A Shroom of One's Own 🍄
women and life-changing mushrooms
Fungal Looking
Writer and mushroom forager Maria Pinto coined the term fungal looking to describe a perception shift that happens when you start paying attention to wild mushrooms. You begin noticing the different types of fungi and surrounding organisms to the point that like Maria, a casual stroll might turn into an on-all-fours inspection of a stray shaggy mane (aka lawyer’s wig, and I can’t decide which name is better).
Maria also explains how fungal looking has refocused her human environment, too.
“It's a mode of going into a situation without knowing that you have the answers, which is a kind of humility that mushroom hunting has hopefully taught me.”
“It's really easy to, in this day and age, especially with the way we engage with the world through social media and through soundbites and all that stuff, to go into situations with a made-up mind and with the idea that you're gonna know exactly what you're looking at when you see it,” Maria says. “But mushrooms do not operate like that at all.”
However you feel about kingdom fungi and order Agaricales, mushrooms do have a lot to teach us, and right about now is a great (as in, holyshitsointense!!!) time to practice some fungal looking.
This week’s episode—SHROOM BOOM 🍄, pt 1—is the first of a three-part series exploring women, race, queerness and capitalism through the practical and psychedelic magics of mushrooms.
ICYMI:
🙅🏻♀️ Kvennaverkfall like it’s 1975. (NPR) On Tuesday, thousands of women and nonbinary Icelanders, including Prime Minister Katrín Jakobsdóttir, went on 24-hour strike of paid and unpaid work to protest unequal pay and gender-based violence.
🏳️⚧️ Japan inches forward on trans rights. (NYT) The country’s Supreme Court unanimously ruled that it’s unconstitutional to require that trans folks be sterilized in order to legally change their gender (yeah, no shit), which riled some TERFs, of course. However, the ruling does not affect additional mandates that trans adults undergo gender-affirming surgery, be unmarried and have no kids when applying for a legal gender ID change.
⤴️ un-United States of Abortion. (Jezebel) It’s not especially surprising that the number of abortions in the US have gone up since Dobbs v. Jackson; the stats have ALWAYS shown that abortion is a fact of life, regardless of what the law says and the literal lengths folks now have to go to access healthcare.
💋A romance novel feast for the eyes! (The Pudding) The infographics gods (specifically Jan Diehm and Sandra Chiu) have blessed us with a gorgeous analysis of modern romance novel covers categorized by raunchiness, art style and racial diversity, with some cultural contextualizing and Fabio’s 400 romance novel covers to boot. (My only wish is that this existed when we made ep. 148: Romance Novel Redemption!)
🎈 Mazel tov, Annie Korzen! (Bookshop) If you fell in love with Annie from ep. 175: Age-Defying Friendship, take your parasocial relationship to the next level with her new book of stories, advice and LOLs, out now in print and audio.
Unladies’ Room: The FIRST Mushroom Fad
Even though mushrooms are getting their own miniseries, I still needed to take to the Unladies’ Room to share the deeper women’s histories attached to them. It was news to me, for instance, that Beatrix Potter was an amateur mycologist and prolific mushroom illustrator before Peter Rabbit made her one of the most famous children’s book authors of all time.
My unladybrain also lit up upon learning how the adoption of mushrooms into early 20th-century American cuisine triggered a longstanding misogynist mistrust of women as poisonous witches (!!) and made wild mushroom foraging low-key chic.
Then, there’s the QUEEN OF SLIME MOLDS, Guilielma Lister, whom I stumbled across while researching. Turns out these alien organisms aren’t part of the fungi fam, but an honorific like that was simply too unladylike to not investigate further.
unladies are saying:
I’m a communications professional and mom to a freaking amazing trans son. The flowchart in your Unladylike book (which I own) was where my conversations with my kid around gender and identity started, and it was such a valuable resource to help him (and me!) understand how multifaceted identity can be.
- unlady Leslie, making my day/week/life
til next week . . . STILL THINKING ABOUT THE WRINKLED PEACH CAP MUSHROOM!!!! 👽
