Weekend Roundup / Open Thread
Alright my Beach Witches, it’s time for me to say goodbye. I can’t believe it’s over! I didn’t get to talk to you about so many of my petty enthusiasms! Please find me if you’d like to talk about cheese, maple syrup, Bar Rescue, Prince, Bud Light Lemon-ade-Ritas, crop tops, Steve Zahn, Ryan Adams, Shoot ’Em Up, Steven Universe, and probably a hundred other things. I will be lurking around the comments, and you can find me on Twitter. Shout out to Haley, my beautiful slutty babysitter, for having me. I cannot wait until she’s finally in New York and I can force her to explain makeup to me.
This week we learned about powders and creams and burned the shit out of our hands while waxing. I tried to plop my hair and it didn’t exactly work. Mariah Carey is a pervert and a genius. There are kickass interviews with Jillian Tamaki and Hilton Als, and Casie Brown on being the Other Woman. Also, carry my memory on by buying yourself a jumpsuit.
Did you see Anna Fitzpatrick gettin’ it in The New Yorker? Or Silvia Killingsworth on Anthropologie in the same place? Elsewhere (on Matter), here’s Pilot Viruet talking about Black Exhaustion, which is very important, and here are a bunch of smart people in an incredible roundtable about consent and words and all those little grey areas we live in and it’s pretty incredible and necessary. Like, this:
The legal meaning of consent is sterile, the social meaning volatile, but within my relationships, when the consent was there, it hung in the middle of us like atmosphere. Consent feels wordless to me — — a space more than an extractive transaction between two or more faiths — — and without a beginning I can mark. We begin consenting to each other way, way before we are skin to skin, and our need to build this consenting atmosphere extends to situations that aren’t obviously sexual. Many non-sexual friendships aren’t consensual; how many children are coerced into their family’s particular ideals for behavior? That’s why the politics of consent are so damning, because what we don’t access when we talk about sexual assault is the transition to violence that occurs in what are most often — — at the outset — — consensual, or at least not emotionally or physically violent, relationships. We don’t access the fact that structural inequality runs so deep some populations cannot even consent to the quality of the air they breathe.
Damn.
Starting Monday, Haley will be joined by the wonderful Alexandra Molotkow. GET EXCITED. STAY EXCITED. According to her interview she is reading The Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft, so you’re in good hands. Stay magic, my friends.
