Gynomite’s Reading Room!
Hi there! So if Gynomite seems a bit sparse these days, it’s because I’m doing a bit of a reorg. This blog, running for five years now, is everything I like, but I have set up a Tumblr that is more focused on body image and self-esteem, as part of a larger project I’m working on. It’ll cull stuff from Gynomite and also have a bunch of new stuff too. Go follow!
Let’s all celebrate Reese Witherspoon getting arrested (and releasing a pretty classy statement).
New Indoor Kids episode up today, with Blair Butler and FilmCritHulk, discussing everything Bioshock: Infinite! Full of spoilers- you have been warned!
Two amazing posts about being ladies in a boys club- one from Sara Schaefer, and one from Molly Lambert. Go read!
My review of Doctor Who at TV.com!
Gynomite’s Reading Room!
An interesting look at how TV works now and why some of your favorite shows get axed.
Kumail and I were on Bullseye, making video game recommendations! Listen to the whole show here, and our segment here.
New Doctor Who review from me is up at TV.com!
Yikes, we need some sexism Avengers.
I’ve started blogging for Elizabeth Banks! Yup. First post- how the reality of living in Game of Thrones time isn’t as cool as the fantasy.
These Dove ads will make you cry. Thanks Amanda!
Belief in a punitive God is correlated with poor mental health, and belief in a loving God is correlated with less poor mental health qualities. Interesting, huh?
New Indoor Kids is up, with Tom Bissell as our guest!
A gorgeous look at cheerleading uniforms from the 80s, at Jezebel.
Gynomite’s Reading Room!
A nice examination of how young women are portrayed in popular shows like Game of Thrones and Mad Men, using YA archetypes.
Half of Justin Bieber’s followers are fake. I’ll file this under “things that make me feel smug for no reason”.
This just in: Kid Rock makes sense!
I loved this post from Naomi at Rookie about hibernating from the world because of an illness.
New episode of Fetch Quest! Listen up, I do a bunch of the voices in this one!
The Mamas and Papas and the Petes.
From last night’s Meltdown. We’re singing a song called “OhMyGodEmily”. I love these dudes- differently, sure, but they’re the best.
Picture by @eloyvseloy
Gynomite’s Reading Room!
I wrote for and helped voice this new animated series at Geek and Sundry called Fetch Quest! Watch and you’ll hear me yelling!
A really fun juicy post on what may happen at the end of Mad Men. (No spoilers, just speculation.)
I appeared on the Nerdist podcast JV Club with Janet Varney, discussing my teenage years in North Carolina. As a bonus, here’s the Tumblr borne out of that appearance- HotDogWarmChurchFeet.tumblr.com.
I didn’t hear about this case when it happened, so pardon me for being late: In 2007, two goth kids were walking home around 1am when they were attacked by a bunch of teenagers. Both went into a coma. The girl, Sophie Lancaster, died. As a result of her family’s tireless campaigning, being attacked for looking goth/emo/alternative is now considered a hate crime in Manchester. Read all about it here.
Also, my review of Doctor Who at TV.com!
New Indoor Kids episode up today, with Blair Herter and Jessica Chobot talking babies and Bioshock!
Gynomite’s Reading Room!
This was a fascinating read in Entertainment Weekly about how we have way less sex scenes in movies now, even when the movie stars a woman who is a sex addict or prostitute. Blame kids and their disposable income.
The top 5 runway casting directors talk about why runway shows are often so white. It’ll probably make you mad.
New Indoor Kids episode up, with Ivan Van Norman from King of the Nerds talking tabletop games versus video games!
Period panties exist, and they can be yours for as little as $24.
I wrote a review of the newest Doctor Who at TV.com!
VICE chats with the “dirty girls” (from a few Gynomite’s Reading Rooms ago) 17 years later.
I was on the 50th Harmontown episode, because my husband Kumail proposed to me on it. Listen if you like.
The Tacocopter will bring you tacos. If you’re in San Francisco.
I just found this old ad from the Nerdist BBC show I was on last season and it made me smile, so I’m posting it here. I just guested on the new season and it should be on the air soon!
I contained multitudes.
I have been writing about body issues a bit these days, and I am starting to undertake a much larger project that is just going to be about body issues, so I’ve been working on upping my comfort level in showing you me, in words and pictures, as I was.
And what I was was pretty damned awkward. I won’t use the “ugly” word to describe myself, because it seems to make people feel the need to correct me or compliment me, and this isn’t about getting current validation, or making you feel sorry for me, or anything like that. I am just dipping a toe into talking about myself when I liked myself least and trying to find some comfortability there, because at this point is hella uncomfortable.
For a long time, while I was awkward-looking and even now, I refused to acknowledge that I was awkward-looking. I’m not sure why- maybe I thought that if I didn’t acknowledge how ugly I felt, no one else would notice either. More likely, it was because I grew up around a bunch of girls and women that self-depricated their appearances way too much, and I hated it. Some of them did it for attention, some of them did it because they truly believed they weren’t attractive or worthy, some of them did it so that it wouldn’t sting as much when you did it, some of them did it to make you laugh. All of them, I felt, were traitors to themselves. I didn’t like how I looked, sure, but I wasn’t going to let you in on that secret. I wasn’t going to let you become part of my self-hatred. I had enough of it as it was and didn’t need help with cutting myself down. So I did a lot of ignoring of comments, staying away from bullies, and not trying on clothes on shopping sprees with girls half my size. I was constantly scanning the environment to see if anything in any given situation could set me up to feel embarrassed, and if it seemed like a possibility, I refused to do it.
This, of course, was before I adopted an alt/punkrock/badass way of being, which allowed me to adopt an incredibly helpful “I DON’T CARE WHAT YOU THINK ABOUT HOW I LOOK” attitude that built my eventual backbone and self-esteem. We’re talking the seminal years of middle school, at the tail-end of which I started dyeing my hair with markers and wearing band shirts, experimenting with my ugly.
I am currently on a plane flying home from a lovely trip to NC to see my family, and one of the things we did was go through a ton of old pictures. There are plenty of me as an adorable child, quite a few of me as an awkward overlarge middle schooler, but less still of me as a teenage punk rock princess. Objectively, I look equally ridiculous as both a middle schooler and teenager, but in my eyes, the teenage me looks…. free. Middle school me, full of self-loathing, appears to be holding her breath in pictures, always trying to twist out of frame, wearing enormously oversized sweaters that approach her sister’s style but can’t copy it, refusing to smile or smiling a desperate smile. Teenage me, clad in black and sparkly ill-fitting clothing, looks pretty ugly too, but by god, she appears to be okay with having her picture taken. She appears to be breathing. It took me years to perfect the simple tasks of inhaling and exhaling into my own body.
If you’re interested, take a look at a few pictures of me from my awkward years.
Gynomite’s Reading Room!
I probably won’t be blogging much over the next couple of days, but in the meantime, here are some fun things for you to look at and read.
This post is fantastic because not only do you find out what celebrities dated back in the day (Kathy Griffin and Jack Black!), but you also get to see tons of pics of celebrities when they were very very young and sharp.
This is a lovely profile on the lovely Tig Notaro in Elle magazine, a sentence I never thought I’d write.
I am very interested in how we choose to perform our age. Age, like gender, is a thing to be performed. I read an interview with Liz Taylor that talked about how actresses now all want to seem like children, but in her day, actresses all just wanted to be seen as grownups because it was the only way to be taken seriously. If you look at a picture of Liz Taylor at 21 and Sandra Bullock at 21, they look years apart. A friend of mine who is in his mid-20s is dating a girl who is probably 22, and she and I frequently show up wearing similar outfits. I’m over ten years older than her. I would like to think that somehow I’ve done something to age-appropriate my outfits a bit, but that’s up for debate. Regardless, I like how I dress, and I know how to pull out grownup stuff when I have meetings, and I’m lucky that I get to dress like a lunatic at work. Because of all this, I’m very interested in seeing two celebrities who are the same age, chronologically, that seem very far apart developmentally. Here are two posts devoted to that topic.
Shia LeBeouf continues to fascinate.
Gynomite’s Reading Room!
It’s amazing how much more interesting the Today show is now that we know all its dark secrets.
This week, the Indoor Kids, the podcast I do with my husband Kumail, welcomes Steven Yeun from The Walking Dead! One of my favorite episodes!
This is a cold-blooded, “daaaaaamn” PSA about rape that was made in Scotland. Enjoy! (no trigger warnings)
Victoria’s Secret is making a line of clothing and underwear aimed at teens and adolescents… or are they? (Spoiler alert: the most likely are)
Flapper dictionary from 1922! I want to believe these are real and not just some fun prank that a sassy flapper played on a journalist, but come on…. monogolist?
Our friends Blair and Jessica had a baby, and Blair is blogging about being a new Dad every day. It’s adorable and sweet and hilarious.
I am impressed with the thoughtfulness of this ranking of all 27 seasons of The Real World, done by Vulture and sent to me by my childhood friend Christine, who has been awesome for a good 24ish years now. (I can’t speak to her pre-3rd grade years, I didn’t know her then.)
Ask Gynomite!
In her former life, Emily “Gynomite” Gordon was a couples and family therapist licensed in 2 1/2 states. In this life, she’s a freelance fighter of your emotional woes with Ask Gynomite. Write her at askgynomite@gmail.com- all emails stay confidential. Today, Gynomite takes on rebounds and exes and etc.
Hi there Emily, long time listener (Indoor Kids, your blog) and first time emailer with some thoughts. I was recently browsing Ask Gynomite and came across a video response of yours – Jan 14, 2013, “I’m always concerned my boyfriend is going to cheat on me” – that unfortunately I saw a little too late to help my relationship. I’m a straight dude who, up until about a month ago, was dating a woman (nine months) who sounded very much like the girl in the email, except my ex had actually been cheated on in the past (she also cheated once herself). In another relationship I’ve kiss-cheated, but never sex-cheated, although I know the distinction doesn’t mean much. She was constantly suspicious, would habitually accuse me of flirting with my female (and occasionally, male) friends, to the point we would get into arguments nearly every weekend and/or after most social functions. My argument to her was I was only having conversations with these people, trying to connect with them on a friendly human being level, while she, claiming to be a very intuitive person (which wasn’t entirely inaccurate), would say it just “felt wrong” to her, and I should just stop talking to girls to make her feel better. Honestly, I never cheated, nor had any intention to, and so it was the main issue that eventually ended our relationship. When we would fight about it, only during the knock-down-drag-outs would she admit that her behavior was unfair, and that she’d like to change (although she still would scoff at therapy).
