we are 10 years old

10 years ago today, we were two weeks into our final year of uni when we thought wow art criticism is so weird, shall we try doing it ourselves??? how funny would that be?? lets make a website STAT. we got into a routine writing a new review and posting it on the white pube dot com every sunday, taking turns, zarina, gab, zarina, gab, and i’m soooo sorry but unfortunately we carried on long past the joke of it all. 10 years is so long. we are both 31 for context. that’s 1/3 of our lives. i’ve only been with my boyfriend for a measly 9 years. the white pube is my one true love!!!!!

I think 4 things kept us going:

• spite
• the animal need to write
• patreon
• how funny ‘the white pube’ as a name is

if you think hey i like the white pube but I wasn’t there in 2015 and I dunno what they’re writing was like then (terrible), don’t go hunting for it because we’ve taken it off the website. the reason being, this time next year, we’re releasing an anthology of the best writing across those 10 years with penguin. it’s gotten to a point where we would rather present the old writing with an explainer or some behind the scenes than just leave it up on this site. god forbid a text from 2017 is the first one you ever read. god forbid it’s from 2019, oh god no T_T

but that’s a bit of marketing im probably not allowed to say yet

what i am allowed to say is

thank you. we’ve had a lot of nice birthday wishes today from people telling us the impact the white pube has had on them but i think you lot have had more impact on us. all the art you make. all the couches we’ve slept on across the world. all the attention, reading us word by word or listening to the podcast for years. you’ve stretched out brains so that we never had to do MAs. fuck a book when you can go on an art date with an interesting person. thanks for all being so interesting, always. it’s been a privilege to make so many good friends who have come together around this website. i love writing. i love community. i love that writing brought me a community.

and that goes beyond the community me and zarina have between us. it becomes this big feeling people share in, a feeling that’s always changing because the writing is never still.

i’ll be honest, there was a time last year where I thought man i can’t do this for another 10 years, because i was so ill I was convinced the only way to right my body was to get a proper job, and I applied for all sorts, and I worked on different things, and found I wasn’t well enough to do Proper Jobs – that writing is the only thing left accessible to me. after the panic and sadness, which doesn’t ever really go away, I am just left thinking: well thank god I have the white pube, and that we’ve made the white pube accessible to me, and that our audience has helped make it a job too. our patreon is still on a downwards trend so idk what that means for the actual-actual future but I think the spite / animal need to write / joke of the name will sustain us in the end.

anyway i’m not re-reading this to check for typos because i want it to be a true Blog

thank you, love from gab, i love writing so much

now here’s a picture from the very first week

and then here’s a picture i can’t explain