allison’s Reviews > On Womanhood: Bodies, Literature, Choice > Status Update

“her only hobbies are going to a ballet studio that closes in the first episode, and renting a motel room where she methodically eats her way through cheeseburgers, vomits, showers, and then sits meditative between sheets that still smell of grease.” love

“…paradox of female fertility: the ability to reproduce is both a lifeline and a life sentence. As Moira Weigel wrote in a review of Hulu’s The Handmaid’s Tale, ‘the one thing that gives you value in society is the very thing for which you are hated.’”

“The very first sentence of pride & prejudice is a wink; a statement that single men in possession of good fortunes must be in want of a wife, when all Austen’s readers know the opposite to be true—single women with no fortune or means to speak of are very much in need of husbands.”

“School is where you learn what you are worth. Not your actual value as a human being, but your social worth, an arbitrary appraisal by others that’s inherently flawed yet hard to shake, even in adulthood.”