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the_mary_sue_feed
User @scaredandsobbing in a video she uploaded to TikTok two days ago recounted how her parents almost got divorced over what could have been her name: Angie. But what’s so wrong with that name? As it turns out, everything but the context is very important.
Taking viewers to the time of her birth, user @scaredandsobbing said that her mother had a difficult birthing experience, one that put her and her mother’s life at risk. The atmosphere was already tense. To add to the chaos, user @scaredandsobbing mentioned that her father fainted, which only made her mother more upset. As if that wasn’t enough, her mother was told she was having a boy, but it turned out to be a girl, and she hadn’t prepared any names for a girl. Unsure of what to name her daughter, she turned to her husband for suggestions, but the name he proposed made her furious, leading her to threaten him with divorce and say she would “beat the shi* out” of him.
the_mary_sue_feed
You truly need to be a special breed of ignorant to declare yourself too intelligent for literacy.
Most of us would probably stop at “too busy” or “too tired,” but Andrew Tate, never one to aim so low as the average person, has gone ahead and utilized the very concept of illiteracy — you know, the kind your grandparents warned you about — as a flex.
the_mary_sue_feed
What’s the worst thing to happen when you’re trapped in the confined space of a train car? A creepy stranger deciding to make their unwanted internal monologue a public broadcast. In such situations, most of us lean into the “polite smile and look at the floor” routine. But this German woman decided to take a much more creative and terrifying approach.
TikTok creator @bmaegomes is sparking a massive wave of laughter after sharing her defense mechanism against a creep while on a train in Berlin. A man old enough to be her father cornered her on the train with a creepy compliment. But the creator responded with a facial expression so distorted it effectively ended the conversation for good.
no_apologiesaskamanager_feedA reader writes:
I was recently promoted to a director role, and one of my direct reports is my former boss who hired me into the company, “Tom.”
Tom was a great boss in the eight years I worked for him. He’s an all-around terrific manager who coaches well, provides clear goals, gives flexibility to meet those goals, provides opportunities to learn and grow, advocates for his team, the works.
After a few years working for him, a promotion opened up and Tom urged me to apply. I got it, became his peer, and built my own effective team using his style as my model. Last year, our department director positioned opened up. Tom and I both applied. I impressed our relatively new division VP, and got the job.
Days after that, I found out through a colleague that Tom was very disappointed. Apparently the previous division VP had told Tom that he was a “shoo-in” for the job when it opened. In fact, he turned down some outside opportunities that would have paid more because he was anticipating this promotion. I had no idea that this was his expectation.
Tom has been nothing but professional and complimentary with me, but I’m really concerned about how I can manage him effectively. I need him to stay—he has longstanding personal relationships with all our key clients. If he left suddenly, we would be in a real bind.
Our HR and division VP have also emphasized the need to keep Tom on staff due to his role as a talent spotter and his client relationships. I asked about getting him a raise and an intermediate promotion, but our corporate structure is pretty stratified and there’s nothing between his level and mine. What do you recommend to navigate the potential awkwardness of managing my former boss, as well as keeping him happy despite his disappointment in not getting this job—and his missing out on the raise that came with it?
I answer this question over at Inc. today, where I’m revisiting letters that have been buried in the archives here from years ago (and sometimes updating/expanding my answers to them). You can read it here.
The post I’m afraid my star employee is going to quit appeared first on Ask a Manager.
bluapapilio
liveonearthalpennia_feedThis finishes up the cluster of articles I've been reading on lesbianism in pornography. The current article points out an interesting contrast in the view of lesbian sex depicted in pornography versus that depicted in "learned" texts, especially medical manuals.
Toulalan, Sarah. 2003. “Extraordinary Satisfactions: Lesbian Visibility in Seventeenth-Century Pornography in England” in Gender and History 15: 50-68
In contrast to the previous article on 17th century pornography, this one is all about the lesbians!
# # #
The typical focus on researching female same-sex desire in the early modern period centers around medical and legal records, the motif of physiological anomaly (the enlarged clitoris myth), and attempts to identify covert homoerotic themes in women’s writing. In contrast, pornography and popular culture (ballads and pamphlets) present a different view, even though they can rarely be interpreted as self-reporting of the women involved.
Pornography is a particularly rich source of imagery for how people thought sex between women was performed, setting aside the question of its accuracy. It contradicts the notion of lesbian sex as “hidden from history” or “something not to be named.” And in particular, pornographic literature diverges from the more learned imagery of “masculine” lesbians or clitoral hypertrophy.
Given the authorship and primary audience for 17th century pornography, it is often considered to reflect male prurient fantasies and have little connection with actual female behavior—a view exacerbated by modern feminist debates over whether pornography is inherently misogynistic, as well as by the persistant trope of the “obligatory lesbian scene” in modern pornography. But the depiction of lesbian sex in early modern pornography is more contradictory than a simple assumption of male gaze and highlights a significant gap between the image of lesbianism in elite literature and that intended for popular consumption.
This article attempts to recover the historical and social context that pornography had for 17th century readers, separate from the meanings imposed on it by modern analysis. Modern analysis is inevitably filtered through a psychoanalytic lens, which views fantasies of sex as serving psychological needs, especially relieving or displacing anxieties. For example, the presence of a dildo in f/f pornography is interpreted as reassuring the male reader that a penis analogue is indispensable to sexual satisfaction. But interpretations like this can be challenged, not only in a historic context, but in contemporary readings as well.
The main body of 17th century literary pornography (such as The School of Venus, The Dialogues of Luisa Sigea/Satyra Sotadica, and Venus in the Cloister) emerged from a genre of “dialogues between whores” which can be traced back to Lucian’s Dialogues of the Courtesans, with more recent roots in Aretino and the like. Often the 17th century works would directly allude to these antecedents, either in format or in directly claiming the lineage. The new development was to place the dialogues in the mouths of ordinary women rather than prostitutes, sometimes framing them as instructional literature.
Although the economics and sociology of book buying and reading in the 17th century lean towards assuming a male audience, potential female readers should not be discounted; Direct evidence for any specific readers of pornography is rare, but general references to women and girls having access to erotic works (or works with sexual content, such as medical manuals) is recorded, often in disparaging ways. Reading, in this era, was often a social activity, with one person reading aloud to others.
Although the typically-anonymous authorship of pornographic texts is usually consider to be male, the texts themselves are framed through female voices (sometimes attributed to a fictitious female author) and often proclaim themselves to be intended for a female audience. Women were also active in the publishing industry. Claims that the texts themselves provide evidence of “inauthentic” male fantasies in part derive from modern assumptions about what authentic homoerotic experiences ought to look like. If the texts themselves are often contradictory or incoherent, is that proof of inauthenticity or evidence of multiple competing experiences and understandings? The contradictions between pornography and “professional” literature in this area have already been noted.
Traub (“The Perversion of Lesbian Desire”) argues for two dominant models of female homoerotic desire in the early modern period: the “masculine” tribade and the “chaste female friend.” But the protagonists of lesbian pornography fit into neither category. Although reference may be made to such ideas, the central characters are depicted as typically “feminine” women with no anatomical abnormalities. Their sexual activities include mutual acts, contradicting the image of a contrasting active/passive pair. Further, their encounters result in mutual orgasm, despite the absence (mostly) of any penis-analogue. Orgasm can be achieved by manual stimulation, and though dildos may be discussed in the text, they are absent from the women’s beds.
The actual content of these texts thus contradicts the assertions that early modern understandings of lesbianism assumed analogy to male-female relations. In a French context, it’s possible that this reflected harsh legal penalties for women engaged in penetrative sex (though why this should affect texts that include many different modes of transgressive sex is unclear). However English pornographic texts similarly offer few examples of dildo use by female couples (as opposed to being used for solitary pleasure). Exceptions (the examples are ballads) typically involve cross-dressing women who are suggested to have used an artificial penis, not only for disguise, but for sexual activity. This is a decidedly different context from the female-presenting women of the pornographic dialogues. Another context in which dildoes are mentioned in a putatively same-sex context involves men who disguise themselves as women in order to gain sexual access—an access which assumes that women might engage in erotic play together—who then pretends that his actual penis is a dildo to maintain the charade.
The author summarizes that 17th century pornography cannot be classified as merely intended to male consumption. It offers a different take on the possibilities for sex between women than the professional literature of the era. This apparent contradiction can be seen, instead, as illustrating the competing discourses available to readers. Although pornographic texts can’t be viewed as directly representing an “authentic” female experience, they do demonstrate that the popular imagination included the possibility of women engaging in satisfying sex together without the participation of a man, even symbolically.
the_mary_sue_feed
Actor Morgan Freeman, known for Street Smart (1987), The Shawshank Redemption (1994), and the Dark Knight trilogy (2005–2012), may not have been overtly critical of Donald Trump in the past. However, through his support for Democratic individuals over the years, he has made it clear that he is not the biggest fan of the Dorito Dictator. This changed recently when Freeman, in light of recent events in the United States, spoke his mind about Donald Trump without holding back.
Morgan Freeman said a couple of things about Donald Trump and the state of the US under his rule during his recent appearance on MSNBC’s The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell to promote his latest movie, The Gray House. One of the most striking points he made, which has since gained significant attention on social media, including X (formerly Twitter), is that the current US president was a convicted felon and, despite that, holds one of the most important positions in the US and the world, owing to the significant amount of control the country has over nations around the world.
the_mary_sue_feed
President Donald Trump’s response to a reporter regarding the midterm election stoked fear in social media users. The president appeared to hesitate before responding to an unsettling inquiry.
“Are you considering a national emergency around the midterm election?” A reporter asked Trump. “Who told you that?” He responded. “There’s been reporting that there’s a proposed executive order about this.” The reporter clarified and asked Trump again.
the_mary_sue_feed
Members of the American Congress have been expressing their disapproval of President Donald Trump’s military actions against Iran. Fellow Republicans, even those who had formerly supported Trump’s campaign, had lambasted him online.
On February 28, the United States and Israel launched a ‘preemptive’ strike on Iran. In response, Iran retaliated by bombing U.S. bases in Bahrain, Jordan, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the UAE. The choice to bomb Iran did not pass through the U.S. Congress.
the_mary_sue_feed
Despite actively endorsing Donald Trump during the 2024 elections, American conservative commentator and conspiracy theorist Candace Owens has been highly critical of the current administration since he became president of the United States. While she holds problematic views on a multitude of topics, one of the things she has repeatedly advocated for since last year is the freeing of Palestine from Israel. In relation to Israel, she has also often spoken against its control over the United States of America, particularly Donald Trump, who has become a pawn in its hands.
Candace Owens is once again calling Donald Trump out for allying with Israel and waging a war on Iran. In a video circulating on social media, possibly taken from an episode of her podcast, Owens can be seen stressing that Trump’s decision to join Netanyahu in bombing Iran was not an “America first” one and largely benefits only Israel, which is now controlling the US and its actions.
the_mary_sue_feed
Have you ever tried on an outfit that looked perfect in-store, then gone home and realized there’s something deeply wrong with it?
Maybe the zipper gets stuck way too easily. Maybe properly caring for it requires way more work than anyone should be expected to provide a single clothing item. No matter what it is, there can be just a single thing that can completely ruin an outfit.
the_mary_sue_feed
If you’re an animal lover or someone who wants to talk to their pets, beware. You will sob when watching Pixar’s new film Hoppers. Like ugly cry. You have been warned.
The Daniel Chong film follows Mabel (Piper Curda), a girl who has loved animals her entire life and who is dedicated to protecting them. But Mayor Jerry (Jon Hamm) makes that incredibly difficult. The film takes us into the world of the animal kingdom by quite literally putting Mabel in the thick of it. A new technology allows her mind to be placed into a robot beaver and the rest is history.
the_mary_sue_feed
Years after paying Netflix to keep up with exclusive movies and dramas, one question lingers in everyone’s mind: can passwords be shared with someone else? And can more than one person use a Netflix account?
Simply put, people can share one billed account—granted that it’s a Netflix Household Account. A Netflix Household Account isn’t restricted to just profiles. The person watching through an account must be connected to the internet of the main place where Netflix is watched.
askamanager_feedA reader writes:
I have a new employee, Joe, who has been with me about six months. The headline is that he’s pretty terrible. He lacks knowledge, his work is slow and often wrong, he lacks attention to detail, shows no sense of urgency, ownership or understanding of priority, and requires constant hand-holding to even get close to completing tasks. There’s a lot to unpack about him but the short story is: I made a big hiring mistake and I know separately that I need to address it. This letter isn’t quite about that though.
Recently, a distant relative of Joe’s wife’s passed away. That’s sad. He was sending me constant (and unnecessary) updates about it. We have a super generous and broad vacation day policy — everyone gets 30 days a year, it’s easy to take. I told him he didn’t need to worry about keeping me updated during this difficult time; he should feel free to take the time he needed. I would ensure things were covered and we’d circle up when he was back. I want to emphasize here that I believe people should have leave when they experience a death.
That said, he decided to work one day this week. Instead of working, however, he dug through a surprisingly arcane part of our leave policy, one I didn’t know existed, to find an obscure bereavement leave process I was also unaware of. He asked if he could take bereavement leave instead of regular leave. I had no idea about this, so I dig up the HR policy. It was very clear: bereavement leave is only for immediate family (parent, child, spouse) and is only three days. So, I told him that based on my reading of the policy I didn’t think I would be allowed to approve bereavement leave, but I would be happy to approve as much regular leave as he needed. He doesn’t take much time at all, so he had 27 days banked, just for context.
So, again, instead of doing his job, he contacted HR asking if bereavement leave would be allowed for distant relatives especially if he was “close” to the relative. HR wrote back and said “oh yes, of course!” which frustrates me on a separate front. It seems illogical that HR has a clear policy that they apparently don’t require people to follow. As a manager, this makes me look bad when I’m just trying to follow the rules — but whatever! HR stinks. So anyway, he sent this email to me and then promptly requested five days of bereavement leave. Since HR obviously didn’t care about the policy regarding the type of relative, I figured why the heck would they care about the three-day limit — so I approved it. He’s off this week; I hope he’s getting through it.
Except! I’m quite livid about this and seeking your advice to get through it. Joe put more immediate and consistent effort into figuring out how to avoid taking a vacation day than he has on literally anything he’s worked on in six months. I’ve never seen him own, care about, and follow through on something like this. He’s making almost six figures and regularly performing far below his expected level. I’ve started providing constructive feedback, but he always spirals, claiming he’s trying hard and doing his best. He responds to nothing I say about how taking notes during meetings might help him remember things, or that making a to-do list might help, or that he should feel free to ask questions if he’s unsure about something. I’m not mean, I don’t yell, and I don’t convey any of this in a threatening manner. I do my best to be gentle, kind, and encouraging. Nothing seems to work — he’s just consistently an under-performer, except it seems, when it comes to something he cares about, which is apparently not his job or the quality of his work. It’s about ensuring he can maximize time off for the death of a distant relative to whom he has no direct relation. In that case, he was eager to go find information, push for resolution, ask questions, and care about the details.
As he’s been out, I’m just getting mad about this. Now I see that he’s capable of the behaviors required for his job — so he isn’t struggling and in need of mentorship or guidance. He’s capable of doing a good job, but he doesn’t. That’s probably an oversimplification. I do think he lacks many core skills for his job (again, this is my fault regarding hiring, I really messed up).
At the end of this long note, my question for you is: Is there some way I can contextualize and offer feedback to Joe about this situation? That, as his boss, I would like him to try doing his job as well as he did when he was trying not to do his job?
This is hard because I don’t want to misstep and come off as insensitive about death, sadness and emotional stuff. If had told me he wanted to take two weeks off, I would have approved it. We work in a state with generous paid leave; if he wanted a month, I would have helped him navigate that. My core issue here is that he dug deep on something so obscure to achieve an outcome. This is exactly the behavior I wish he’d exhibit at work (owning tasks and driving them to completion), yet I’ve seen him do it zero times until now.
Ultimately, I probably just need to start hard documenting his various failures and get him PIP’d out. But I just genuinely thought he was inexperienced and capable of improvement, so I believed mentorship, guidance, and support would be a path to success that I, as his boss, could provide. I no longer think that.
Beat me up here if I’m being unreasonable – I’ll take the feedback, I promise!
In that case I’m going to say it bluntly: This is more on you than it is on Joe!
It’s on Joe, too. But as his manager, it’s mostly on you.
You have an employee who you describe as “pretty terrible,” who does indeed sound pretty terrible, who doesn’t respond to feedback and hasn’t shown any improvement despite coaching. That’s the problem that has been requiring far more urgency from you, and that would be the case even if the bereavement leave situation never happened.
It sounds like the bereavement situation jolted you into seeing it more clearly, but it’s been the case all along: you need to manage Joe much more actively and be more assertive about resolving the situation one way or the other (meaning that he needs to either raise his performance to a good level in the very near future or you need to replace him with someone else).
But you should not use the death of his relative as a way to say, “This kind of persistence and initiative is what I need from you in your job.” Nor do you need to! You should just start managing him much more closely — which at this point means moving from just coaching to more serious warnings, as well as a clearly structured path that will end with him either making specific improvements by a specific timeline or leaving the job. You needed to be on this path before the bereavement situation; you can get on it now without referencing the bereavement.
On the bereavement leave specifically, I do think you made some weird choices — approving him for five days of leave when the policy only offers three doesn’t make a lot of sense. You’re saying “well, HR clearly doesn’t care about who you can take bereavement for, so they probably don’t care how many days it is either,” but that’s a pretty big leap. When Joe asked for five days, why not contact HR at that point and say, “Joe is asking for five days and my understanding is that it’s only three — can you confirm before I respond?”
On the issue of who he can take the leave for: if this is really a distant relative of his wife who he wasn’t close to himself, then yes, he’s abusing the policy … but do we actually know that? He knew enough to give you play-by-plays of what was happening, so it seems possible that he was closer to this person than you realized. Or maybe not, of course — some people do abuse this kind of situation and stretch the truth when it will benefit them, and maybe that happened here. But it’s not outrageous for your HR to choose to trust him when he said they were close. And yes, HR needs to clarify the policy because otherwise you’ll have people thinking they can’t take the leave for the death of the aunt who raised them, when that’s apparently not their intent, but you leaped really fast to “throw the whole thing out.”
Anyway, the upshot is that you need to manage Joe more assertively. You’re feeling frustrated because you’re not getting what you need from him, but that just means you need to step things up on your side. You have all the power here.
The post my bad employee showed a ton of initiative in a personal situation — can I use that to explain what I need from him at work? appeared first on Ask a Manager.
snopes_feedcakewrecks_feedMarisa F. writes,
"My sister-in-law had a beach destination wedding in Mexico, and decided that she loved this sand castle cake:"
"Upon speaking with the baker, she explained that she understood that the baker may not be able to recreate the cake exactly, but would be happy with something similar. The baker insisted that she could make a cake as equally beautiful. They agreed that the cake would be 3 tiers, with the sand castle on the top.
"On the wedding day, she instead got 3 separate tiers, each topped with its own version of a flesh colored sand castle:
That door and window are what really sell it.
"Luckily, the Bride and guests have a great sense of humor, so the Penis Cake was the hit of the reception."
To be fair, they could also be mushrooms. Really happy, attentive mushrooms.
[insert "fun guy" joke here]
"My sister-in-law was disappointed, of course, but even she had to laugh."
Wow, talk about a good-natured bride! I'm totally sending this to the next newly-wed who e-mails me complaining that her cake's shade of cerulean was a little off. PERSPECTIVE.
Oh, and here's the real kicker:
"After the reception, they discovered that the 'castles' were merely frosting covered Styrofoam, so this cake topper now has a place of honor in the loving couple's home."
Bwahahaa! Now that's my kind of wedding memento!
Thanks to Marisa for letting me use an epic John Cleese pun for the title, even if I couldn't think of any more Fawlty Towers jokes to work into the post. You must excuse me; I'm from Barcelona. (Ok, so that's ONE.)
*****
And from my other blog, Epbot:
unicornduke - craftiesthe_mary_sue_feed - ‘Is your name meme?: Woman says her name almost caused a divorce between her parents because of itsthe_mary_sue_feed - Andrew Tate Thinks He Is Too Smart to Read Books. Maybe He Just Can’t Read?the_mary_sue_feed - German woman shuts down creepy train encounter with an old man by saying ‘thank you’—but her twist lmuccamukk - Music Mondayno_apologies - A Wild Bicorn Approachesaskamanager_feed - I’m afraid my star employee is going to quitbluapapilio - 🔊 Daily musicliveonearth - Morning at homealpennia_feed - Contrasting Views of F/F Sex in the 17th Centurythe_mary_sue_feed - ‘Great power should not act on autopilot’: Morgan Freeman blasts Trump as a ‘convicted felon’ draggithe_mary_sue_feed - ‘Who told you that?’: Donald Trump Dubiously Responds to a Question About the Midterm Electionsthe_mary_sue_feed - ‘This is not America First’: Republicans Oppose Trump’s War Against Iranthe_mary_sue_feed - ‘He’s literally using ‘we’: Even Candace Owens thinks Trump’s decision to team up with Israel againsthe_mary_sue_feed - ‘I have fallen victim to the Old Navy leather Billie fart pants’: Woman finds pants on sale at Old Nthe_mary_sue_feed - ‘Hoppers’ Review: Pixar At Its Finestthe_mary_sue_feed - Does Netflix Still Share Passwords? What the Rules Actually Areaskamanager_feed - my bad employee showed a ton of initiative in a personal situation — can I use that to explain whatsnopes_feed - Why Stevie Wonder appears in Epstein files for refusing to perform for Israeli armycakewrecks_feed - Faulty Towersbranchandroot
