thanks in advance: get this done by the time i press “send”
thanks for your interest: why’d you have to bring this up
would you be so kind: fucking do it
best: i have never physically met you
all best: this conversation is over
all my best: i wish you would die
happy to help: this is the easiest thing in my inbox
i hope this helps: i’ve done all i’m willing to do
i did a bit of research: i googled it, because you’re too lazy to
sorry to chase: answer my email
so sorry to chase: answer my FUCKING email
i am really sorry for being a pest but: i am LIVID that you are ignoring me
please contact my colleague: this isn’t my problem
i’m copying in my colleague: this isn’t my problem and i am thrilled about it
i’ll check and get back to you: i might forget to
i’ll let you know when i hear anything: i will forget to
can you check back with me in a week?: i’m hoping you will forget to
per our earlier conversation: i just yelled at you on the phone
great to chat just now: you just yelled at me on the phone
thanks!: i’m not mad at you
thanks!!: please don’t be mad at me
thanks!!!: i’m crying at my desk
please advise: this might be your fault
kindly advise: this is entirely your fault
mind if i swing by?: i’m already in the elevator
can you confirm for me: you told me before and i deleted the email
sorry if that was unclear: i think you’re an idiot
let me know if you need anything else: please never contact me again
tampons/pads marketed to young kids who just started getting their periods
should be a thing
wrappers with dinosaurs and planets and glitter and cats and sea creatures
make kids feel comfortable about something natural that happens to their bodies.
and for goodness sake
don’t sexualize it
No. Actually. Why do you need this? You don’t. Getting your period means you are starting to mature, which means you need to drive them AWAY from needless things like that. Also, you all bitch enough as it is about paying for these things, imagine how much more money companies will charge for those things? Or, maybe EDUCATE them, so they will already feel comfortable about it. Jesus fucking christ.
Tell that to ten-year-old me, who still hadn’t had the period talk yet in school. I was crying and freaking out because I thought I was dying. Then my mother comes up to me and says with a smile “You’re becoming a woman!” I didn’t want to grow up yet. I was ten. Fucking ten and was told to start to grow up. My mom wanted me to get away from silly little kids things because I’m fucking bleeding out my goddamn vagina.
Also some people are children at heart and like to be silly and having a dinosaur-patterned maxi-pad would be pretty fuckin’ hilarious and I’m sure there’d be a huge market for that.
Not all people with vaginas are stoic and serious and want the same frilly, swirly boring-ass pads and tampons.
Plus if you’ve been having a miserable day and say you bought the character variety pack of pads. Sitting in the bathroom stall wanting to stab everyone and you open up some baby dinosaur pads. You’ve got dinosaurs in your underwear. No ones gonna ruin your day now.
U by Kotex has these, Tween pads. Sparkly box, cute designs on the pad and wrapper. There are even “period facts and myths” in each box, and the inner wrapper has instructions for how to use a pad properly. What’s more is they are smaller than standard pads. (I use these pads because I’m a petite person). Best part? Everywhere I buy them, one box of pads is less than $5.
^^^^^^^ THESE ARE THE BEST BTW. VERY SOFT AND FUN AND COLORFUL. DID YOU KNOW THAT EVEN SEEING PRETTY COLORS CAN LIFT YOUR MOOD? I DIDN’T. NOW I DO.
BUT REALLY THESE ARE THE BEST OK
BECAUSE WHEN MY TEN-YEAR-OLD SISTER GOT HER PERIOD SHE WAS SUPER SCARED BUT I GAVE HER MY PACK AND SHE’S LIKE THIS LOOKS KINDA COOL AND NOW SHE THINKS SHE’S SO AWESOME AND COOL BECAUSE SHE WEARS COLORFUL PADS WITH SHOOTING STARS AND HEARTS ON THEM AND SHE’S SO CONFIDENT IT’S SO AWESOME
SO YOU TRY TELLING ME THAT SEEING A TEN YEAR OLD GIRL DEPRESSED AND ASHAMED OF A NATURAL BODY FUNCTION IS PREFERABLE TO SEEING HER SHOWING OFF HER UFO AND SHOOTING STAR-PATTERNED PADS TO HER BFFS
YOU WOULDN’T GIVE A FOUR-YEAR-OLD BOY A BORING BEIGE BAND-AID NO YOU’D GO OUT AND BUY THE HECK OUTTA THOSE SPONGEBOB AND TOY STORY SHITS BECAUSE IT MAKES THEM HAPPY DON’T MAKE YOUR GIRLS GROW OUT OF THINGS THAT MAKE THEM HAPPY BEFORE THEY’VE EVEN LEFT ELEMENTARY SCHOOL
Ok but U by Kotex has got all of our backs. This brand dose great and empowering things for all women and even girls 🙂
Why are people with vaginas expected to be grown ass adults at 10 but people with dicks aren’t expected to act like adults until their 20’s??
^^^^^ ALL. OF. THIS.
Fan fiction is a way of the culture repairing the damage done in a system where contemporary myths are owned by corporations instead of by the folk.
sometimes you say or do bad things while you’re in an awful mental place. sometimes you say things that are rude or uncalled for or manipulative. and i’m not going to hold that against you. mental illness is hard, and no one is perfect. but once you’re through that episode, you need to take steps to make amends. you need to apologize.
“i couldn’t help it, i was having a bad episode” is a justification, not an apology.
“i’m so fucking sorry, i fucked up, i don’t deserve to live, i should stop talking to anyone ever, i should die” is a second breakdown and a guilt trip. it is not an apology.
when you apologize, the focus should be on the person you hurt. “i’m sorry. i did something that was hurtful to you. even if i was having a rough time, you didn’t deserve to hear that,” is a better apology. if it was a small thing, you can leave it at that.
if you caused significant distress to the other person, this is a good time to talk about how you can minimize damage in the future. and again, even if it is tempting to say you should self-isolate and/or die, that is not a helpful suggestion. it will result in the person you’re talking to trying to talk you out of doing that, which makes your guilt the focus of the conversation instead of their hurt.
you deserve friendship, and you deserve support. but a supportive friend is not an emotional punching bag, and mental illness does not absolve you of responsibility for your actions. what you say during a mental breakdown doesn’t define you. how you deal with the aftermath though, says a lot.
This is the most carefully-nuanced discussion of this I think I have ever seen. Thank you for writing this.
The claim that ‘just’ ‘shrinks your power’ was popularized earlier this year by former Google executive Ellen Petry Leanse. As I pointed out then, what it overlooks is the fact that words like ‘just’ have a range of functions: you can’t just [sic] assert that they are ‘demeaning’ in every context. (As I also pointed out, Nike didn’t choose ‘Just Do It’ as a slogan because they thought it sounded pleasingly weak and powerless.) Even when ‘just’ is being used as a hedge (i.e., to make a point less forceful or more tentative), the commonest reason for that is simply to be polite; and politeness is more strategic than demeaning.
Only the other day, I got an email that read:
“Sorry to disturb you over the holiday period, but I’m just trying to firm up the schedule, and I wondered if you’d had time to check your diary yet. Have a great new year and get back to me when you have a chance.”
I didn’t think, ‘oh, this guy is really shrinking his power’ (yes, I did say ‘guy’: writing ‘sorry’ and ‘just’ in emails is not an exclusively female habit). I thought, ‘well, that’s considerate, making clear he knows it’s Christmas and I might have better things to do than help him with his schedule’. And since he had been considerate, I figured I’d return the favour: I replied the same day.
If he’d left out all the ‘self-undermining’ politeness features, the email would have looked more like this:
“I’m trying to firm up the schedule, so please check your diary and get back to me as soon as possible.”
The style may be more businesslike, but I’d have read this version as accusatory and borderline hostile (‘hey, I’ve got a schedule to make, why haven’t you given me the information I need?’). And I’d have registered my displeasure by putting it in the pending file until we were both officially back at work. So, politeness can pay dividends: ‘sorry’ and ‘just’ FTW.
Apart from being based on naïve and simplistic ideas about how language works, the other big problem with the ‘women, stop undermining yourselves’ approach is that it presupposes a deficit model of women’s language-use. If women use the word ‘sorry’ more than men (and by the way, that’s a genuine ‘if’: I’m not aware of any compelling evidence they do), that can only mean that women are over-using ‘sorry’, apologizing when it isn’t necessary or appropriate. The alternative interpretation—that men are under-using ‘sorry’ because they don’t always apologise when the circumstances demand it —is surely no less logical or plausible, but somehow it never comes up. As I said back in the summer, the assumption is always that ‘a woman’s place is in the wrong’.
The reason for this is simple. If your business is peddling advice to women, you have to begin by persuading women they’ve got a problem, and that the cause of the problem is their own behaviour. If that’s not the case—if, for instance, the problem has more to do with other people’s attitudes or with structural inequality—then telling women to behave differently is not going to fix very much.
Can I tell you a secret? You don’t have to be in a relationship.
I mean it. I know they force it down your throat until you choke on it. Girls aren’t pretty unless they’re wanted. Boys aren’t men unless they’re having sex with someone. People aren’t lovable until they’re dating someone.
But a relationship won’t always make you happy, and as wonderful as romance is, it isn’t the only love that exists. I have seen friendships that are deeper and more pure than couples who swear it’s forever – and yet the friendship is the one people ignore.
I have heard so often “nobody loves me” out of the mouths of people who are single. And it kills me because if you ask them: where are your parents, your teachers, your classmates, your pets – they say, yes, okay, but it doesn’t count. Of course it counts, love doesn’t diminish just because someone doesn’t want to have sex with you. In fact, doesn’t it sort of make that love more real that they want nothing – not even a date – out of you?
It is pretty to be in love. It’s magical, I’m sure. But it’s also wonderful to stop for ice cream in your prom dress with six other girls. It’s also wonderful to go visit the world with nothing but a bunch of buddies who are really excited about learning.
The problem is: we’ve made everything about “the one”. But maybe “the one” is just you, loving yourself, having fun, and being happy. Maybe instead of looking for our other halves, we should be piecing ourselves together.
Maybe I wasn’t born unfinished. Maybe I am the one who makes myself better.
Can I tell you a secret? You don’t have to be in a relationship.
I mean it. I know they force it down your throat until you choke on it. Girls aren’t pretty unless they’re wanted. Boys aren’t men unless they’re having sex with someone. People aren’t lovable until they’re dating someone.
But a relationship won’t always make you happy, and as wonderful as romance is, it isn’t the only love that exists. I have seen friendships that are deeper and more pure than couples who swear it’s forever – and yet the friendship is the one people ignore.
I have heard so often “nobody loves me” out of the mouths of people who are single. And it kills me because if you ask them: where are your parents, your teachers, your classmates, your pets – they say, yes, okay, but it doesn’t count. Of course it counts, love doesn’t diminish just because someone doesn’t want to have sex with you. In fact, doesn’t it sort of make that love more real that they want nothing – not even a date – out of you?
It is pretty to be in love. It’s magical, I’m sure. But it’s also wonderful to stop for ice cream in your prom dress with six other girls. It’s also wonderful to go visit the world with nothing but a bunch of buddies who are really excited about learning.
The problem is: we’ve made everything about “the one”. But maybe “the one” is just you, loving yourself, having fun, and being happy. Maybe instead of looking for our other halves, we should be piecing ourselves together.
Maybe I wasn’t born unfinished. Maybe I am the one who makes myself better.
ealdor 