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Yesterday’s Pleats are in tomorrow’s seafood (microplastics, it seems, tend to concentrate in mollusks like scallops, mussels, and oysters, fancy girl food and treif alike). Of all the myriad toxicities of microplastics, I was most tickled to learn that they are estrogenic and can lower sperm count; the red-pilled among us might argue that the Pleats themselves made me trans.
Ehrenreich’s work has always acknowledged that power operates at the intimate level, which is part of what makes it difficult to resist. To engage in political struggle is not only frightening, it is painful, because power is not just out there: it is also a voice in your own head — projection, inner fear. This is a distinctively feminist insight and not by coincidence.
By 1967 public nakedness is not uncommon. In fact, it’s hard to turn around without coming face-to-nipple with an unclothed body.
N+1’s heroes (despite occasional attempts to diversify things) were often drawn from this Carveresque ethos — which seems to have also doomed the magazine to repeat the false binary of sellouts v. masochism. My point here isn’t that “selling out” is OK, but that the binary itself proved unsustainable and almost always led, as in Carver’s own case, to some form of seriously shitty, uncritical surrender to one of these strands or the other, or to both.
The fact that most doctors like me—my colleagues in obstetrics and gynecology very much included—don't know how to perform abortions is one of the greatest scandals of contemporary medicine in the US.