This week, I was reminded that I had a body after my doctor, surprisingly, chased me down, with phone call after phone call, to remind me I was due for a blood test for my wonky thyroid, a full panel for my annual well visit, a mammogram, and a pap. Don’t worry, reader, I’m on it.

In fact, just yesterday, I had several vials of blood removed from my body, a process that always causes me to depersonalize a little. How is that we can just show up, have a stranger extract blood from us, and go about our days, while they decide what, if anything, is wrong with us? It’s actually insane!

This is related, though, to the recommendations I have for you this month, because I’m thinking a lot about gore and horror and representations of violence, and how they can either reaffirm or destabilize our world, make us well, or more sick, tell new stories, or old ones. I’m thinking, too, re: all the recent discourse, about our desire to declare what we fear dead, rather than reckon with the ways it is living.

As a reminder, these roundups are for paid subscribers only, as a thank you for making everything you read here possible. And since I will have to start repaying my student loans again under the current administration’s impossible new program, and apparently for the next 30 years, now and until I die, your support keeps me afloat.

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ICYMI

I wrote about the revolutionary monstrosity of women’s rage in The Bride! and the Theroux documentary on the manosphere—but also the current bananas discourse on feminism (see also below, behind the paywall ofc!).

And have you seen how many amazing conversations with amazing authors have been coming into your inbox via this very newsletter!!

Such as:

A reminder! I am hosting a virtual writing retreat for founding subscribers of this newsletter only, the week of April 13. How it works: I will share a writing prompt on that Monday via email, to engage with throughout the week. On Tuesday and Thursday, we will meet via Zoom at 3pm PT/6pm ET for an essay ideas workshop, and a book ideas workshop, respectively. These will be discussion-based clinics, where you can get feedback from me and other dedicated writers on essay and book pitches. On Wednesday, I am also hosting a live conversation with about the gothic, feminist criticism + fiction, and her new novel, Ultranatural (playback available to all paid subscribers). Then on Friday, at 10am PT/1pm ET, we will meet again on Zoom to discuss the week’s prompt, how writing went, and to meet your fellow writers. There will also be an AMA portion to ask me whatever is on your mind re: feminism and writing. Upgrade your subscription now to join us, and you’ll also get access to the fall retreat.

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Currently reading

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Well, just when you think things can’t get worse in this place, the president starts a war. What a time to be alive.

Over the past month, I spent a lot of time thinking about the devastating and hidden/ignored abuse of women and girls globally. I also finished the third draft of my novel, which really feels like the first, in the exact right way. My kids are getting back to spring sports, and we’re still making it a regular practice to get out to protest and volunteer together, to be in community as much as possible. I am really grateful to be doing, as we have been saying in the writing class I’m teaching, work that my foremothers never could’ve dreamed of. I’m also so tired.

Below is a juicy digest of links, books, podcasts, things to watch, even products that helped me through the last month, and that I hope will help you, too.

Links

I’m in Oprah Daily, talking about the fifth shift, the sexual labor women perform to maintain desire in hetero marriages! For a full rundown of the concept, listen to our pod episode on the fifth shift. Next week, I’ll share what else I told the writer of the Oprah piece that didn’t make it into the published article.

Please read and sign this open letter:

More to Hate

An Open Letter to the College President Who Maintained Close Ties with Epstein

Dear Dr. Botstein…

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2 months ago · 478 likes · 718 comments · Kate Manne

ICYMI

This month, I wrote about how the current administration treats politics like a game, about Wuthering Heights the book and the film, and about a welcome turn toward women’s solidarity in pop culture.

Don’t forget to check out these great conversations about bad moms, good women, mediocre men, and DILFs (and the brilliant books by these authors):

We also chatted about our favorite unhinged novels and how we read now.

Please let me know in the comments what you want to read for Reading Group in the coming months—whether it’s more classic feminist essays, current essays or themed roundups/syllabi, or books!

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Over at the pod, this month Tracy and I talked about porn panic, the state of the union, Epstein coordinating the #MeToo backlash, and why men need feminism just as much, if not more than, therapy. And our episode on wine moms is just out.

Currently reading

• I had the honor of reading my friend and pod cohost ’s forthcoming memoir My Mother’s Daughter many months ago, as she was getting the draft finalized. But here’s my reminder to everyone to preorder this book, which uncovers a whole system of abuse against women— namely, homes for unwed mothers that coerced women, including Tracy’s mom, into giving up their babies. It’s an anti-abortion, pro-white and nuclear family legacy that we need to discuss and that persists in other forms today. Here’s what I wrote in my blurb for the book: “A tender, revelatory, and deeply moving look at how family is shaped in the shadows of patriarchal power…. By unearthing her mother's story, Tracy steps into the light and creates something altogether new. Defiant, transformative, and incredibly timely, this book will forever change how you understand motherhood, love, and the power of sisterhood.”

• On that note, Kate Schatz’s new novel Where the Girls Were is about this same legacy, and follows a seventeen-year-old who is sent to a home for unwed mothers, and who finds an unexpected community there. I am so glad we are talking about this history.

• I also just started reading ’s Ultranatural, a gothic romp through female pop stardom, with a protagonist that will remind you of your favorite 90s girl idol. A study in what we do to girls via fame and brand, which looks an awful lot like what we did to Britney.

• I just got my hands on a copy of The Book That Taught The World to Orgasm and Then Disappeared by Rosa Campbell, and I am eating it up. This is an accessible, deeply personal journey through the archives of Shere Hite, the author of The Hite Report. Hite is a complex feminist figure who rose to celebrity status, then disappeared. I have always been fascinated by Hite’s prescience—she was saying everything women are saying today about sex in hetero relationships in the 1970s, and she was doing it on prime time TV. And of course, what the public did to her tells us a lot about our culture’s response to women who speak honestly about women’s experiences. I also wrote about Shere two years ago here:

• Other books at the top of my unruly TBR pile that I am already confident you should preorder: Yesteryear , Land Maggie O’Farrell, A Woman’s Work Elinor Cleghorn

Listening

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For many, watching the state execute another person over the weekend—a white man, a veteran, a gun owner, an essential worker—will be an inflection point. For Minnesotans, this has been a long, slow build. What they are doing right now is what so many of us have longed for, and perhaps thought was impossible, for years. It’s a testament to community organizing and local activism. We owe them the world.

Whether you’re mad, sad, totally dysregulated, or all of the above, let’s support them. Below is a list of ways to help those on the ground in MN. Comments are also open to all, until/unless that gets unmanageable with drive-by assholes. Please share actions big and small, places to donate, helpful thoughts about the current moment, good stuff to read or listen to, ways to stay sane, whatever you got for us— as long as, again, it’s not assholery or pro-ICE rhetoric, in which case, you’ll be blocked, byeeeee.

DO/DONATE/BUY/DON’T BUY

Call your senators

Donate to help people pay rent

Donate gas cards and prepaid phones to help those detained at Whipple/those helping

Huge list of places to donate

Again, calling is free

Abolish ICE shirts

Boycott or join a pressure campaign

General strike this Friday January 30!

Tell GoFundMe to stop supporting state terror

Find a local org or group to connect with if you have not already— some places to start: SURJ (offering a training tomorrow on how to prepare for ICE presence in your town), DSA, local food banks, your neighbors

Like this post to support donations, sponsored by some of my amazing friends and colleagues

Rental assistance

Go to a local protest. Look for actions outside your immigration court. Bring kids if it’s safe and have them make signs beforehand, as you talk through what’s going on, and how many people care, and want a different world. A friend of mine always brings a bucket of chalk for the kids, too, so they can fill the sidewalk with whatever they want to say, and connect with other kids.

READ/LISTEN

Love letters to MN (& send a love note to MN here)

A great piece of journalism on Minneapolis, surprisingly at The Atlantic

And another by Kerry Howley

Read literally anything about the history of white male supremacy that got us here, a history this administration is actively attempting to erase

Listen to Jelani Cobb talk about that history

Teach your kids history

Laugh

Making art is also free <3

What else you got? Share below.

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Translation: I watched a bunch of movies over the holiday break, and as usual found myself distracted by how we characterize women, specifically mothers, and their suffering.

It would be easy to oversimplify 2025’s cinematic motherhood mood board as “motherhood is bad,” but this perspective betrays a certain kind of paranoid reading, which Eve K. Sedgwick defined as entering an artistic experience with “an unmystified, angry view of large and genuinely systemic oppressions” or a “hermeneutics of suspicion.” The paranoid readers of today’s motherhood texts would have us all believe that motherhood itself suffers from a paranoid analysis. But this view on today’s cultural conversations about motherhood is more defensive than anything, nearly always coupled with a highly personalized defense of motherhood’s best qualities.

The point of art, however, is not to make an argument for women to have children (!), or even to make an argument that more women should enjoy the work. It’s to say something. Hopefully, something that hasn’t been said, that makes us think or feel, rattles something loose. Some of the best films motherhood stories last year did this. They came to what we call motherhood with fresh eyes, new angles. Surprising narratives were enjoyed by many. Others told familiar stories, and where those are concerned, I invite you below to give a little collective eye roll with me, for funsies.

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We started off with a bang with Babygirl and the desire for a normal sex life— oh, and the sharp rise of insecure masculinity/authoritarianism. We close out the year asking whether husbands are as embarrassing as boyfriends, given the rampant inequality in hetero relationships. We are all resolving to stop covering for the husbands, right?

It’s been a year of deep and warranted heteropessimism, feminist backlash, female complaint, violent attacks on citizenship, and an exhausting volume of male grievance. Through it all, we persisted.

Pop culture helped. We dug into the choice feminism of the Swiftie, Frankenstein as a story about men fucking up the world in their pursuit of genius and power, Chappell Roan entering the “is motherhood good or bad” chat, the Girls Gone Wild to pregnancy app pipeline, the controlled sexuality of the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders, and film narratives about soft boys and “crazy” women.

We also looked back at the rise and fall of feminist media, and the many reasons you should support small independent publications like this one, rather than the latest celeb to join Substack, with a staff.

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Personally, I navigated divorce in an economy that is a shit show for all of us, including writers. I also discovered the total pleasure of living alone and regaining control of my own time. And I finished a draft of my first novel. Overall, a mixed bag!

Let’s hope 2026 has less fascism, more freedom, and men reading books by women for the first time in history.

Also more of you listening to , where we are truly doing the lord’s work in these very very dire times, when media is run by tech overlords, podcast bros who think politics is an armchair thought experiment, and self-interested moderates who are just asking questions!

Dire Straights

A feminist podcast critiquing heterosexual love, sex, politics, and culture.

And don’t forget, if you want to write with me every Monday evening in the new year, and meet a bunch of other cool feminist writers with the goal of making art in 2026, you can join my new and expanded writing group here.

Without further ado, below are your favorite essays from this year, in rough order from most loved to gently loved.

Happy fuck 2025 to all who celebrate, which should be everyone. See you next year. ✌️

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You will, however, find a bunch of totally delightful bookish and culture-ish gifts for the grownups in your life (and yourself!), along with a bunch of totally screen-free kids’ gifts.

You should also consider grabbing a spot for yourself or a friend in my new and improved (and much more face-to-face) feminist Writing Group, which starts January 5. You can read all about the structure of the group and grab a spot here.

Enjoy!

For adults:

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I’ve been reading a bunch while researching my new book and I’m nearing the end of the first full draft (!), but I’m keeping all of that under wraps for the time being… which means this month’s roundup is all good/bad stuff to watch/not watch, along with some links to what I’m seeing in the discourse. We’ve got blame women/the lefties talking points, a definitive take on MTG’s about-face, liberal corporate feminism’s latest iteration and TV caricatures thereof, and one actually good streaming film to watch this week about motherhood, plus my current fave Lily Allen to offset all the Mariah.

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I know, I know, who wants to read anything dark, given that the year of our lord 2025 has felt like the darkest years of all the years? I mean, truly, what could be scarier than Erica Kirk’s hand on JD Vance’s neck? I must admit, I spent a few too many minutes yesterday doomscrolling all the takes on this embrace. I’m now almost certain that this single image foreshadows our nation’s future. Again… scary!

What is keeping me going? Besides my youngest child dressed as an old man, and my oldest turning men to stone as Medusa “because patriarchy” (and donating my time and money to local food banks), it’s obviously the new Lily Allen album, which is fast becoming my whole personality.

I really didn’t know how much I missed her. Remember “Smile”? She has always been the voice of a generation. So far, the track below is my favorite, but I reserve the right to revise. Do we need another take on the album? Probably not, but I may just have to write one anyway. It’s that good.

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In the meantime, the other thing keeping me sane right now is, of course, books, and the book I’m working on has taken a gothic turn just in time for fall, which means I’ve been revisiting some of my favorite novels of the darkly feminist variety, and having a bit of a coming home to the fiction that first made me a writer. So, below are a few very good novels I’ve been revisiting, in case you also feel like cozying up with something a little stormy, subversive, or just dark and satirical.

Oh, and here’s your annual reminder that witches were just women that threatened patriarchal capitalism. 🧙🏻‍♀️

Alexander Chee’s The Queen of the Night

Masking, opera, camp, and an epic nineteenth century storyline, called a “postmodern bodice ripper” by The New Yorker, authored by one of our best prose writers? Yes, please.

Mona Awad’s Bunny

I never know what is going on in this novel, but I don’t care, because the MFA jokes are just so perfect. If you want to know what my experience of graduate school was like, read this book. A campy, satirical, dark academia commentary on gender, female friendships, and creativity.

Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House

Why wouldn’t you want to read some Shirley Jackson this week! I refuse to watch the movie, though, on principle.

Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber

I always return to Carter’s stories when I’m feeling a little dark and angry, and I always feel better afterward lol. My favorite story remains the titular one, which ends (spoiler) with the damsel in distress being saved by her own tough-as-nails mother, not by a prince, or any man. Yes, this is a short story collection, not a novel, so it’s cheating, sue me, but read it first!

Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights

I just scored this amazing 1943 illustrated (!) edition of Wuthering Heights at my Half Price Books, and I can’t stop showing it to people. I will be re-reading this one over the holidays in preparation for Emerald Fennell’s adaptation of the book, which we will definitely need to discuss at length.

Percival Everett’s James

Not a gothic per se, but I just love this book so much. It’s about the power of language to dehumanize, protect, and free us. And what is more frightening than American history— and American literature’s erasure of the racial violence on which the country was built?

Add to this list in the comments!

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Reading

I just finished Ada Calhoun’s Crush, which made me laugh out loud many times, especially the way the couple constantly references Polysecure as, like, their bible. It’s a smart and clever autofictional account of a couple testing the limits of marriage. I found it tender and thoughtful in its exploration of navigating love and desire outside the normative confines of heterosexuality and monogamy.

I also finished Dead Spade’s Love in a Fucked up World this month, and though I rarely read in the self-help genre anymore, this is an anti-self-help self-help title in the best way, a soothing read that clearly articulates the myths about love and relationships so many of us carry, while also urging readers toward pleasure and deep connection with others. It generally made me feel more open and curious about both relationships and love, even in, yes, this fucked up time!

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It’s officially the end of summer in California, by which I mean the kids are back in school and now we’re hitting triple digits nearly every day. We’re still spending afternoons and weekends at the pool, but I’m also days away from getting the Halloween decorations down. I’m in a weird in-between space right now not only in life/love but also professionally— working on a new project that hasn’t totally presented itself to me, building a podcast, and languishing in that tense space before a new 10-week class starts at Stanford, which I’m excited about, but which also means the end to some writing and personal freedom.

I’m simultaneously trying to get everything done and nothing / be with the kids and be with myself / be with the new book and be with the other work / be in the world and run from it. You get me. If there’s a vibe this month, for me it has been attempting to sit in that liminal space, not even as a road to some other better, super self (see more below!), but as a way to feel alive despite the darkness around us.

Some Mad Woman writing you may have missed this month

We also had two great prompts from guest authors this month

Don’t forget to get books for El Otro Lado

This week is the last chance to order from our summer reading list, which is full of great recs from both me and your fellow Mad Woman subscribers.

Get books for a good cause!

Every purchase you make generates affiliate proceeds (you don’t pay anything extra, Bookshop just gives us back a small percentage of the sale). We’ve already raised about $50 just from your purchases alone. At the end of this week, I will match all affiliate proceeds and donate to El Otro Lado, an organization that provides legal and humanitarian support to refugees, deportees, and other migrants in the US and Tijuana.

On to the recs…

As always, monthly digests of links and recs are paywalled. Why? Because paid subscriptions keep the lights on here at the newsletter and in my home! If you enjoy the free essays you read here, the conversations my work starts, and/or if you want to chat with us about pop culture, attend the essay revision workshop I’m offering for paid subscribers only next month, dip in and out of our light-lift monthly feminist reading group… I hope you’ll join us.

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You can check out upcoming events for paid subscribers here.

What I’m reading

I’m revisiting a lot of titles I’ve read before for a book I’m currently working on pretty much daily— one I’m not entirely ready to talk about just yet! For now, here are two incredible titles I’ve been dipping back in and out of as I write and think through various aspects of the book, and some books in my TBR pile.

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Anger → action

I know we are all sick about the ongoing genocide in Gaza and feeling unmoored as we witness the intentional starvation of the Palestinian people, alongside all the horrors in the U.S., which continue coming in at an impossibly fast clip. Some resources for turning anger/depression/numbness into small actions follow.

Anne Helen Petersen recently shared a great list of resources to help those suffering in Gaza. These are organizations vetted by those on the ground or those in close communication with people who are. Perhaps you have seen these organizations shared already; maybe you haven’t. Either way, if you are looking for a secure place to send whatever funds you can spare, you can donate to Inara here, the World Central Kitchen here, and The Sameer Project here.

I signed up for the Parent’s Solidarity Fast for Gaza, which I found via Angela Garbes. You can sign up here. The aim of the fast is to “disrupt, organize, force genocide into the news cycle, and flood social media,” and there are many ways to participate. You don’t have to be a parent to sign up.

Don’t forget that any books you purchase from our summer reading list at Bookshop earn affiliate money from the site. All affiliate proceeds will be donated at the end of August to El Otro Lado, which provides legal and humanitarian support to refugees, deportees, and other migrants in the US and Tijuana. I will match as much of what we collectively earn through the reading list as possible.

ICYMI

This month I wrote about how the trad wife mentality taps an antisociality at the heart of white American conceptions of the family, and I wrote about the manchildren populating our screens.

I also wrote about my own complicated relationship with technology these days, and some personal things I’ve been moving through.

And shared a great writing prompt on envy and empathy with our community.

Links

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By the time you read this, I’ll be on a water slide at the local wet amusement park with my kids, trying not to think of the strange dissonance that is summer 2025.

ICYMI

and I have been SO hard at work on Dire Straights, our new podcast, which launched this month, and we’ve been blown away by the support and buzz. Listen to our first two episodes on couples therapy and on “dark feminine” influencers. Next week, we’re dropping a new one on tech bros.

In August, I’m offering an End-of-Summer Camp.

Also reading

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Monthly digests are for paid subscribers so you’ll see a paywall soon. If you want to see everything I’ve been reading, watching, listening to, and otherwise consuming this month, upgrade your subscription. I can’t continue to write this newsletter without paid subscribers.

You’ll also be supporting me when it really matters. Divorce is liberating, but also expensive. I know times are tough for everyone as these nut jobs run our economy into the ground, so this week I’m running a Divorce Fund sale. Right now, a whole year of Mad Woman is just $56.

This sale only applies to annual subscription because these year-long commitments help writers plan their workloads and lives. There are so many of you here who regularly read and value this newsletter, but less than 10% are paying subscribers. Paid subscribers get access to our feminist Reading Group, author salons, chats and comments, all paywalled essays, and more.

For those who still find an annual subscription out of reach but want to add to the Divorce Fund in a one-time way, and for paying subscribers who may want to toss a little extra into the Divorce Fund, you can contribute here. Thanks to everyone for your support.

ICYMI

I talked with & R. O. Kwon for Mother Tongue Magazine about sex in the time of fascism.

I published two more essays this month in a series on libido, including one on the state of feminist media. Here’s the full series:

I talked with whip smart momfluencer scholar about pro-natalists’ bleak vision of the future, and their intentionally cringe Handmaid’s Tale adjacent frocks:

And I wrote about getting my time and my life back:

Our Reading Group also had a great discussion about Audre Lorde’s “The Uses of the Erotic.” We had such a great turnout for the live conversation and a truly wise, beautiful, erotic community connection. What should we read next month? I’ll send out a note with some options to vote on soon.

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Currently reading

A link that got me very excited to redecorate:

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These monthly digests are for paid subscribers of Mad Woman, so you’ll see a paywall show up soon. If you want to see everything I’ve been reading, watching, listening to, and otherwise consuming this month, upgrade your subscription. You’ll also be supporting independent feminist criticism, and my work, at a time that really matters. And you’ll get access to our feminist Reading Group, author salons, more essays, and other treats.

This month my former/still legally my husband signed a lease for an apartment, my first kid tried out for travel softball for the first time and killed it (hoping she doesn’t make it lol), I started a new book I’ve been thinking about for years and re-evaluated by connection to genre, I started a couple VERY exciting non-book projects that I’ll be announcing soon and launched a new class, and I ran more consecutive miles than I ever have in my life.

Meanwhile, American democracy continued to collapse, the pope died after meeting JD Vance (would be my reaction too), Americans were disappeared and deported, the economy tanked, and jfc what else. Sitting here writing to you, I strain to remember how many awful things have happened in the last four weeks.

But I have been trying to balance the effort to remember what is happening and has already happened with an equal effort to take note of everyone I see and speak to daily— many of them writers, artists, parents, or journalists, some of them kids—who are continuing to find ways to refuse and resist and feel joy. Here is a gathering of some books and culture that kept me afloat(ish) this month.

ICYMI

I launched this series of libido this month, with more essays to come:

Links

I loved reading on handling the news and also this by on how easy it can be not to know anything, and how we can refuse to look away, while refusing a steady diet of overwhelming news bites. I deleted a lot of apps this month, reloaded them, and I’m just keeping on with this cycle as needed. I’m thinking a lot about making space for the good work we already know how to do, and continuing to do it.

Earlier this month, I wrote about the broad push to restore “positive” imagery to motherhood; then the New York Times published a report on the White House consulting with people like Malcolm and Simone Collins, self-proclaimed “provocateurs” and techno-optimists, on ways to coerce (because forcing with abortion bans isn’t enough for them) women into pregnancy. You may have heard, the Collins even proposed introducing a National Medal of Motherhood for women who have more than 6 babies.

I’ve been spending a lot of time this month looking at early versions of American pro-natalism and eugenics, and let me just say, friends, not a whole lot has changed since then. And: I was disappointed to see the response to this report from many liberal feminists followed the “if you want more women to become mothers, do these policies” line of thinking. I understand, of course, the impulse to point out the hypocrisy in the platform—and, I guess, to pour on to social media with reminders that “women don’t want to have children because having children in America is so hard.” Sure.

But also, some people just don’t want to have children, ever, and we don’t need any sort of political or cultural initiative to try to convince them of that parenthood is the best job on earth. It feels like we’re spinning our wheels in the discourse of the pandemic—this begging for policy scraps for mothers, this rattling off a list of national policies that would make care more sustainable and equitable. We are so so far past that now.

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Meanwhile, the president is yelling at anyone he can get in a room with cameras, and the VP is such a little child I really cannot stand it. I have volumes to say about men and emotional regulation and power, but I’ll save it for another day.

Lately, I’ve been troubled, too, to see lots of sentiments online like “X is resistance”—wherein X is literally anything that we all do everyday. Breathing is resistance!

And I mean, sure, literally persisting right now is a form of resistance. But I fear we’re on the edge of losing the plot, as we often do in moments like this, when it comes to ideas of both “community” and “resistance”. I can already see the “coffee is resistance” mugs queuing up in Bonfire.

Perhaps I’ll go long on some of these observations soon, but for now, it feels like a good time to get offline as much as possible, read, and really think about the small, everyday acts of feminism we can engage in.

Here’s some of what I’m turning to help me think all this through:

1. Freedom of the press doesn’t exist in America anymore, and wrote so smartly about the WaPo op-ed section’s new direction and the question of whose “personal liberties and free markets” Bezos is protecting. This has me thinking big thoughts about this column and our community, and my commitment to it. I’ll say more about this soon, but it’s clear that independent media is becoming more important than ever, and that we cannot trust the big spots to get us out of this mess or publish the thinking that will help us through the coming years.

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I’ve been really trying to work on my female friendships, which includes getting real with myself about who I am as a friend, who I have been, and who I want to be. The truth is that I haven’t always been a great friend, especially in the years when I was putting my husband, my children, and my work at the center. There are many tragedies of heterosexuality, but one I’ve been thinking a lot about lately is the way heterosexual dating and marriage damages female friendships, as women learn to place men at the center of their lives.

When they do exist in such contexts, female friendships tend to function as a kind of stopgap or release valve— a forum where men’s failings are discussed and debated and unloaded; girls nights’ where no one passes the Bechdel test.

I’m trying to reconsider what friendship looks like through another lens, and I love thinking about the possibility that while I cannot stave off hormones and attraction and the mythology of love forever, perhaps my daughter will grow up understanding that her friendships and her contributions to her community will always be more valuable than her relationships with men. That alone feels radical in these times.

Some great writing on real love by people I love:

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Climbing, as a sport, is not without its own gendered symbolism, but we’ve been admiring its artfulness and delicacy, too. We watched a climber who is trans win the whole season and cheered him on. I thought about my trans friends and students and colleagues, and about the gender spectacle that is sport (no one covers this better than ).

I also ran 10 miles this weekend, and my own relationship to this practice is riddled with metaphor, something I both laugh at and take seriously. I think a lot about how sport and wellness have replaced religion, whether as opiates of the masses or simply as systems of belief and ritual in which we find meaning, and about how these massive ideological spectacles are used to maintain power and control over all our bodies.

Which is why who gets to play, who gets to make the rules, who gets to craft the symbolism, who gets the worship, these things matter, because we look to these practices of the body as metaphors for both the individual and the collective.

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I thought, well, of course I’m tired, given the state of the world and my personal life and the hurried nature of doing so many types of work each day just to make ends meet. Maybe, too, this was perimenopause coming for me?

There’s a curious thing that happens in a culture that gaslights women at every turn. We tend to gaslight ourselves, such that when we know, bone-deep, that something is wrong, we ignore the signs.

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You’ll notice a paywall below— a reminder that these protect me and our community from trolls and harassment. Paid subscribers also keep this newsletter afloat. If you believe in the necessity of feminist writing right now, I hope you’ll join us. You’ll get access to all paywalled writing, and little treats likes these Monday letters, weekly recommendations, craft notes and writing prompts, virtual salons with amazing authors, and more.

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Most mornings now, I run as part of a program I’ve taken up to help my body learn to go longer distances. I do this because it helps me understand myself. As I run, a person I do not know reminds me in my ear to get comfortable with discomfort. It’s a place, this voice says, where growth happens on a cellular level.

One aspect of this training is to come right to the threshold of what would feel impossible— to take yourself not to the edge of collapse, as some fitness routines would have it, but to what’s before that, which is a sustainable yet concerted effort. A push, not a shove. It should not feel impossible, not torturous.

Rather, the goal is to turn my legs over as fast as I can without feeling like I’m working so hard I cannot go on. I have to take care that I’m not edging on pain, self-harm, injury, or collapse. I shouldn’t even want to walk, to throw in the towel. I should be able to find some joy in the effort.

I do this work regularly now for thirty minutes, an hour, sometimes more. But of course, it would be impossible to do it all day, or even every day. The body has to rest, recuperate, and absorb change.

But the work provides valuable lessons for these times.

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Give a year of Mad Woman for 25% off

Well, friends, the world is falling apart, male supremacy and fascism are on the rise globally, and… it’s gift guide season?? I have mixed feelings about gift guides for obvious, unoriginal reasons. My knee-jerk response is to be annoyed with them, but then I look at those made by my favorite authors and always find them creative, non-consumerist alternatives to the holiday ads I am being served everywhere else I look.

So in that spirit, here are five things I am giving friends and family this year that you won’t see on any other gift guide.

Don’t forget you can also get my book, Touched Out, in paperback now! It makes a great under-$20 gift for new and old moms. I have also been told by many women that they have given my book to their male partners, who in turn said it taught them so much about what their partners were going through. So, buy my book for men instead of getting them another shaving kit!

Get Touched Out in paperback

If you’re new here, you can read my interview with , just published over at her brilliant newsletter . The conversation is a great introduction to Touched Out, and to where my writing is taking me now.

Is My Kid the Asshole?

Why So Many Moms Are "Touched Out"

I talk a lot in this newsletter about the feelings of isolation and overwhelm that often accompany motherhood. Today, I’m thrilled to be interviewing author Amanda Montei, one of the most incisive thinkers and writers on the topic. Her fantastic book…

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a year ago · 19 likes · 1 comment · Melinda Wenner Moyer

Please also buy books from this Mad Woman winter reading list as you top off gifts! All affiliate proceeds I earn from purchases you make there through the end of the year will be donated directly to Transanta. The books on the list are recs by me, your fellow subscribers, and books featured at the newsletter lately.

Now, my 5 very original, very Mad Woman gift recommendations:

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