The subversive power of good-girl head-nodding
Plus: weaving and social justice, Ryan Gosling playing with puppies, becoming a 'nanny of the state,' and more in the weekend roundup.
Hello!
I’m back from a 10-day trip to Mexico City and Oaxaca, which means my weekend roundup is back, too. I’ll spare you the (really amazing, I swear) slideshow and instead share a quick anecdote that is relevant to so much of what I write about here.
In Oaxaca, I got to visit Vida Nueva, a women’s weaving cooperative in Teotitlan del Valle, and watch a demonstration on dyeing wool with pomegranate rinds and cochineal, a bug that infests cacti. The cooperative was started by single women who were being “exploited by village middlemen, who forced the women to sell their rugs through them,” as the New York Times reported a few years ago.
One of the women, Pastora Asunción Gutierrez Reyes, attributes the collective’s success to the help of Flor Cervantes, a woman in the non-profit space focused on women’s rights and social justice. A decade ago, Cervantes started working with the group—at first, just to share information about reproductive health. They talked about everything from bodily anatomy to domestic violence.
Years later, they started talking about business and formed the cooperative, which brought about financial independence. Now the group has initiated “the village’s recycling system, created an eldercare program and spearheaded a reforestation of communal land, even getting the local government to kick in additional acreage.”
It’s a testament to the intersecting nature of these issues. Reproductive health is tied to conservation; so is financial independence and community care.
To the links…
Koa Beck, my one-time editor-in-chief at Jezebel, writes about becoming a licensed foster parent: “I’m acquiescing to care for children under their rules, their protocols, and their standards. I’m a nanny of the state.”
A young woman used Bumble, and a bit of “ego-stroking,” to get confessions from January 6 rioters before turning them over to the FBI. “It definitely didn’t take a lot of arm-twisting to get them to start talking about it,” she told NBC News. “Basically me being like ‘Wow, so cool—then what? What else?’ Was pretty much all it took.” I love thinking about patriarchal socialization—all that good-girl head-nodding and “mm-hmm-ing”—being used in subversive ways.
“My desire doesn’t need another person. It doesn’t even need me. It wants to be poured into the world,” writes Sophie Strand
I’m very curious to read The Right Kind of White by Garrett Buck, which is forthcoming in 2024. It’s about his pursuit of a “good white person” ideal—coming from a liberal, progressive background—and his realization that he needed to bridge the divide with not-so-“good” white people.
Also on the 2024 books front: I started reading Charlotte Shane’s An Honest Woman: A Memoir of Love and Sex Work on vacation. I have lots of underlined passages that I want to share with you, but I’m not allowed since it’s an advance reader copy. (I’m not trying to galley brag, I swear.) I’ll just say: there’s so much in there about desire, intimacy, and the dysfunction of heterosexuality that I’ll definitely be talking about here in the new year.