Zingy Egg Salad & Everything Is Crazy
A delicious sandwich for turbulent times, and the ending of a friendship.
Hi friends,
I make sandwiches and chat about sexism, misogyny, reproductive rights, and other stuff on TikTok and Instagram. I wrote about how it all started in this post. Thank you for being here. Please tell your friends if you dig my sammies. There’s a recipe for a delicious egg salad sandwich below!
It’s the Guns
This week, Shannon Watts shared one of my videos on her Instagram. This was a huge deal for me. Shannon is a gun violence prevention activist, and the founder of Moms Demand Action, the largest women’s volunteer organization in America. The advocacy group has helped pass hundreds of gun safety laws around the country since its founding in December 2012. Shannon has amassed millions of followers on social media with her work, and she’s got a fantastic Substack, Playing With Fire.
Seeing one of my videos on the the platform of an activist I admire made my whole week. One of my favorite things about making these sandwiches is that I’m learning so much about the massive community of activists, writers and creators that I’ve been looking for my whole life. Hey, Substack, I’m falling for you!
Shannon’s repost was particularly meaningful to me because my life was shattered by gun violence in 2005. It’s a topic that I touch on occasionally with people who I know and trust, but I’ve never really written about the experience. I’m finding my voice and my way, and in this last year, I think I’ve gathered the fundamentals to begin. I don’t know what form it will take, but I’m cracking into it — and Shannon’s acknowledgement feels like a really cool sign that it’s time. ❤️
RIP Jezebel
I’ve been a fan of Jezebel since its inception in 2007. The site was shuttered with zero fanfare last week, and it leaves a massive fucking hole in feminist media. The site’s founder, Anna Holmes, wrote an amazing piece in the New Yorker titled “Jezebel and the Question of Women’s Anger.” She writes:
I see Jezebel not as the beginning of the end of the digital-media era but as a moment—a spark—within an ongoing discussion about gender politics. That conversation has led to new realities around sexual assault and harassment, pay inequity, and cultural depictions of women. It also makes some people uncomfortable—in part because it involves women expressing their anger in public and sustained ways. “Every woman has a well-stocked arsenal of anger,” Audre Lorde wrote in 1981, which can act as a “powerful source of energy serving progress and change.”
If that’s part of Jezebel’s legacy, I’ll take it. It’s about everything I could have hoped for.
Jezebel was a haven for me, a place where I didn’t feel crazy. I felt community. I discovered some of my favorite writers there — Jia Tolentino, Joanna Rothkopf, Ashley Reese — and it checked so many boxes: pop culture, politics, thoughtful essays, hot takes, and scary stories, with that sweet, sweet feminism bubbling underneath. I’m going to miss it a ton, not least because it served as a place where I started to make sense of my rage.
The best essay I’ve read about the shuttering of Jezebel (thank you Michelle for sharing it!) is Lyz Lenz’s “Where does all the rage go now?” on her excellent Substack Men Yell at Me. She writes:
Jezebel was shuttered last week — a move that the site’s new owners say was motivated by an inability to sell ads off its content.
But in the era where the driving forces of our economy are the Barbie movie and Taylor Swift and Beyoncé, not being able to make money off a feminist website feels less an economic necessity and more an intentional shuttering of women’s voices.
It’s part of a backlash to the rage that gained a new voice in 2007 with the founding of Jezebel and 10 years later flooded the streets. It’s backlash to the airing of rape culture’s dark secrets during the #MeToo movement, which Jezebel had a hand in — the site and its journalists were at the forefront of the reporting of many of those stories.
There is other backlash happening, too. The rollback of reproductive rights across the country. A rollback of LGBTQ rights, particularly for trans people. After all, expansive definitions of gender free all people. Heteronormative roles trap us. And there is a renewed call for limiting rights to divorce. Cultural discourse is pushing women to marry and have children.
The crazy thing is, we’ve faced backlash for decade after decade. When I was a kid, I had so many women on TV and in film and comedy to look up to: Carol Burnett, Sigourney Weaver, Debbie Allen, Phylicia Rashad, Jane Curtin, Kate Jackson, the entire casts of Golden Girls and Designing Women… Angela Lansbury was the 60-something star of Murder, She Wrote, a primetime show about a female senior citizen who solved crime! You think that show would get made now? Fuck no!
But by the time I graduated from theatre school, the Pussycat Dolls and Britney Spears were dominating the airwaves. Soon afterwards, Lindsay and Nicole and Paris were making headlines. Bandage dresses, low-rise jeans, and slut-shaming were everywhere. And I had no fucking idea what had happened. Susan Faludi had written about it in her 1991 Pulitzer prize-winning book Backlash, but I didn’t know about it, because I wasn’t tapped into the feminist community. When I finally bought a copy last year, I was fucking floored. Everything in it holds true now, if not more so.
Please go read Lyz’s clear-eyed, inspiring essay for her thoughts on backlash, and where our voices and our rage should go, now that Jezebel is no more. It’s upsetting, and it’s really fucking good.
Zingy Egg Salad with Labneh and Jalapeño
I had a falling out with a friend. That is to say, someone who I’d considered a friend lost his mind and unleashed some absolutely heinous shit in my DMs. I was shocked, but when I heard from another friend that he’d done the same to her, I realized that he’s simply letting a mask drop. I made a sandwich about it:
And I felt better, because this sandwich was really, really tasty. I was inspired by this recipe, and by my friend Natalie’s reconstruction of a dish based on a post on Athena Calderone’s gorgeous Instagram. Here’s what I came up with!
INGREDIENTS (yields 2 sandwiches)
4 hard-boiled eggs, peeled
¼ cup mayonnaise (Kewpie is the best for this sammy IMO)
¼ cup labneh
1 ½ teaspoon Dijon mustard
fresh tarragon, finely chopped
jalapeño, thinly sliced
salt and pepper
4 slices white bread
Make Yourself a Sandwich
Hard boil the eggs. Roughly chop them. Mix with mayonnaise, labneh, Dijon and as much tarragon as you like. Season with salt and pepper. Divide the egg salad evenly between two bread slices, and top with sliced jalapeño. Put the top slices of bread over the egg salad, slice and serve right away.
Eat with your eyes closed to shut out friends who are actually assholes while feeling the deep gratification of your delicious sandwich, which you made for yourself.
Last Licks
Salad Sprinkles!! Woman-owned, made with love. My fabulous friend Jordan and her BF Blakely launched a line of toasted, flavorful breadcrumbs that give your salads, pasta, sandwiches, ice cream and everything else a glorious crunch without the ouch factor of a crouton. Croutons are so aggressive. Salad Sprinkles are the answer! I used the chili crisp flavor in my chicken cutlet sandwich, and it made the coating *chef’s kiss* perfection. You can request a sample on their site. Taste ‘em now, and give their IG a follow for the nationwide rollout, coming soon. #nomorecroutons
Thank you for hanging out with me. See you soon! - MJ ❤️🥪