(So we might as well use our power for good and start teaching the jerks)

What is the remedy for a smug white teenage boy who thinks he knows better than I do?

Years ago, I got takeout at this chili place. All I wanted was some Cincinnati chili to eat at home.

At home, where I have my own silverware. Where I am not forced to eat with plastic, an experience I do not enjoy plus I do not like the waste of plastic utensils.

I told the worker, an older white teenage boy, that I did not want utensils.

He put them in the bag anyhow.

I looked at them and said, “I told you I didn’t want utensils.”

He shrugged and told me it was too late to change it.

Then I gave him the cash – a ten dollar bill plus a quarter and three pennies for a charge of $9.28.

He looked at me, keyed something into the cash register, counted out 72 cents from the cash tray, and dropped them in my hand.

I said, “I gave you change so you could give me a dollar bill back. So I wouldn’t have a lot of extra coins.”

He rolled his eyes and closed the cash drawer.

I was so astonished at his rudeness and utter disregard for what I had told him that I didn’t even know what to say.

Today, I would know what to say.

Today, I would give him my middle approaching old age lady glare and say, “Please open the register, take these coins, and give me a dollar bill.”

Today, I would say, as I handed him the plastic utensils, “I told you I did not want these.”

Today, I would say, “Why are you ignoring what I tell you?”

I would not smile.

I would not laugh.

I. Would. Seethe.

Let’s seethe together. Let’s shout together. Let’s make sure we are heard.

(PS Today is the No Kings March. Are you there?)

Oh wait I mean the Hollywood Persistent Suitor Who Deserves A Hot Woman Even Though He Is A Loser Or Is Loser-ish

I just watched this show, A Remarkable Place to Die. The main character, Anais, is a detective. She’s smart and strong and doesn’t take any crap.

Her colleague, a smart, handsome male detective, is interested in her and asks her to dinner.

She says no.

The male pathologist, who is also smart and handsome, is interested in her and asks her to dinner.

She says no.

A male witness in a murder case is a grungy, ungroomed backpacker. He asks her out at the murder scene, the scene where a fellow backpacker has been killed in his sleep, a scene that I guess made Witness think of love?

She says no.

Witness waits for Anais to come out of the police station. He is still grungy and ungroomed. He asks her out.

She laughs and says it would be completely inappropriate for her to go out with someone involved in a case she was investigating.

(Not to mention there is nothing at all appealing about Witness. Nothing. Put him next to Detective and Pathologist and he disappears in his unappealingness.)

He shows up a third time and she says no again.

In the next episode, we see her waking up in the morning. She rolls over – and guess who is next to her in bed?

Not the colleague.

Not the pathologist.

But the gross, obnoxious backpacker.

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That episode – obviously – was written by a man.

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That episode was written by a man for a show made in the Year of Our Lord Twenty Twenty Five.

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This trope is not going away.

This trope is not going away despite #MeToo. Despite everything.

This trope tells men that as long as you harass a woman – a woman you could not otherwise get, BTW – eventually she will succumb and you will get what you want.

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There is a long history of this story. Look at almost every Woody Allen movie: he plays a whiny loser who punches way above his weight. Diane Keaton? Mariel Hemingway?

(Although it turns out that Diane actually did have a relationship with Allen. Gross.)

(Although maybe she felt compelled to date him because he controlled access to what she wanted. Another example of men using sex to control access to power.)

Any other movie where the slacker guy gets the girl anyhow:

• Reality Bites (I wrote about what happens 30 years after she picks the loser)
• Knocked Up
• Something About Mary
• Etc, etc, etc

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This isn’t going to change, is it? Not while men still run everything. Men write and direct the world they live in – the world they want to live in.

From the NY Times last year:

Women Directed Fewer Box Office Hits in 2025, Report Finds

The number of female filmmakers dropped to 8.1 percent this year from 13.4 percent in 2024, according to a study from the University of Southern California.

Even this headline from Variety is not encouraging, as the gain is still not to the level of our portion of the population:

Women Make Historic Gains in Streaming, as 36% of TV Creators Are Female

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I would say we should watch only shows written and produced by women, but sadly, the show A Remarkable Place to Die *is* produced by a woman. She gets the rest of it right – it’s a show about a woman that’s not about men – the men are supporting characters and Anais’ sole purpose in life is not to Find A Man, but damn. Why did she let Anais sleep with the loser? Yes, the episode was written by a man. But it was approved for production by a woman.

I wrote to the production company to complain. I will see if I get a response.

Why you should donate to or volunteer for Judge Chris Taylor, who is running for Wisconsin Supreme Court

Last week, when I was canvassing for Judge Chris Taylor for the Wisconsin Supreme Court, I met Liz, who was raped when she was 19.

Stranger rape. She was, she said, in the wrong place at the wrong time.

I nodded in agreement. Yes, we women have to be so careful, don’t we?

Wait.

No.

There should not be “wrong” places for us.

We should not have to be so careful.

We should be able to exist in this world without worrying that someone will harm us.

He was a rapist. He chose to violate another human being. He has all the culpability.

Holy smoke it takes a lot of work to reframe my thinking.

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She ended up pregnant.

This was before Roe. “It was when you had to go in the back streets to get an abortion,” she said.

Which is what she was forced to do.

Liz lived to tell the tale, as did another woman I know, Jane.

Jane had gotten pregnant when and her boyfriend were in college. He said it was not a good time for them to get married. She flew to Mexico for the abortion, calling her sister once she had arrived to tell her exactly where she was in case she didn’t return and her family needed to find her body.

She got the abortion and lived.

It’s been a while since Jane told me her story, but I think the boyfriend later asked her to marry him and she said nope.

(Yes! I found the post I wrote about Jane two years ago and I remembered correctly.)

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I met Lucy, 76, yesterday when I was canvassing. When I told Lucy that Judge Taylor used to be an attorney for Planned Parenthood (which is one of the reasons I want her on the Wisconsin Supreme Court – her opponent is anti-choice), Lucy didn’t miss a beat.

“I am for abortion,” she said.

Two of her college roommates had needed abortions late in much-wanted pregnancies.

One fetus didn’t have a skull and was aborted at six months.

The other fetus – seven months – had multiple anomalies and was going to die in utero. Her parents named her Abigail and held a funeral.

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This world where women have to fly to Mexico or risk their lives in back alleys? This world where a wanted baby has to die in your uterus for you to get the medical treatment you need?

We are returning to this world and worse.

We can’t depend on the US Supreme Court, but there are state courts doing the right thing.

Send a few bucks to Judge Taylor or phone bank for her so we can continue the fight for women’s rights – for all rights.

PS I changed the names and identifying details of all these women, but the stories themselves are real.

Which, alas, is probably the only thing I have in common with Nora Ephron

Remember Nora Ephron’s essay about how she hated her neck?

I hate my neck, too, but I hate my hands more.

Probably because I see my hands more than I see my neck, but whatever.

I hate my hands.

I hate how dry and wrinkled they are. I hate how thin the skin is. I hate the dark blotches.

I hate my hands.

Yes, they still work just fine.

Yes, I can hold things and carry things and make brownies and bread and wash my face and open doors and I can do all these things without pain.

But I hate them.

They are so ugly.

They look so old.

*I* look so old.

I cover them in vaseline before I go to bed.

Vaseline, it turns out, is not a magic potion that will restore youth to my skin.

I use sunblock on them.

Sunblock allegedly prevents further damage, but does not cure age.

My hands look old.

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I scold myself for being so vain.

When did I become so vain?

I wasn’t vain when I was younger because, I thought, I had nothing to be vain about. My friends always attracted more attention than I did. I had eyes. I knew who was pretty and who was not.

On a date once in college – we had gotten to the underwear-only stage – this guy told me that I would be cute if I lost some weight.

I still am not sure how to take that. Was I cute? Or was I just chubby and hence not cute?

Some additional context for this guy: He had a massive crush on one of my roommates/best friends. People always mixed us up – we were the same height, with the same hair color, and we lived together. Also, our names IRL are very similar: Think Danielle vs Danette.

(But really people are just lazy.)

She did not reciprocate his feelings.

He once offered her all of his money if she would sleep with him.

Over 40 years and I still remember that.

(She did not accept.)

(She laughed in horror.)

(I think he asked me out because he thought I was kind of a substitute for my friend.)

I knew I wasn’t vain and I saw that as a good thing.

I was proud about my lack of vanity.

I was vain about my lack of vanity.

Now I know it’s not that I was morally superior.

It’s that I was clueless, sailing along on the beauty of youth.

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I don’t have a happy ending for this story, an aha! moment where I am grateful just to be alive.

Because my hands do look old.

And my neck does look old.

But I will say that when I saw a friend at my college reunion, a friend who has always been so, so beautiful, and I told her she hasn’t aged, she laughed and said that oh yes she has.

She is still gorgeous.

Are there bushes?

The town of Oconomowoc, Wisconsin, removed the provision for public restrooms in the plans for a new city park.

Some, including Alderman Chaz Schellpeper, simply feel a large restroom structure shouldn’t be so close to the park. “I’m totally opposed to building the restroom on the Green,” he said.

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

The same council member above also tried to remove a provision to include plumbing from the budget, simply so no later representatives of the people, people including women and children, would be tempted to add restrooms later:

Schellpeper unsuccessfully tried to eliminate the inclusion of laterals, which would be installed underground to allow restrooms to be added back into the project, from the concept plan. He acknowledged his intention was to “hamstring” future aldermen from “making a bad decision” for restrooms near the oval space.

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

Are you as shocked shocked as I am that a man would not see any need for a public restroom?

Are you shocked shocked that a man would not even consider the needs of anyone who doesn’t have a white penis?

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Last Saturday morning, as we were standing in line waiting for the library to open, an older white woman said: That Mamdani sure can spend money.

(This was not completely out of the blue – another woman and I were talking about how great Mamdani was.)

Me: What do you mean?

Woman: He paid people $50 an hour to shovel snow!

Me: First, he paid them $30 – three zero – not fifty. But even so, so what? He got the streets clear in a day. That’s a big deal.

Woman: Wasting taxpayer money.

Me: But that is the exact purpose of taxpayer money – to make life better for all of us. How much would it have cost for the streets and sidewalks to be covered with snow and people not able to get anywhere?

Woman: It’s a waste of money!

Me: We are at *the library,* which is funded by taxpayer money. The sidewalks and roads you used to get here – taxpayer money. Our public schools – taxpayer money. This is socialism – where we use our money to improve the community.

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Who are these people who think that the purpose of taxpayer money is to be saved? To be hoarded?

They’re OK with the regime spending one billion yes billion with a B dollars a day on an illegal war against Iran, but not with spending a few maybe tens of thousands of dollars to do things that actually serve us? That make our lives better?

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When you plan to attend a public event – a festival, a concert at a city park, a fair – what’s one of the first things you think of?

I can tell you what I think of: Will I be able to pee? Will there be public restooms?

If the answer is no, then I have to do some hard thinking. Maybe I just don’t go. Or, if I go, I stop drinking fluids several hours before the event.

If I had children, I would stop at the “Maybe I just don’t go,” because it is not reasonable to dehydrate children.

I don’t think men ever go through this process.

When the entire world is your toilet, you don’t have to care about anyone else.

PS I did email the reporter for the story and asked him if anyone had asked the council member where women and children were supposed to pee, but I have not heard back from him.