- Joined
- Mar 10, 2023
So who in yon polycule gets the federal tax credit for having a dependent child? Since they're calling themselves The Laverys, I guess it's Joe and Mal if they're filing jointly and Joe if they're filing separately.
Grace Lavery / Joseph Lavery & Daniel M. Lavery / Mallory Ortberg - "Straight with extra steps" couple trooning out to avoid "dwindling into mere heterosexuality"
- Thread starter CobraPlissken
- Start date
- Joined
- Dec 31, 2018
- Joined
- Jun 13, 2016
Good thing Mallory sold that stupid house she bought in Oakland when interest rates were stupid low. Lucky she’s in the renters paradise that is current NYC, where Jos is truly happy.
- Joined
- Mar 12, 2021
Agreed, they could have hired editors off the advance and set up a schedule of themed content. Not that it would have succeeded, but it would have provided something. They didn't even use that time to set up alternate blogs or audiences on Ghost or similar, since their problem was with Substack. Because how many times has Joe updated the blog on his website? Not once.
But I think, like the proposed terf debate, Joe couldn't handle the clowning he got from the trans community for being Substack's token trans writer. That basically sealed the deal for him to not even try to build anything. Even Gretchen Felker-Martin, whose writing also sucks, writes regular TV/movie reviews that are coherent to general audiences. When Joe tries this, we get that sitcom book, saying things that interest no one about shows that he doesn't even bother to watch.
And she clearly invested the money she made from the house wisely. Why else would she be taking barely over minimum wage jobs?
Prescription Bugs
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- May 3, 2021
Some people continue to be diehard commies once they have kids, but a goodly portion of them realize that the only ally their kids really have is them. Society’s rules aren’t changing any time soon. The ones who see how the world works realize that the income they produce and the experiences they give their children directly affect where they end up. The smart ones realize they have to manage their money and reputations. If they don’t, then their kids get to live with no money and embarrassing parents.
Maybe New York is different and you don’t have to be at least mediocre rich to make it doable and fun to raise kids, but somehow I doubt it.
They could swing it in Michigan though. They could be the cool, worldly people with a nice house and great educational opportunities there.
They might go the route of embedding their Lily-white, pampered, well penetrated butts into poor, minority New York communities and schools, to really prove that they are hardcore leftists. Then maybe they will do their own version of Nickel and Dimed in America or Ehrenreich’s pet project Maid. They will gain attention through their fake, self imposed poverty and get woke “missionary” points for it all. That’s one thing they haven’t tried yet, but I bet they will soon. They’ve got to keep finding ways to be special and sympathized with or they’ve got to find some humor. Right now both are lacking. People are sick of people like them and they aren’t funny at all. Butt jokes and whimsical imagined conversations only go so far.
They must differentiate themselves and fast or they may fall into heteronormative, vanilla, wasp obscurity real soon.
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- Joined
- Jun 13, 2016
Don’t be under the delusion that the throuple is going to make a child any sort of priority. Selfish vapid people have kids for various reasons but the kids don’t become a priority over their own desires, but an inconvenience. The people you are writing about are parents who decide they need to put the needs of their children over their own and others. Joe would also never move to a real POC neighborhood or role play among the proletariat. The proletariat need to look to Joe to find their way out of darkness.
Basically Joe isn’t going to alter his aspirational life for a baby. These are people that think they won’t have to change their lifestyle to be a parent. Bobby Joe is like adding a tiny roommate to the household! They believe raising a baby will showcase the fruits of their superior and enlightened lifestyle. Lmao.
I don’t think anyone can figure out the logic behind Joe and Lilly deciding to become breeders, not even Joe himself. They’ve never offered any insight on how they went from embracing urban childless queer gender fluid lifestyle is the best, to wanting to play mommy and daddy. I honestly think Joe was all out of new ideas to try and distract him from his own existence. He seems to have run through the entire degenerate playbook without satisfaction.
He may have finally circled back to heteronormative, traditional “children give life meaning” thinking. Joe has a very meaningless life and yet seems hyper fixated on “meaning” to the extent he’s studied English lit /critical theory and has spent countless hours in psychoanalysis. Joe has tried two marriages, changing countries and then states regularly, he was unhappy and “burnt out” once he achieved the tenured professor goal, took estrogen and RP as a woman, marriage again, moved again, participated in queer orgies RP as a woman, played “trans scholar” and got another girlfriend…he still felt empty and unsatisfied. He is a middle aged empty vessel and Bobby Joe isn’t going to change that, but having a child was one thing he had not yet tried. Joe is a needy vampire that can only take and demand, and he will remain one.
Also Joe fancies himself a “writer” so needs content so he can churn out garbage books that nobody reads. Nobody was interested in his fat, middle aged trans-orgy adventure. He had resorted to writing about TV sitcoms ffs, which I’m pretty sure fueled the idea of having a kid. Joe will try to write some insufferable book about a queer parent raising a child to totally upend the dominant child rearing norms!
I kept hoping someone in their echo chamber might query their seemingly 180 life decision to breed, but if so I never saw it, never a hint even. One day Joe is dreaming of trans abortions and Mallory is happily chirping “mamas don’t let your babies grow up to be breeders” and the next her husband is announcing he’s expecting with his girlfriend. Crickets.
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- Joined
- Dec 17, 2019
He is a middle aged
- Joined
- Mar 10, 2023
So Joe's getting less and less attention. The Reaction Factory seems to find him dull. No one's shocked by the utterances of a jowly, pretentious troon. They seem to think he's a nobody. Eeeek. Joe begins tweeting about a babby. Joe! Joe! Joe! Joe! Joe!
Babby is born. Joe contacts the tabloids about his babby and his motherhood and his harem. Joe! Joe! Joe! Joe! Joe!
I'd bet something similar had been happening within the polycule. Work was a drag. People weren't giving him money for being Joe like Substack had. Mal was going to NZ, finishing a book, sticking with Substack, the whole thing was getting very middle-aged and middle class.
Having Lilly in bed or in the selfies wasn't lighting any fires anymore. It wasn't even humiliating Mal very much anymore. How does Joe control Mal and Lilly and make himself the center of attention? A babby! Joe! Joe! Joe! Joe! Joe!
Or in just five words:
Babby is born. Joe contacts the tabloids about his babby and his motherhood and his harem. Joe! Joe! Joe! Joe! Joe!
I'd bet something similar had been happening within the polycule. Work was a drag. People weren't giving him money for being Joe like Substack had. Mal was going to NZ, finishing a book, sticking with Substack, the whole thing was getting very middle-aged and middle class.
Having Lilly in bed or in the selfies wasn't lighting any fires anymore. It wasn't even humiliating Mal very much anymore. How does Joe control Mal and Lilly and make himself the center of attention? A babby! Joe! Joe! Joe! Joe! Joe!
Or in just five words:
- Joined
- Dec 17, 2019
* Jowly
* Severely undershot
* British teef
* Jaundiced
* FAT
Pretty sure this ugly POS starred in a B movie...
- Joined
- Jan 4, 2020
I am almost certain that baby was a spontaneous decision made within a period of one day to three weeks time with absolutely no fucking forethought aside from "Would you like asspats and a protégé who will become the golden child of the queer humanities community?"
They're not disciplined or smart, they're just well studied. They don't want the burden of responsibility that comes with foresight, living in the moment is more pleasurable and romantic (at the moment) and they're going to get a trainwreck pileup of bad "in the moment" choices soon enough.
This implies Joe has people who want to hear what he says outside of a niche enough audience that either barely has money (welfare troons) or college kool-aid drinkers that like him (so very small).
Joe makes me want to commit murder just to stop reading his work. Even his tweets have me clawing at the walls.
What does work for troons & poons? What is their wheelhouse of appeal? I'm guessing sexual talk and calls to violent actions for troons, but what about pooners? I think enbies can be classified under the quirky girl umbrella thought.
It's the funniest shit if she decided to have the poor kid as an assertion of dominace. Try to establish being the queen, end up fucking miserable with or without Joe as long as she has the kid.
It's tragic as fuck for Rocco though. F, I hope he doesn't curate a personality disorder or horrid shallowness like both of his parents.
>Joe reducing himself to fucking MICHIGAN, a COMMONER'S state?
>Joe suffers filthy poor people?
>Lilly and Mallory have to be around possible gangbangers?
Yeah, they're fucked.
Do you think it is genetics or by raising? And would anything ever cure him? I don't think he'll ever stop being empty. It might be something that medication can't even cure.
Speaking of empty vessels, I'm wondering what is underneath Mallory, if anything. She seems to be childish and a bit of a brat at heart when people not in her circle talk about her, and beyond that, seems to keep up one facade of writing only. I'm terrified for her that there's nothing underneath.
- Joined
- Feb 25, 2021
Joe vagueposted about having to go off of his meds for a while, in what later turned out to have been the lead-up to conception, so it was at least that premeditated.
Not the part about funding and who's going to take care of the baby, but the part about Joe's genitals got due consideration.
- Joined
- Jan 12, 2022
Gay fanfiction where at least one of the dudes has a vagina and they monologue about pronouns.
- Joined
- Jun 13, 2016
Both, but the raising (nurture) is the primary cause. We don’t know much about his mom and grandma, but I’m going to guess there were female personality disorders in mom or maybe both.
Joe’s father wanting nothing to do with him or his mum, yet happily raising children with his wife, certainly affected him. I don’t know when he found out the truth vs how long his mum fed him the Thornbirds teleplay, but both were damaging. It’s sad that he will damage Bobby Joe by being some freaky confusing mee-maw daddy in a gaudy dress.
Joe will always be an empty vessel but personality disorders tend to mellow with age. Joe deciding to have a baby reads to me as some acceptance he was a fat, middle aged man and trying to act like a hip, horny, 25 year old FTM in the big city had finally started to feel embarrassing.
Deciding to have a kid probably has something to do with his career disappointment and decline in academia. He’s been falling well behind his peers in achievement markers. The polycule looks a bit silly next to actual families, so Joe thinks maybe a baby could fix that. Joe is ambitious, he managed to get tenure at Berkeley before 40. He’s published several books that dozens of people have read. Post-tenure depression is fairly common and Joe seemed to get hit hard by it. He jumped into marriage #3, decided to change his gender and moved far away from the school he had just gotten tenure at. I think some regret for the rash extremism, and the ensuing fallout, might have started to set in this past year for him.
(Ironically, for Joe, most people say the “cure” for post-tenure depression is to really get involved with your students and help them further their pursuits and goals. Cooperation, not competition, post-tenure. Joe is not capable of this sort of unselfish behavior, cannot derive joy from it. It would be a personal hell for him to authentically help students with no personal ulterior motive. He probably started deeply resenting the young, carefree, wealthy, students too.
Bobby Joe will not magically transform Joe into a stable, decent human being. Medication certainly won’t cure him either. Estrogen didn’t magically make him any better or maternal. Psychoanalysis just lets him wallow in his juices, which he enjoys.
I predict Bobby Joe will watch his dad move plenty more times, he will meet lots Dad’s new girlfriends, probably not see Dad very much for a year or two at a time when the trouple implodes and he has nervous breakdown or new relationships. After dramatic upheaval and absence Joe will then suddenly want to see and cling to his dear son because he’s alienated everyone else (again). Bobby Joe will eventually become his go-to when he doesn’t have an adult women giving him attention and that will become common given his increasing age and track record. The ladies aren’t going to be lining up to fulfill the thrice divorced, fat, gout ridden man’s polycule dreams. Unfortunately for Bobby, his dad wants to get attention, not give it, so I don’t see the relationship being very healthy. Bobby will just start to resent his selfish, flakey, self-obsessed mum-dad who’s only interested in him when he’s not getting enough attention elsewhere.
Mallory is a mystery. I see her writing persona as an intellectualized character she created, but not an authentic reflection of her actual self. What she has subjected herself to with Joe is hard to fathom. Her intellect is in conflict with her underdeveloped emotional life/ social skills. For all her witty feminist writing it seems she really wanted to submit to male authority. I think she somehow reconciled this by role playing a man, and Joe helped by role-playing a woman. She even took her “wife’s” surname. Lmao.
So now it’s all very woke and the “man” is submitting to the “woman”. It’s hilariously convoluted but it’s how Mallory, sorry Mr. Lavery, can explain what amounts to living as a submissive, fundamentalist Mormon sister wife in Brooklyn. (But at least a Mormon sister wife would demand to have her own children, not just raise her sister-wife’s child) Luckily Mallory had kept company manners around the sister wife until recently, just like a well-bred lady should do.
The sunk cost fallacy is so enormous I’m not sure if there’s any line in the sand for her. Imagine telling Mallory Ortberg circa 2014 about her future as a cuck and sister wife. “Oh yes you will get married, but your husband will have a baby with the another woman that he’s more attracted to, but you can babysit.” It’s like a genie wish.
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- Feb 15, 2019
Just noticed a funny well-intentioned comment on Mallory's Insta post of herself holding Rocco:
lol. This guy has no idea Mallory isn't even related to the baby.
lol. This guy has no idea Mallory isn't even related to the baby.
- Joined
- Apr 6, 2019
Well they are both bald with fat faces.Just noticed a funny well-intentioned comment on Mallory's Insta post of herself holding Rocco:
View attachment 5964040
View attachment 5964041
lol. This guy has no idea Mallory isn't even related to the baby.
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- Jan 26, 2020
I find it strange that Mal has never really bothered to pretend to be a man. She changed her appearance, but surely the whole point of troonism is that the 'gender' manifests in the inner self, not the outer. But she just went right along being an agony aunt (very female coded), if anything she took on the persona of a young, naïve, woke college student (also pretty female coded). Then she wrote a book about women in a women's hotel and now is writing about babies. Does she have one single solitary masculine hobby?
So now, half her original audience went and quietly became TERFs, so they aren't interested in what she has to say. The other half think she's supposed to be a man and listening to men's voices for women's issues is against their code of wokeness. The new, young, woke generation don't have much respect for quirky bookish women (boring, or lesbians, who are the back to being the most uncool thing you can possibly imagine, and probably terfy also) and also think that she is an actual man.
She doesn't fit in anywhere.
She could be pumping so that Joe and Mal can do some of the night feeds and let her rest. It's actually a pretty sensible way to go about things, especially with extra hands. She could still be feeding during the day.
Hmmmm such things depend, often on whether your outside activity is legitimate and looks good for the department. It's one thing to ditch your service requirements to go research at Oxford or the Sorbonne for a year. That sounds impressive and prestigious to everyone, and your colleagues will not be bothered by it. But if you're not showing up semester after semester, and you have blatantly moved 3,000 miles across the country to hang out in a city that you have no reason to be in, people's opinions are going to change quite quickly.
Joe would be expected to have his share of graduate students, and to shepherd them to graduation in at least a semi-timely manner. Someone who is not around, ever, has a reduced ability to do this, and those students won't ask him to supervise if they don't meet him while he's teaching courses. Professors juggling three or four graduate students are not going to be thrilled with some layabout that doesn't have any.
Ditto with service work. If you are busting your ass going to department meetings, sitting on University committees, entertaining visiting speakers, going to seminars and asking questions, being on committees for graduate exams, helping the undergraduate English club with their poetry volume, and talking the Dean down from stealing six of your offices for the business department, guess who you are going to give serious side-eye when they waltz into town in baby-vomit stained Versace.
Nor does moving 3,000 miles away from your previous job really help the applications for any other. Plus all your potential colleagues, who are required to consent to your hire, are going to be well aware of the extra burdens you dumped on your previous ones.
David Glowie
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Jul 4, 2022
Warhammer, apparently. Although I can't remember whether she was talking about playing or painting (the pictures are all broken) and you can definitely argue about whether there's anything particularly masculine-coded about painting tiny figurines with dainty little brushes. I know a number of straight couples where the woman's hobby is painting gaming minis and the man's hobby is playing the game.
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- Dec 17, 2019
It's because she cannot write and she's got about as much talent for it as Sideshow.
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- Jun 13, 2016
She tried to paint Warhammer pieces at some point. It's the only male associated activity I can recall her sharing. She had a membership at some rock climbing place a few years ago but judging by her lack of physique I don't think she kept up with it.
It is hard to fathom why Mallory didn't just decide to be a butch woman. No public declaration or hormones needed, just dress and cut your hair however you want. Maybe you're right about it not being cool enough. She seems uncomfortable with men in general, so wanting to be one is even stranger since she doesn't even seem to like to being around them.
To be fair Mallory's religious upbringing cemented a rigid gender binary and presentation during childhood. Very distinct rigid gender binary clothing was the norm in evangelical Christian circles. So it might have felt like shedding dresses and floral prints, must equal masculine. Women wearing pants was suspect in conservative church circles.
Mallory's mother dressed her daughters very femme and girly. I have no idea if Mallory liked or disliked dressing as a girly girl growing up. She certainly didn't shed femme dressing as an adult in her 20's, in fact she dressed way more proper, femme and conservative than most of her peers back then.
The reason we chew this over so much is that for all that Mallory’s writing about being trans it’s generic, impersonal, superficial and textbook. She’s regurgitating the same trans talking points and dogma as everyone else. I find the constant reminders of how “this is my personal trans experience that doesn’t represent other trans people,” right before writing cliched sentences that are repeated by every trans writer, comical. The correct tip toeing to adhere to dogma and not offend is comfortable for Mallory, she’s just in a new belief system and social world.
When I first started reading about Mal’s transition I took an interest in her thinking and reasoning behind it. She was unique in the fact she wasn’t under 20, nor did she have a history of being butch lesbian. These two groups seem be to the two demos most pooners come from. A thirty year old femme presenting, girly type feminist woman declaring they were male was unique. (The only other pooner demo is the unhappy woman, married to a man, who just had a baby. They the only other demographic significant enough for me to have noted, but they are much much smaller than the other two.)
I thought she might offer some interest insight and depth that seems so lacking among pooners, since she’s older and a writer. Nope. She offers the same tired one-size fits all word buffet with peppered with the “this totally doesn’t represent all trans people” disclaimers. It’s very similar to how new religious converts all sound very similar when writing about their new faith, because they are all studying from the same literature.
Maybe it’s why she finds a self-obsessed navel gazer and drama lover like Joe interesting. She seems to avoid emotional drama and insight and Joe is fixated on it. It probably doesn’t fit the writer persona she’s honed and is comfortable with either. She seemed to really suffer and struggle when broaching in her writing , or being interviewed, on personal or serious matters. Maybe being trans finally gave her an outlet to be extremely earnest and believing again, something she lost when she shed her Christian beliefs. It does suck to lose that type of certainty, people who lose it usually seek it in other forms.
I've also wondered if both Mal and Joe stopped taking hormones. Mallory's skin and over all physical presentation make me think she stopped taking T quite awhile ago at least when I compare her to other pooners five years on. I wasn't sure how many TIFs keep continually taking T once it resulted in some of the permanent secondary physicals characteristics they desired. Also, being around a newborn lowers T production, it's been studied in fathers and men helping care for infants.
I don't know what strange things a newborn would do to a transman's endocrine system, if they are or aren’t taking T. Once I experienced instant milk production thanks to random unrelated crying newborns in public I started to believe newborns have magical powers over adult hormones. I'm convinced smelling their little heads cast some sort of aroma protection spell.
YMMV but bottle feeding of a newborn usually results in bottle spoiling.
After two or three months of breastfeeding you can usually get away with bottle feeds at night, or if you work, the baby usually prefers nursing at that point. But in my own, and others I’ve talked to, have found it’s critical to keep the bottle away the first two months. Once a baby is drinking 6-8 Oz a meal you are pretty safe to use a bottle when needed.
I’m sure there are some magical newborns that will go back and forth between a bottle and breast without fuss, but I haven’t known one. (I also never met the magical newborns I kept hearing about that slept six hours a night by three months. My cousin claimed to have one, but when we spent a weekend with them we just realized the baby cried bloody murder, it just didn’t wake up them up.)
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