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Cupcake redux

Caperton

A post a few weeks ago about girliness, gardening, cupcakes, and Sigourney Weaver was the focus of some amount of passion from women who happen to love cupcakes, gardening, and/or Sigourney Weaver in equal parts. One member of those ranks is, apparently, original post author Peg Aloi, who had the following to say in our fair comments:

Peg:
Gosh. I had no idea this would stir up such anonymity. For the record, I am a feminist, a professional gardener and a professional baker (cupcakes my specialty in fact)! I was hired to write this piece for a website I work for (not HuffPo) and was given a topic and slant the editors wished me to use. I suppose my intentions were misconstrued as I was hoping there was plenty of tongue-in-cheek attitude to balance out my complaining. Also, my bio for the piece originally mentioned I was a professional gardener and baker, but that was edited out by the PR guy who gave it to HuffPo, so the irony was not there to help folks discern my stance, I guess.

Gardening is definitely for for wusses! I work my ass off at it and come home sweaty, dirty and tired from my professional landscaping gigs. I do everything on my own, no male helpers of big equipment. Maybe I should blog about that instead??? And for the record, Cupcakes Take the Cake and Garden Rant are two of my favorite blogs.

Anyway, mea culpa! I meant no offense to anyone who is a badass gardener, baker, knitter, fashionista or otherwise engaged in some artful domestic pursuit. I am one of you…

One of us. One of us.

So there’s that. And now it’s time to put it all behind us and celebrate with red velvet cupcakes and a showing of Alien.

7 thoughts on Cupcake redux

  1. She means animosity rather than anonymity, right?

    Also, not buying it. The original post was positively steeped in contempt towards girly things. I’m someone who does find childishness in adults a bit offputting, so I even agreed with some of her points, but the way she made them was not very feminist at all.

  4. I don’t buy it either. This woman needs to learn to write better if she doesn’t want her writing to be “misinterpreted”. Mentioning her profession wouldn’t have been enough to make these phrases seem ironic.
    “…it does indeed appear that we’ve lost sight of what it means to be a badass, strong, tough woman…
    “… This weird retro world of cooking, heirloom tomatoes and Jane Austen is starting to feel a bit smug and smothering.”
    “…a genre normally full of victims. Let’s hope tough gals become a new trend.”
    Her “tongue-in-cheek!” “misinterpreted!” comment doesn’t help. I suppose “anonymity” was mean to be “enmity” or “acrimony”, but I can’t work out whether “Gardening is definitely for wusses” is meant to be ironic, was typed too fast, or is just more of the same “crafts! yuck!” content as the original article.

  5. Um, okay. It’s good to know that she is willing to trash large swathes of women because her editor wanted that “slant.” “Feminism” means a lot of things to different people, but to me a pretty big component is standing the fuck up for other women/yourself as a woman, whether it’s expedient to do so or not. So: no she’s not one of me because I don’t happen to value a paycheck and resume at all cost to my ideals.

    And I’m very not so big on the manipulativeness of her last line! We’re not a goddamned membership club, the ladies of the feminist persuasion. We’re ladies that like to think independently, as best I can tell, and that ladies’ “solidarity” crap is so, so often a way to stifle dissent. Men don’t waiver all rights to independent thinking because of their mutual dudeliness; I would really like to think the same is true of the un-dudes.

  6. Anybody that wants my Jane Austen will have to pry it from my cold, dead hands, over the pile of bodies of people who tried before them. If there’s two things in this world I like, it’s violent video games with big guns and Jane Austen.

  7. She disses cupcakes *majorly* and then she says she’s a professional baker? WTF? Where does HuffPo get its writers? Really.

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