Bracketing, for a moment, what it feels like to wake up, read that the U.S. government has bombed a bunch of young girls at the behest of a dithering old man who gets distracted by gold curtains, then somehow close that tab and check one’s email:
My inbox has been a thing to behold this week.
Each morning since March 1, an extra layer of surrealism awaits me there — which is saying something, since we’re dealing with pretty high baseline surrealism levels lately, IMO. It’s a pink-tinged layer, because, you see, it is Women’s History Month. A month for me. A month for us. A month for being inundated by press releases cheerfully demanding that I spotlight female entrepreneurs.
I’ve mostly embraced a bemused ambivalence about Women’s History Month over the last few years. Because, well, what else am I going to do? Of course it’s absurd that half the population gets a “time peg,” a pat on the back, a slightly-better-than-usual chance of being featured on something for 1/12th of the year. But at a time when women’s rights in the U.S. have backslid by decades at a whiplash-inducing speed, the cognitive chasm between the girlboss corporate feminism gumming up my inbox and the experience of actually existing as a woman in this country has begun to feel brain-breaking.