Alison Rosen, Things I Can and Cannot Understand, Gross Leggings, and more
The leggings are really gross, you guys. Alison isn't. Alison rules.
Hey, guess what! Chicken butt. Yes. Of course. But furthermore: please remember that our show exists because of listener donations. If you’ve donated, THANK YOU. If not, it’s easy: go here, pick a level that works for you, then select DEPRESH MODE from the list of shows.
I like how the world works sometimes
This week’s show is an interview with Alison Rosen of the podcast Alison Rosen Is Your New Best Friend. She must have felt pretty good going into the audition for a show with that name. She must have thought, “My name IS Alison Rosen so I’m a shoo-in to get the job!”
We talk about the things we have in common (interviewing people, trying to be nice, depression) and the things she’s been through that I can’t truly understand (postpartum depression, the unique stress of weight for women in our society, working for Adam Carolla).
Sometimes you won’t be able to fully understand things
And sometimes you won’t realize that you cannot understand those things until you’ve tried to and thought you did.
I’ll explain.
I live in the Twin Cities and in the aftermath of the George Floyd murder last year, I generally kept my mouth shut about stuff like whether riots were justified, the relationship between black people and cops in the Twin Cities, and generally what it all means. Tried to keep my mouth shut. Didn’t always succeed but tried.
Because I had observations but I didn’t have complete understanding. Hadn’t lived it. Felt very little fear when seeing a cop car. And in today’s media landscape, there are a LOT of voices. So I figured I’d just try to push my voice out of the way to give room for the more qualified.
On a less deadly matter, Jill and I were recently watching Lu La Rich, a documentary on the leggings retailer and MLM scam LuLaRoe…
And of course a documentary about that LuLaRoe being a scam will naturally make it out to look pretty bad. And LuLaRoe is pretty bad. It’s a thing where women have to buy thousands of dollars worth of clothes, then try to sell it, AND convince other women to ALSO start selling the clothes too. Then the market gets increasingly flooded, the quality of the clothes declines sharply, and the only way to make any money is for the people on the bottom to get more people under them. It’s like a million other scams that have been going around for years.
“How did these women FALL for this?” I asked Jill, my voice full of judgment.
She explained to me that this company offered the idea of liberation. Women who are often dependent on their husbands’ income with no upward mobility of their own could have a chance to succeed on their own. In a sexist society where even having a job and a family can be difficult for a woman and that job pays less than a man would make, the LuLaRoe model felt like a lifeline for a lot of women.
And I hadn’t understood that. I hadn’t flipped on that part of the empathy machine.
Sometimes the LuLaRoe leggings were so awful that they looked like they had genitalia, which is not a look customers wanted.
Anyway, I had to check my privilege and stop making fun of these women. But I reserve my right to make fun of these leggings.
Alison also hosts the podcast Childish
But I have no problem judging children. I’ll judge them all the day long. And why? Because that’s easy.
Important and deeply odd questions that get asked
Tumblr is still a thing! And over at this one is people from a variety of jobs revealing some of the more strange questions they’ve ever been asked.
Natural History Docent: “A guy asked us ‘If I had a time machine, and managed to kill and cook a T-Rex, what would it have tasted like?’ and every paleontologist on staff decided to take him seriously. They did research to learn about fat distribution, and read up on culinary science to learn what flavors meat, even did chemical analysis on the bones. They concluded that it’d be Tough (no evidence of juicy fat pockets), bitter (carnivores tend to taste foul) and would probably kill him, because heavy metals travel up the food chain and T-Rex accumulated a lot of the cadmium that was in the dirt in the late cretaceous. Wrote him a letter with our findings and he sent us back a drawing of him and his buddies cooking a T-Rex over a fire and all of them throwing up and dying, and it’s my favorite drawing in the whole world.”
Your employer is really good at saying they give a shit about your mental health, not very good at actually giving said shit
This according to an updated study on mental health attitudes in the workplace.
Although employers have responded with initiatives like mental health days or weeks, four-day workweeks, and enhanced counseling benefits or apps, they’re not enough. Employees need and expect sustainable and mentally healthy workplaces, which requires taking on the real work of culture change. It’s not enough to simply offer the latest apps or employ euphemisms like “well-being” or “mental fitness.” Employers must connect what they say to what they actually do.
Being against mental health stigma has become a lot like being against racism or sexism. It’s a good and correct position but also really easy to fake. Saying you support the mental health struggles of your employees - you know, those struggles that the employer put them in and/or exacerbated - is super easy. And there’s very little accountability so when the employers fail to do anything meaningful, they won’t be blamed.
Many of the employers don’t really care if you’re happy or suicidal. They might care in regard to how productive you will be to benefit the company but that’s not the same thing as being human. Or they won’t care at all because they figure you can be replaced. And in those cases, they’ll STILL probably make a show of caring about mental health because it’s good PR that can profit the corporation.
