhood
That won’t help unless and until being a victim is delegitimized as a route to instant status and attention.
As noted by our host, it’s all in how they’re told.
Lying in their teeth.
Hadn’t heard that phrasing before.
Da-yum. Sucks to be you guys.
Lying through one’s teeth is more common.
[ Looks out of window at greyish sky, light drizzle. ]
Ah, drizzle. Our old friend.
Simon and Garfunkel sang about that.
How degenerate do you have to be to threaten and assault emergency crews working to restore power after a hurricane?
This never used to happen. I blame two chief factors:
Thanks to the decline of our schools and culture, fewer and fewer people have any understanding of our infrastructure, much less appreciation for what it takes to maintain it, and thus get indignant when anything goes wrong.Some segments of society are increasingly degenerate and in need of radical restraint.
Here in sunny (ha! Auto corrected to “zany”) Silicon valley, we just ended a week-long heat wave. Temps in the 35-40 C range. For the last week running more like 20-30.
On The last hot day we took The dog to Half Moon Bay to meet a friend who just had to euthanize her old dog, a giant male pit mix, Uncle Chance to my little girl Poppy. Chance taught Poppy how to pee like a man, complete with post-pee dirt-flinging. Friend brought her other dog, Dalli, and the two pooches tired each other out goofing around on the beach.
Temps around 15. Sea fog. Typical summer weather.
Yes, but have you considered the merits, the charms, of drizzle?
Forget ‘degenerate’, focus on ‘stupid’.
Drizzle…
July 4 is the official start of fire season here. July 2 we had dry lightning in the hills a few miles away, the worst possible thing.
We had several late spring rains, so the brush and wild grass grew like crazy. They are now rapidly drying out, becoming fuel.
The cheerful sound of chainsaws and woodchippers is The only thing keeping me happy right now.
Why not both?
and people call Flappr a smut blog
Bugger.
Act casual, say nothing.
Theodore Dalrymple has remarked on more than one occasion about the problem of litter in Britain. This may be part of the problem.
Those Council commissars should be placed in bins. Heads down.
I’d bet that’s where they found them in the first place.
100 deg F: 100 yrs ago or more, the US South had a reputation for laziness. In fact, without air conditioning, much of the summer was too hot to do anything. On top of that, yellow fever was rampant.
Self-deception: one of the hallmarks of a successful life is responding to feedback from reality. Learning to study for a test, losing weight, exercising, saving money. etc. Instead of complaining and blaming “the system”.
Forget ‘degenerate’, focus on ‘stupid’.
I respectfully disagree – degenerate is the better term. I’ll add “entitled” as well as it is definitely a cultured/coddled attitude. They may be stupid too, but I think that’s downstream from the degenerate.
This is Houston, which was invaded in the Great Migration in 2005 by post-Katrina New Orleans scum (I think Atlanta got hit as well) and the city was forever changed by their degenerate, entitled presence. May not have been the best place before, but it certainly wasn’t improved after.
That article linked torqued me off no end – first because those linemen are mostly from out of state, driving their trucks from all over the USA (we’re talking over a day’s drive!) to go to Houston to help out the local utilities get the power back on. And second, because I lived in Florida the year of the 5 hurricanes, two hitting my area, and power off for over a week both times. We cheered when the out of state linemen showed up – everyone was so happy to see them. These entitled, degenerate a$$holes think they can do whatever they want to anyone, anytime – rob, steal, destroy, menace, murder. Degenerate scum. They don’t even care about each other or their own tribe of losers, let alone the rest of the civilized world.
Not promising.
We are ruled by people who shouldn’t even have authority over their own bedtime.
I’d forgotten about that. Thanks for mentioning it.
I happened to be on the road in the Midwest immediately after a Florida hurricane, and saw many long convoys of electric utility trucks heading south.
I couldn’t imagine doing anything less than tip my hat to them and wish them well. Those who harm them, or threaten harm, should be treated as special enemies of civilization and removed forthwith.
Damn & blast. Just received my copy of Michael Flynn‘s In the Belly of the Whale only to find out he died last year.
They think that because they can. No one is stopping them. No one is going to stop them. They know this. They see through the bluff of law enforcement. Law abiding citizens (LAC) think crime doesn’t pay. That criminals mostly get caught and pay consequences. LAC don’t understand that for those committed to crime, it’s all in the game. Mostly criminals get away with stuff. But if they do eventually get caught, the justice system for them is so slow and ineffective, any prison time is just a temporary setback. They still get fed and have their needs met. For a LAC, getting caught doing a significant crime would mean the end of their lives, at least as they had known and built them. Much greater loss, especially financially, for the LAC. Thus for them, crime doesn’t pay. Lawfare plays into this significantly.
I confess, I had never heard the term “fly-tipping” before.