Feeling All the Feelings

My woman brain won't let me write a post. Okay, I'm sort of kidding, but after reading two books that insist that women's brains are inherently different from men's--wired for emotions, wired for caution--I think I'm starting to believe it.

Seriously, though, I haven't been able to finish a post to put on this blog. I missed my deadline yesterday, and now, here I am typing a placeholder post, just so I don't feel like a complete failure.

I got stuck for a few reasons. One, I read two books that were so full of gender nonsense that my brain got scrambled. Two, I read a great first-person article on Vox that got me thinking about race and gender and the intersection of the two and the fact that I have an interracial marriage and an interracial child, which is something I rarely think about, and, wait, why don't I think about it more? Three, I started to really doubt my ability to say anything meaningful, a feeling that only made me wonder if I really do have a stupid female brain that is keeping me from succeeding by constantly undermining me with self-doubt.

Obviously, I've got a lot of stuff going on. I'm a thinker. I'm an overthinker. So, at least now you know what you're getting into if you follow this blog. I will think stuff to death. But I'll try to do it on my own time and only give you the edited version.

I'll leave you with a quote from that Vox article, "I Never Noticed How Racist So Many Children's Books Are Until I Started Reading to My Kids" by Leigh Anderson:

The YA writer Shannon Hale notes that when she speaks at school assemblies, the administrations often will grant girls permission to attend her lectures, but not boys. For male authors writing books with male protagonists, the school will allow both boys and girls to attend. Hale writes: "[T]he idea that girls should read about and understand boys but that boys don't have to read about girls, that boys aren't expected to understand and empathize with the female population of the world...this belief leads directly to rape culture." It's not a far leap to imagine that white children reading only about white children will stunt their empathy for people of other races.