Nancy and Sarah on the unhappy women at the center of a new essay, “The March of Kamala’s Brides." Is the problem political? Cultural? Psychological? YES!
Upper middle class,professional, middle aged white woman & mother tapping in here…I’m not unhappy, I am a feminist and a moderate liberal. Also, happily married I want Kamala to win. All these things can exist in one person.
Nancy’s rant about Kamala followers that will inevitably get disappointed and have to make excuses for her is the exact same thing that should and could be said about Trump followers. It’s not necessarily a political issue but a statement of some people (men and women) who want to believe that a leader can get them to the promised land. You’re painting too broad a brush against women.
Also- “what happens to you, is your fault” is the worst kind of victim blaming in cases of sexual assault, child abuse, and neglect. Please don’t forget that these things happen to people daily and have a long term impact on their mental health. That it might in fact be the reason they are unhappy and need Prozac :)
Re: The American president as our savior. I remember the night of the 2004 election when GW Bush was elected to a second term. I was at a party with my then Canadian boyfriend and outraged that my country had chosen this man as our figurehead. He didn’t understand why I cared. “It’s just your president,” he said.
20 years later, he was right. If the presidency of Trump and now the latter half of the presidency of Biden, who clearly has dementia, has shown me anything about American politics it’s that who our president is really doesn’t matter. Symbolically, yes. Culturally, yes. But politically? Policy wise? I think it makes no fucking difference. This isn’t say they’re all the same. There are just much greater and stronger forces at work shaping all of these outcomes that we pretend a single person can influence.
Middle aged, upper middle class, previously professional, married wife and mother here and I could not agree more! I’m kind of conservative but I can’t stand the Trump as savior thing…or any other politician for that matter. I was raised with the notion that politicians are liars and slime balls and that every candidate needs to be scrutinized . I really try to be extra cautious and not get sucked in and start making excuses for my candidate of choice. It’s tempting to do that at times!
My demographic is just like yours and I want to barf at the Trump worship. Like, literally Christians comparing him to Jesus. We complained about the cult of personality around Obama (rightly, in my opinion), and now they've outdone that by a mile!
Interesting conversation. In Coming Apart, the controversial Charles Murray described the four institutions of meaning as faith, family, community, and vocation. You don’t need all four, but those are the only four. That always rang true to me.
I think, generally speaking, progressive politics deemphasize family and openly scorn faith—both of which social conservatism pushes. I suspect that has a lot to do with the disparity.
There are plenty of women that clean the gutters, cut the grass, fix the plumbing, pick up the kids, cook the dinner, etc etc. They do what needs to be done. (As do most men)
I don’t think women are that unhappy or needy, my goodness! Being happy does come from inside.
Paglia is wrong. Women worked in munitions factories during WW2, “outside the home”. That was the beginning of day care (my mom was one of the women) Women did what was needed, as they usually do, same for most men Id say.
I thought the article was very offensive. Not real world.
The whole discussion was not real world to me.
Too many choices when feminism was began? It was amazing! We had choices. It was revolutionary and existential. I don’t think it made anyone unhappy in my experience.
41-year-old professional woman here, happily married for the past year, childfree but technically a step mother to my husband’s adult kids (we see them rarely), and also technically a biological mother to two children
I helped conceive through egg donation using my young, fresh ooctytes when I was in my 20s.
I’m also interested in the topic of why so many women are depressed and/or on SSRIs. My husband is a neuroscientist and he says we still don’t know how to cure depression with pharmaceuticals because we don’t actually understand what part of the brain is “misfiring“ to create feelings of intense sustained despair. People feel better on them, so they “work” to some extent, but it may be a placebo effect or just a diminishing of all feeling that people are interpreting as improved mood. Or, they lift the fog enough to enable people to make the life changes needed to improve their baseline mood.
Either way, I know many women who dutifully take SSRIs or milder antidepressants. All of these women have ostensibly successful lives - financial security, loving partners, healthy children, and no physical or intellectual disabilities.
It’s never enough. We must also be perfecting our mood and disposition!
Like Nancy, I’m one of those people who swears by exercise as an antidepressant. I was an overweight, unhappy teenager who fancied myself “depressed.” (I never experienced true depression and most dissatisfied women haven’t, either). I started running and hitting the gym after school instead of driving around with my burnout friends getting stoned. I never looked back. I’m always doing something active, and although I feel existential dread, it doesn’t register because my body feels so healthy that it counteracts the negativity emanating from my brain. I am exceedingly grateful for what my body can do, especially as women are being told now that perimenopause is going to prevent us from doing anything after the age of about 40.
I emulated my father’s emotional disposition and strategy, a man who divorced my mom, quit booze, and found fitness in his 40s. I rejected my mother’s disposition, a stay-at-home mom who smoked pot and cigarettes throughout the day, stewing in her unhappiness for most of her middle age years.
My mom is happier at 70 than she was when she was my age. At some point she found better things to do, mostly creating art and jewelry. My father is deceased, unfortunately. You cannot outrun death.
I thought having a career would protect me from ending up like my mother, but my job is the thing that gives me the least pleasure and enjoyment in my life. If my husband made double the salary I would quit my job tomorrow! But my job does give me stability and it did enable me to marry someone who was also financially stable because that made me an attractive prospect on the dating market despite being of the “advanced age“ of 40 when I was married.
Stay at home moms are unhappy.
Single mothers are unhappy.
Childless cat ladies are unhappy.
Career women are unhappy.
If everyone is unhappy, no one is unhappy. So then we really think conservative women are happiest? I think they just don’t exist in social circles where they receive validation for expressing negative emotions. They might rush to the doctor for prescriptions for antidepressants, but they aren’t going to dwell on it in polite company. Or maybe they’re just more apolitical which probably does make people happier! Politics makes everyone miserable.
The PEW survey of partisanship by gender and marital status needs to incorporate race in order to tell the complete story. Black women are going to skew the data because they are so unlikely to be married and also to vote Democratic.
The most likely group to get married and stay married is still white women with a college degree. These are the Democrats, aren’t they? Yes, marital rates are declining among this cohort slightly, but they are still overwhelmingly likely to get married eventually. I need to see a more fine-grained analysis before I will believe that the vast majority of Democratic women voters are childless cat ladies. I work in academia and 95% of the lady professors I know are married or engaged by the age of 35. I’m an outlier because it was very unlikely that I would end up marrying since I did not find a partner in graduate school when most people in academia settle down.
Partisan breakdowns are not accounting for all the unmarried, lower socioeconomic status, I.e. “poor whites,” (especially men) who aren’t voting at all or who vote Republican sporadically, but identify as independent.
I think this argument is as useless as the “white racial resentment” argument to explain the rise of Trump. Childless cat ladies do not explain the Democratic Party. They are in the coalition, but it is primarily a party of elite educated married liberals.
Another aspect of race I'd love to see studied is the effect of white guilt. I hear a social justice movement that tells me that as a white lady I have no right to be happy. As a middle-aged woman, I can easily reject that message, but I think my daughter has fully internalized it.
Guys don’t ask about your feelings apropos of nothing. Chances are if your guy is asking how you are feeling, the evidence of a problem isn’t all that subtle. I think that is part of the reason some people don’t like being asked the question. Built into that question is an unstated “why are you acting weird?” question. Guys that ask often generally aren’t terribly perceptive, better safe than sorry. Guys that almost never ask the questions generally have a mental model issue where they assume you think just like they do / overestimate how well they know you. The bulk of dudes show up in the middle.
We hear a certain tone, or you go quiet for a spell, and the spidey senses start tingling. One never pokes the bear, but it is good practice to keep YOUR garbage out of sight until you are out of bear country.
So we ask.
First ask is premise checking, second ask is an offer of help, the third ask serves as either a “coupon” for future interaction on the topic when you are ready, or an “Ok, let’s have it” because the consequences of an argument / explosion is less “annoying” than things as they stand. Obviously your results may vary, but most guys (as mentioned in the pod) have a bubble-wrap like compulsion to pop problems when they arise. Ask number three, is basically the end of the bubble wrap. We are just checking to see if there is more, or if we have to wait until the next Amazon order shows up.
On the unhappiness score thing, I fall in line with the self-reported part. People are people to me. I think the distribution of unhappiness is pretty even across the board. The big difference is prolly in the reporting. If I go just by what I hear women say, or what is reported, or media writ large I just assume most women are “miserable” in the same way that most men are “angry”.
Not to go all DFW “this is water” here, but those defaults are inaccurate, but they are comfortable / close enough without getting into the particular details of what is actually troubling us at any given moment. When I was younger and someone asked me why I was angry all the time, I would be bothered by it and argue. As I have gotten older, the inaccuracy of the question has bothered me less. It works well enough for a stand in for whatever human complex feels I am having / expressing at the time. People know how to handle “angry” and the way they tend to handle it works generally for whatever mood I am in. A gesture of care or concern, and plenty of space and time. I wager women have a similar thing to being “miserable” or sad. It’s not exactly accurate, but the treatment works well enough in a “do no harm” kind of way.
Men don’t need a reason to get angry, ladies don’t need one to be sad. You can talk about loss of purpose, meaning, religion, the patriarchy, feminism, social media or god knows what else. But at the end of the day in order to value “good” feelings, you are gonna have some “bad” ones as a contrast emerging on their own. I think if there is a distinction to be made when it comes to ladies and guys around these things, it might be that ladies are their own worst enemies. If you aren’t sad, you might ask the question “why aren’t I sad?” or get interested in people who aren’t happy like you are, maybe “help” them with their sad feelings. There be dragons that way.
Most guys would find that kind of questioning insane. “Good times” for me at least are fairly content free in my memory. I remember a good time fondly, but I remember almost nothing about them in detail. We kinda go on autopilot and roll with it, like we are trying to pitch a perfect game.
That is my two cents. There are a lot of sad dudes out there, and a lot of angry women. But I think if you get sad or angry about people being sad or angry… maybe someone should toss a monkey wrench in the machinery there.
Sidenote, I have a half finished playlist of music I am cobbling together inspired by Nancy’s book for my personal amusement, and the first artist that popped into my head was Lana Del Rey. Part of the reason I love the cover is that kind of “Smoking by the pool at the hotel” thing, which she kinda exudes. I got some Etta, Billie, Petty and Segar mixed in there, but she really is the tempo setter at the beginning. :D
Thus concludes the novel for this week, great gab as always!
I’m as sympathetic to a “welfare queen” meme as a next person, but it’s pretty stupid to talk about single women as some new class of government dependents. You still need to be a parent for eligibility in most programs although now you can get Medicaid if you’re a poor, single man, too. It’s prime age non-working men that we should be really worried about. The uptick in men on permanent government disability or who have exited the workforce entirely is alarming and no one seems to care about it.
There’s always been a class of women who are wards of the state but a bunch of hiring women with college degrees are not in this cohort. The streets of major cities are littered with nonworking men who are the true dead beat husbands of the state.
i started out having a hate-hate relationship with miranda july, but i've come around to the point where i'd almost have to call myself a fan-boy if i wasn't probably too old for that.
it all started badly when i saw her movie 'the future.' it's not just that it's quirky. i love quirky. swim in it. but this movie drowns in quirkiness. it has a talking cat that narrates the film ffs. i still hate that movie.
but i gave 'you & me & everone i know' a chance & actually found that i loved it. & then come her role in josephine decker's 'madeline's madeline', where she was so great, & the movie is one of my favorite of all time. it's streaming for free on tubitv. greatness.
& then kajillionaire made me have to admit that i was a fan & i'd judged her too harshly. even though i still hate the future & its wacky talking cat.
i haven't read any of her books yet, but i have two of them on my kindle (the first bad man & no one belongs here more than you) & will get to them later this year.
i don't know why i told you all of this, but after you mentioned her it became really important to me to come here and type all this stuff.
I'm 45 minutes in, but I have to pause for the Fifth Column live event you kindly linked to. 5:30pm my time PT, 7:30pm Chicago time (although it was listed as 8:30pm)! I'll be back!
If you are paid TFC, there are YouTube links for both events on their Substack. I watched and enjoyed both, I would count the 2nd as better, but it's TFC you can't go wrong.
Ladies! I missed you—so glad you’re back! I hadn’t read Samuels’ piece so I paused your show to read it first. And wow—I thought it was fascinating! He connected many dots that are really worthy of further discussion and I’m thrilled you’re doing so. Thanks for bringing it to my attention!
Mid thirties male here. In a committed, long-term relationship of >10 years. The “What’s the matter” discussion hit a bull’s eye. Always dig the Sarah & Nancy discussions.
Quick question: they discussed their observations of when men typically cry and/or what makes them cry. This was also discussed in an early episode. Does anyone remember which episode that was?
Yes! I had a ton of end-of-summer chores these past few weeks, plus I had to resume the dreaded school-transportation grind, and I wished I had your lovely voices in my ears. Can't wait to listen; my afternoon pickup line will be 50% less irksome. Welcome back!
The unhappiness thing is interesting. I wonder if it has something to do with all the messaging we get about how ‘happiness’ is the ideal, or even natural state. That is not actually true, so then you can feel as though you are defective and need medication. This is separate from actual clinical depression however. I do wonder also if this has to do with the pharmaceutical companies marketing normal emotions as unnatural and needing to be fixed.
But there is so much more to it too! Comparison (reading, viewing people with more glamorous lives - this goes way back into the past), lack of meaning, lack of communities and connection, poor quality food/lifestyles, the list goes on.
I cannot wait to hear both your thoughts on the Pill! This book is very interesting: How the Pill Changes Everything by Dr Sarah E Hill. So fascinating, and also slightly disturbing.
Upper middle class,professional, middle aged white woman & mother tapping in here…I’m not unhappy, I am a feminist and a moderate liberal. Also, happily married I want Kamala to win. All these things can exist in one person.
Nancy’s rant about Kamala followers that will inevitably get disappointed and have to make excuses for her is the exact same thing that should and could be said about Trump followers. It’s not necessarily a political issue but a statement of some people (men and women) who want to believe that a leader can get them to the promised land. You’re painting too broad a brush against women.
Also- “what happens to you, is your fault” is the worst kind of victim blaming in cases of sexual assault, child abuse, and neglect. Please don’t forget that these things happen to people daily and have a long term impact on their mental health. That it might in fact be the reason they are unhappy and need Prozac :)
Re: The American president as our savior. I remember the night of the 2004 election when GW Bush was elected to a second term. I was at a party with my then Canadian boyfriend and outraged that my country had chosen this man as our figurehead. He didn’t understand why I cared. “It’s just your president,” he said.
20 years later, he was right. If the presidency of Trump and now the latter half of the presidency of Biden, who clearly has dementia, has shown me anything about American politics it’s that who our president is really doesn’t matter. Symbolically, yes. Culturally, yes. But politically? Policy wise? I think it makes no fucking difference. This isn’t say they’re all the same. There are just much greater and stronger forces at work shaping all of these outcomes that we pretend a single person can influence.
Middle aged, upper middle class, previously professional, married wife and mother here and I could not agree more! I’m kind of conservative but I can’t stand the Trump as savior thing…or any other politician for that matter. I was raised with the notion that politicians are liars and slime balls and that every candidate needs to be scrutinized . I really try to be extra cautious and not get sucked in and start making excuses for my candidate of choice. It’s tempting to do that at times!
My demographic is just like yours and I want to barf at the Trump worship. Like, literally Christians comparing him to Jesus. We complained about the cult of personality around Obama (rightly, in my opinion), and now they've outdone that by a mile!
Yes it’s so gross!
Interesting conversation. In Coming Apart, the controversial Charles Murray described the four institutions of meaning as faith, family, community, and vocation. You don’t need all four, but those are the only four. That always rang true to me.
I think, generally speaking, progressive politics deemphasize family and openly scorn faith—both of which social conservatism pushes. I suspect that has a lot to do with the disparity.
There are plenty of women that clean the gutters, cut the grass, fix the plumbing, pick up the kids, cook the dinner, etc etc. They do what needs to be done. (As do most men)
I don’t think women are that unhappy or needy, my goodness! Being happy does come from inside.
Paglia is wrong. Women worked in munitions factories during WW2, “outside the home”. That was the beginning of day care (my mom was one of the women) Women did what was needed, as they usually do, same for most men Id say.
I thought the article was very offensive. Not real world.
The whole discussion was not real world to me.
Too many choices when feminism was began? It was amazing! We had choices. It was revolutionary and existential. I don’t think it made anyone unhappy in my experience.
re: "Women worked in munitions factories during WW2":
"Rosie the riveter" is something I remember reading/hearing about plenty when growing up in the 60s.
Wait…Nancy dated Eddie Veder? Listening to the episode ASAP!
41-year-old professional woman here, happily married for the past year, childfree but technically a step mother to my husband’s adult kids (we see them rarely), and also technically a biological mother to two children
I helped conceive through egg donation using my young, fresh ooctytes when I was in my 20s.
I’m also interested in the topic of why so many women are depressed and/or on SSRIs. My husband is a neuroscientist and he says we still don’t know how to cure depression with pharmaceuticals because we don’t actually understand what part of the brain is “misfiring“ to create feelings of intense sustained despair. People feel better on them, so they “work” to some extent, but it may be a placebo effect or just a diminishing of all feeling that people are interpreting as improved mood. Or, they lift the fog enough to enable people to make the life changes needed to improve their baseline mood.
Either way, I know many women who dutifully take SSRIs or milder antidepressants. All of these women have ostensibly successful lives - financial security, loving partners, healthy children, and no physical or intellectual disabilities.
It’s never enough. We must also be perfecting our mood and disposition!
Like Nancy, I’m one of those people who swears by exercise as an antidepressant. I was an overweight, unhappy teenager who fancied myself “depressed.” (I never experienced true depression and most dissatisfied women haven’t, either). I started running and hitting the gym after school instead of driving around with my burnout friends getting stoned. I never looked back. I’m always doing something active, and although I feel existential dread, it doesn’t register because my body feels so healthy that it counteracts the negativity emanating from my brain. I am exceedingly grateful for what my body can do, especially as women are being told now that perimenopause is going to prevent us from doing anything after the age of about 40.
I emulated my father’s emotional disposition and strategy, a man who divorced my mom, quit booze, and found fitness in his 40s. I rejected my mother’s disposition, a stay-at-home mom who smoked pot and cigarettes throughout the day, stewing in her unhappiness for most of her middle age years.
My mom is happier at 70 than she was when she was my age. At some point she found better things to do, mostly creating art and jewelry. My father is deceased, unfortunately. You cannot outrun death.
I thought having a career would protect me from ending up like my mother, but my job is the thing that gives me the least pleasure and enjoyment in my life. If my husband made double the salary I would quit my job tomorrow! But my job does give me stability and it did enable me to marry someone who was also financially stable because that made me an attractive prospect on the dating market despite being of the “advanced age“ of 40 when I was married.
Stay at home moms are unhappy.
Single mothers are unhappy.
Childless cat ladies are unhappy.
Career women are unhappy.
If everyone is unhappy, no one is unhappy. So then we really think conservative women are happiest? I think they just don’t exist in social circles where they receive validation for expressing negative emotions. They might rush to the doctor for prescriptions for antidepressants, but they aren’t going to dwell on it in polite company. Or maybe they’re just more apolitical which probably does make people happier! Politics makes everyone miserable.
Missed you two. Happy Friday. Fun to listen to you both while cooking tacos 🌮.
Great talk. Fascinating.
The PEW survey of partisanship by gender and marital status needs to incorporate race in order to tell the complete story. Black women are going to skew the data because they are so unlikely to be married and also to vote Democratic.
The most likely group to get married and stay married is still white women with a college degree. These are the Democrats, aren’t they? Yes, marital rates are declining among this cohort slightly, but they are still overwhelmingly likely to get married eventually. I need to see a more fine-grained analysis before I will believe that the vast majority of Democratic women voters are childless cat ladies. I work in academia and 95% of the lady professors I know are married or engaged by the age of 35. I’m an outlier because it was very unlikely that I would end up marrying since I did not find a partner in graduate school when most people in academia settle down.
Partisan breakdowns are not accounting for all the unmarried, lower socioeconomic status, I.e. “poor whites,” (especially men) who aren’t voting at all or who vote Republican sporadically, but identify as independent.
I think this argument is as useless as the “white racial resentment” argument to explain the rise of Trump. Childless cat ladies do not explain the Democratic Party. They are in the coalition, but it is primarily a party of elite educated married liberals.
Another aspect of race I'd love to see studied is the effect of white guilt. I hear a social justice movement that tells me that as a white lady I have no right to be happy. As a middle-aged woman, I can easily reject that message, but I think my daughter has fully internalized it.
Wow. Great point.
Guys don’t ask about your feelings apropos of nothing. Chances are if your guy is asking how you are feeling, the evidence of a problem isn’t all that subtle. I think that is part of the reason some people don’t like being asked the question. Built into that question is an unstated “why are you acting weird?” question. Guys that ask often generally aren’t terribly perceptive, better safe than sorry. Guys that almost never ask the questions generally have a mental model issue where they assume you think just like they do / overestimate how well they know you. The bulk of dudes show up in the middle.
We hear a certain tone, or you go quiet for a spell, and the spidey senses start tingling. One never pokes the bear, but it is good practice to keep YOUR garbage out of sight until you are out of bear country.
So we ask.
First ask is premise checking, second ask is an offer of help, the third ask serves as either a “coupon” for future interaction on the topic when you are ready, or an “Ok, let’s have it” because the consequences of an argument / explosion is less “annoying” than things as they stand. Obviously your results may vary, but most guys (as mentioned in the pod) have a bubble-wrap like compulsion to pop problems when they arise. Ask number three, is basically the end of the bubble wrap. We are just checking to see if there is more, or if we have to wait until the next Amazon order shows up.
On the unhappiness score thing, I fall in line with the self-reported part. People are people to me. I think the distribution of unhappiness is pretty even across the board. The big difference is prolly in the reporting. If I go just by what I hear women say, or what is reported, or media writ large I just assume most women are “miserable” in the same way that most men are “angry”.
Not to go all DFW “this is water” here, but those defaults are inaccurate, but they are comfortable / close enough without getting into the particular details of what is actually troubling us at any given moment. When I was younger and someone asked me why I was angry all the time, I would be bothered by it and argue. As I have gotten older, the inaccuracy of the question has bothered me less. It works well enough for a stand in for whatever human complex feels I am having / expressing at the time. People know how to handle “angry” and the way they tend to handle it works generally for whatever mood I am in. A gesture of care or concern, and plenty of space and time. I wager women have a similar thing to being “miserable” or sad. It’s not exactly accurate, but the treatment works well enough in a “do no harm” kind of way.
Men don’t need a reason to get angry, ladies don’t need one to be sad. You can talk about loss of purpose, meaning, religion, the patriarchy, feminism, social media or god knows what else. But at the end of the day in order to value “good” feelings, you are gonna have some “bad” ones as a contrast emerging on their own. I think if there is a distinction to be made when it comes to ladies and guys around these things, it might be that ladies are their own worst enemies. If you aren’t sad, you might ask the question “why aren’t I sad?” or get interested in people who aren’t happy like you are, maybe “help” them with their sad feelings. There be dragons that way.
Most guys would find that kind of questioning insane. “Good times” for me at least are fairly content free in my memory. I remember a good time fondly, but I remember almost nothing about them in detail. We kinda go on autopilot and roll with it, like we are trying to pitch a perfect game.
That is my two cents. There are a lot of sad dudes out there, and a lot of angry women. But I think if you get sad or angry about people being sad or angry… maybe someone should toss a monkey wrench in the machinery there.
Sidenote, I have a half finished playlist of music I am cobbling together inspired by Nancy’s book for my personal amusement, and the first artist that popped into my head was Lana Del Rey. Part of the reason I love the cover is that kind of “Smoking by the pool at the hotel” thing, which she kinda exudes. I got some Etta, Billie, Petty and Segar mixed in there, but she really is the tempo setter at the beginning. :D
Thus concludes the novel for this week, great gab as always!
I think Samuels makes some interesting points, but I find “Brides of the State” really demeaning and its acronym doubly so.
I’m as sympathetic to a “welfare queen” meme as a next person, but it’s pretty stupid to talk about single women as some new class of government dependents. You still need to be a parent for eligibility in most programs although now you can get Medicaid if you’re a poor, single man, too. It’s prime age non-working men that we should be really worried about. The uptick in men on permanent government disability or who have exited the workforce entirely is alarming and no one seems to care about it.
There’s always been a class of women who are wards of the state but a bunch of hiring women with college degrees are not in this cohort. The streets of major cities are littered with nonworking men who are the true dead beat husbands of the state.
I just ordered Nancy’s book!! (And you don’t like the word “mentor”? But I want you both to BE my mentors!!)
i started out having a hate-hate relationship with miranda july, but i've come around to the point where i'd almost have to call myself a fan-boy if i wasn't probably too old for that.
it all started badly when i saw her movie 'the future.' it's not just that it's quirky. i love quirky. swim in it. but this movie drowns in quirkiness. it has a talking cat that narrates the film ffs. i still hate that movie.
but i gave 'you & me & everone i know' a chance & actually found that i loved it. & then come her role in josephine decker's 'madeline's madeline', where she was so great, & the movie is one of my favorite of all time. it's streaming for free on tubitv. greatness.
https://tubitv.com/movies/505445/madeline-s-madeline
& then kajillionaire made me have to admit that i was a fan & i'd judged her too harshly. even though i still hate the future & its wacky talking cat.
i haven't read any of her books yet, but i have two of them on my kindle (the first bad man & no one belongs here more than you) & will get to them later this year.
i don't know why i told you all of this, but after you mentioned her it became really important to me to come here and type all this stuff.
I enjoyed the First Bad Man a lot.
i'll bump it to the top of my queue!
I'm 45 minutes in, but I have to pause for the Fifth Column live event you kindly linked to. 5:30pm my time PT, 7:30pm Chicago time (although it was listed as 8:30pm)! I'll be back!
Yea, Nancy is speaking!!! Not enough Nancy, but she was there nonetheless!
Oh good! I dropped before she got on the mic. I'm assuming they'll release it soon!
If you are paid TFC, there are YouTube links for both events on their Substack. I watched and enjoyed both, I would count the 2nd as better, but it's TFC you can't go wrong.
Yes, it's up! Now, do I pay my 5 bucks for today's or just wait for someone to post the unlisted YouTube link and be one of the many freeloaders? :D
Ladies! I missed you—so glad you’re back! I hadn’t read Samuels’ piece so I paused your show to read it first. And wow—I thought it was fascinating! He connected many dots that are really worthy of further discussion and I’m thrilled you’re doing so. Thanks for bringing it to my attention!
Mid thirties male here. In a committed, long-term relationship of >10 years. The “What’s the matter” discussion hit a bull’s eye. Always dig the Sarah & Nancy discussions.
Quick question: they discussed their observations of when men typically cry and/or what makes them cry. This was also discussed in an early episode. Does anyone remember which episode that was?
Thx
Yes! I had a ton of end-of-summer chores these past few weeks, plus I had to resume the dreaded school-transportation grind, and I wished I had your lovely voices in my ears. Can't wait to listen; my afternoon pickup line will be 50% less irksome. Welcome back!
The unhappiness thing is interesting. I wonder if it has something to do with all the messaging we get about how ‘happiness’ is the ideal, or even natural state. That is not actually true, so then you can feel as though you are defective and need medication. This is separate from actual clinical depression however. I do wonder also if this has to do with the pharmaceutical companies marketing normal emotions as unnatural and needing to be fixed.
But there is so much more to it too! Comparison (reading, viewing people with more glamorous lives - this goes way back into the past), lack of meaning, lack of communities and connection, poor quality food/lifestyles, the list goes on.
I cannot wait to hear both your thoughts on the Pill! This book is very interesting: How the Pill Changes Everything by Dr Sarah E Hill. So fascinating, and also slightly disturbing.