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.

Empowered woman, who is in no way unhinged, teaches her small children to scream profanities at random people.

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.

Lifted from the comments – which you’re reading, of course – an item deserving of a little more attention.

The Atlantic is currently promoting an article from its archive, one selected by the editors as a “must-read,” a measure of the magazine’s importance to the progressive lifestyle. A choice that is perhaps more telling than intended.

The chosen article, by novelist Xochitl Gonzalez, poses the question, “Why Do Rich People Love Quiet?” It is sub-headed, “The sound of gentrification is silence.” A racially judgemental tone prevails. Such that the term rich people can be read as meaning white people. Followed by implied tutting.

It begins with an account of life at university – Brown, since you ask – and the merits of Brooklyn hip hop combos:

Ah, those downtrodden minority students, huddled together for mutual safety. Lest the roaming tigers find them.

As I said, the tutting is implied.

And then, belatedly, the realisation that attempts at intellectual activity – say, at an upscale university – tend to require a certain restraint, noise-wise:

Morning lectures being an inconceivable thing, it seems.

Ms Gonzalez, who repeatedly mentions how “minority” and “of colour” she is, also tells us how she, “just wanted to be around people in places where nobody told us to shush.” Say, when being a late-night annoyance to roommates and neighbours, a thing that by her own account happens repeatedly, or when playing music in a library. Where other people are trying to study:

A bold admission. One, I suspect, that reveals more than intended. Also, the claim that one can sit down in a library accidentally.

Ms Gonzalez’ tale of woe continues:

Ms Gonzalez, it seems, was being oppressed. Just for being thoughtless and noisy when people are trying to study. Her comfort was being impacted by requests for civility. How very dare they.

As dicentra notes in the comments,

Well, indeed. One of the many things to have somehow not crossed our author’s mind.

Feel her pain. The outrageousness of it all.

Well, yes, It does. You selfish, classless bint.

And note the sly downgrading of an ability to do some actual work as mere comfort. Or an ability to sleep without hearing hip hop once again booming through the wall.

And the Atlantic publishes this – this ode to antisocial selfishness – as if it might leave the reader morally improved. And feeling sympathetic towards the author.

Inevitably, Ms Gonzalez blames her own moral shortcomings on other people’s race and class, as if, by expecting politeness, they were imposing on her in cruel and unusual ways. Because – magic words – “of colour.” But the common variable, the one that’s hard to miss, is the author’s own rudeness and self-absorption. And so, she blunders into the library’s “Absolutely Quiet Room,” and fires up her music.

Oh, and for those of you curious about the author’s precise level of brownness, and thereby magical qualities, and all those rather handy exemptions from reciprocal proprieties, I’ll just leave this here:

Ms Gonzalez tells us that the “absence of noise” – by which she means, consideration for others – is “at odds with who I was. Who a lot of us were.” And yet she wonders why other people – less selfish people – might want to get away from her. Away from all the noise. And to live somewhere nicer, somewhere she doesn’t.

Readers may wish to ponder the possibility that noise may often be a pretty good measure of other issues. People who don’t care about stopping their neighbours from studying or sleeping may not care about other things too. Other boundaries. Which in turn may go some way to explaining the existence of those quiet, gentrified neighbourhoods, the ones that so offend Ms Gonzalez.

The expectation of consideration is soon, predictably, via contrivance, framed as a form of racial oppression. A way to torment “Black and brown communities,” in which the ethos is “loud and proud.” Because if residents of respectable neighbourhoods object to their nights being disrupted by endless overdriven sound systems, then this is merely “an elite sonic aesthetic: the systemic elevation of quiet over noise.” And almost certainly racist.

“One person’s loud is another person’s expression of joy,” we’re told. “I take pride in saying that we are a loud people.”

An expression of joy by loud people can be found embedded below:

What’s the point? 🤦‍♂️ pic.twitter.com/oIcSwQH82f

— Clown World ™ 🤡 (@ClownWorld_) June 11, 2024

Note the self-satisfied quip, “They’ll be fine. They can buy a house somewhere else.” Today’s words, by the way, are recreational spite.

At which point, readers may wonder how Ms Gonzalez, a novelist, manages to write her books amid the fashionably vibrant racket that she recommends to others. All that shouting and shrieking and “ceaseless music” that she finds so liberating and authentic. Wouldn’t those extended and rather complicated trains of thought be disrupted, and likely made impossible, by all the shouting and laughing, all the whumping and thumping, all those jolly sirens?

Happily, an answer is provided in the pages of Elle Décor, in which Ms Gonzalez opined some two months earlier:

This point is expanded upon:

And so, our silence-needing novelist sought out “a gorgeous historic house in downtown Kingston, New York.” Ah, yes. An “upstate vacation rental.”

Perhaps Ms Gonzalez was hoping that readers of her Atlantic article – the one about noise being so vibrant and racially affirming – would not stumble across her Elle Décor piece, published weeks earlier, which rather calls into question her own later claims. And which, it has to be said, suggests a certain pretence, a certain hypocrisy.

In short, then, your desire for peace and quiet is terribly problematic, and probably racist. While hers, not so much. Which is enormously convenient. If not entirely convincing.

Previously in the Atlantic:

A woman oppressed by crumbs.

And another expensively educated Brooklynite who insists that crossword puzzles are “one of the systemic forces that threaten women.”

And then there was the attempt to convince us that chronic thievery is totally fine and nothing to complain about, provided it’s being done to someone else. Someone who isn’t an Atlantic contributor, presumably.

Oh, and let’s not forget that the Atlantic referred to Elon Musk as, and I quote, “a far-right activist.”

Attention, comrades. My fellow heroes, titans, thinkers of deep thoughts. It is time to map out the world of tomorrow:

There are no post revolution theatre troops, only post revolution mine troops, comrade. pic.twitter.com/ACIref7r9r

— Hegel Borg™️ (@xxclusionary) June 10, 2024

Because after the revolution, we will need accessible theatre.

Presumably, to take our minds off all the riots and ruin and burning cars. Earlier revolutionary rumblings can be found here and here. Topics covered include the pivotal importance of “artists and visionaries,” and the righteous washing of other people’s bin contents. Thereby enabling us to “eat from a revolutionary and resistance standpoint.”

Consider this an open thread. Share ye links and bicker.

Lifted from the comments, a small point, on suburban versus city living. And those who would prefer that you didn’t have a choice:

I went out on my porch last night and there was a guy milling about in front of my neighbor’s house, sitting on their retaining wall, just, you know, hanging out on somebody else’s property at 11pm.

Freedom from that (and a million related things) is what suburbanites are… https://t.co/O94JKBdBv5

— wanye (@wanyeburkett) May 30, 2024

A thread ensues.

In the comments, Jacob adds:

Well, yes. Quite.

Not having to guess whether some stranger sitting on your wall at 11pm is a threat, or just someone with an impaired sense of boundaries – and not having to do that regularly – is freeing. Likewise, being able to park your car on the street outside without fretting, routinely, about whether someone may try to steal it, or steal some part of it, or just vandalise it out of moron spite, is similarly non-trivial.

And contra Mr Gifford, a thing one might wish to enjoy.

Update, via the comments:

Mr Gifford, since you ask, is a proponent of the “15-minute city.” He doesn’t much like car ownership, or people having the option of living in the suburbs. He’s also rather disdainful of the fact that some of us would rather not “live closer to all kinds of different people,” a proximity to difference – now there’s a euphemism – that is presented as some kind of unexplained moral imperative.

That some people prefer to have neighbours with broadly compatible values and expectations – say, regarding behaviour, noise, the observation of normal boundaries, things of that kind – seems to vex Mr Gifford. The word “privilege” is deployed in a rumbling kind of way.

A rumbling we’ve heard before, while marvelling at its implications.

Update 2, via the comments:

Regarding Mr Gifford’s enthusiasm for our proximity – that’s coerced proximity – to “all kinds of different people,” MattS notes,

Another non-trivial point, one touched on here, and about which readers may have views somewhat at odds with those of Mr Gifford.

Dicentra adds, not unreasonably,

YOU WILL CARRY THOSE FOUR BAGS OF SHOPPING ON PUBLIC TRANSPORT. OR DIE IN THE ATTEMPT. CITIZEN. 

And where, needless to say, you will delight in being surrounded by “all kinds of different people.”

At which point, this came to mind, along with this. And of course this infinitely charming scene. Among many others.

Update 3:

In the comments, Daniel Ream adds,

And if everyone involved has shared values and behavioural expectations – the kind of cultural common ground – and moral common ground – that Mr Gifford would presumably disdain as problematic, as mere “privilege.”

A while ago, I mentioned that for many years a neighbour has had an ‘honesty box’ on a small, home-made stand on the pavement outside their house. Passers-by can help themselves to surplus produce from the owner’s vegetable garden, or small plants, or unwanted toys, or whatever. People leave the suggested, very nominal charge or whatever they deem appropriate.

In a box. That doesn’t get robbed.

Almost every time I pass it, I’m faintly pleased that it exists. It does seem rather symbolic. And it serves as a reminder that I’ve lived in neighbourhoods where such a thing would very promptly be vandalised and thrown into the road, and where delight would be taken in its destruction – and in the misery of its owner.

And the difference between the two scenarios – or between this scene and this one – is not caused by poverty, or indeed “privilege.” It’s about being better people. The kind of people one might, say, prefer as neighbours.

Update 4:

Regarding the reference to better people, EmC replies,

To acknowledge the obvious does have an air of scandalousness. Such is the practised dishonesty of our times. But at risk of being thought “privileged,” or insufficiently egalitarian, I would prefer to walk down the street without someone doing this in order to do this. To me or anyone else.

Outrageous of me, I know.

Quoted below, extracts from a conversation that in many circles would result in much hissing and flailing of limbs, but which, it seems to me, very much ought to be had:

From the following video, in which Andrew Gold talks with the formidable Mia Hughes, author of The WPATH Files, about pseudoscience, malpractice, and experiments on children.

It’s a forty-five-minute watch, but there’s plenty to chew on. Much that could be quoted. I should point out that the later sections of the interview, which explore surgical affirmations, or as one surgeon puts it, “creating body types that do not exist in nature,” does get a little vivid, and indeed surreal.