A Brief History of Happiness-Blocking

Jenny Howard
Jul 10, 2017 · 22 min read

Historical Happiness Blockers and Reclaiming Happiness

I. Introduction

History, as it’s told, is necessarily about happiness. When we think about history, we are thinking about the stories of people who have had the prerogative of having their stories told. More than that, they have had the prerogative of having their stories listened to. Why does this imply history being about happiness? Happiness is an allowance. To be happy is to have some sort of immunity to, in the broadest terms, societal concerns. When we talk about history — both as it happened and as it is happening — we are talking about consequences of happiness. When we talk about history, we are talking about oppressors of happiness. Those that oppress happiness (whether or not this is on purpose) are happy. To this end, what happens when we create a new history? That is, what happens when we give stories to those who didn’t have that prerogative? I am interested in examining what Sara Ahmed terms the “Unhappy Archives” — archives from the other side of happiness. Like Ahmed, I am skeptical about happiness being a key to living a good life. Unlike Ahmed though, I am skeptical of this only insofar as I find our current use of the term happiness to be grotesque. “Current use” meaning a type of fulfillment made achievable by only the elite members in society. It is vague, and despite this, it brings about images of upper-middle-class white men, who are also cis-gender, heterosexual, neurotypical, and all the other identifiers that, through “winning” a genetic lottery, has granted them the utmost privilege in society. They sail through life. They are happy. They are the people about whom history books are written. I am skeptical about this notion of happiness for several reasons: I am a woman, I lived in a house with broken windows for several years, I am Latina, I am Korean, I have been through the foster care system. I find “happy” as it’s used to be repulsive. I am not skeptical to the degree that Ahmed is, however. Her argument implies that awareness of oppression means you can never be happy, nor should you want to be happy. I agree that I can never be happy in the same way as an upper-middle-class white man, nor do I want to be. But I do think reclamation of the term “happy” is possible, and I think it’s necessary. I think reclamation is necessary for all the people whose stories were not told, though for this paper, I will focus largely on the (un)happiness of women. To reclaim a word, we must become aware of its faults. In order to reclaim “happy,” we need to recognize that it conventionally isn’t used to talk about women. Through this paper, I look to explore tracking the unhappiness of women through its origins, and trace it through Western history. I will look at unhappiness through colloquialisms, etymology, and literature. My point is this: words have an impact. And as much as words have consequences, the ones we don’t use — the ones living in that negative space, the erased ones — have consequences as well. In observing the negative space, I will make a case arguing against happiness (as the term is used in America) as the end-all be-all of one’s life. In doing so, I hope to give some answers to how we…:

i. find “joy in killing joy” (Ahmed 87).

ii. “. . . fuck not just lovers, but Time and Silence too” (Muscio xxxi).

iii. reclaim happiness.

History is gendered secondary to systematic oppression. I want to see what happens when we start to explore the history of happiness from the perspective of women. Further, I will make the case that we can reclaim happiness as a form of resistance.

II. Where did this start?

Aggro-Culture

It is well documented that prior to the rise of agriculture — around 10,000 years ago — communities were fairly egalitarian (Devlin). Anatomically similar humans beings as we are familiar have existed for roughly the last 200,000 years. When agriculture became the means of production, women began being seen as property. I will make the case, as many others have, that agriculture was the beginning of aggro-culture. That is, the process of farming cultivated an environment in which the patriarchy thrived, thus beginning systematic oppression of women’s happiness. And when happiness is oppressed, aggravated women abound.

Christopher Ryan, co-author of Sex at Dawn, argues in his Ted talk that the oppositional relationship between men and women is an artifact of agriculture. Essentially, in exchange for food and shelter, women would give men their fidelity — or, at least, the promise of it (Ryan 2014). But why did it go this way instead of a matriarchy? In short, it is nonsensical for women to be plowing the fields when they’re pregnant (Gjullin, et al). Being pregnant is in fact a medical condition, and an important one at that. When women are pregnant, they are out of commission for physical labour not only for the latter half of their pregnancy, but also for the first several years of their child’s life. And when several women in a community are out of commission secondary to progressing the human species, men are left to deal with agricultural labor. Furthermore, with the rise of agriculture comes with the ability to stay stationary. Prior to agriculture, communities were perpetually moving from one place to another. When communities are mobile, there is little space to accumulate superfluous belongings. Being inert allows and encourages accumulation. Accumulation of property like supplies for growing crops becomes extended into seeing women as property. Why is this? In short, it has to do with the ways in which property is discussed. Plows, livestock, and women were equated to belongings. This idea of having a woman insinuates a hierarchy, with men owning and women belonging to.

I will not make any claims here about how the rise of agriculture itself explicitly contributes to the unhappiness of women. That being said, the rest of what I have to say in this paper directly follows from this power shift. As I hope I’ve made clear, the historical context behind our words and actions is of utmost importance. The rest of this paper is written with it in mind that the roots of the patriarchy do in fact have roots. The patriarchy was not born into any specific man, though we are now born into it, and have been for the last 10,000 years. The readers of this paper should be operating under the comprehension of this fact, and recall often that the male hierarchy has a beginning, and it is possible to end it by looking at the negative space it has created.

III. Where are we?

The Daughters of Cultural Entropy

“There are other ways women have been made to disappear. There is the business of naming. In some cultures women keep their names, but in most their children take the father’s name, and in the English-speaking world until very recently, prefaced by ‘Mrs.’ You stopped, for example, being Charlotte Bronte and became Mrs. Arthur Nicholls. Names erased a woman’s genealogy and even her existence.”

Rebecca Solnit, Men Explain Things to Me

Up until the recent generation — though it certainly still happens within the current one — women in heteronormative marriages have taken their husband’s last name. This means when we look at family trees, women are left to the branches. The core of family trees is composed of men. Our family names come from our forefathers, and there is no remembrance of our foremothers. Not only is this an issue of gender — we are erasing women — but we are also erasing cultural heritage. For instance, my grandmother, Rosa-Alva Alemany de Villarreal, born in Peru and relocated to Oaxaca, and then later to the United States, married a white man. Upon taking his last name, Howard, my entire Peruvian heritage was erased. And similarly for my mother, whose maiden name is Hwangbo: upon signing onto Howard, the Korean namesake is diminished; neither of her brothers have children. I, nor my mother, nor my grandmother, are anomalies. Women have been giving up their names and thereby their culture for centuries — originally, doing so signified women as property of their husbands.

When we dehumanize women in this manner, we make happiness an impossible achievement. We disappear women, and claim happiness to be a pursuit of all humans. But the dehumanization of women allows happiness to exclude us. Further, when society makes the existence of women invisible, it becomes submissive in the attainment of happiness. When the core of our identity’s internal aspect — our ancestry — is destroyed by proxy to our identity’s external facet — our name — we vanish women. The very words with which we use to distinguish ourselves are manipulated and flat-out dissipated, and so too along with our happiness. It comes as no shock that other elements of our language simultaneously continue this destruction.

Daughters of Lexical Entropy

“Moving from phonetics to etymology, ‘vagina’ originates from a word meaning sheath for a sword. Ain’t got no vagina.”

Inga Muscio, Cunt: A Declaration of Independence

The impact of words on happiness and oppression must be talked about from a historical and etymological stance. The word ‘vagina’ was first introduced to me during “The Period Talk” in fifth grade. Up until that point, my parents and friends all had cute euphemisms when we talked about genitals. After that, I had heard the word ‘cunt,’ from heated arguments between family members, or thrown across middle school courtyards from 12-year-olds learning how to use words from the blacklist. Currently, ‘vagina’ is used everywhere: from clinical gynecology exam rooms to far-from-clinical text messages of young men trying their hand at sexting. As this entire paper argues, historical context is important. And there exists an etymological jewel that has been hijacked over the years: ‘Cunt’ needs a comeback and a reclamation.

The term ‘cunt’ was used as an ancient term of respect for women, priestesses, and princesses alike (Muscio). ‘Cunt’ was used as a term to refer to women, though not in the demeaning way it’s used modernly. The abrasiveness of this word is evident only from modern readers of ancient texts, not from the ancient speakers and writers themselves (Bilger). Women-centered words necessarily evolve. Words endure beyond people, empires, civilizations, and the rise and fall of communities. ‘Cunt,’ along with other women-centered words such as bitch, whore, slut, and puta, acquire connotations far from their origins as societies change. These words compulsorily obtain a negative connotation, not far from secondary to the primordial systemic disintegration of powerful women.

The history of our lexicon is important to consider when we’re looking at happiness. When we continue the work of bias from years past, we not only silence but ignore the people who were the target of these words. When we fail to educate ourselves and our society about the etymology of certain words, specifically women-centered words, we fail women across timelines. We are failing both our ancestors and our predecessors, as well as ourselves. We are encouraging the practice of withholding happiness from the parties on which this partial language attacks. We suppress happiness with our language by allowing our terms to serve as constant reminders of the patriarchal structure. Our language serves as subtle framework of the ways in which we condescend, patronize, and destroy what inherently belongs to women — their bodies and their anatomical agency. If we allow ‘cunt’ to disintegrate, so too do women. When women unknowingly permit their bodies to be referred to as mere scabbards, we allow language to be itself to be discriminatory. Our view of people is inherent in the ways in which we speak about them, and describing women as anatomical sheaths, we prevent happiness and well-being as an option them.

As I have made clear, the very vernacular with which we speak and write is genderwise problematic. I have made the case by looking at a history of ancient words, namely ‘cunt.’ Turning now to a more modern example, the pervasiveness of addressing a group of individuals as “you guys” — and the surprisingly low amount of backlash regarding as much — is astonishing. The Merriam Webster online dictionary tells us that we can use ‘guy’ in its plural form to “refer to the members of a group regardless of sex.” That said, it is necessary to realize that dictionaries are far from apolitical.

At a personal level, nearly every example I’ve read regarding mathematics has centered around a male mathematician (save for anything written by Penelope Maddy of UCI, who writes extensively on the philosophy of mathematics, and in fact does address this issue in mathematical fields (Maddy: 2003)). For example, a text may read: “While calculating the integral, the mathematician may begin to have some insight regarding where his composition function will come in handy” — or something of the like. Furthermore, this is not an English-only phenomenon. Addressing a mixed group in Spanish is just as problematic, using ellos as opposed to ellas, and the formal ustedes, which is genderless, is quickly becoming a dead word. As far as my linguistic abilities and knowledge suffices, American Sign Language gets it right, where groups of people are addressed as just that — people.

The evolution of a male-centered lexicon, I believe, affects happiness in this central way: when we use a male-centered language, we negate women from entering the lexicon. In doing this, we wind up talking about men when we talk about happiness and decidedly and systematically do not talk about women and happiness. In Bitch Magazine, Audrey Bilger talks explicitly about this regarding the supposed gender-neutrality of the phrase, “you guys.” In her article “The Common Guy,” Audrey Bilger details an experience in which two female friends confronted her about being called a guy. She follows the story up with:

[T]hen I started listening. I listened first to my own defensive indignation. Clearly, my friends had touched a nerve. Deep down I knew that they were right: Calling women “guys” makes femaleness invisible. It says that man — as in a male person — is still the measure of all things . . . Once I copped to being in the wrong, I started hearing the phrase with new ears. Suddenly it seemed bizarre to me when a speaker at an academic conference addressed a room full of women as “you guys”; when a man taking tickets from me and some friends told us all to enjoy the show, “you guys”; and on and on. It was as if these speakers were not really seeing what was before their eyes. I experienced a sense of erasure, of invisibility.

Bilger continues, reporting Alice Walker’s view of the expression: “‘I see in its use some women’s obsequious need to be accepted, at any cost, even at the cost of erasing their own femaleness, and that of other women. Isn’t it at least ironic that after so many years of struggle for women’s liberation, women should end up calling themselves this?’” (Bilger). To refer back to Muscio’s vernacular, in order to “fuck not just lovers, but Time and Silence too,” we must demolish inherently sexist language that we use to refer to women.

And when we commit ourselves to this eradication, it is then that I believe we can be happy. Julia Annas’ essay “Happiness as Achievement” makes the case that being happy is quite different from feeling happy. This is due to feelings being episodic and fleeting (Annas 45).

And, because she acknowledges that our wants and abilities to live happy lives are vulnerable to societal pressures, it is necessary to consider our lives globally (not linearly) to be happy (46–47). A weakness in her argument, however, is that she makes the case to replace linear thinking with global thinking, because that is the way in which we can shape and organize what happens in our lives. Her essay doesn’t go in depth enough into the notion of societally-damaged desires, and it is hard to know what we do when it is in fact society that is doing this shaping and organizing of our lives. I find it plausible that the unawareness of this effect may in turn make total happiness harder to achieve — metaphorically, fish don’t think about water. Becoming aware of oppression by happiness is the first step in taking the reigns of the way our life turns out. The awareness of this may in fact engender anger, despair, frustration, et cetera, though it may also give us — if not a clear path to follow — at least a clear one to avoid.

Particularly with respect to the world-wide war on women, the patriarchy is deep-seated as I have already outlined, and the very words with which we communicate to women is foundationally patronizing. When our language favors one gender over the others, it becomes reflected in our speech. Language shapes the ways we think about the world, and when we dehumanize femaleness, we diminish their happiness as a potentiality.

All this being said, we are quite literally writing women out of history when we write and speak as such. We create an issue that presents itself passively — we ensure that girls and women cannot find anyone with whom to identify in our literature, sciences, and colloquialisms. The problem extends further when we take into account this lack of identifying with what is presented to us via language when we can’t get women to identify with each other. This is the “I’m not like other girls” phenomenon, which I mention in a later section. This internalized misogyny is not far from secondary to our language. It doesn’t seem too far a cry to say that the subliminality of colloquial language has an effect on how we wind up structuring our lives. If we wish to form our lives ourselves, we must first become aware of lexical sexism, and then dedicate ourselves to the erasure of that sexism in order to unerase femaleness.

The Three Ds to Desirable Girls: Depressed, Disappearing, and/or Dying

Sarah Ahmed’s chapter “Feminist Killjoy” from her book The Promise of Happiness details what it is to kill joy as a feminist, as well as what happens when women become aware of the oppression of happiness. Ahmed discusses this using analysis of literary texts. I’d like to continue doing so in this paper. John Green’s Looking For Alaska (LFA) holds a prime example of the trifecta of a Desirable Girl. The main female character, Alaska, is depressed (or at least, emotionally taxed), she decides to take an adventure and disappear, and she winds up dying. LFA won Green the 2006 Michael L. Printz award, has been published in over 30 languages, and is taught in high school and college curricula (Swanson). The book is best summarized by Green’s website:

Miles Halter is fascinated by famous last words — and tired of his safe life at home. He leaves for boarding school to seek what the dying poet Francois Rabelais called the “Great Perhaps.” Much awaits Miles at Culver Creek, including Alaska Young. Clever, funny, screwed-up, and dead sexy, Alaska will pull Miles into her labyrinth and catapult him into the Great Perhaps (“Looking for Alaska”).

Alaska is emotionally damaged secondary to the guilt she feels surrounding her mother’s death when she was in 5th grade. She’s edgy and drinks wine in high school. She’s unpredictable, and can go “from a hundred miles an hour to asleep in a nanosecond” (Green 88). Clearly, she is Miles’ Manic Pixie Dream Girl. The Manic Pixie Dream Girl, in her broadest state, is the sole reason for the male protagonist’s adventure. Before meeting her, he was dull, boring, and living a safe life. He doesn’t take many risks. Everything changes when he meets his MPDG, though. The mystique of the MPDG is palpable, and as readers, it’s hard not to fall in love with her. She’s floats through life, she has a sense of adventure, and is strong and independent. But the movies and novels involving an MPDG are never about her. They’re about her male counterpart, and how drastically his life changes when he too falls for this girl. As Miles states in LFA, “I was gawky and she was gorgeous and I was hopelessly boring and she was endlessly fascinating. So I walked back to my room and collapsed on the bottom bunk, thinking that if people were rain I was drizzle and she was a hurricane” (Green 88). Alaska, like other MPDGs, is a hurricane in the sense that she changes everything in her path — including Miles. What Miles finds “endlessly fascinating” about Alaska is that she is so far removed from his safe life. Her mystique resides in her bold personality, and Miles is about to experience her storm first-hand. The MPDG is quirky, and is often “screwed-up” by some tragic heartbreak in her earlier years. She doesn’t let people completely into her life; she builds walls around herself because she needs to protect her still-mending heart. She inevitably begins to let a Nice Guy™ into her heart, and she becomes the sole reason for him “finding himself” (Weiss). This is never her story. This is about a boy becoming a man, leaving his safe and boring life for one of adventure. MPDG is just the supporting role in all of this. I should note, Green does some work where, toward the end of the novel, when Miles realizes the things that made Alaska so dreamy were also the things that destroyed her, serving, I think, to warn against categorizing and idealizing young women. I do not think this is the main message perceived by the audience, though I am thankful there is some redemption for Alaska’s minimal story arc.

Tying this to Sara Ahmed’s “Feminist Killjoy” isn’t difficult. Ahmed discusses consciousness and happiness, specifically that feminism revolves around becoming conscious of things to be unhappy about. Further, she states that “inheriting feminism can mean inheriting sadness” (Ahmed 78). Novels that have an MPDG promote the notion that girls are desired so long as they have something deeply screwed-up about them. These girls are exciting and cheerful despite their screwed-up-ness, and allow their happiness to be engulfed and taken by the aforementioned Nice Guy™. This notion touches on Ahmed’s introductory point of being happy for the sake of someone else’s happiness. Girls are taught to be “ladylike” and make other people happy. We are told to put people — especially males — before ourselves. Because the “history of feminism is a history of making trouble,” and girls are taught not to make trouble (at least, not to make societal trouble), we are being taught to disregard feminism (Ahmed 60). Further, the female troublemaker is labeled as such because she gets in the way of other people’s happiness. When girls are taught to identify with the MPDG, they are taught to put the happiness of men and boys before their own. Women and girls come secondary to men in this view. Additionally, the MPDG fantasy is so heavily promoted in pop culture that becoming aware that it is a trope can often take difficult conscious effort. The dream of the Desirable Girl is a negative feedback loop. If you achieve it, you’re at a loss because all that’s been achieved is a forfeit of one’s joy in order to be wanted. If you don’t achieve Desirability status, you’re also at a loss by proxy of being undesirable. It is upsetting that girls are taught the mixed messages of striving for perfection while also being screwed-up in order to find the balance of value, attraction, and importance. MPDG tropes are an affront on our happiness, and becoming conscious of them — while saddening — is necessary for countering “forms of power and violence [that are] concealed under signs of happiness” (Ahmed 69).

The Myth of the Other Girl

What happens when womankind can’t identify themselves in literature, texts, movies, and other cultural items, is that we cannot identify with one another. This comes out in the myth of the Other Girl. This myth has its roots in young women saying things — either out loud or on online blogs — such as, “I’m not like other girls, I’m [complex/deep/a tomboy/adventurous/et cetera].” Typically, the young women saying or writing these sorts of things is “not like other girls” because she is one of the guys, or she likes things that aren’t promoted as “feminine.” She isn’t catty, she likes to read, or she has complicated feelings about worldly things. Emily O’Connell explains the danger of the Other Girl myth in her essay, “I’m Not Like Other Girls, Because Other Girls Don’t Exist”:

If you’ve ever embraced the idea that you are a credit to your gender, consider that believing that you’re worth more than Other Girls means you believe that women are inherently worthless. If you think being thoughtful, intelligent, and ‘complicated’ makes you different from Other Girls, consider that you’re saying that women are inherently vapid. If you think being passionate about sports or music or literature or Power Rangers or whatever else on earth you love makes you different from Other Girls, consider that you’re really saying that women are inherently dull and uninspiring.

The myth of the Other Girl leaves us with droves of women who are in competition with one another. They aren’t like the Other Girls, so they force themselves into competing with one another — for men, for jobs, for looking the best, for living the most picture-worthy life. This means indulging in isolation from other women. It is destitute to believe that other girls are shallow and obnoxious, but “. . . it’s comforting to believe that our isolation is the tragic result of our exceptionalism” (O’Connell). What this means is that our role models of happiness are either men or they are women who aren’t the Other Girls. In the first case, our role models exhibit a type of happiness that is inherently unachievable to us. They are men living in a largely patriarchal world. Thusly, their happiness is, at least partially, secondary to a systematic favoring of them. We do not have that option. And in attempting to pursue that kind of happiness, we will set ourselves up for disaster. In the latter case, our role models are perpetuating this patriarchy. Our role models who are decidedly unlike womankind paradoxically create a sense of competition with other women to be like them. To choose not to be like other girls means we don’t choose womankind. If we don’t choose womankind, we choose to create more negative space. We elect to promote the notion of happiness that is intrinsically unavailable to us. However, when we do elect to relate to fellow women, we can redefine happiness and make it a woman-centered word.

IV. Where are we going?

Reclaiming “Happy”

“Reclaiming words can be such a bitch.”

―Gary Nunn

Sarah Ahmed’s book The Promise of Happiness details an argument against living a happy life. In fact, it seems to be that she states it is impossible to be happy if one truly is unaware of what she calls the unhappy archives. That is, the awareness that the oppression of happiness, as she details and as I have in this essay, goes against any moral view of happiness. For Ahmed, to be happy is to oppress. Ahmed is skeptical of “happiness as a technique of living well” because it is often “associated with some life choices and not others” (Ahmed 2). Her assessment of happiness claims it to be associated with a heteronormative life, and thusly, those that deviate from this are seen as unhappy. Ahmed wants to kill joy, because killing joy means that one “is to open a life, to make room for life, to make room for possibility, for chance, for alternative ways of living” (Ahmed 20). It seems “alternative” here means anything that doesn’t quite align with the American Dream of white collar jobs, picket fences, and nuclear families. This is to say that happiness presents itself in the bourgeois, and this means happiness, as the term is used, has both moral and social distinctions: happiness “. . .rest[s] on ideas of who is worthy as well as capable of being happy ‘in the right way,’” and there is “[A]n anxiety that the wrong people can be happy, and even a desire for happiness to be returned to the right people” (Ahmed 13). Happiness in its current usage functions as a guarantee that will guide people to specific objects. This becomes problematic when the specific objects are unattainable inherently. To this end, women cannot be happy because the promise of happiness isn’t for them (though it certainly is pitched as though it were). Feminists cause unhappiness by being aware of flaws in the system: we notice that unhappiness is built in (Ahmed 87).

I agree with Ahmed that unhappiness is structured in society. That, in fact, is what I have been arguing with this paper. I do think that happiness is used as oppression, and that its current connotation applies only to a very specific group of individuals, of which women are excluded. However, I do think it is possible to be “happy,” or something like happy. To be sure, I certainly don’t want the sort of happiness that is pitched in patriarchal America. Even if I did, I wouldn’t be able to achieve it. That being said, I do experience some sense of overall joy, cheerfulness, tranquility, and elation in my life, and I suspect my womenfolk friends do, too. I want to use the term “happy” to describe myself and these feelings. To do this, we must redact the word first. Reclamation is about power, and to reclaim “happy,” we need to shift the power of happiness to the other side.

To reclaim a word, we must first recognize its shortcomings and partisan qualities. If we wish to reclaim “happy,” we need to recognize that it traditionally does not apply to us womenfolk. When we talk about happy, as I have argued, we are not talking about women. We, as a society, use the terms “happy” and “happiness” to refer to a group of oppressors. If we wish to both be happy and be feminists, we must stop our own oppression. This means stopping our engagement in behaviours — specifically lexical behaviours — that oppress others. This means not addressing mixed groups as “guys.” This means calling out detrimental characterizations of girls and women in our pop culture. This means supporting black and brown women. Stopping our oppression means working to destroy the myth of the other girl, and to discover our inherent ability to identify with women. Womankind comes in all shapes, sizes, colors, and ages, “but we all have cunts, and it does not matter if they are biological, surgical or metaphorical. A cunt’s a cunt” (Muscio xxvi). When we are able to identify ourselves with one another, we are then ready to reclaim happiness. Happiness, like women, is vast and varied, but when we start using it to describe women, we repudiate against the social pressures that have deformed what it is to live a happy life.

Works Cited

“Academics Speak.” Theory Review: Ahmed’s The Promise of Happiness (2010). N.p., Web. 27 Apr. 2017.

Ahmed, Sara. The Promise of Happiness. Durham and London: Duke UP, 2010. Print.

Angyal, Chloe. “A Few Words About Reclaiming “Slut”.” Feministing. N.p., 2012. Web. 27 Apr. 2017.

Annas, Julia. “Happiness as Achievement.” Daedalus 133.2, On Happiness (2004): 44–51. JSTOR. Web. 27 Apr. 2017.

Bilger, Audrey. “The Common Guy: One Seemingly Benign Phrase Makes a Man Out of All of Us.” Bitch Media. Bitch Magazine, 31 Aug. 2002. Web. 27 Apr. 2017.

Cramb, Mary Jo Tewes. “John Green and His Manic Pixie Dream Girls.” Los Angeles Review of Books. N.p., 29 Jan. 2016. Web. 27 Apr. 2017.

Devlin, Hannah. “Early Men and Women Were Equal, Say Scientists.” The Guardian. Guardian News and Media, 14 May 2015. Web. 27 Apr. 2017.

Gjullin, Emma, Peter Saathoff-Harshfield, and Balal Rahim. Personal interview. 21 Apr. 2017.

Green, John. Looking for Alaska. Farmington Hills, Mich: Large Print, a Part of Gale, Cengage Learning, 2016. Print.

Horan, Molly. “Manic Pixie Dream Girls Aren’t The Problem. The Guys Are.” Refinery 29. N.p., 14 Oct. 2015. Web. 27 Apr. 2017.

“Looking for Alaska.” John Green Books. N.p., n.d. Web. 30 Apr. 2017.

Muscio, Inga. Cunt: A Declaration of Independence. Seattle, WA: Seal, 2005. Print.

Nunn, Gary. “Power Grab: Reclaiming Words Can Be Such a Bitch.” The Guardian. Guardian News and Media, 30 Oct. 2015. Web. 27 Apr. 2017.

O’Connell, Emily. “I’m Not Like Other Girls, Because Other Girls Don’t Exist.” Thought Catalog. Thought Catalog, 27 July 2015. Web. 27 Apr. 2017.

Maddy, Penelope. Realism in Mathematics. Oxford: Clarendon, 2003. Print.

Ryan, Christopher. “Transcript of “Are We Designed to Be Sexual Omnivores?”” TED.com. N.p., Feb. 2014. Web. 27 Apr. 2017.

Schutte, Gillian. “C Is for Cunt.” Ms. Magazine Blog. N.p., 27 Nov. 2012. Web. 27 Apr. 2017.

Schwyzer, Hugo. “The Real-World Consequences of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl Cliché.” The Atlantic. Atlantic Media Company, 09 July 2013. Web. 27 Apr. 2017.

Solnit, Rebecca. Men Explain Things to Me: And Other Essays. London: Granta, 2014. Print.

Swanson, Clare. “The Bestselling Books of 2014.” PublishersWeekly.com. N.p., 02 Jan. 2015. Web. 27 Apr. 2017.

Weiss, Suzannah. “7 Lies ‘Nice Guys’ Will Tell You (And Why You Shouldn’t Believe Them).”Everyday Feminism. N.p., 12 Oct. 2015. Web. 03 May 2017.

17.

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math & mountains, sometimes I write a thing or two.

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