In 2007, blogs were the dominant form of social media; the word “meme” referred to a prompt designed to inspire actual human beings to write their own entries; and a woman using the handle Yano had a blog called “Yano What I Mean,” where she helped other bloggers by sharing her weekly “10 on Tuesday” meme.
I don’t know where Yano went. Her website appears to be defunct, and the address redirects to what appears to be a link farm written in a dialect of Chinese that Google refuses to translate. But I think of her now and then and wonder how she’s doing.
I was feeling nostalgic this evening, so I searched my own archive and found a series of posts I’d written in response to her 10 on Tuesday prompts. I thought it might be interesting to revisit them and see how my lists have changed.
Here’s an updated version of the first one I did, back in November 2007:
10 Reasons Why It’s Great to Be a Woman
1. Free Milk Duds at Lou Mitchell’s.
That’s all I’ve got.
My greatest joys come from things like teaching middle school, training dogs, reading, writing, and creating artwork, none of which is gender-dependent. Platform heels made my list in November 2007; today, if your event is too formal for Birkenstocks, you can safely assume I’m going to blow it off. My original list praised the storage capacities of purses, but I swapped them for jeans with deep pockets in 2019 and cargo pants last year and haven’t looked back. At 32, I felt all warm and fuzzy whenever I impressed old guys by demonstrating competence with tools, but at 48, I just find that sort of nonsense patronizing: I change my own flats and fix my own toilet because I’m a responsible grownup who doesn’t have time to fart around waiting for a tow truck or a plumber to come to the rescue.
Apparently I have completely outgrown this 10 on Tuesday topic, but that’s OK. The prompt still served its purpose, as it gave me an excuse to look back and consider how my understanding of gender politics has evolved over the past 16 years.
Emily