The Potty Mouth Granny

  • The Tradwife Movement: A Pretty Apron Wrapped Around an Old Idea

    I’ve never understood the appeal of tradwife content. Watching a woman bake sourdough bread in a spotless farmhouse kitchen while wearing a ball gown has never been my idea of compelling entertainment. Yet it’s wildly popular, especially the content of Nara Smith. Nara Smith is a model with more than 12 million followers on TikTok.…

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  • The Paradox of Race

    I’m not going to lie—I’m tired of white people. I’m tired of the wealthy ones who are destroying the planet through greed, exploitation, and an insatiable hunger for more. And I’m tired of the everyday ones with their astonishing lack of curiosity and critical thinking. Many of them benefit from white privilege, yet they’re still…

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  • The Everleigh Club: From Silk Sheets to Section 8

    Chicago has always had a talent for reinventing itself. Sometimes it builds a skyscraper. Sometimes it tears down a brothel. And sometimes it tears down a brothel…and builds public housing on top of it. You really can’t make this stuff up. If you had wandered into Chicago’s Levee District around 1900, you would have found…

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  • Hoard Park: Known as the Da Park

    Tourists will never find Hoard Park in a guidebook. It doesn’t have Buckingham Fountain or the grandeur of Jackson Park. It’s just a small neighborhood park tucked away on 72nd and Dobson. But for me and my childhood friends, it was our treehouse. Long before I knew anything about urban renewal or city planning, I…

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  • The Many Ways in Which the United States Ain’t Shit

    I was sitting here thinking about America, a country that is often described as the greatest nation on Earth. It is a nation that has accomplished extraordinary things. It has sent human beings to the Moon, produced some of the world’s greatest innovations, and given birth to cultural treasures such as jazz, blues, gospel, and…

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  • Humanity’s Centuries-Old Fascination with Whores

    Let’s be honest: few figures have occupied more space in the human imagination than the whore. Kings wrote laws about them. Priests preached sermons against them. Artists painted them. Writers filled novels with them. Politicians condemned them in public and sought them out in private. Entire civilizations have spent thousands of years obsessing over women…

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  • The Older I Get, the More I Wonder

    I’ve never been a religious person, but I do believe there’s something out here that’s higher than us lowly mortals. Something. I don’t know what it is. Is it a person? Is it male or female? Is it both? Is it neither? Or is it pure spirit, moving through the universe in ways we can’t…

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  • Confessions of a Bookworm Who Turned Out to Be a Nerd

    For most of my life, I thought of myself as a bookworm, not a nerd. In my mind, nerds were the people who loved math, science, computers, and all the technical subjects that made my eyes glaze over. They were the kids building robots, memorizing equations, and spending their weekends at science fairs. I was…

    thepottymouthgranny

  • The Long Shadow of Patriarchy

    Patriarchy did not fall out of the sky one random Tuesday afternoon like bad weather. Human beings created it. Layer by layer. Rule by rule. Fear by fear. Property deed by property deed. And once you really start studying history, you realize patriarchy is not simply “men being in charge.” It is an entire social…

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  • The Romanticization of Marriage Amongst Black Folks

    Every day on social media, Black people bewail the lack of marriage in the community. Folks write think pieces, make podcasts, go live for three hours at a time mourning the “breakdown of the Black family” like they’re standing over a gravesite in a church hat and hard-bottom shoes. But some of these same people…

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