Spectator Life

For most of my life, I was a night owl. Up-and-at-‘em types would tease me for my sleeping-in habits. I’d go on the defensive by saying, yeah, you get up at the crack of dawn, but you’re also in bed by dusk like a nerd, whereas I burn the midnight oil like some mad genius tinkering away with the romantic moon and my fellow nocturnal beasts. I preferred, until relatively recently, to work late rather than get up early to complete tasks. In college, I avoided 8 a.m. classes like Joe Biden avoids news conferences. But deep down, I always longed to be one of those people who was bright-eyed and bushy-tailed first thing in the morning, accomplishing half their to-do list before I had hit the snooze button for the third time. For years, I thought it just wasn’t in the cards.

Today is my 10,369th day of "girlhood". I don't have a bow in my hair, nor am I wearing a Barbie pink dress. But I am still a woman. Because I was born one. Because I am. I will always pray that people suffering from gender dysphoria are able to find peace with who they are. However, I do not have any sympathy for those who play-act as women using hackneyed stereotypes, pretend to speak for us — and then have the stones to tell us we are the problem when we don't comply with their delusion. Such is the case with Dylan Mulvaney. Despite not actually being a woman and even only "identifying" as such for less than a year, Mulvaney has somehow become the woman du jour. Mulvaney is a TikTok influencer with over 8 million followers and a viral series he calls, "Days of Girlhood".

A so-called TikTok "star" went viral this week after complaining to her more than 2 million followers that a ranch prohibited her from riding their horses because she was over the weight limit. Remi Bader, who describes herself as a "curve model" — a new term for plus-size models that sounds "nicer," says former model Anna Shillinglaw — claimed in a TikTok video that Deep Hollow Ranch in Montauk, New York, made her leave because she weighed more than 240 pounds. "I don't really need any opinions on this one," Bader said in response to commenters who noted that horses cannot carry humans above a certain weight without severe strain or injury. "It's the fact of how it wasn't advertised and how poorly it was handled. This was my experience not yours. ...

Parson Weems, the popular author of the early American republic who invented the apocryphal story of George Washington and the cherry tree, achieved his greatest commercial success as a pamphleteer with Hymen’s Recruiting-Sergeant; Or the New Matrimonial Tattoo for Old Bachelors (1799). In this booklet, the amiable old clergyman suggested that young people ought to get married not only for financial security and in order to bring up young Americans but “for pleasure.” His racy pamphlet went into thirteen editions, and copies were still being sold fifty years later. The new report from W. Bradford Wilcox and Nicholas Wolfinger of the Institute for Family Studies has a much less catchy title: Men and Marriage: Debunking the Ball & Chain Myth.