"[W]hat surprised me most was that nearly all of Lucy’s co-workers and former mortuary classmates are women, specifically young women in their twenties and thirties."

"'There were only three guys in our class and one of them was a trans man. There were a lot of queer people,' she explains. I’d assumed she would be a quirky outlier in a class of gaunt, poorly socialized men, but as a tattooed lesbian with a warm Midwestern disposition, Lucy actually represents a growing majority. A quiet changeover has taken place in mortuary science—one largely obscured by the shroud separating the death industry from polite society. Over the past four decades, female enrollment in mortuary programs has grown from five percent to roughly 75 percent of recent graduating classes. As a journalist who came up during the peak of girlbossery, I’d been pitched all manner of 'female first' stories—'Would you like to interview Chobani’s first female yogurt sommelier?'—but this felt more substantial than a corporate puff piece. So why this generational shift? And why now?"

From "Keeping Up Appearances/The women taking over the funeral industry" (LA Review of Books).

Is this about... makeup?

"I hate travel. Just the slog of it. I like sleeping in my own bed."

Said Grace Coddington, quoted in "At Home: Grace Coddington/Inside the fashion stylist and creative director's ‘very catty’ East Hampton retreat" (NYT).

That's a gift link — like all NYT links — so you can see the very bed where she prefers to sleep and lots of other rooms in the cozy, catty house. The cattiness is in the artworks, not a lot of real cats, though there is one real cat, seen in 2 of the photos. I really like this house, especially with its tiny guest cottage, used as an office.

Speaking of travel — I'm a connoisseur of travel critique — I wanted to show you...

"Are you f–king stupid? It’s not your lived experience, so just shut the f–k up!...How is it so difficult for you to see space made for women at a Sex Pistols gig?"

"If you are a man who gets offended by a band making room for a female only moshpit then you are PART OF THE PROBLEM... Stay home, read a book by Bell hooks, come back when kindness, compassion and empathy have landed with you."

Said Sex Pistols singer Frank Carter, quoted in "Sex Pistols singer Frank Carter clashes with male concertgoer for crashing women-only mosh pit: ‘Just f–king leave'" (NY Post).

I thought the women-only section was justified by the physical difference between male and female bodies, that it was the same issue we see in the effort to limit women's sports to biological women, but no: Carter also said: "When I say a ladies-only moshpit pit, I of course mean a trans-inclusionary space. The space is for people who don’t usually feel safe."

Was there any way for this "male concertgoer" to identify as one of the "people who don’t usually feel safe"?

Alexithymia.

I'm reading "My Fiancé Won’t Touch Me. Should I Still Marry Him? Our Ask the Therapist columnist, Lori Gottlieb, advises a 65-year-old reader who loves her partner but is physically and emotionally unsatisfied" (NYT).

From the letter writer:

Our therapist and I suspect undiagnosed alexithymia (or difficulty in experiencing and describing emotions), while he defensively attributes it to mere “emotional reserve.” After a year of failed couples counseling, we are living in a completely platonic relationship.

"I never liked that term, 'guy's guy.'"

Said Meade, reading the previous post, the one about the man who shot the rooster named Nixon.

That sounds like one of those sentences that makes me think I'm experiencing another bout of transient alexia.

What's wrong with the phrase "guy's guy"? I'd ask Meade but he's watching that video I sent him, the one with a guy named Larry listing a lot of things he's not going to do anymore now that he's 72.

Left to my own devices I went looking for "guy's guy" in my blog archive. I believe I've only used the phrase once: "Now, if everyone would please dial down all the criticism and let Obama get on with his un-self-conscious guy's guy agenda, it will all work out just fine."

That was in an October 26, 2009 post called  "Obama's White House boy's club." And I was using the phrase jokingly echoing something the NYT had written: 

"The [rooster] was named Nixon, after the former president, 'basically because he was a jerk' said his owner, Bill Leimgruber...."

I'm reading "The Chickens Came Home. So Did the Roosters. In Vermont, a single bird set off a feud over what, exactly, constitutes farm country, mirroring a battle dividing communities across America" (NYT). 

Last fall in Merrimack, N.H., a former town councilor infuriated by one bird spent months pressing for an ordinance with fines that climbed to $500, prompting one 40-year resident to ask: “We’re an agricultural town. If people moved here and now, all of a sudden, don’t want to listen to the noises of the deer, and the roosters, and the raccoons and the loons, why did they move here?”...

Because of the covid lockdown and because of the rising price of eggs, a lot of people were buying chicks, and some of those chicks grew up to be roosters. 

"Books that get called weird girl lit tend to deal in uncanny or dreamlike circumstances."

"In Ottessa Moshfegh’s 'My Year of Rest and Relaxation,' a woman uses drugs to hibernate her way through a deep depression. In Mona Awad’s 'Bunny,' a cult of women M.F.A. students make rabbits explode with the power of their creative minds. In Kate Folk’s 'Sky Daddy,' a woman is erotically fixated on airplanes. In an interview, Moshfegh said she finds the weird girl label 'patronizing,' 'conservative' and 'misogynistic.' She maintained that the word 'weird' in this context perpetuates oppressive expectations about what a woman should be. 'There’s nothing weird about interesting stories about people,' she said. 'That’s what novels are. And I would challenge anyone who’s using that term to tell me what a normal girl is supposed to read or write.'"

From "What Is ‘Weird Girl Lit,’ Anyway? Romantic delusion. Social alienation. Body horror. Just a few of the elements celebrated online — if not always by the writers who earn the label" (NYT).

Yeah, what is a normal girl supposed to read or write?

From the comments over there: "A lot of fiction is about weird people. Many have been male. Holden Caulfield, most of Philip Roth, most of Thomas Pynchon, Ignatius in 'A Confederacy of Dunces,' Sherlock Holmes, the whole Karamazov family. You could argue that Elizabeth Bennett is a weird girl, considering Regency norms. Oh, Lady MacBeth, Medea, definitely weird. It's an advantage to an author to have a weird character or two. It's like Tolstoy said, 'All happy families are the same.'"

"For this person, the commitment to contesting the evil of whiteness is all-consuming, an ideological North Star that orients her entire worldview...."

Writes John McWhorter, in "When White People Like Hannah Gann Pretend to Be Black" (NYT).

To be the victim is to be not just innocent but also more interesting. It also can provide a sense of meaning in a modern world that no longer gives ready answers to the question of life’s purpose. “Who am I? What am I for? I’m … Black!”.... 

In the pre-woke days, I knew a couple of intermediate cases. These were white women who embraced Black culture, dated Black men exclusively, used “blaccents” spontaneously and deep down seemed to wish they were Black. (Why these cases seem to almost always involve women is an interesting question to which I don’t have an answer.).... 

That column was inspired by the new Rachel Dolezal, Hannah Gann.

"Cube enthusiasts... explain the plummeting age of champions by pointing to kids’ enthusiasm for the puzzle, their ability to learn quickly and that they simply have more time to practice."

"Many are from China, which has schools that teach speedy Rubik’s Cube solving.... Yunzhi practices two to three hours a day, her mother told Red Star News of Chengdu, China...."

I'm reading "6-Year-Old Girl in China Sets a Rubik’s Cube Record Lian Yunzhi of China solved a Rubik’s Cube five times in an average of 4.27 seconds, setting a women’s world record" (NYT).

And I'm not thinking oh, isn't she cute? like most of the commenters over there. I'm thinking: 1. Child abuse, and 2. A separate "women's" division is bullshit. 

The "men's" record — i.e., the record — is 3.51 seconds, almost 20% less.

These kids who train for hours a day in Rubik’s Cube solving — what are they really being trained for? It made me think of this viral video:

"[A] vocal group of male commenters have used the [Lindsay Clancy] case to create a sounding board for their resentment of women...."

"Hugh Anthony, who has 66,000 followers, has taken aim at 'modern-day feminists' who are 'satanic freaks … masking [alleged murder] behind psychosis.' Another man brags about dumping a woman because she empathised too much with Clancy’s postpartum psychosis. 'I can’t ignore or gamble my future children,' it reads, to the tune of 2,800 likes. Yet another, from Collin Rugg, a bloviating X provocateur with 2.8 million followers, claims that men are taking their wives’ support of Clancy to divorce court. He shared a video of an attorney who said he would help male clients strip ex-wives of their visitation rights based on their views about the case.... [Men] are whipped into a froth by manosphere types leveraging a tragedy against all women. [Women] are crassly using that tragedy to show the systemic brokenness of marriage and motherhood, bending the facts around their feelings.... Both sides of this tawdry tit-for-tat are incapable of making this catastrophe about anything other than themselves."

Writes Poppy Sowerby, in "Men and women are falling out over Lindsay Clancy. It’s sick/Content creators have hijacked a tragic murder trial and turned it into an ugly proxy war over gender politics" (London Times).

"Patients who disagree with their doctor can be 'fired' or flagged with scarlet letters in the corners of their electronic medical charts."

"'Exaggerating.' 'Resistant.' 'Noncompliant.' 'Hysterical.' To be sure, there are problematic patients, even dangerous ones. But for the rest of us, the imbalance between our defenselessness and the doctor’s discretion can create an unhelpful dynamic, one that pushes us to stop advocating and start accommodating. The result is waiting rooms full of people pleasers and providers who never get the full picture. The pressure to be pleasant and pliant is especially strong for women. Just as 'bossy' women often don’t get promotions and 'uppity' women are more likely to be sexually harassed, women who are branded as difficult patients are at risk of not being taken seriously or losing access to care. This is one of the reasons women overapologize, even for their own pain. A simple disclaimer — 'I don’t mean to be difficult, but …' — can backfire as well...."

Writes Allison Sweet Grant, author of "Lump: A Memoir in Ineloquent Reflections," "This Is Why Women Are Scared to Tell Their Doctors the Truth" (NYT gift link).

A mere 30 years ago, this was a highlighted modern problem on "Seinfeld" (Season 8, Episode 5, "The Package"):

 

(Yes, I know this is my second "Seinfeld" post this morning. It was in looking for this Elaine-at-the-doctor material that I stumbled into the unfilmed episode stuff I blogged an hour ago, here.)

"In the 1800s, a secretary was part aide-de-camp, part executive-in-training — someone who handled the boss’s correspondence and bookkeeping, but also learned the business..."

"... and would eventually ascend to a senior job. With the rise of the modern corporation around the turn of the 20th century, however, the secretary became more like a noncommissioned officer — a worker with real responsibility but little upward mobility. It was at this point that the position became mostly female. Companies then broke up and degraded the job further over the decades, replacing the secretary with pools of typists, receptionists and data entry personnel, almost all of them women, too. The final step, amid pressure from the feminist movement in the 1970s, was to allow a small number of college-educated women to ascend from these clerical jobs to the ranks of middle management. But even this came with a loss of status, as managers would have to do more of their own grunt work. 'They’re now being promoted, but the clerical tasks are promoted with them,' said Jason Resnikoff, a labor historian. 'The middle manager would do more typing, correspondence, more of their own filing.' These days, almost no one has an assistant...."

From "In Trump’s Economy, Job Gains Go to Women. That’s Not an Entirely Good Thing. Despite the administration’s best attempts, the diminishing status of many American jobs is driving a spike in women’s employment" (NYT gift link).

"When we did... the Laestrygonians… there were these stuntmen who were all 7 feet and then they got stunt men who were under 5 feet. My double was a woman...."

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Devyn Dalton, the stunt double, is 4'6". Damon is said to be 5'10".

Equality? Ridiculous!

There's no way in the world that 7 of the top 14 novels here were written by women.

In fact, there's only one really great novel written by a woman in the past 200 years and that's Gone With The Wind by Margaret Mitchel.

I'd rate it as the greatest American novel of all time. https://t.co/6OJWFjTDk9

— Ted Joy (@TedJoy71) May 16, 2026

Here's the Guardian's explanation, "Who’s in, who’s out, and how many have you read? The story behind our 100 best novels list":

"And it is a vicious cycle: the more women and non-binary people do the overwhelming majority of resistance work..."

"... the more men take in the wrong-headed message that this work is not for them...."

Writes Saul Austerlitz, author of "How to Assemble an Activist," in "How do we get more men to join the anti-Trump resistance? My activist group is about 80% women. Where did all the men go – and how can we get them back?" (Guardian).

My first thought was: Don't push the "and non-binary people" talk. But anyway isn't it funny that you're so vitally interested in the male/female split and simultaneously hot to insert "and non-binary people"? 

"My unscientific conclusion is that the men who have already drifted away, whatever their reasons, are unlikely to come back. Instead, now is an ideal time to extend an invitation to the men in our circles who hover on the edges, shouting fruitlessly at their TV screen or social-media feed, not knowing yet how much good they can do – or how much better they will feel

"I’d never questioned my gender before I came to America; growing up in India, I’d always identified as a girl."

"Of course, India has a gender hegemony of its own — one I arguably benefitted from in many ways and suffered from in others. I am upper-caste, upper-class, Hindu, and also a Tamil woman who didn’t look like the models in the Fair & Lovely commercials. I was the only Tamilian in most rooms I was in, a fact my North Indian classmates consistently reminded me of. Still, the popular conception of what a woman or a man was felt more fluid. I grew up among Sikh women who didn’t tame their body hair, men who would hold hands platonically with their male friends, and children who cross-dressed for play (almost every boy had a photo of himself dressed up as a girl by his mother for fun).... [And there] is our third-gender community, or hijras, as they are commonly known...."

Writes Supriya Ganesh,  "My Strange Dysphoria/Growing up in India, I never questioned my gender. When I moved to the U.S. at 18, I began to feel disconnected from my body" (New York Magazine).

"There’s always two poles in any movement. There’s this pull toward being post-human, shinier, newer, cloned, etc., the sense that people have elevated the lacquered surface of the machine over the body."

"[And there's this pull toward] I’m real. I think we’re like old stone houses. We have the value of antiquity. If you haven’t tweaked yourself, it’s like you have a working fireplace that’s been going since 1680. We’re authentic.... For all women, there’s that line between choosing to be malleable and pleasing and to conform with the collective norms or refusing it.... No, I’m not playing that game."

Said the 77-year-old French Vogue editor Joan Juliet Buck, quoted in "Why Fashion Suddenly Loves Older Women/Representation of women of a certain age has never been higher. What’s going on?" (NYT).

The article is by Vanessa Friedman, who continues: "Authenticity is, of course, one of the current buzzwords not just in fashion, but in culture generally. It’s a reflection of the fear that individual style has been lost to the algorithm.... It’s not just influencers and celebrities who have become the vehicles for this version of ageless sameness. It’s political figures, too.... As many MAGA women have embraced the plumped and smoothed 'Mar-a-Lago face,' it has become an expression of a larger social swing toward exaggerated norms and old-fashioned patriarchal gender roles rather than simply a cosmetic fad."

"I can’t think of one person in a relationship that I would want for myself. I’ve done it before and prefer focusing on me and my own needs."

Says a 33-year-old Toronto woman, quoted at the beginning of a NYT article called "Why Marriage, for So Many, Is Less Appealing Than Ever/From Gen Z to Gen X, a pause in the march to the altar, or a decision to skip it altogether, is becoming more common."

There's also this from Shani Silver, 43, host of "A Single Serving Podcast": "[A]s millennials, we got to the age where we were promised all these things would happen, and they never did.... [We] worked on ourselves throughout our lives to become the desirable partners we were told to become... But the men didn’t rise along with us. They’ve stagnated. There are imbalances in domestic labor responsibilities, emotional labor responsibilities, in running a household... If you marry a man you’re settling for, I don’t see a lot of relationship longevity."

Hegseth succeeds in pressuring Scouting America — AKA the Boy Scouts of America — to rid itself of DEI.

"No more DEI. Zero."

The Department of War has officially put Scouting America on notice.

It’s time to get back to basics — and DoW is leading the charge. pic.twitter.com/EnY9mvaFLX

— Secretary of War Pete Hegseth (@SecWar) February 27, 2026

 

From the Department of War:

"Perhaps you’ve noticed.... Amid all the cars that are parked headfirst, a seemingly increasing number have instead been backed in."

"These dissenters face out, like getaway drivers in a bank robbery ready to make a clean escape. Some people, myself included, find the move annoying. William Van Tassel, the manager of driver training programs for AAA... said that perhaps it was because they were following AAA’s updated guidelines.... My own theory is that reversing into a space is a response to the ambient anxiety in our society, akin to privately noting the exits in a movie theater. In a nation of rampant gun violence, backing in so you can quickly get out provides a sense of security.... [Van Tassel] cited a 2020 study from the journal Transportation Research that found, among other things, that the pull-in, back-out maneuver had a higher crash risk. Since pedestrians are most likely to be found walking in the major lanes, not in a parking space, it’s safer to back into the area with fewer people.... But I can’t bring myself to join in, and I don’t fully accept the safety argument. Since 2018, new vehicles sold in the United States have been federally mandated to have backup cameras, which can assist in reversing out of a spot without plowing into someone...."

I'm reading "Do You Back Into a Parking Spot or Back Out? An exploration of what’s driving a change in America’s parking lots" (NYT).

Those who do back up — is it for safety? Do other people believe it's for safety? As the male author of the NYT article says: "My wife suspects they’re mostly men showing off." Ha ha. That's what I think too. And by the way, I've always been quick to suspect that people are just showing off. I was much worse about that when I was much younger. I can honestly say that when NASA put a man on the moon in 1969, I thought they were showing off. I looked away! The moon landing was a very big thing; backing into a parking space is a very little thing. In things big and small, I am ready to disrespect the achievement as a matter of showing off. A lateral thinker will therefore ask: What's bad about showing off? Where would we be without it?