Muscle Milk, The Rock, Creatine, Brad Pitt's Abs, Men's Health, Ripped Tobey Maguire, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles — here's food & gender scholar @EmilyContois on the suffocating image of swole that surrounded young Gen-X and millennial men:
"Teen girlhood is a site of constant contradictions. It’s celebrated and derided, sexualized and overprotected. But teen boyhood barely exists. It’s viewed as a life chapter to rush through in order to reach manhood, the stage that matters."
I thought there were a lot of "how to get Britney's abs" articles, but they're nothing compared to "how to get Brad Pitt's abs" in men's mags. People are STILL WRITING THEM.
Also good god this Muscle Milk ad
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
If that line from my own newsletter about "the idea of how I could have lived if I had allowed myself to just weigh what I weighed" smacked you in the face, then you, too, should subscribe to @sarahlovescali
Or if you a cried a big puddle under your chair reading The Bridge Dog
The digitization of Seventeen is very haphazard and weirdly catalogued but I was so thrilled to find the Letters to the Editor re: that cover; if you're one of those college girls from Wheaton who debated this in your dorm, let's chat
A reader just sent me this (fairly heartening?) screenshot that's been making the rounds in her 14-year-old daughter's Snapchat world
The United States is particularly good at looking a sprawling problem like systemic disinvestment in public education square in the face and thinking “I bet some very small individual purchases will fix this.”
Have you seen a local story on 'businesses can't fill positions b/c low pay + COVID fears' (that may or may not blame unemployment benefits)? I'm collecting them
This nut allergy / kid coddling essay is so bizarre; do we not recall what became of the last over-coddled generation (answer: after being shamed for moving back into our parents' basements if those basements existed in the first place, we turned into work robots)
Also there's a great section in Barbara Ehrenreich's FEAR OF FALLING where she quotes a bunch of different conservative writers bemoaning the state of coddled and lazy boomers (in their 20s) in the 1970s
Midge Decter's LIBERAL PARENTS, RADICAL CHILDREN (1975): the boomer who "languishes now in a hospital where the therapists feel that in another few months he might attempt a few tasks & even...hold down a job"
also omg forgot to share that one of the Baylor influencer twins (currently finishing up their senior year) got engaged yesterday
reminds me of the Christian university where many of my friends went where one of the women's dorms had sweatshirts depicting the three thing residents should do before graduating and one of them was get an engagement ring?????