Because I Behaved (Fully) Myself In Public
more thoughts on happiness and eating alone and _that_ study
Some Good Decisions:
Right before I left for Paris I saw Liberation at the Roundabout Theatre. I’m still thinking about it. The play, as the title suggests, is primarily set in 1970 at a Women’s Lib circle in Ohio. The conceit is a daughter in present-day looking back at her recently deceased mother’s years of independence and reckoning with what her mother gave up to be a mother, and whether her mother regretted it, and in turn what she herself is possibly giving up. The acting is extraordinary. And at times, quite brave (especially during the scene where you realize why you had to put your phone in a locked bag on the way in). The scenes between the mother and daughter felt visceral.
It would have been an interesting play at any time, but took on new intensity in this recent era where we are literally seeing women’s accomplishments stripped from the walls and websites. I also experienced moments of real frustration. Not so much with the play, but the fact that the conversations, and debates, the characters were having have not changed so much in half a century. We have still, as a culture, not figured out how to tell new stories about women, and at the same time, the ones we have are quickly disappearing (these things are likely related!).
I was reminded of this listening to Dr. Tressie McMillan Cottom and Christiana Mbakwe Medina on The Trevor Noah podcast this week (side note: the forever best part of the TN podcast is CMM, who I wish would split off so we could just listen to her and the guest), talking about the deadly effects of cultural amnesia:
TMcC: The the conundrum of social progress is what you have is a generation of women who benefited from feminism but never experienced what made feminism necessary. We think, and that's not to say that it is not true that, but we think the sort of like interpersonal bias and violence we experience at work or school or whatever is as bad as it can be, when really as bad as it can be is being fundamentally according to the state and appendage of your husband.
CMM: Not having a bank account.
TMcC: That’s actually as bad as it can be, but for you that's like this vague notion…The things we don't talk about is probably more than the things we do talk about. And so there's a like, there's this current that, you know, there's this ongoing generational amnesia when you have suffered in any kind of way. Like I just don't think people want to sit around the dinner table and talk about the beating that finally broke them or the the, you know, the sexual violence that finally pushed them to leave a husband, right? People just don't want to talk about that. And so it becomes real easy for you not to inherit the violent part of the story.
I was at a weekend matinee show of Liberation, and the audience skewed over sixty. I kept turning around to see the reactions on people faces. I suspect it felt like exposure therapy to many, a suspicion that was confirmed on the way out when I overhead women say things like “if I had to do it again, I wouldn’t have had them.” Liberation is running through April 6.
Aminatou Sow on Eid Mubarak. “I bet she is still fasting in detention.”
Julia Ioffe on the VP’s foreign policy doctrine (such as it it).
And now, for my next trick, I will eat alone!
Last week, eating alone temporarily replaced not having children as the main culprit in the current sorry state of the world (though not for long!…though that is another newsletter entirely). From the New York Times:
the annual World Happiness Report, which was released on Thursday and showed that the United States had dipped to its lowest slot in the country rankings — 24th — after being ranked as high as 11th in 2012, the first year of the report.
Americans are increasingly miserable, the report says, and it explored a possible indicator: The number of Americans eating alone has risen exponentially this century.
You will not be surprised to hear that I have thoughts.