David Minerva Clover

It is worse to be fat shamed because thin shaming is often just fatphobia in disguise. Let me say that again for the people in the back.

It was like how you might feel if you thought you were the only person who liked apples. Maybe everyone else just thought apples were for decoration, but you liked to eat them. And then one day you found someone else who also ate apples, and you got really excited about that! And then suddenly, it hit you… What if everybody secretly ate and enjoyed apples, only we were all too afraid to mention it?

I’m a poor person. I live below the U.S. poverty line. And yeah, I deserve to make my own financial decisions. The reality is that I did not become poor because I ate a meal in a restaurant one too many times, and while it’s true that eating out less can affect one’s budget, refusing to ever eat out again won’t make me not poor.

I learned binge-watching Mister Rogers that he wasn’t just being comforting, he was rephrasing many of the things I was hearing in therapy.

My family relies on having our food delivered specifically because of our less-than-ideal financial situation. We don't do this because we're rich.

We’re trying to raise him with a lot of options and very few assumptions, but I won’t be mad at you if you call my kid “handsome little boy” or something. It’s fine. People have a hard time talking about babies without gendered labels. Even I have a hard time with it, and I’ve put a kind of ridiculous amount of energy into analyzing this stuff.

However, I do have one favor to ask. Please, for the love of everything that is good in this world, stop calling him “little man.”

After the solstice, the light very slowly begins to return, and every day is a little longer. Yule is a promise: winter sucks, but spring will come again.

Teeth are inseparable from class in this country. I have gotten by in life largely by being able to “pass” as middle class, by being white and articulate and confident. People meet me and assume that I must have gone to college. Middle class people talk to me like I’m their peer. But I am not their peer. I will never be their peer.

Here’s the thing though, hating romantic comedies, and avoiding them when I could, didn’t stop me from absorbing their all consuming messages about love, sex, and romance.

One of the most insidious things that patriarchy does is the complete and utter devaluation of anything that is considered “women’s work.” Not only does patriarchy limit what women (and all trans and nonbinary folk) can do in the world, it also takes what we do manage to do and tells us it isn’t worth anything.