Sunday Squee: The Toast

The Sunday Squee is when I can talk about things that make me happy and excited. The main focus will be on different things people created, from books to movies to television shows to podcasts, and my effort will be to highlight less commonly known things as a way to share what I love. If you want to join in the Sunday Squee, please link back to me so I can enjoy what you love!

I love The Toast.

For those not in the know, The Toast is a feminish weekly humorish blog that manages such a perfect balance of the raunchy and the sublime that it fair takes my breath away. It's feminist without being more than just academic enough, intersectional without wearing it as a forehead tattoo, and consistently and constantly builds an environment of woman-centered goodness where mostly everyone is welcome. Topics break down along several axis, from the Link Roundups, to the lifesaving How You Can Tell You're in X Story, to Reactions to Art, up to and including critical Pattern Behavior Cartoons, to the If X was Your Boyfriend/Girlfriend series, to Femslash Fridays, and who can forget the gut punching Children's Stories Made Horrific (The Little Mermaid was actually improved by the end, but Beauty and the Beast and the Frog Prince both gained a Lovecraftian horror to them).

What inspired this post was the juxtaposition of An Interview With @AfAmHistFail and The Secret to Having Sex After Giving Birth, both by the indomitable Nichole Cliffe. The former is a hard-hitting, sardonic look at the racism which remains so strongly woven into how US Citizens view our history, and what we're willing to overlook due to nostalgia. Given this was barely any time after the Charleston shootings (Carvell Wallace's poignant letter to his mother ran on The Toast), this was a cogent view of the racism that still exists in the US. The latter is a humorous but serious look at the relationship between people who give birth and their bodies, and is especially notable for the charming framing that reinforces how variable those responses can be and how valid those differences are.  Everyone has their own lived experiences, and their lived experiences are valid and important. The Toast is a place to read the comments, and below that post is a bevy of people comforting each other and finding common ground on experiences they thought they were isolated within and now find they are not. It's beautiful, touching, and incredibly funny. Whether it's for humor or for pathos, I find myself reading The Toast with glee and usually learning something in the process about being a woman, about being a feminist, and about being a good human being.

Other notable posts:

• Books That Literally All White Men Own (with it's follow up about Favorite Responses).
• Women Having a Terrible Time at Parties in Western Art History
• How I Learned to Love my Skin Color
• A Linguist Explains the Grammar of Doge. Wow.
• On Harriet Vane and Lord Peter Wimsey: An Essay with Personal Interruptions
• Positive I Don’t Have a Uterus
• A Country Called My Mother
• Sorry I Murdered Everyone, But I’m An Introvert (I am an introvert, too...)
• The Right Words to Say: On Being Read as White
• Notes On Other Household Appliances From William Carlos Williams

I recommend deep dives into the history of The Toast, for there are many gems there!