🦡 Possums, Unrealistic Beauty Standards, & Kenny Ortega Scholarship: Lil Treasures #333

Happy 333rd edition of Lil Treasures, which means we’ve been gathering here on Fridays for a little over six years (is that right, math is hard). Last week I mentioned I was in Hoochatown (it’s really Hochatown, but we all call it Hoochatown), Oklahoma for family reunion. We kayaked (I kayaked with an eight-year-old, which is kind of like kayaking with a possum), we swam, and on our last night, we attempted friendship with an actual possum. He did not receive my cousin’s tortilla offering in the spirit of benevolence in which it was meant, but a rousing good time nonetheless.

Before we get started, I just wanted to give you a heads up that I’m reviewing a recent read that focuses on sexual assault, so if that is something you’d like to avoid, please skip the “What I Read This Week” section.

I have the links and the good shares for you now:

🪭 Discovering that Zohran Mamdani still can’t get over Kacey Musgraves’ Golden Hour album is such a delightful piece of pop culture nonsense. Can’t you see him bopping around Gracie Mansion humming “High Horse”?

💄 This essay from Jia Tolentino, “Our Plastic Surgery Nightmare,” is a fantastic look at the new beauty standards for men and women. Like please this banger:

“…no one understands quite like a model, or maybe even like “any woman in general,” that beauty involves labor and performance. The comically tangled impulses here—the admiration of women who organize their lives around their looks, the disgust toward women who could be so superficial as to organize their lives around looks—can only develop in the absence of real intimacy, of regular exposure to women in their actual natural state. Such thoughts also make real intimacy increasingly impossible. The corporeal self—the face and the body that respond to the presence of another—retreats into the shiny carapace of the commodity, and wonders, from this hidden vantage point, if it will ever be known.”

💃 It’s beautiful to be seen, and I know I am because about a million of you shared jenna.sais.quoi.paris’s series on Boy Dance, knowing that I would, in fact, love it. My favorite is the one where she breaks down Zac Efron’s performance in the High School Musical 3 song, Scream. Anyone who takes a scholarly approach to Kenny Ortega is my kind of academic.

📚 What I Read This Week:

The Secret History of the Rape Kit by Pagan Kennedy ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

A quick listen (a little over five hours, read by Claire Danes), this book expands on Pagan Kennedy’s New York Times Sunday Review deep dive into how the rape kit came to be, why there is a massive backlog, and functions as an American history lesson on the way we’ve understood and criminalized sexual assault. While walking us through the concept of rape even being a crime (???!!!), Kennedy focuses in on Marty Goddard, the Chicago activist who helped develop and create the rape kit, as well as brought awareness and training to police departments around the country in how they processed sexual assault. This is certainly not a light-hearted read, but a truly fascinating look at the struggle to get doctors and law enforcement to take sexual assault seriously.

🎧 This Week’s Pods:

Evan and I talked through listener comments about the ways pop culture has discipled us (for better or for worse). We unpack The Good Place, Broadway musicals, and, strangely enough, Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride at Disney. Because of course.

This week on Shelf Respect, we’re behind the paywall to chat about our most recent reads for a Shelf Reflections episode. Hear about what we hated and what we loved with a free 7-day trial.

This Week’s Essay:

✝️ Honestly what does "biblical" even mean?

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Jul 22

Earlier this month, an article from The Atlantic was passed around our Shelf Respect Slack channel: The End of Reading is Here. If the title sounds depressing, the contents are apocalyptic: In 2022, less than half of American adults read any book at all. In 2023, the percentage of Americans who read for pleasure was 16%, dropping from 28% in 2004. American adults are reading books meant for young adults, no one is reading the newspaper anymore, and reading scores are down.

Shall we treasure?

I hope you all have the best weekend possibly available to you, I hope you thrive in ways heretofore unknown by humankind, I hope something lovely happens to you.

Love you mean it,

Erin