Its crazy how you can be a mostly functional child despite the endless abuse you faced and then you hit between 18 and your 20s and suddenly your body and mind are like "Heyyy so tutorial over and now you're going to become crippled from all that survival and trauma, good luck!"
saw trap but it’s you trying to explain to a 24-26 year old woman that she’s still young and she has to agree within the 10 minute timer or your head blows
When I studied marketing, one of the first things I learned was this: you don’t sell the dress by describing its patterns or fabrics or stitching.
You sell the dress that promises the woman she will look desirable to her husband who won’t flirt with Jane from accounting.
That’s Marketing 101: you speak to people’s primal fears and desires, not their rational minds.
So when women say they’re afraid of “ruining their bodies” after pregnancy, it’s not about vanity per se.
It’s not only about “my breasts will sag” or “this dress won’t fit me anymore.”
The fear is much deeper and older and I’d say primal.
At its core, it’s the fear of no longer being desired by the man you love. The fear that he might stop seeing you and start seeing Jane (or Lisa, or whoever) from accounting instead.
And in a world that commodifies female bodies to an almost religious degree, where women’s appearances are on display, rated, mocked and dissected 24/7, that fear is completely rational.
We live in an economy of beauty and we’re all participants, whether we like it or not.
Men might claim now oh I don’t find postpartum bodies unattractive (hypocrisy) or even “I’d never find my wife unattractive after childbirth” but we must be very honest with ourselves: every day they reinforce the opposite message: with what they like, what they watch, what they follow, what they mock and berate, what they joke about. The hypocrisy is blinding.
Women didn’t invent this insecurity; we absorbed it. We’ve been told since childhood that a woman’s worth is tied to how she looks, and that losing that appeal means losing love, safety and status.
So when we express fear of losing our bodies it’s not out of idk being shallow, we’re expressing fear or not being desired and loved anymore by our husbands and we are being honest about the very world we are forced to live in.
Nobody warned me about this before becoming a wife but husbands eat so much meat. So much. You cannot overestimate it really. The best way to make sure there are leftovers is to cook something with not very much meat. In my husband’s world a rotisserie chicken is 3 servings.
If you can’t riff it’s not a charisma thing to me. It’s more like you don’t notice things. Your mind isn’t working to find the connections that amuse and delight. You are bogged down in the muck and the mire.
Shrek is a deeply Dostoevskian tale about the lonely man who revels in his suffering because his inescapable conscience makes him aware of moral virtues and beauty (and his own lack thereof). He protects his insecurity by living in a swamp (a crawlspace or underground bunkeresque home) and he puts up the scary ogre persona to make his pain of being a social pariah valid, but the mask imprisons him as much as it protects him hence he feels alienated even when he has friends or receives kindness