Anne Helen Petersen Quotes

The poor and people of color are yoked to the abject; white people use its exploration as a path toward self-liberation. It’s a valid critique — and one that Broad City has increasingly interrogated, suggesting, especially in later seasons, the extent of Abbi and Ilana’s privilege.

Feministing writer Jos Truitt puts it, “trans women are disrespected and treated terribly when they don’t pass, but if they do pass they’re called out for upholding the gender binary and cis standards of beauty. It is an impossible bind.”13

The desire for the cool job that you’re passionate about is a particularly modern and bourgeois phenomenon — and, as we’ll see, a means of elevating a certain type of labor to the point of desirability that workers will tolerate all forms of exploitation for the “honor” of performing it. The rhetoric of “Do you what you love, and you’ll never work another day in your life” is a burnout trap. By cloaking the labor in the language of “passion,” we’re prevented from thinking of what we do as what it is: a job, not the entirety of our lives.

hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt, will never buy a home, and are terrified of what a medical catastrophe could bring, so long as you can still blend in with higher incomes in a social setting.

...the difference between cute, acceptable unruliness and unruliness that results in ire is often as simple as the color of a woman's skin, whom she prefers to sleep with, and her proximity to traditional femininity.

We were raised to believe that if we worked hard enough, we could win the system - of American capitalism and meritocracy - or at least live comfortably within it. But something happened in the late 2010s. We looked up from our work and realized, there’s no winning the system when the system itself is broken.

You are what you eat, read, watch, and wear, but it doesn’t end there. You’re also the gym you belong to, the filters you use to post vacation photos, where you go on that vacation. It’s not enough to listen to NPR, read the latest nonfiction National Book Award winner, or run a half marathon.

It’s no surprise that people who thrive in the office are almost always the same people who have accumulated or were raised with a lot of identity-related privilege outside it.

Millennials, by contrast, have internalized the need to find employment that reflects well on their parents (steady, decently paying, recognizable as a “good job”) that’s also impressive to their peers (at a “cool” company) and fulfills what they’ve been told has been the end goal of all that childhood optimization: doing work you’re passionate about, which will naturally lead to other “better life outcomes.

As Darcy Lockman puts it in All the Rage: Mothers, Fathers, and the Myth of Equal Partnership, “Reports of the modern, involved father have been greatly exaggerated.

Just because inequality is not as dire does not mean that it is not felt.

Femininity cloaked power and strength, made it more palatable, less threatening.

In America, particularly in non-unionized workplaces, this sort of chronic understaffing acquires a logic all its own. If you can stand to lose employee weight, you should; if you don’t, you’re leaving profits on the table. Appropriately staffing isn’t a way to create a better work environment; it’s “bloat.” Workplaces attempt to counter the negative effects of understaffing with professional development, bonuses, perks, snacks, therapy dogs, subsidized gym memberships, swag, happy hours, access to meditation apps; the list is truly endless. One HR person told us that she was always amazed that employees complained about stress and overwork but then never took advantage of the perks. It makes sense, though. They don’t have the time. What would really make their lives better isn’t a meditation app, but adding a few more employees without also adding the expectation of more work.

Gone with the Wind (1939), were actually made with Gable on loan to other studios,

Of course, there have been unruly women for as long as there have been boundaries of what constitutes ‘feminine’ behavior: women who, in some way, step outside the boundaries of good womanhood, who end up being labeled too fat, too loud, too slutty, too whatever characteristic women are supposed to keep under control.