Skirts From Long, Long Ago

I'm prancing around the house in black pantyhose and a short skirt that would be longer if it wasn't too tight around my stomach and on what I called to my mother "knock off" black boots.

"Was that skirt twenty pounds ago?" My mother comments when she takes a look at me in my bedroom.

I nervously pull at the skirt, "Fifteen or twenty pounds, yeah." I bought it months ago, and it was loose then.

"Let me look at you," she says as I spin around. She insists that I go to a New Year's Eve party in either dress pants or a skirt, even though the get-together is for recovering addicts who are essentially homeless. A bit like going to the Christmas party for the other people with severe mental illness who make up my current therapeutic program. No one is going to dress up. People can barely afford Walmart jeans and t-shirts. "What else do you have?"She runs her hands over the small selection of clothes I have, much of which I can't fit into. I have more pairs of jeans and dress pants in sizes four and six than I could ever need--buying them out of vanity that I could actually fit into something that small. Now, they are useless, and the odds are fairly good that I will never be able to dress myself in them again, as our body is just organized on the imperative that we need to keep all the weight we gain, and therefore we mustn't lose those precious pounds which could save us in a famine.

"That's all I have, I can't fit into anything else, the rest of my clothes are in the garage," I answer. I have two rows of clothes in a closed room in a shop.

Sexism in A.I.

"Similarly, conversations like mine with Alexa and Siri reveal more about human expectations than they do about A.I. By creating interactions that encourage consumers to understand the objects that serve them as women, technologists abet the prejudice by which women are considered objects. They may overlook this hazard in part because these workers are, for the most part, men."

--"The Bot Politic," by Jacqueline Feldman, The New Yorker

The Tinder Experience, Part VII

When you talk to me like I'm a prostitute, it makes me want to charge you.

Feminism Lost

"Others worry that the women’s movement has spent too much time policing language and behavior, blaming and shaming at the expense of dialogue. That, Professor Williams argues, can make misogyny attractive to the white working class, a way to rebel against condescending elites."

--by Susan Chira, "Feminism Lost. Now What?," The New York Times

For some reason, a few people out there equate rudeness (that they are oblivious to) to freedom of speech, as if you are given the right to be an asshole (however, "assholeness" is protected by the Court, unless the hate speech is meant to incite immediate violence). Political correctness does not censor people; it simply recognizes the difference among us in life experience, our priorities and values in a respectful manner. Being polite and considerate to your audience (of one or more) is a delicate art that we could all use more practice in.

Bisexual Women at a Party for Recovering Addicts

Joseph and I are at a clean and sober party for recovering addicts. A pretty, young woman comes up to him, they exchange greetings, she looks at me briefly and then floats on past.

"I wonder if she's bisexual," I say, giddy from two shots of Grey Goose that I had in a bar, waiting to meet up with him.

He instantly smiles, "How did you know? No, really, how did you know?"

I just shrug.

Really, That Many? Guess Who's a Kiss Ass?

For some reason, of which I can't remember now, the English instructor has his school email inbox open and plastered all over the screen in front of class while we were all waiting for lecture to begin. Just the first, few messages were projected. Three of them were from me.

I was horribly embarrassed, and said to myself, "I'm famous."

The Tinder [Tender] Experience, Part VI

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