Jumanji
Azealia Banks
“Jumanji”
-Azealia Banks
June 2012
It matters whether women sit at the table. No one speaks up for you when you are standing outside with your nose pressed up against the glass. You cannot window-shop for power. But we still listen with a touch of suspicion when women share their desires to achieve the extraordinary. When a young women starts talking about her career aspirations, the next question on the script seems to be whether she’s thought about starting a family.
And while both Slaughter and Sandberg explicitly aimed their remarks at professional women, there is also, of course, a very real class component to this conversation that cannot be ignored. As the daughter of one of the “Walmart moms” mentioned in Slaughter’s piece, I grew up around women who hustled to work one and often two unfulfilling jobs for lousy pay so they could give their children every opportunity. As the daughters of those women, we were surrounded by constant hustle, and we learned early on why education, financial security and hard work mattered. When we talked about our futures, my friends and I, we did not talk about stepping back, only pushing ahead, because we saw firsthand the crushing personal heartbreak created by “dreams deferred.”
It wasn’t until I spent a lot of time around the middle and upper classes that I met women who seemed afraid to aim too high. I couldn’t help wondering whether ambition seemed audacious to them because no one hunts for a ticket out of comfort. And now, having worked through two pregnancies, I still find it odd when strangers ask me in professional settings how I am planning to balance “it all.” It’s such a profoundly personal question that it doesn’t seem to deserve a response. But the answer is that the women I knew as a kid did much more with far less and simply got on with it, and I use their example as my guide.
From “We Need To Tell Girls They Can Have It All (Even If They Can’t)” - The Atlantic
The framing of that whole piece about “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All” felt like cheap baiting (even though I think the piece itself at least tries to ask some real questions and make observations about how society hasn’t progressed at the same pace as ambitious women), but I really dug this part of Gayle Lemmon’s response to it, on a personal tip.
when you think about it, the song ‘let the bodies hit the floor” is really just a darker version of ‘it’s raining men’
Apparently “Google” is the most searched term in Bing.
