I appeared on PBS’ To The Contrary, and discussed the Alabama State Supreme Court’s decision declaring fertilized eggs “children,” as well as women serving as troops for Ukraine. Watch here:
Tag: feminism
January 2024 To The Contrary Appearance
I appeared on PBS’ To The Contrary, and discussed Nikki Haley and backlash against DEI. Watch here:
Me, Graduate School, Middle Age, The Big Box Store
Doing graduate school in middle age is strange behavior. No one is waiting for the graying to burst into our respective fields screaming, “I have arrived.” I am in the process of pursuing an MFA in creative writing at Mississippi University for Women. It is a strange choice to wallop homework into my life, and I stand by it, even though more appropriate behavior for my demographic (working mother, aging parents) entails flossing away what little time remains at the big box store.
But graduate school has not changed this fact. I continue to spend time in the big box store. I do a number of big box stores on a regular basis: the discount store, the book store, the sporting goods store that under the leadership of a woman CEO has made it harder for school shooters to buy their guns and ammo there. My daughter, who is ten, begs to go to any varietal of big box store with me because then she can beg that I buy her everything inside the store. Earlier tonight we went to the supermarket in the big box store complex and I caved. I let her get the Gingerbread House Cinnamon Toast Crunch on clearance. I am a sucker for a deal at the big box store. My daughter knows this. It is why she has a discontinued Harry Potter pen projection light from Marshalls, where I went last weekend to pick up a cheap blanket for the dogs.
The big box store in late-stage capitalism America bears similarity to middle age. Time accelerates and slows in perplexing ways, and I buy things that wouldn’t sell a few seasons ago at a lower price even though I struggle to close my chest of drawers. I am old enough to remember a time when it seemed flashy for big box stores to have soaring facades above their entrance not backed by actual levels/floors of the building structure itself. At 43 I am old enough, and moneyed enough, to have tried Botox on my forehead once. It was fine but it dissipated after a few months, and I doubt I’ll do anything like that again. Earlier tonight, in the parking lot by the shopping cart carrels, my daughter asked me why I said aging is a feminist issue. My voice shifted to its ‘spirited steed’ gear and I told her we could talk about that on the drive home. She then commanded I explain the concept in 10 words or less. I said, no.
Aging is a feminist issue because women and girls are subject to pressures on their appearance that are unrealistic, make us feel bad, and consume our time, I said. Aging is part of this, and especially for women, I said. My daughter told me that’s too many words. Fine, I said. I’ll explain it in two words: total crap. She squirreled in the backseat and we kept bickering about aging, feminism, and how many words I am allotted to express my ideas to her about politics. God I love her.
I find that to age out loud is a political statement. It is a statement I am making. I am not afraid of my age. I am proud and lucky to be here.
But it is a special type of lunacy to be in graduate school when time is as comparatively limited as mine. The reality of doing graduate school part-time in middle age while working full-time and doing sandwich generation as a fucking prickled verb looks like:
+ Me completing homework in the car in the parking lot outside of gymnastics practice
+ Me responding to emails from the school at the speed of crawling, from a baby who hasn’t learned to sit up yet
+ Me dashing off portfolio of work for the semester in the lobby of a hospital skilled enough to keep old parents old, rather than dead
I would like to revise my statement that it’s not lunacy, but rather optimism or maybe self-love that keeps me in graduate school. To believe that I can improve for the sake of improving, and to commit to doing it, is a gift. I love becoming a better writer. I’ve got a big box store of a brain full of stories and poems and essays I want to improve. I know time is precious, that it runs out. To acknowledge that and keep going in earnest as myself, this spirit attached to a woman with caregiving and professional responsibilities, is the sacrilege that interests me.
November 2023 To The Contrary Appearance
I appeared on PBS’ To The Contrary, and discussed Nikki Haley’s candidacy, as well as remote work and women. Watch here:
September 2023 To The Contrary Appearance
I appeared on PBS’ To The Contrary, and discussed sexism in the music industry and period poverty. Watch here:
May 2023 To The Contrary Appearance
I discussed religion in public life as well as abortion restrictions on PBS’ To The Contrary. Watch here:
Anger Management Issues Are Abuse. Just Say That.
I would like to decry, declaim, and holistically reject the frame of Anger Management Issues, a frame so clinical as to create its own pathology: our collective inability as a culture, still and after all these years, to name and shame abuse within our own relationships and those of our loved ones.
Anger Management Issues were invented as a mechanism for abusers to save face, to give them an out for which there is learning and functioning and the bland speak of corporatese. Anger Management Issues seem to be deployed as a couple’s issue just as much as an individual Yosemite Sam’s, for anger is often used within the context of multi-person concepts such as arguments and disagreements and rows.
But when a partner or family member is kicking the living crap out of you — whether physically, sexually, mentally, spiritually, emotionally, financially, and/or otherwise1 — it’s not an Anger Management Issue. It’s an abuse issue. And we hate to say that someone is being abused especially when others have known about the so-called Anger Management Issues for awhile, because then we are all, in some way, culpable for being part of a society or family or neighborhood that allows this Anger Management Issue to occur in plain sight, or at least behind closed (but porously loud) doors.
We hate to say that someone is being abused because too often the judgement of abuse is made, in part, by reviewing the actions or intentions or discernment (oh, please) of the person being subject to another person’s willful violence. “She’s a strong woman and we don’t need to worry.” Or: “She can hold her own,” they’ll say as he is clearly abusing her irrespective of the strength of her will as a person to not be subject to violence. Or “that would never happen to me because I respect myself too much to find myself in that situation,” the unhelpful “model strong woman” will say on the television on the ladies talk show or to her friends over a glass of wine.2
The reality is not really like that. I once purchased a book in hopes of helping someone deal with his Anger Management Issues, and together we sought couples therapy to address his Anger Management Issues. But they weren’t Anger Management Issues. They weren’t couples therapy issues. They were abuse issues that belonged to the person perpetrating the abuse.
What I want you to know is this: No one should yell at you and break you down to pieces. No one should whack at your self-esteem with a machete for sport. No one should break things or punch holes in walls or destroy your property in the hope of scaring you into submission. No one should force or guilt or coerce you to sex. No one should withhold money or health insurance from you, or try to cut you off from participating in the public square or relationships with other people. No one should break your spirit or punch your face or bend your hands back or burn cigarettes into your arm or do any manner of physical things.
If you hear that someone has Anger Management Issues, I ask that you slow down and start thinking really carefully about what behavior is being described, and that if you are the person dealing directly with that person that you develop a plan to get away safely, and if you are a person whom the target of the Anger Management Issues feels they can trust, that you make yourself available non-judgmentally to support them as they navigate their way out. As you go about your life, please question the use of the term Anger Management Issues, and start thinking in your head, is abuse actually what is being described? Even if we haven’t called this behavior abuse in the past, is that actually what it is? Give peace the benefit of the doubt, that peace is in the right on this on this question of what is abuse — the targeting of an individual — and what is a mere issue of executive functioning gone wrong — an inability to control one’s own emotion of anger.
________
1Please don’t ask the question if abuse is “physical” or “something else.” It is all horrible, and this question and hierarchy sets up a respectability for forms of abuse that can equally threaten (as well as lead to) physical destruction. I know you mean well. but please don’t ask this question as the answer is irrelevant to whether a person would benefit from no longer being subject to abuse.
2Is it always men doing abuse to women and girls? No. Women do abuse to men and boys. Women do abuse to women and girls. Men do abuse to men and boys. There is more than the gender binary and abuse happens in all ways and directions. Gen Z is leading on the ridiculousness and inapplicability of the gender assignment concept as a mandatory checkbox on the birth certificate, driver’s license, and estimate of life potential, and I tend to agree, gender itself is a made-up farce that systematically advantages some over others. I shun all relationship violence. And yet I am unable to resist using she and he as I did in the paragraph above to describe abuse because men are conditioned to expect subservience from women and men’s violence against women is an unavoidable pattern that goes on and on and on and on. Enough!
March 2023 To The Contrary Appearance
I appeared on PBS’ To The Contrary, and discussed diversity, equity, and inclusion programs and justice for transgender people:
January 2023 To The Contrary Appearance
I appeared on PBS’ To The Contrary, and discussed diversity and the Oscars, and Marjorie Taylor Greene angling to be the vice president on Trump’s ticket:
Dear Noom, I Am Respectfully Declining Your Eating Disorder In 2023
Dear Noom,
I would like you to know that New Year’s Day is my most hated day of the year. It is a day when I am expected to perform that there is something wrong with me — my body, my approach to life, and my mind. It is a day when I am supposed to declare that I will optimize my flawed self in the year ahead. This ‘new leaf’ is self-hatred as social contagion masquerading as ‘wellness’ and ‘inspiration.’ What is packaged as ‘doing something for me’ is in fact to the benefit of massive corporations like Noom, which generates hundreds of millions in revenue from individuals who are being taught to hate their bodies and ‘improve’ themselves. They are so profitable that investors dropped an additional $540 million on you last year.
This year your advertisements, which I long ago blocked and reported as scams on social media, are unavoidable on television. I would like to talk about them with you as someone who nearly died of anorexia because what you are doing is diabolical, blood-on-your-hands-quality stuff.
How DARE you label hunger and desire to eat as pathologies, “psychological triggers.” You know why people want to eat? Because we are wired to need food to survive. This does not make us greedy or sick or flawed. It makes us human. If I get hungry because I see someone else eating good food, it doesn’t mean I have FOMO. It means that my body needs nourishment.
How DARE you even use the word “trigger” the way you do. When I was in my worst days of anorexia, getting bruises from my mattress and no longer speaking much, skulking from room to room in silence because I had no energy and accepted I was likely to die of what I could no longer stop, I’ll be honest that message boards for people with eating disorders were a lifeline I needed. We used the word “trigger warning” to indicate content that might cause someone to engage in more self-harm. “Trigger” was a word we used to protect our brains from pro-dieting messages. “Trigger” in its common vernacular evolved out of feminist and trauma communities. Let me be honest, advertisements like Noom’s are proof that the need for feminism is alive and well in 2023.
What I know of your service is this — it mimics many of the behaviors I engaged in on my own and messages I told myself on my own that hurtled me toward my grave. I would like you to think carefully about that. But I know you don’t care. All of this garbage weight loss stuff has always been about money for companies like yours. No matter how much you try to package it as ‘wellness.’
I am respectfully declining adamant and invasive suggestions that I pursue an eating disorder with you in 2023. Hunger is not a mental pathology. Bodies exist and they need to eat.
Thank you and please go away now.
Cordially,
Erin
Erin Matson 