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And the safety briefing included the question “So if you’re pregnant, do you want to know or not?”

Turns out there had been a bit of an awkward situation once where the keepers had casually mentioned a woman’s pregnancy in a group, and she herself didn’t even know yet. Turns out the wolves are excellent at telling if you’re pregnant and the keepers can tell based on their body language.  They get all odd and careful around pregnancy. (Even wolves knows that you have to take care of pregnant people.)

So they definitely knew she was pregnant.

And if I remember my BBC documentaries right, a wolf will leave the pack to give birth and introduce the cubs to the pack once she feels ready for it. And maternity leave is flexible but often around 6 months so they’re going “YOU WERE GONE FOREVER! WE WERE SO WORRIED! WHERE ARE THE CUBS?? WE HAVE TO GREET THE CUBS!!“ 

Oh, absolutely not offensive - and a veeeery interesting question.

I have a very inclusive understanding of literature. I believe that everything added to our vast literary landscape has inherent value, especially since so many of the books that are maligned and notoriously dismissed as "bad literature" are written primarily by women and for women.

Unfortunately, the establishment of the literary canon, propagated over decades and centuries by academic authorities at universities and through the arts and review pages of newspapers, has been relentlessly used as an instrument to erase the literature and writing of marginalised groups. As much as I enjoy a good classic - and don’t get me wrong, most of the novels classified as classics today are classics for a reason - being introduced to feminist and queer literary theory opened my eyes to the fact that, even in our current era, the books that survive as the supposed pillars of our canon have been highly selected through a bias that has spent centuries attempting to uphold the status quo.

For example, something that really fucked me up was learning that, in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Britain, a great many of the books being sold were written by women and read by women - to the point that men adopted female pen names because literature written by women was held in such high regard. Yet almost none of it has survived in our cultural consciousness or is given much consideration, even within literary studies, because the process of canonisation was largely controlled by men in positions of power, who naturally elevated the books written by members of their own in-groups.

That history has taught me not to pass judgement on the popular romance novels that are relentlessly mocked in our current culture. It haunts me to think about how many books by women we have lost over the centuries because we were not taught to defend literature that was not held in high regard by the people responsible for constructing the canon - and in fact even be ashamed of reading it!

Of course, that does not mean that everything I make these impassioned speeches in defence of is something I personally enjoy or read. But I still think it is important that we, as literature students, neither ignore these books nor make fun of them. They are an important part of our current Zeitgeist, and we should all be much more conscious of the mechanisms through which books become canonised.

Having said all that, my favourite publishing category is actually one that was popularised in the US: upmarket fiction. Upmarket fiction essentially combines a highly literary, sophisticated writing style with more compelling and commercially accessible plots. It is what I prefer to read - at least at the moment - and I would place it somewhere between the so-called classics and more mainstream commercial fiction. Taylor Jenkins Reid’s novels would be an example.

I believe and I promise you.

You my addiction.

if you want to exercise more, it's always assumed it's because you want to be skinny

if you want to eat better, it's always assumed it's because you want to be skinny

like a lot of the time the reason chronically ill people gradually experience worsening symptoms and pain is because theyre unable to move their bodies without limitation or agony. the loss of muscular tissue as a result of illness should be cause for serious concern but nobody gives a fuck because theyd rather focus on being skinny. like, physical therapy can literally save people's lives.

we should be using research on muscular development to create appropriate exercise routines for people with limited movement or energy, that matches their limitations while helping mitigate or at least slow muscle loss. or making physical therapy cheaper and more accessible. or advocating for bed and housebound people to make exercise more accessible. literally fucking ANYTHING.