One Hell of a Steep Learning Curve

cranberryloops:

Dear Anon, whoever you are, you made me very very grateful today. 
From the bottom of my heart - thank you. 

Seconded and thirded. There’s a fanfic of hers that’s the most haunting I’ve ever read, and one of the very best. Love cranberry.

(Source: sherlockiansbepositive)

kryptaria:

prettyarbitrary:

hollydiggity:

imsuggestingcoconutsmigrate:

hiddles-batched:

bearyourcross:

yeahmicah:

mythosaur:

quellingmyboredom:

Muppet Treasure Island…

Fern Gully tbh

Jackie’s Back

Home Alone 2 

If I’m perfectly honest, my original is It, because I grew up in a horrible household

Mine is rocky horror, so I’m unsure what that says about my household. Other than it was awesome.

I first remember him in Clue.

Technically, Rocky Horror, but I first saw it when I was around eight or ten, when it came to HBO. My parents caught me watching it again, because at that age, I couldn’t understand what the hell the plot had been — I just liked the dancing and singing.

So I suppose the first movie of his that I understood was Legend. But still, Rocky Horror.

And I will forever regret not seeing Anthony Head play Frank, though I’ve caught some youtube clips of it.

I will always associate Tim Curry with the thrill of being half naked in a theater and the thunk of toilet rolls hitting the screen.

havingbeenbreathedout:

peninsulamamoenam:

emmadelosnardos:

Thinking about Susan Sontag today after all the hullabaloo about one child or more in The Atlantic, and Zadie Smith’s rebuttal in The Telegraph of the idea that creative women should only have one child (thanks to peninsulamamoenam for pointing me towards these stories).

I can’t say I know a terrible amount about Susan Sontag, but her Notes on Camp were very influential to me as a college student, and Illness and Metaphors and Regarding the Pain of Others have been texts that I’ve come back to from time to time as a clinical psychology student.

So Sontag is someone I respect, greatly, and I pay attention when people speak of her. As for her having children (or child) — Sontag was someone whose work habits, from what I’ve gathered, were always very deliberate and part of a larger intellectual plan that she had for herself, and I could see her as someone who might intentionally choose to have only one child. But of other one-child authoresses? The number of children that women have is not always an intentional decision, thought out beforehand with great attention to a woman’s future career aspirations.

One of the problems with articles like The Atlantic’s is that it seeks in statistical trends the answer to the question ‘how should we live our lives?’. Statistics use large data sets to draw conclusions about aggregate group behavior, but group averages are not good bases to predict or prescribe individual behavior, because individual vary widely and that variability is obscured when we aggregate data. So just because more successful female writers tend to have fewer children, does not mean that we should have fewer children if we want to be successful female writers; there are always individual exceptions to group trends and what works for the group may not work for an individual.

In addition, just because we know that productive female authors tend to have fewer children than productive male authors, it doesn’t mean that having more children is what causes women to be less successful writers. That is a poor conclusion to draw, statistically speaking, because there are other factors involved, besides procreation, that determine how good of an author a person can be, not the least of which include hard work and creativity, talent and originality. So even if we choose to have fewer children, if we lack the ingredients that make a writer a writer, we won’t succeed on that account, either.

Finally, it’s a bit ridiculous to prescribe a certain kind of reproductive behavior with the expectation that it will make women ‘better’ in another area that has absolutely nothing to do with reproduction but has a lot to do with available time. In social science we would say that there is a ‘third variable’ involved here that is mediating the relationship between number of children and writerly success, and that is the number of free hours available to a woman. Having a child certainly may reduce the number of free hours available that are so desperately needed to engage in meaningful creative work, but working three jobs to pay off debt will also reduce that available time, as would having to take care of aging parents, or to return to school for additional education, etc. 

If anything, this finding that successful female writers have fewer children is probably a reflection of the fact that child-rearing takes a lot of time (who knew?), that most of that work falls to women (really?), and that women who spend more time taking care of children will have less time to write (obviously). So, I agree with Zadie Smith that the issue here isn’t the number of children that a woman has, but rather the number of free hours that she has, time that can be secured in any number of ways, such as having a willing stay-at-home spouse, the financial means to hire child-care, grandparents who live near by, or a high quality early-child education system that is sponsored by the government (think Sweden, France).

But it’s easier, from an American perspective, to take for granted that women are the ones who care for children, and to conclude that if a woman wants to be creative, then she should just have fewer children. Easier to focus attention on women’s individual choices (and what of their partners’?) than to rebuild a social system that devalues the unpaid work of women, that is only starting to think about early childhood education as a worthwhile social investment, and that still looks to aggregate-level statistics to determine the ideal path for individual behavior.  

EXACTLY.

Everything Emma said.

Also, as a creative woman who doesn’t have children and personally never wants any, I found the Atlantic article’s unexamined assumption that “have fewer kids” means “have only one kid,” to be a bit jarring.

Yes, yes, and may I add yes. The number of children a woman has doesn’t make her more or less a writer or more or less a woman. (Shakes hbbo’s hand.)