Reading Time: 6 minutes After my son’s suicide, I was unprepared for the religious toxicity spewed my way. At first, I dodged it as uselessly as Newman with the frilly dinosaurs in Jurassic Park. But I learned quickly, and unlike Newman, I made it out alive. By setting boundaries in proportion to the offense, my mind could focus on […]
boundaries
Posted inReligion
Evangelical Christians: Your God has boundary issues
Reading Time: 7 minutes I know it’s customary to blame Christianity’s problems on the bad apples that spoil the bunch, but I don’t think that really gets to the core of the problem. Remember how Jesus said if the fruit is bad, you should be looking at the tree to figure out what’s wrong? Let’s do that then, shall […]
Posted inCulture, General
You Without a Mask Are Like a Dog Off a Leash
Reading Time: 5 minutes I’ve seen varying opinions about whether to wear a mask during a pandemic, and I think some of these opinions are more valid than others (usually those with hefty research backing them). And I just came up with a metaphor to explain why the whole topic has me somewhat upset.
Posted inCulture, General, Sex & Gender
Social Distancing Is Like Monogamy: It Only Works If You Observe It Perfectly
Reading Time: 9 minutes Learning to assess and communicate about risk in relationships is something that many Americans don’t learn how to do, and I think it might be connected to our culture’s default setting of monogamy (or at the very least, that there’s a useful parallel to draw).
Posted inReligion
Weaksauce Substitutes and Daddy Issues in ‘This Present Darkness’ (LSP #124, Ch. 14)
Reading Time: 10 minutes In Chapter 14, we’ll discover how dangerous it is for Christians to seek out real experiences that compete with their beliefs. We’ll also encounter a character capitalizing on a young woman’s Daddy issues. Yes, today, Lord Snow Presides over two dangers fundagelicals dreaded in the Satanic Panic in the 1980s: counterfeit experiences and secrecy.
Posted inReligion
I Was a Purple Christian People Pleaser
Reading Time: 9 minutes Maybe it’s so easy to switch flavors of Christianity because at heart, most of them share the same humanity-crushing underpinnings. One of the worst of those underpinnings involves the systematic destruction of a person’s sense of boundaries and self-worth–and then the outlawing of any way for people to refuse impositions on their time. In that vein, here’s how Christianity programmed me to be a people pleaser.
Posted inEducation, General, Myth & Folklore, Sex & Gender
The #MeToo Take Two Panel at #AFSAM19 (Part 1 of 2)
Reading Time: 5 minutes One of the highlights of the recent American Folklore Society meeting was a panel discussing events in #MeToo, what folklorists can specifically contribute to the discussion, and continuing problems with abuse/assault in our field. In what follows, I’ll summarize some of the highlights of the panel on #MeToo (labeled “Take Two” because we had an […]
Posted inCulture, General, Sex & Gender
Emotion Work vs. Emotional Labor
Reading Time: 4 minutes I recently had the opportunity to explain to someone what I think is a key distinction for when we use the term emotional labor and when we talk more generally about how humans work with emotions in their daily (and sometimes professional) lives. I thought it was worth replicating here.
Posted inCulture, General, Sex & Gender
A Reminder About the Ansari Topic: Trans/Gay Panic Is Still a Legal Defense
Reading Time: 4 minutes When discussing a woman’s response to nonconsensual sex, recall that it’s still defensible for men to kill a lover based on gay or trans identity.
Posted inCulture, General, Sex & Gender
Sometimes We Commodify Intimacy, and That’s Okay
Reading Time: 4 minutes Is intimacy inherently better when it doesn’t have a dollar amount attached to it? I don’t necessarily think that has to be the case.