(´･ω･`)

I’m at the executive management level for my very small company and I have 4 people who report directly to me. I am a nice boss. I’m friendly with my employees, I treat them like professional adults, I actively try to create a positive work environment, and I mentor them and make sure they’re advancing in their careers. I do my best to shield them from the rest of management doing stupid shit. My employees like working for me.

The other day one of my employees came to ask if she could change her hours on Mondays. I said yes immediately because it’s helpful for me to know when she’s here and when she’s not, but as long as she gets her work done I don’t care when and where she does it. She then proceeded to tell me that it was so she could attend therapy and like … I will never use this information but … as a general rule don’t fucking do that.

Do not tell your employer shit about your mental or physical health except for the bare minimum needed to request a reasonable accommodation. Even your nice boss can fire you, even your nice boss can unfairly change your working conditions, and even your nice boss at some point is probably going to face pressure from their superiors.

I just remembered that this was a thing that was HILARIOUS in 2006 and apparently that was ten years ago now.

Old people: join with me in remembering how funny we found this on LiveJournal.

Young people: look at this lolrus, it’s so happy, it has a bucket.

When I said it was birdseed she just went “oh- can they actually eat that? Is that safe?”

I didnt know how to respond like, at all, so I just pointed at the duck and said “bird”

like, if there was a study (and I'm just making this up as an example) showing women suffer from mosquito bites more than men do

you could do the ~"Gender Critical"~ thing and go "see!? mosquitoes get it!!"

OR

you could go "that's interesting" and start asking more questions, like:

is this data self-reported? controlled?

were they studying the women or the mosquitoes?

did the study use methods that would let you tell the difference between "being bitten more often" and "noticing bites more often"?

did the study include any trans people and were their results any different? if yes were they on HRT or not?

how similar were the men and women in aspects other than gender? do we know their social class, jobs, diets, blood types?

because in fact the study i made up just then could lead to a huge variety of conclusions. from my description above you can't tell the difference between studies that show:

mosquitoes are attracted to people with higher estrogen levels

mosquitoes are opportunistic and women spend more time near mosquito habitats for sociocultural reasons

every gender gets bitten about the same amount but men are socialised to pay less attention to physical discomfort so more of them don't notice minor bites compared to women (and by more we mean like 60-40, this is a bell curve thing)

we accidentally got heaps of women in the study that have the mosquito's favourite blood type and not so for the men, oops

mosquitoes are attracted to people with more x and y in their diets, which is currently mostly women for, again, largely sociocultural reasons

etc etc etc

So I’m not one for conspiracy theories (because let’s be real, it gets racist really fast when you fall down an online rabbit hole), but let me just pop on my tinfoil hat for a second.

Because my personal theory (and I will die on this hill) is that the “I’m just a girl / girl maths / men think about the Roman Empire” discourse on social media (even when it was tongue-in-cheek) helped prime the ground for the conversation that is now starting to bubble up on the American right around household voting and women’s independent political power. And because American culture-war politics rarely stays in America, this is probably going to ripple out around the world via the populist satellites of MAGA (looking at you Reform).

Because even ironic discourse can still help normalise an idea. And the idea being normalised was that women are not really serious adults: that we are too frivolous to grapple with intellectual complexity such as Diocletian’s tetrarchy (that every man apparently has on his mind 24/7 despite one of the best classicists living being the GOAT Professor Mary Beard), too silly to be trusted with money, or too helpless to perform basic adult tasks.

Then the “divine feminine”, “feminine energy”, and “sprinkle sprinkle” dating discourse adds to this, because even when it is supposedly framed as female empowerment (or as a critique of men being the source of all evil in the world- because women’s pretty little heads aren’t capable of malice) , it often ends up circling back to the same idea: that women are not really meant to stand fully on their own two feet.

That is also where tradwife content fits in, because it takes that same underlying premise and turns it into a lifestyle. If “girl maths” makes women being bad with money funny, and “sprinkle sprinkle” makes dependence on a man sound like strategy, then tradwife content sells full financial dependence as aspiration (almost a solution to the girl maths and an end point for the sprinkle).

Because although this content is all coming from different parts of Beyoncé’s internet, it has the same common thread running underneath it. And this is how a cultural milieu gets created: different strands of culture keep repeating the same premise until it starts to feel like common sense in the Gramscian sense (not common sense as in the Chanel from the back of some guy called Dave’s van is probably fake, but common sense as in the assumptions a society absorbs so thoroughly that they stop looking political).

And that is also why the gender essentialism of the current culture wars matters here, because the argument is not only that women are bad with money but that biology creates fixed social roles and that stepping outside those roles is a threat to the social order (which is why the attacks on women’s autonomy and the attacks on trans people are not separate moral panics so much as different fronts of the same project). Once you have spent years insisting that cis men and women have natural social and domestic functions, it becomes much easier to make individual rights look like a dangerous modern excess rather than the basic condition of being a free adult.

This is a spot from an italian estate agency (we are governed by the right-wing party)

The woman says "Ridiculous..."

The old lady is not in her home. She is at work. She's meant to be what in Italian is called "la portinaia", aka a cross between a doorwoman and cleaner of a residential building. She's in her small "office" space, at the entrance of the building, from where she can survey the coming and goings of the inhabitants. It's a job that has mostly disappeared, but is culturally very clear to us as having the connotation of "potentially gossipy, one-million-percent judgmental woman who sees everything that goes on in the apartment complex, knows everyone and their secrets, and has Strong Opinions™️".

me: this is personal and powerful

musician: BECAUSE SHE LEFT ME