Episode 1.11 Lazy Women & Eating the Rich with Cynara Geissler

September 22, 2017

Hannah (Host): [Music: "Mesh Shirt" by Mom Jeans] Hi, I'm Hannah McGregor and this is Secret Feminist Agenda. Welcome back, lovely humans, and I hope you're ready for a real fun and shouty conversation about gender, class, and laziness. But before we get into that, let me tell you what my secret feminist agenda is this week. [Music: "Mesh Shirt" by Mom Jeans] 

Hannah (Host): So I want to talk briefly about the relationship between feminism and capitalism? Oh, am I going to manage this briefly? Oh, let me start with a little bit of context. Um, I just bought a condo in Vancouver, which is, I think, the most expensive housing market in Canada, sort of a famously expensive housing market [laughter] and, uh, the unaffordability of housing here, the lack of affordable housing, is a huge crisis that a lot of really important activism is happening around. You know, a lot of activists are rightly pointing out that affordable housing should be a basic human right and that the city has a responsibility to intervene to make sure that everybody has somewhere safe to live. Meanwhile, the market just continues to expand. People keep talking about the real estate bubble bursting at some point, but there's really no sign that that's gonna happen. People talk about foreign investment being the problem, but that's often just veiled racism and xenophobia and when push comes to shove, the situation that leaves many of us in is renting expensive apartments and knowing that those apartments could kind of be pulled out from under our feet at any time. So, here I am in Vancouver, having recently started a job that I plan to stick around for a while and my university offers a mortgage subsidy for new faculty because they recognize that a lack of affordable housing is a main reason why people leave Vancouver, and it's expensive to hire new faculty. [laughter] So, universities would rather we don't go. 

So I took a recommendation from a friend and started working with a local realtor. Alright, shout out to my realtor, Connie Buna, who works extensively with the queer community in Vancouver and does a lot of work around housing justice. So yeah. So anyway, you know, I started looking for a condo and when I started it felt like just sort of a practical and logical thing to do, right? The subsidy meant that it would be not more expensive than renting and if I could manage to get sort of, what do people say, onto the housing ladder, which is kind of a gross turn of phrase, but like people kept saying like, "Oh, equity, equity is good, it's good to buy because then you're investing in yourself rather than flushing your money down the toilet." We hear all these things all the time. Right? 

So yeah, it seemed practical, but I never thought of myself as a person with any actual attachment to the idea of owning a home. I really thought, I really had thought that I wanted to be a lifelong renter or that I was happy to be a lifelong renter, or that maybe I would like invest in a cottage one day and, you know, keep renting little apartments in the city. But as soon as we started to actually look and I started to actually think about what it would mean to own my own space, I kind of got obsessed with the idea of owning my own home and [laughter] for every place that I made an offer on and that got outbid by 100,000 dollars because Vancouver is ridiculous, I just... it got harder and harder and I started to realize that there really was something about being able to buy myself a home that was feeling really important to me. You know, I think there's a few different things going on there. I mean, I think in part it's personal. You know, like many people, I have moved around a lot; I've had a really unstable past decade and a half of my life that has involved a lot of re-location and a lot of uncertainty, and so the idea of that kind of stability felt downright luxurious and deeply desirable. But I do also think that there was really something happening in my mind that had to do with the appeal of a kind of, like, shoulder pad feminism self-sufficiency. That is, I became really enchanted with the idea of being a single woman with a successful career who had bought herself a condo. That felt to me like, yeah, I am doing this, ladies are doing it for themselves. Shortly after I found out that the offer on the condo that I did purchase had been accepted, I was walking down the street listening to the new Kesha album, which is like all I do lately, shout out to Marcelle for forcing everybody to listen to the new Kesha album. And I was listening to the song "Woman," which opens with the lyrics:

Music: ["Woman" by Kesha] I buy my own things, I pay my own bills. These diamond rings, my automobiles. Everything I got I bought it. Boys can't buy my love, buy my love, yeah. 

Hannah (Host): And I really found myself feeling like, [clip from "Woman": "Yeah"] That's what I do. I buy my own things. Everything I got, I bought it. And then that [laughter] got me thinking about some of the widely varying responses I saw, in fact, to "Formation," the Beyoncé music video, when it first came out. Something I saw from a number of Black feminists was like, "Oh, we actually don't want a feminism that is premised in capitalism and the acquisition of things," right? We want anti-capitalist feminism and [laughter] I have found myself through this process of acquiring a condo, sort of, really coming face to face with the ways in which some of my feelings of self-sufficiency really do come from the capacity to acquire things, um, and that's something that I'm really trying to think through. Like, what does it mean to know that there is something significant about an ability to take care of myself, about the kinds of freedom that come from being financially independent like this. A freedom that I would really, really like all women to have because, God damn I worry for women who are financially dependent on their partners. That really scares me, even when I know and like their partners, it still scares me. I'd still like every woman to have the financial capacity to just take the fuck off if they need to, but recognizing at the same time that this is an independence that's premised in all kinds of privilege, obviously, and it's also premised in, you know, capitalism and in a participation in a housing market that isn't sustainable and that isn't accessible. [laughter] Yeah, so I don't, I do not have an end to this, except to say that [laughter] that I'm feeling torn right now between the kinds of deep comfort that come from knowing that I'm going to have a place to call my own and the deep discomfort that comes from an understanding of the ways that forms of feminism rooted in capitalism are never truly radical and this isn't even getting into the reality of being a settler on unceded Indigenous territory, which is a whole 'nother topic for a whole 'nother episode.  [Music: "Mesh Shirt" by Mom Jeans] 

Hannah (Host): All right. It's time to meet Cynara. Cynara Geissler is the marketing manager at Arsenal Pulp Press, which is a fantastic independent book publisher here in Vancouver. She's also a writer and a fashion icon. Her poems and essays have appeared in magazines such as Event, Geez Magazine, Shameless and SubTerrain, and several of her essays on fat acceptance are published in books like Lessons from the Fatosphere, which is wonderful and I own it and you should buy it. She also wrote the iconic Establishment article, "Toddler Grandma Style: The Fashion Approach that Will Set You Free." I will mention this again, but that's linked through the show notes and if you haven't already read that, you need to go read that right now. I thought we were going to talk about fatness or fashion or independent publishing, but Cynara had some topic surprises in store for me. Check it out. [Music: “You Don’t Own Me” by Lesley Gore]

Cynara (Guest): [conversation fades in]... You're yelling at them. [laughter]

Hannah (Host): [laughter] Yeah, I am because I'm always really mad. That's my secret. [laughter] Um, so what do you wanna talk about? 

Cynara (Guest): What do I want to talk about today? I want to talk about the idea of: Do you know any lazy women? What is a lazy woman look like? Uh, and then I think I want to just talk about general class warfare, eating the rich, that, that kind of thing. [laughter]

Hannah (Host): [laughter] I wanna start with eating the rich. No, let's start, let's start with laziness because that is, like, makes me viscerally uncomfortable in a way that a lot of radical dances don't. Like, not intellectually uncomfortable. I'm like, "Yeah, absolutely. Like laziness. Let's go." But God, my inner Presbyterian is just like, "But you'll go straight to hell." Like there is, it's like an instinctive gut clench of like, "Work harder! Oh God." 

Cynara (Guest): Yeah. So I guess like it's that thing of the puritanical work ethic certainly, and then the idea that I think many women have internalized–women, non-binary people, people who are just told they're talented at caregiving and life admin as if that it's a difficult sort of thing that is along biological lines–so, we're encouraged to do martyr-like levels of work, but we're not really taught that, like, work and rest are sort of separate cups, that you have to fill both of them. We kind of think like, I have to earn rest and certainly I think that and certainly I do things like, "No, you can't go to the bathroom until you complete the end of this paragraph." [laughter] And like, that's really rolling the dice sometimes. 

Cynara (Guest): [laughter]

Cynara (Guest): And that's unhealthy, it's like, am I really going to start worrying about like incontinence things because I need to be–I've placed so much self-worth in productivity? So yeah, I've been reading, I've been listening to Brené Brown. She has really great audiobook called The Power of Vulnerability, and in it she talks about the idea of scarcity and how scarcity is something that we kind of create for ourselves, and then we become obsessed with making decisions based on, "Well, if I don't say yes, if I don't do this thing, no more opportunity will come." And then she sort of says, "What if productivity wasn't self-worth?" And that's very difficult–

Hannah (Host): [laughter]

Cynara (Guest): Isn't that? Yeah. Hannah just curled into a ball actually, just on the floor. [laughter] But like what if you said that to yourself, right? Like what effect does it have? I think it feels very, very dissonant. So, the sort of thing that I was thinking about is one of my role models as a kid was Jem, from Jem and the Holograms, the cartoon series. We do not acknowledge the film that was made a few years ago. To me, that's not real. 

Hannah (Host): Do we feel okay about the super fat, positive and queer positive comic book adaptation? 

Cynara (Guest): Oh, I feel super great about that adaptation. That adaptation is wonderful and might even be better than the original series because they've taken the best things of that show in the eighties and turned it into a comic book with a lot of body diversity and characters of different backgrounds and it's amazing. But, so Jerrica Benton, Jem: By day she's a powerful record exec and then she's also by day and night Jem, the front woman of Jem and the Holograms, one of the most popular pop bands, and so we don't think of her as a superhero, but actually she has an alter ego, she has a holographic computer given to her from her father called Synergy, which creates the holographic illusions. But I read–I started to think about her and I realized, like, her superpower is that she's two women at the same time. She has an alter ego so that she can do all the things she's supposed to do in a day and that's what we're supposed to aspire to. 

Hannah (Host): That's so 80s, right? Like, it's so the sort of image of feminism that the 80s was pushing forward, which is that like you are going to be career successful, but you better also be thin and beautiful and a desirable sex object, but also like a good and ethical person, like you still have to provide all this emotional labor. You should probably be trying to save the world. Like, that feminism, like the Jem and the Holograms feminism is, that's exhausting.

Cynara (Guest): It is. And I was thinking about her too because she's also, she owns Starlight House, which, so she's like the mom to 12 homeless girls on top of her other jobs that she's doing. [laughter] But then she only dates one guy. So, she dates Rio and I started thinking about that and I was like, well, you know, Spider-man, Batman, other heroes, they might have flirtations with other superheroes when they're in costume, but then Peter Parker and Bruce Wayne, like they date different women when they're civilians. I'm like, so why doesn't Jerrica Jem? And then I'm like, no, actually this is her version of giving herself a break. 

Hannah (Host): [laughter]

Cynara (Guest): That's her spa day, is like only dealing with one guy's crap, right? Like I'm like, does it flatter her in some way? Is she like, "He's really only into me because I'm both these women." Like maybe that's a pick me up for her. But I was like, how sad is it that like, that's the sort of structure of her life, that's what's aspirational. Yeah. So I think about women in my life, it's like, do you know any women who just like play a first person shooter for a week and then like do a bunch of bong rips and like, you know, aren't doing projects. Like do you, can you actually think of a woman in your life that you would be like, "That's a lazy person?"

Hannah (Host): I can't, I can't because the friends I have who are less sort of manically fixated on productivity than I am are people who have just, like, built like a small space for like self-care in their lives. Like, to actually imagine a lazy woman is... it's really difficult. This reminding me of a conversation I had with my friend Kaarina, who was on an earlier episode and talked about the way that anti-depressants shifted her understanding of herself and one of those things was that she was really convinced that she was a lazy person when she was depressed until she, like, got on anti-depressants and realized that she was actually just a person who is naturally quite good at recognizing her own limits. [laughter]

Cynara (Guest): [laughter] Great realization.

Hannah (Host): I know, right?

Cynara (Guest): I mean I feel like the closest we maybe get to models of lazy women in pop culture may be like Ilana and Abbi on Broad City and I think, I wouldn't necessarily say they're lazy, but I think they get to do what I'll call the weekending that men get to do. Like I often joke like, if a woman were to do–and I've written an essay sort of about this–a performance piece called like "Self-care," it would just be like her fusing to a couch, playing like a first-person shooter and eating pizza and then guys would be like, "This art is stupid. We do this all the time. It's just called my day off, right?" 

Hannah (Host): [laughter]

Cynara (Guest): Like, but we don't structure our lives like that and I've started to think about what that means, and it also ties into models of ableism, right? Because you know, the ability to over-extend yourself, like that's–it doesn't feel like it–but it's actually a privilege and I think it actually cultivates a culture where those are the–it shifts the expectations, right, of what is a reasonable amount of work to do. And I think, just like in terms of class warfare, we should be pushing back on that. Like, we shouldn't want a culture where I'm on the clock 24 hours a day or I'm only as valuable as the 37 projects that I'm working on. Right?

Hannah (Host): Well, when you think about what's happening under late capitalism right now, which is like that automation means that people are not required to work as hard or as much as they do and rather than that resulting in people working less but maintaining a high quality of life, what it's resulted in instead is the gradual evaporation of anything like a recognizable 40 hour a week job and the rise of entrepreneur culture. Um, do you remember those ad campaigns for Fiverr that were going around on social media? So Fiverr is this platform where you basically go on and say like, "This is a thing I will do for $5." So, like, I will edit and up to 10-page manuscript for $5. Or, I will like, fix some html code that's not working on your website. Like, you know, some people go on and say like "here's things I will do" and the ads for Fiverr were like these pictures of young people and then captions that were like, um... let's see, I feel like I can almost remember this one verbatim. "Eat coffee for lunch, follow through on your follow through." Like it was this never stop grinding, like work yourself to death, then you know you're a real entrepreneur. In this new future, in this nightmare of late capitalism, there are no regular jobs. The structure of nine to five, an hour break for every eight hours you work, guaranteed weekends off, that's disintegrating. But it's disintegrating paradoxically, like, in the historical moment where there's more everything than there's ever been before. People do not need to work as hard as they are, like really objectively do not. 

Cynara (Guest): What would it look like if that wasn't the way that I valued myself and it's a tough question to answer because I think that part of the push backs onto slow living and like homesteading is kind of, which to me feels like more work. Like, I'm with Adorno on this stuff. I'm not with Adorno on much, but when he's like, "No, camping's not leisure," [laughter] like I don't want to poop in a bucket for fun. Like, why is that–like, why is building a deck my leisure activity? Like what is capitalism sort of done to our thinking? Uh, and so for me, like, yeah, I'm with him on that. I also think it's gendered. I think that play is more complex for women than it is for men and I think our culture builds in a certain amount of play just into the idea of bro culture, right? Like stuff like the man cave that's like tricked out with all your toys. Uh, I just don't think that we have models of that. So I feel like I'm actually searching for that and then also trying to create that and also asking what does it look like to slow down when you're not wealthy? Because I think when you're younger there's a lot of mentorship and things that exist and that are accessible cost-wise too. But I think if you're trying to like, life pivot to a slower life in your 30s or 40s, like what does that mean if you don't have a huge financial safety net because you actually have to hustle to live? So, I think a lot of our models are kind of like, "oh, just retreat to your beach house and only accept two to three clients a week." [laughter] Like I don't, you know, like I don't actually. [inaudible] Yeah, sure, sure, I would love to. But yeah, I wonder what that looks like and I wonder sort of what our working class models of success are and I don't have really good answers for that right now. 

Hannah (Host): I mean, it's an absolutely fantastic question because when I think about leisure, I think about like the history of leisure is that it's an invention of the middle class. Like, you don't have, when you are landed aristocracy, you don't have a category called leisure because you don't have a category called work, and leisure only exists as the opposite of work. And leisure is also by definition not accessible to the working class. Like, you were working class because you have to work all the time and you are aristocracy because you have to work never, and you are middle class because you get to balance having a job and having leisure time and the invention, like the whole idea of hobbies are a middle class conceit. This sort of idea that you're structuring your time around when you're working and when you're not working and when you're not working, you are rendering yourself a valuable human through another set of activities, and we can tie those into all kinds of leisure activities, right? The sort of, uh, the image of middle class kids all having to learn a musical instrument when they're young. The judgments around being a reader versus not being a reader, right? The sort of idea amongst book people that they are somehow morally superior to people who don't read for pleasure. The idea of working out, of exercise as sort of demanded leisure activity, right? So there sort of becomes this moral weight on leisure activity, but that's all a deeply middle class conceit. So like, what does opting out look like from a working class perspective? I don't know the answer, I don't know the answer to that is. I don't, I don't. And I also think that part of like my own sort of fixation on, like, you're not allowed to ever stop working is stemmed in an awareness of the intense privilege of my class status, my education level, the career that I have found myself in, which is all saying to me, you know, you have an opportunity that very few people ever get. So, how dare you turn your nose up at it, right? Like, you have this great job, work yourself to death. 

Cynara (Guest): Yeah. I think the idea of, like, what does it mean to take advantage of an opportunity, but like why does taking advantage of an opportunity have to mean that you're like, doing it so hard that you have like what I like to call is the minimum security prison fantasy where you're like, what if I just went to jail for a few months and then I had time to like make a poncho. I modeled this on like Martha Stewart. 

Hannah (Host): [laughter] 

Cynara (Guest): [laughter] Yeah, but it's like we, I think that that's a common fantasy that we have, that we're kind of like, well, what if I lightly got hit by a car

Hannah (Host): [laughter]  

Cynara (Guest): and then like I wasn't really hurt but I had, but the doctor was like, "No, you have to stay here and you have to lie down." And like I said, yes, it is a privilege to have access to work and opportunity, but I mean this, the research and like Brené Brown does this research on love and shame, and she's basically found in her research that we can't actually love or take care of people better than we can ourselves. Evidence actually shows, and like parents and a lot of people push back on this, but if you want to treat people with empathy, you have to have like a deep reserve of self-empathy and vulnerability to not to the flaws in others, the flaws that you might hate most about yourself, with shaming rhetoric. So I'm thinking a lot about that, about like, we do a lot of shame-based motivation in activism. We really like to tell people like if you're not showing up in these specific ways, and they're often very ablest ways, like I dunno the left, as Sarah Schulman said, we just love to get our bodies out in the rain. We just love to stand out in the cold in front of a thing and–

Hannah (Host): The more uncomfortable the better.

Cynara (Guest): Yeah, and that's like that, there's some definite moral religious things to unpack and like, you know, let's, like Dorothy Allison: "Suffering does not ennoble, it destroys," but unless we are actually physically or emotionally in distress, it's like we don't think our work is meaningful, but that's actually statistically not true. Like we're not the best equipped to care for people and to make change and to work towards these goals that we so desperately–Like, Nazis are everywhere. It's a really stressful time. Like, they were always everywhere, but now they're really emboldened about it. Now they're just like, "We're here. We're Nazis were covered in swastika tattoos," like I don't know, not even, but like they're everywhere. So, the pressure, there's this huge pressure and we have all the time of like, what are you doing to show up? How many, how many family members are you talking to today? Like what are you doing? And I actually think that we should resist that a little bit. Or we should think about like what does it mean for me to show up where do my skills lie? Because the idea of everyone's best course of action is to like put their body between Mayor Gregor and some Nazis, like I questioned that actually. I wonder why our mayor thinks it's more appropriate to encourage people to be between him and those people when he could make a different decision about that. Right? 

Hannah (Host): I mean, the Nazis can have Mayor Gregor. That's fine. 

Cynara (Guest): Maybe that's what the best outcome of this would be

Hannah (Host): [laughter] 

Cynara (Guest): Like the centaurs that carried Dolores Umbridge away, the Nazis just carry away Mayor Gregor to his white pent house, which I'm sure they would love, aesthetically. Like, it would suit them. But yeah.

Hannah (Host): [laughter] The thing that's super resonating about what you're saying is the sort of struggle that I have been feeling to empathize with people, specifically with sort of white and able-bodied people who cite anxiety as a reason for not showing up for things. Right? Like, I can't do this or I can't, you know, I can't keep up with the news. I can't read about this stuff. I can't show up at protests. It makes me too anxious. And because I am also a deeply socially anxious person and I'm making myself, I'm just like reading Twitter until I cry every day, I'm like, "Well, I'm destroying my life for this. Where the hell do you get off not doing this right?" Like, it's that, that lack of empathy, like I'm showing no empathy to myself and I'm not taking care of myself, so you too should prove that you are worthwhile ally by like driving your mental health into the ground. Which is objectively a useless thing to do, as is shaming people with disabilities for not showing up to protest. Like, objectively useless, in addition to being profoundly ableist. Like, there's no value in it other than a sort of virtue signaling via an insistence that doing more is always better, rather than doing smart things. For example, like recognizing that we have fucking hate crime laws in Canada and you can just say, "No, you can't have that protest. Racism is illegal here. Sorry."

Cynara (Guest): Yeah, that could be a choice. That could be a choice you can make, but I think again, this comes from this, the scarcity mentality of like, "No, everybody has to have their say and we should have a rally and we should all get together and what we should do is have a giant meeting until everyone agrees on the very best possible course of action we could take and then we all agree that that's the best thing." Like, as if there's some way of having a pure consensus on what the best thing to do is. It's like, no, the world is a mess. There's things that need to be done. I'm not saying that we should all eat sheet cake or anything like that, but I am saying, what if we all before we reacted or were mean to ourselves, like just breathed a little bit. [laughter] 

Hannah (Host): [laughter] 

Cynara (Guest): Like what if you just slowed, like, physiologically what if we just all took a few deep breaths and then thought about what we were going to say, you know? Like, I don't want to suggest that certain things aren't urgent and people should absolutely call to action. But I think we now believe that everything is urgent, from our work to our leisure, to what–you know, I think people now, I know that the people that take the vacations where they like beat themselves up about not having the max vacation. It's like, "Well I only visited 75 out of 70 museums that I plan to see on my seven day vacation. [laughter] So I guess I'm not committed to culture." 

Hannah (Host): I actually don't know who has written about this, but many people have written about the sort of manufacturing of a permanent state of crisis. I mean, Orwell, to start. Like the idea of that governments maintain control via manufacturing permanent states of crisis, and we can see that in all kinds of ways, right? We can see it in employment, we can see it in politics, we can see it... Like, I think sometimes we were kept from more meaningful forms of political intervention via the manufacturing of constant crisis so that you can only ever react. You can't ever act. And that state of being in a permanent condition of fight or flight panic reaction, that's a great way to keep people if you want control over them. 

Cynara (Guest): Yeah, the Hermione example of this is, like, you get a time turner so that you can actually stop and control time to take on as much work as possible, more than actual day's work, right? And I mean, I feel like the first time I read about that, I was like, "I want this." Like that was my immediate reaction was like "Wow, I could pack in like four degrees until one degree. That seems like a great way to live." Right? And now I'm kind of like, no, like the time turner should actually be like a cautionary tale. That's how we should interpret it. [Music: “You Don’t Own Me” by Lesley Gore]

Hannah (Host): If you would like some more Cynara, you should definitely follow her on twitter at @cynaragee, that's C Y N A R A G E E, and while you're at it, go follow her on Instagram, handle's the same, @cynaragee, and her Instagram feed is luminous. I've linked to some of for fabulous writing on the show notes as well and you should go read it because she is pretty dang smart. Speaking of people who are pretty dang smart, why don't we check in real quick with Kaarina? [Music: Kaarina's Theme: loon hoots, instrument plays] 

Kaarina: Hey listeners and welcome to Kaarina's Cozy Self-care Corner. So, today I want to talk about this amazing creature I just read about, the gloomy octopus. The gloomy octopus is the type of octopus that lives outside of Australia and was characterized by its especially hermetic existence, even for an octopus. So it's so reclusive, but not only does it go into its den during the day and only come out at night, but it blocks the opening of its den with rocks so that it can be in total solitude. And I just think that is fantastic and I really encourage you to look up videos and pictures of the gloomy octopus because they're so beautiful. They're the kind of creature that can adapt their skin color and texture to blend into their environment. If I could do that, I would definitely become the color and texture of my favorite hoodie, [laughter] so you can think about what texture you would imitate.  But another thing about the gloomy octopus is that scientists have discovered a group of them that live together in a town, [laughter] a rock town called Octopolus. So even though they love being alone, they've chosen to live together in this little pile of rocks and they don't like it. They fight all the time. The scientists have many videos of them fighting and chasing each other, and I just think I really identify with this creature and I bet you do too, because they're just this bundle of contradictions. So they want to be alone. They want to be close to others, but they hate that, they react against it. They're hostile towards the others that they have chosen to live near. And they can safely blend into any environment and yet they still choose to hide in a den with the door closed with rocks. And I relate to this because of my own tension between loneliness and sociality. So, I find myself often feeling so lonely, but so unwilling to be around other people, especially to go out in the sense of going out spending money, drinking, meeting new people, making conversation, making small talk. And I often find myself really uncomfortable in group situations. I prefer one-on-one, two-on-one hangouts. So going out in a lot of social situations are not my ideal, but being alone, not my ideal either. So I just wanted to acknowledge that contradiction that I think a lot of us have, acknowledge it and decide not to beat myself up about it this week. And also acknowledged that social media can be a really good tool and navigating that are managing it. I think there are a lot of complaints about social media as an isolating technology for the ways that it disconnects us from the people physically around us or it distracts us from the moment, being in the present, and you could say a lot of things about that. But you could also say that social media gives us this in-between space, this very self-managed social space and it's taken me awhile to learn how to manage it. So, things like unfollowing or unfriending people that I don't actually want to interact with, even in a superficial way, or a creating Twitter lists that kind of, yes, I do want to follow politically active people and I want to learn from them, but sometimes I just want to see what my friends are up to, use Twitter as that more personal, closer circle place. So this week I guess the self-care assignment is just to acknowledge your contradictions around social and personal time, if you have any, and, uh, recognize the ways that you are managing them and give yourself permission to lean on social media or to re-think the way you're using social media to be that in-between space. Basically be the gloomy octopus you want to see in the world. Whatever texture, color that may be, whether you live in Octopolus or you live in a den covered in rocks 20 miles away. Best of luck, my gloomy octopi. Bye. [Music: Kaarina's Theme: loon hoots, instrument plays]  

Hannah (Host): As per the usual, you can find show notes and all the episodes of Secret Feminist Agenda on secretfeministagenda.com. You can follow me on Twitter @hkpmcgregor and tweet about the podcast using the hashtag #secretfeministagenda, and keep up the rating and reviewing and sharing. We're getting more listeners every week and it's entirely through word of mouth. So you're really making this happen. The podcast theme song is "Mesh Shirt" by Mom Jeans off their album, Chub Rub. You can download the entire album on freemusicarchive.org, or follow them on Facebook. Cynara's theme is you don't own me by Lesley Gore. Goddamn classic. That's it for this week, my darlings. This has been Secret Feminist Agenda. Pass it on. [Music: "Mesh Shirt" by Mom Jeans]