Tag / feminism

Rory holds a cup of coffee.
by Nerdy Spice

Meet Adversion’s readers: random ‘ships, important questions about Rory and Lorelai’s schedule, and a lot of people who hated Arrival

Hello loyal readers! We know some of you by name or handle–cool internet peeps who subscribe or post or comment, plus, of course, our moms and college roommates.

But who are the OTHER visitors who make up the rest of our [uhm, insert modest number here] visitors a month? The people who maybe stop by once, only to find the perfect listicle–or to be bitterly disappointed? We decided to get to know them… by looking into the search terms that led people here.

Of course there are the expected people who came searching for Dawson’s Creek recaps or that perfect quote from Romy and Michele. But the rest are a fascinating and motley crew. Here is an unofficial and incomplete taxonomy of our search engine visitors:

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by Janes

Breaking Bad Hatewatch: Pilot

A classic pilot! And it’s actually a pretty good one, in the sense that, like all the best pilots, it’s a microcosm of the whole. This series premiere captures everything I admire, and exemplifies everything I find completely facile about Breaking Bad. Continue reading →

by Janes

Breaking Bad Hatewatch: Kickoff

It would be a giant understatement to call this an “unpopular opinion,” but I just don’t like Breaking Bad. I don’t super enjoy watching it, which would be fine–there are a lot of great shows that I admire even as they’re not to my taste. But in this case, even the admiration factor is pretty low. Beyond simple enjoyment, I just don’t think Breaking Bad is that great a show. Continue reading →

by Nerdy Spice

The Great Dawson’s Creek Rewatch Project: Season 4, Episodes 13-15

We’re rewatching all of Dawson’s Creek in honor of its twentieth anniversary. Will require some mind-numbing. Drinking game rules can be found here.

Season 4, Episode 13 “Hopeless”

By Nerdy Spice

Joey and Pacey are seen at middle distance through a window, their foreheads touching.

In an episode that embodies the classic, largely extinct phenomenon known as the “pre-February-sweeps filler episode,” Joey strikes a devil’s bargain with Mrs. Valentine to get time off for the senior trip. The sitch is that Pacey and Joey have to accompany Drue on his date with Anna Evans, the daughter of the head of the board, which Mrs. Valentine forced him to go on in order to further her social ascent or something. Mrs. Valentine lays out what we writers like to call “the stakes” in highly literal terms: “If she does [have a nice time], the days off are yours.” Little does she know how high the stakes actually are: no less than Joey Potter’s seemingly indestructible virginity is at stake. Buuut more on that from Janes later.

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by Nerdy Spice

[Dietland 1×05] Is my friend Kitty kind of evil?

Every week our fake advice column answers a question from a character on Dietland.

Dear Adversion,

First-time writer here. My name’s Cheryl, and I’m a newscaster with Austen Media. And I’m worried Kitty Montgomery has gone Off. The. Rails.

To be honest my alliance with her was always a little bit… involuntary, you might say. She’s got an in (if you know what I mean) with Stanley, the mogul of the Austen family that owns my TV network. And she’s effing devious. If I weren’t aligned with her, she’d have made my life hell. But also, I mean, we have a lot in common. We both care about fitness and our careers so much. She’s an awesome workout partner, and she’s really fun when she’s in a good mood, like when you get her drunk and she actually eats something (because it takes the edge off her hanger), or like when she’s just delivered a really satisfying tongue-lashing to a subordinate.

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by Nerdy Spice

[Dietland 1×04] How do I know if he likes-me-likes-me?

Every week our fake advice column answers a question from a character on Dietland.

Dear Adversion,

So, I kind of made a deposit on my weight-loss surgery today.

As you know, Verena and her organization, Calliope House, had offered me all this money to go through some kind of awareness-raising program. I was going to use the money to get the surgery, but the program sucked! First, I went off my meds and did some pretty bonkers stuff. This week, it got even worse.

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by Nerdy Spice

[Dietland 1×03] Oh God, THE SHAME.

Every week our fake advice column answers a question from a character on Dietland.

Dear Adversion,

YOU HAVE TO HELP ME.

OK, so I took your advice from last week. I threw out all my meds, and I went back to this woman Verena Baptist and told her I was in for whatever her super secret happiness plan was. And she told me that her plan was all about being kind to myself, and wrote me the promised check for twenty grand ahead of time! So far, so good, right?

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A white woman (right) with plain makeup and hair opens her mouth as a pretty, well-coifed black woman (left) leans in and presses a red lipstick to her lower lip.
by Nerdy Spice

[Dietland 1×01-2] Should I Go Off My Meds For Twenty Grand?

Every week our fake advice column answers a question from a character on Dietland.

Dear Adversion,

My name is Plum Kettle. Recently I’ve been trying to drop enough weight to qualify for weight-loss surgery. It took all I had just to lose a pound this week, and I still have fifteen more to go before I qualify for surgery. I’ve been working as a ghostwriter for an online advice column (solidarity, sister!) at a beauty website called Daisy Chain owned by a big conglomerate called Austen Media. The site’s run by Kitty, a gorgeous red-haired woman with terrifyingly taut biceps, who treats me like shit and has an inflated notion of her own brilliance. I like to write fiction on the side, but it’s not going anywhere, and I don’t date because guys never look at me because, as you probably gathered, I’m fat.

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Woman in dumb white pantsuit (Cristal) swaying on a petal-strewn wedding aisle. Two bridesmaids in pale pink behind her.
by Nerdy Spice

Dynasty Recap: 1×01 “I Hardly Recognized You”

The first people to appear onscreen in the series premiere of Dynasty, Josh Schwartz’s modernized remake of the classic show, are the Trumps: Donald, Ivanka, Tiffany, Trump Junior, and Eric are at a ribbon cutting ceremony. This is followed by a shot of the Kardashians.

I take this as a declaration of intent: Like Gossip Girl and The OC before it, the latest Josh Schwartz creation is going to be about rich people. But this time it’s not those quiet, repressed, Emily Gilmore-type rich people who seem to throw big parties precisely in order to avoid having scenes. These are rich people who throw parties in order to have more witnesses when they do make a scene. These are rich people for the age of reality TV! We aren’t on the Upper East Side anymore, baby.

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by Nerdy Spice

Women Upstairs: On Claire Messud’s The Burning Girl

“My mother assures me that it happens to everyone, sooner or later,” says Julia, the narrator of Claire Messud’s new novel The Burning Girl; “…everyone loses a best friend at some point.”

Julia is quiet, cautious, and sensitive; her soon-to-be-lost best friend is Cassie, a fragile-looking, “troubled” girl, much more daring and eventually more popular. As Dwight Garner observed in The New York Times, “This pairing is a familiar one”–so many other novels about female friendships, from my favorite YA novel Someone Like You to recent literary phenom My Brilliant Friend, seem to feature the same general contrast. And it seems to be the universal inclination of writers (many of whom are quiet and sensitive) to narrate from the point of view of the less daring, the less dynamic friend—the friend with less story to tell. The narrator then spends so much time looking at her friend, watching her, resisting her stories rather than driving forward her own, that the novel’s center of gravity rests between narrator and friend, rather than centering on the narrator.

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