Postbougie helps me learn that just because we're both black that doesn't give me the right to start complaining that some other lady's sex life isn't the same as mine. Trying to force all black women into this one model isn't working! Marriage is consistently held up as an ideal, but women who don't fit into the ideal don't go "AHAHAHA! I'M GOING TO HAVE A BABY OUT OF WEDLOCK* TO BRING DOWN THE BLACK COMMUNITY!!!" It's not like that, and no amount of finger wagging is going change the reasons people do things that we don't like. I can say "You gotta LUUUURVE everyone you have sex with" and folks will still have casual sex, because sex is fun. I can say "You need to do a credit check, background check, and check his 401k contributions before he can even see your ankle" and folks would pretend to do a 401k check, much like religious folks pretend they never have sex outside of marriage, and then go with what actually fits their lives instead of my ideals. Yea, I said it, people will go with what fits what is actually going on in their lives rather than the ideals of people on the internet that live in totally different states!


*That sounds so judgey and old fashioned, btw?

More about how No Wedding No Womb is a horrible fucking idea.*


*Not so much about weddings- there's nothing wrong with a good marriage,but the idea that if everyone conformed to this marriage ideal, everything would be dory hunky.

Apparently scolding black women to get married hasn't been working, so we need a different approach. It's not two parent, white wedding or total chaos as our choices. There's a rainbow of opportunities out there.

The black snob discusses parenthood and I have an opinion. My first opinion is that not every child can be so easily dissuaded from sneaking out at night as the black snob. Some children are easier to parent than others, so a child who is easy to parent can be guided easily with a parent with just basic parenting skills. It's like getting a baby to sleep through the night. Some will sleep through the night no matter what a parent does almost[They won't sleep through the night if they have a rap concert every night at 3 am, but other than that, they'll sleep through anything] and some will have parents up every night, contemplating leaving their child at the fire house. People who have the easy babies can think they are better parents than those with more difficult babies, but that may not in fact be the case.

Of course, many others may have issues with the narrative about the goals and dreams of teen moms- I get the vibe that some think that if teen girls had higher self esteem or more goals or something they wouldn't get pregnant, and while it's important for girls to have goals and dreams, a broken condom doesn't go "Well, she wanted to be an ob gyn,so I'll magically fix myself!",and contrary to stereotype, 'good girls' who have goals and study hard still have sexual relationships- some with well meaning boyfriends and some with 'men' who ought to be ashamed of themselves, and some will, even if they have access to birth control,will get pregnant, and some of them either won't have access to or do not desire to have an abortion or go through the trauma of adoption.

I also have to note that the nuclear family model is not the only model- a cousin, a brother, an aunt,a friend, a teacher, a church member- all of them can raise a child. I have to admit that sometimes I think we act like women have a crystal ball and can see the future of a relationship,so we blame women for not knowing that a relationship would go south- it's not just casual encounters that lead to single parenthood, but committed cohabitation or even marriage.

Children aren't a problem to be solved, but a solution to be envisioned.

The idea that everyone should fit into a narrow box of 'adulthood' does great harm. People go without help and support they need. And the places where we need support aren't visible to others. For example, if one can only live on their own by working two jobs, and they have issues with fatigue or a need for more sleep than others consider necessary- even if the peanut gallery has a lot to say about that, it's better for that person to center their health. If a person is able to go to a few social events for maybe 4 hours a week, but can't work a 40 hour a week job, well, the peanut gallery needs to put a sock in it. You know what? Maybe learning to put a sock in it is an important ability to learn. You never know what someone is doing only at great cost that you take for granted. Maybe more STFUing is what we need.

"Sometimes I think that the world's so small, that we can never get away from the sprawl"-Arcade Fire

George Will is an idiot. This much is true. This week I was reading both Collaspe and The Place You Love Is Gone which are both about the same thing in different ways- humans overtaking the resources that are avaliable to them.

People like George Will don't get it. We're not so much concerned about whether in a million years the carbon levels will go down. We're worried about the human population crashing due to hunger, lack of resources like water, animals, and farmland, natural disasters due to climate change, and wars over resources. Yes, people like Pierson do talk about aesthetics, which is important to humans psychologically. Yes, maybe places where the sea comes in and destroys human settlements will come back, but the people displaced have been dealt a strong blow to their psyche, and their livelihoods in the small blink of time which is their lives.

I ask people like George Will to consider the value of what they are willing to destroy things like our forests, our water, our air for. Is it another pharmacy on a road with five? Is it short term gain in the stock market, followed by a crash? We can't keep growing forever, and maybe instead of forever growing outwards, and hoping that somehow things will be alright, we need to plan for growth, and use things we already have, such as buildings empty from the last time we were convinced that that new Wal Mart was the answer to all woes- Pierson speaks of the retail economy as neighbors finding jobs taking each other's washing in- a sterile circle.

Maybe we could live in houses that do not have home theater rooms[yes, these exist. I've been in two homes that have them], and work with the huge housing stock that we already have. Of course, that's crazy talk, like building a grocery store in an area of the city that lacks one!

And anyway George Will needs to fill column inches- better invest that Newsweek salary in some oil stock. Drill in our last wild places! Spill and pollute the water and the land! The earth doesn't care, so we shouldn't.

White feminists discuss fat [replying to this post where some lady says something stupid] Personally, I think that people are too quick to believe that large percentages of the population just randomly become less 'moral'.We think that black men suddenly just wake up and decide 'hey, let's drop out of high school- because we're lazy gits!" and that between 2007 and now, millions of people have suddenly become too lazy to work, and that people have all just suddenly decided that they want to be really fat.

It's because we're so trained to focus in on people's individual moral character that we end up being ridiculous. We also see everything in the light of moral character. If a child pees the bed, he's 'lazy'[I hear this a lot], if a person is fat, they don't have enough 'willpower', and etc, etc, and we structure our society this way- worrying about the moral hazard of unemployment benefits, etc, instead of structuring it so that people can succeed in their goals.