Notes

Happy Birthday To Me

(Hetero)Sex(Uality)

• Aubrey Plaza is playing Heidi Fleiss (notorious Hollywood madam and onetime procurer of prostitutes for high-profile clients like Charlie Sheen) in an upcoming movie so I listened to the Heidiworld podcast on Fleiss. Heidi points out that the most likely sex work clients are older men who didn’t successfully pull beautiful women in their youth, and like ... yeah.

• Something I’ve been marinating on is that a lot of people subconsciously (or even consciously) believe that women who are in love with men are automatically dumbing themselves down, and I’ve personally felt like the subject of this assumption before. It begs the question, would I be smarter if I was in love with a woman instead of a man? I don’t think that it’s more profound or intellectual to not be straight, but it’s not uncommon to see people claiming that any woman who shows emotional depth and intellectual prowess isn’t straight, and it just reeks of misogyny.

• Incidentally, I’ve decided that when I have kids, I’m not going to mention being pregnant on main and just pop up one fine day with a small human child. I don’t have any plans whatsoever to be a mommy blogger but who knows? Maybe I’ll surprise myself. The thing is, I don’t want to be seen as a mother, I want to be seen as a human being, and I can’t change society and force it to start regarding mothers as people anytime soon, so I’m going to just supersede that by demanding to be seen as an individual before I’m a mother or a wife.

• Speaking of pregnancy, there’s been a lot of discourse about postpartum bodies, and I tend to agree with the link I included here. I think that most “normal” men aren’t actively disgusted by their wives’ postpartum bodies, and my own husband’s reaction to that tweet was, “Please stop reading Radfem Hitler’s posts,” but women’s fixation on beauty did not come about in a vacuum!! In the age of social media, being beautiful (which stereotypically means young and thin and ~smooth) is a hot commodity so it’s not surprising that women are anxious about losing it! Moreover, we aren’t blind, we see how men talk about women’s bodies, pre and postpartum, and no, it doesn’t actually change things that men have more than one child with the same women. As per this fake Adriana Lima quote:

  

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Taylor Swift

Most Romantic Taylor Swift songs (in no order)

• Lover

• Love Story

• Daylight

• This Love

• Enchanted

• New Years Day

• False God

• Mine

• Dress

• Is It Over Now? (I’m SORRY but my husband and I are basically the alternate happy ending of this song so for that, I have to label it a love song)

Life of a Showgirl Song Ranking

1. The Fate of Ophelia

2. Father Figure

3. Opalite

4. The Life of a Showgirl (feat. Sabrina Carpenter)

5. Wood

6. Elizabeth Taylor

7. Actually Romantic

8. CANCELLED!

9. Honey

10. Wi$h Li$t

11. Eldest Daughter

12. Ruin the Friendship

General

• A lot of “The Fate of Ophelia” commentary is kind of unhinged like yes, Ophelia’s death in Hamlet represents patriarchal violence (I was an English major and my senior thesis was on sex, death and the law in Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure), but I feel like the insistence that any reimagining of the story is actively offensive to the original text just reads as internalized fury at the idea that ~crazy~ women can genuinely love and be loved in return, and aren’t just fated to be beautiful martyrs. My husband didn’t fix me, but before I met him, even though I hadn’t been actively suicidal for a decade prior, I literally couldn’t imagine myself growing old, and planning for the future mentally and emotionally paralyzed me. But with him, I realized there was life after survival, and I began to conceptualize a life worth living. Look, I’m probably overreacting but there really does seem to be an underlying societal belief that women like me, like Ophelia, don’t deserve happy endings because of who we are, because of the makeup of our brains, because of our history of violence against ourselves, and it makes me angry.

• This all goes back to what I was saying earlier: People seem to genuinely believe that women who are happy in relationships with men lose IQ points and stop being capable of any sound of profundity and it’s just plain misogynistic. Is Life of a Showgirl Taylor’s magnum opus? No. However, I also used to say I didn’t believe in marriage or want kids because I genuinely didn’t believe I was worthy of them to the extent I rejected proposals from two ex-boyfriends, and now I’m happily married so I support it, and after a decent break, I’m sure Taylor’s next album will be different.

• Unfortunately, my friend might be right.

  

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Life and Death and Love

• Last year on my birthday, Liam Payne of One Direction died, which I wrote about at the time. I’m glad Liam’s death bought his former bandmates back together when they’d been at odds for so long, like Zayn Malik and Louis Tomlinson are even doing a documentary series together next year! And, Harry Styles is running global marathons while being photographed with beautiful women, so good for him I guess. It’s just funny how life goes on, even after the death of people you thought would be around forever.

• Something I’ve been thinking about is love as responsibility and love as accountability. My husband finally realized that he loved me when I was mad at him for not living up to my expectations of what he ought to be (I think one of his tweets annoyed me) and made it very clear how disappointed I was. I cared enough to be outraged and upset since I knew he was better than who he was purporting to be, and I think that made it click for him that I was the real deal.

• Generally speaking, I’m very happy. Like, of course there’s some logistical stuff that bugs me and the government shutdown is professionally annoying me, but that said, I feel okay about my life, which is still novel for me. I’m always going to be more morbid than like 99% of people, more fixated on my own mortality, but like I said in my wedding vows, I’m now able to conceptualize a life worth living, and at least in part, I have my husband to thank for that, in addition to my family and friends and pets.