u/VolatileGoddess

I'm pasting the actual lines Rebecca's mum says.

"Oh, that just reeks of jealousy.

It’s very unattractive."

"You know what, w-why don’t you just fire this jealous hag?"

"Well, if I have any advice to give you, it’s that women are monsters.

Men showed us the way, and we perfected the model."

It was so interesting to me, how immediately Rebecca's mum jumps to jealousy and looks. Anyone criticising Rebecca , if female, must be jealous and (it is implied) themselves unattractive physically. Women are 'monsters' and 'hags', in constant competition with each other. The exhortation to Rebecca 'I raised you better than that' - I raised you better than being a feminist.

Tbh this entire exchange has rankled me since I saw this episode, because it's the essence of what some older women and some very current women have to say about feminism. It's hilarious in a dark way that she's saying this to her daughter - who wrested her husband's football club away and is running it herself. How does she think this was possible without feminism?

This is the core of some stuff that kept on coming up in previous seasons as well. Rebecca's loss of confidence after her divorce, how she felt so underconfident on the red carpet till Keeley boosted her confidence. How she could never truly accept Sam. It all hearkens back to her mum, and the stuff she's passed down to Rebecca. It's also part of the reason Rebecca becomes so defensive at what Coach Chilton said. Say whatever, a woman was never even considered for the position of head coach. Why? Yes, Ted is someone she trusts but she did not have even a single female candidate as an alternative?

I'm sure the show will get increasingly into this, but I'm already appreciative of how the first 2 episodes succinctly showed different kinds of feminism. 'Girl power' 'girl boss' 'women supporting women' till you run into a woman like Alice Chilton, who isn't 'girly' or a 'girl's girl'. Then, you need to introduce a man into the equation. I think the show's already called out some of the hypocrisy and I hope it does more.

A man who spends his entire time talking of pederosis, writes about being having an orgasm when a kid has her legs in his lap, there's even a passage that mentions how to protect children against sex crimes by...not talking to strangers, his disgust at her normal childish behaviour, the 'gifts' he gives - Nabokov wrote a straightforward depiction of abuse. I had discussed the book with a friend and read posts about it on Reddit, and all sources mentioned how Humbert cloaks what he's doing in beautiful prose and how he expresses it as a love story etc and how he comes across as a sympathetic narrator. I was expecting to read between the lines to understand what was going on. What I got was a lifelike rendition of what probably goes on in a pedophile's brain, and his merciless pursuit and abuse of Dolores. I would understand the mention of ambiguity if it was actually ambigous at any point. There are so many times when Humbert actually slips in stuff which shows how very aware he is that his justifications are BS. I'm also entirely unsurprised that Nabokov had a creepy uncle who very probably preyed on him as well.

I just finished Yesteryear. It's a very interesting read, and Caro Claire Burke's written it in this propulsive, immediate manner that really draws you in. However, while the book is really worth reading once, it left me with so many questions, and so much irritation at what could have been and was not.

First, Caleb gets off easy. So easy. I read an interview by Burke where she mentions 'my toxic trait is that I love him. He could've just been a schoolteacher.' Yeah, that's true, but in the book itself, Caleb is utterly vile, a rapist and abuser who drugs his wife and slaps her around. She writes intitially about the dichotomy between him and Natalie, how he's a man with some stereotypically feminine traits, who wants to do yoga and be a kindergarten teacher. Which is all fine, but that doesn't absolve him from what he does later, and it's like when men are passed off as 'simple' and 'stupid' , 'under the influence of a bad woman'. There is nothing endearing in this character, no modicum of decency, which his creator seems to find.

Second, why is she so obsessed with putting Natalie in a place where she's abused? It's not enough that she's now in a poverty stricken household, having to do stuff she could afford help for, before. There's an element of 'haha, serves her right' about it which feels unempathetic and frankly jarring to me. What does her abuse add to the plot?

ETA - when I write Caleb got off too easy in the book, it means in the eyes of the author. Not in the eyes of the law, because who knows? However in the eyes of the author it's very clear that he is as Natalie made him. The assumptions behind this are very odd.

Made a horrendous mistake at work today. In fact it sounds unhinged when I'm talking about it, forgot one of the most foundational facts about my job. My boss immediately called me out over it. And I felt so utterly ashamed of myself

He doesn't know I have ADHD. Nobody in the organisation does. The work itself doesn't come easily to me and I remain on top of things if there's a structure in place, of regular reviews. Which weren't happening with the last boss being transferred.

Sometimes I feel so terrible for myself. I'm living alone in a city and coping with all this while struggling to keep afloat in my job. It's so isolating. I wish I wasn't this sluggish person with brain fog all the time. I wish there was someway not to be me. I reacted badly to some ADHD drugs recently, so I'm afraid to retake them. But I'm so done.