All I can say at the end of this long day is that it must suck beyond words to be a single mother.

One thing that does bug me about the contemporary feminist theory is the obsessive need to compare Sex & the City and Girls because these shows supposedly represent my generation and the one 10 years younger than me respectively. You have no idea how many sources in all kinds of languages I discovered that compare these stupid shows.

I liked Sex & the City a lot but the idea that women in the show represent me or any women I know is insane. The show and its characters always looked extremely outdated to me, and it was fun to watch such antiquated ideas and behaviors on the screen. I always thought that the show was a collection of stereotypes more at home in early 1980s.

I also think that there is a big difference between “feminist” and “about women.” And people often seem to lose that distinction.

Hey, folks, good news for feminist scholars. Turns out that the global economic crisis of 2008-9 had a wonderful effect on the field of feminist studies. They have finally – FINALLY! – moved away from the navel-gazing calls for inclusion and intersectionality and are now in a completely new and very promising territory of engaging with the reality of global capitalism and fluidity. I missed this development completely because I had given up on feminist theory precisely when the crisis was beginning. And now I was forced to go back to the field and was pleasantly surprised.

For those who are interested in exploring this new strand of feminist theory, I recommend you begin with the second edition of Postfeminism: Cultural Texts and Theories by Stéphanie Genz and Benjamin Brabon. It has to be the second edition, though, because the first was published in 2009 and was still all about intersectionality and all that.

I will post more sources as I go along.

This is very heartening because I was so not looking forward to writing this feminist article because all I care about is global capitalism and the nationalist response to it. And now it turns out that feminism has gone in this direction, too. This is my first day of writing the article (I don’t consult any sources until I create my own thesis) and I’m already feeling encouraged.

A debate is raging over if the US translator who was at the one-on-one meeting between Putin and Trump should testify. People are resorting to pretty insane arguments as to why she shouldn’t:

And if she were to say what, exactly, transpired, she would violate an ethics code of confidentiality similar to lawyer-client privilege or the silence of a priest during confession.

This is utter bonk. There is no such ethics code, and the analogy us ridiculous. Of course, she should testify.

Priest confidentiality and lawyer confidentiality exist to protect people from being rolled over by the government. But the president is part of the government. In the meeting with Putin, he was the entirety of the US government.

P.S. NYTimes has made it extremely hard to link to them because I’m a subscriber. So if you see a source with no link, it is probably the NYTimes. You can find the entire text by googling the quote.