On the last Friday of each month I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds
Shared by my Daughter” “I need privacy, not because my actions are questionable, but because your judgement and intentions are”. In response to “if you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear”. via @itisboller
The Odyssey may likely be the first example of misogyny in a written work. —Retrieving Gender Balance
“One day, Penelope comes downstairs and she hears a bard singing very sad songs about how difficult it is for people like Odysseus, her husband, to get home. And she says to the bard, quite understandably, ‘Oh bard, play something a bit more cheerful.’ And this young, wet-behind-the-ears teenager Telemachus comes over to her and says, ‘Oh mother, shut up. Speech is man’s business.’” —Mary Beard
Rebecca Solnit on Western Literary Tradition of Silencing Women
I thought of the landmark 2014 essay by classicist Mary Beard “The Public Voice of Women” when a stranger tagged me in a hate post on Saturday that includes these words: “Can someone please tell Rebecca Solnit to stop talking?” The post concluded “Sit down, shut up, and stop running your bullshit.” Some parts of his post I didn’t share here makes me think he was mentally ill, but mental illness in our era often manifests as the psychological equivalent of a weak immune system: a susceptibility to the loud and destructive noise all around us that instructs us how to think, live, act. Quite a lot of that noise is directed toward hating women and has been for a very long time, which was Beard’s point.
6 years of research: “The only trait that consistently predicted objections to remote work was narcissism—the tendency to be self-centered & entitled. The higher the opinions of themselves leaders expressed, the more they coveted power and status—& the more they favored return-to-office mandates.”
“That is a truly fascist idea, the idea of outsourcing thinking; and so our power is in our ability to think with each other. To generate genuinely new ideas”
The Female Pirates (From an Old Print)
Image via @sk76