So I have a lot of posts I’ve collected over the past few months, and it’s high time to share them with you all, and stop feeling guilty about the backlog, and it’s going to be epic because I haven’t written for so long, and I have collected a huge range of great posts.
First up Alex Mills writes, “Anxiety and The Age of Entitlement: A Personal Story“:
Under Abbott’s new policy, if I didn’t have the support of my family, I would have found myself with no source of income or support. Where would I have lived? How could I have payed rent? How would I have purchased food, or payed for the frequent visits to my doctor and psychologist? And how would I have afforded the petrol that got me to all of these appointments?
I would have had no access to support for half a year. And honestly, I can’t really imagine where I might have ended up. When I think back to that time in my life, I am terrified at what this policy would have meant for me. Emergency relief, borrowing from friends, sleeping on couches – all of these things would have been a reality. I could have been homeless.
Blurg5000 writes at I’m Sorry I’m Like This, “The Spikes“:
As horrific as it must sound, sometimes you have to remove a person’s sleep site in order to engage that person. Rough sleeping is incredibly harmful, it affects a person’s physical and mental health and most importantly their personal safety. Each night you sleep rough you are risking getting a kicking because people do that to homeless people.
I guarantee that the outreach team in Southwark know about this site and have been trying to stop people rough sleeping there for some time, not because they lack humanity or a sense of community but because rough sleeping kills people. On average, homeless people die 30 years earlier than the rest of the population. It’s a slow suicide. Or sometimes actual suicide. Are businesses and housing associations cool about condoning something that kills people? No. That’s why they’ve put the spikes there. Or made the benches single. Or too narrow to sleep on. Look around you. These measures are in place all over London.
Violet Blue writes at ZDNet, “Thanks for nothing, jerkface“:
For LGBT, political dissidents, activists and at-risk people everywhere, Google’s little Google+ project became a loaded gun pointed right at anyone whose privacy is what keeps them alive.
Users found out in January 2014 when Google+ force-integrated chat and SMS into “hangouts” in the Android 4.4 “KitKat” update.
At-risk users were disproportionately affected, most especially transgender people who needed to keep their identities separate for personal safety and employment reasons.
One woman was outed to a co-worker when she texted him, and risked losing her employment.
Dylan Matthews writes at Vox, “More evidence that giving poor people money is a great cure for poverty“:
So there you have it: money sent to poor people abroad doesn’t get wasted on booze or cigarettes. But it’s worth asking whether we should even care how it’s spent, ultimately. There’s something more than a little unseemly about Westerners casting judgment on poor people halfway across the world for having a beer or a smoke. As the authors’ World Bank colleague Jishnu Das once put it, “‘does giving cash work well’ is a well-defined question only if you are willing to say that ‘well’ is something that WE, the donors, want to define for families whom we have never met and whose living circumstances we have probably never spent a day, let alone a lifetime, in.”
Xeni Jardin writes at Boing Boing, “Investigative report on collapse of US mental health care system”.
Stella Young writes at ABC RampUp, “‘Life skills’ program teaches wrong lesson“:
Choices are rarely made in a vacuum, and if hair removal for women was a genuinely unbiased choice, it would carry no consequences either way. Removal of body hair would not be met with society’s approval while letting it grow is met with surprise, ridicule and sometimes even disgust. I do it, in part, to conform to patriarchal standards of beauty. It might not be a particularly feminist or unbiased choice, but ultimately it’s my decision. The same cannot be said for this student who, from her mother’s account, had discussed the notion of hair removal at home and made a decision not to shave.
It’s important to reiterate this point: this young woman was presented with a choice. She made one. Then someone in a position of authority told her that removing her body hair is a “life skill”, implying that it’s something she has to do in order to better understand and operate in the world around her. Part of the school’s rationale is that the girls are more likely to avoid being teased if they conform to these social rules. Perhaps they’d be better off teaching tolerance and acceptance of all people, rather than conformity.
stavvers at Another angry woman writes, “An open letter to all men“:
By now, your fingers are probably twitching with the urge to scream NOT ALL MEN ARE LIKE THIS. I can almost feel your agitation, and your desire to say this. Guess what? That desire to burst in and announce NOT ALL MEN is tied in to that self-same sense of entitlement. You say it because you feel entitled to my time and attention. You say it because it horrifies you that I might feel negatively to you and you want to show off what a nice guy you really are.
The Bisexual Community Tumblr commented on the movie G.B.F.
Hiromi Goto made a WisCon 38 Guest of Honour Speech:
It matters who and what is being focused upon in fiction. It matters who is creating a fictional account of these tellings. I don’t think the “burden of representation” rests upon the shoulders of those who are positioned as under-represented. If this were the case we would fall into an essentialist trap that will serve no one well. However, I’m okay with saying that it is my hope that white writers who are interested in writing about cultures and subjectivities outside of their own consider very carefully: 1) how many writers from the culture you wish to represent have been published in your country writing in the same language you will use (i.e. English) to write the story, 2) why do you think you’re the best person to write this story? 3) who will benefit if you write this story? 4) why are you writing this story? 5) who is your intended audience? 6) if the people/culture you are selecting to write about has not had enough time, historically and structurally, to tell their story first, on their own terms, should you be occupying this space?
Simon Leo Brown at the ABC (Australian) writes, “Female video gamers offered real-life escape from online sexism“:
Hannah Morrison, 20, is a major investor in Power Up Melbourne, which is planning to open a “geek bar” in Melbourne in early 2015.
She is particularly keen to create a safe space for women to play video games after experiencing “horrible sexism” while playing online with other gamers.
Rebecca Shaw guest posts at Shiela’s with, “I <3 Internet“:
I found chat rooms where I could actually talk to other lesbians. It still took me a long time to even type that I was one. I was still too terrified to even admit it to a stranger on the Internet. Because the moment I did, I knew it would become real. There was no turning back. But the Internet quickly helped me come to the realisation that there were people all over the world who were funny, smart, (seemingly) normal, happy AND gay. Everything I had been denied in my life up to that point was now at my fingertips. It is hard to overstate what kind of effect a feeling of belonging, a feeling of community, a feeling of same-ness can have on a lonely and isolated teenager. I still couldn’t find the courage in myself to come out until a few years after that, but it didn’t matter. I had the Internet. Without it, I truly don’t know how I would have survived those years. I don’t know if I could have. I felt totally and completely alone; I felt I had nobody I could talk to, that there was nobody that would understand or love me.
The inaugural Special Issue of New Scholar, edited by Gillian Darcy, Nadia Niaz, Caitlin Nunn and Karen Schamberger. This issue concentrates on scholarship around the concept of belonging.
A Lynn at Nerdy Feminist writes, “On Anger“:
The stereotype of the angry oppressed person runs rampant. Angry feminists. Angry gay/trans people. Angry people of color. Chances are, if you’ve ever spoken out about a social issue, you’ve experienced tone policing and had your entire viewpoint dismissed because of your anger–whether than anger was real or just perceived on the part of the listener/reader. These same people offer their sage advice that others would listen to you if you were nicer, that you’d “catch more flies with honey,” and that the oppressors can’t learn unless you’re willing to play nice and educate them.
I saw an unattributed* quote floating around that hits at this point:
People often say ‘stop being angry and educate us,’ not understanding that the anger is part of the education.
This so hit home with me for primarily two reasons. The first is the outward message that those who need/want to be educated about these issues must know that understanding anger is inherently a part of this education. How can you try to empathize with someone’s oppression without acknowledging the emotions that come from that? Having your people murdered, fearing/surviving harassment and rape, not being free to live the lifestyle you want, etc. are all situations that come with a lot of emotions, one of which is logically anger. In order to learn about oppression and move toward being an ally, you must be able to understand that.
Mark Bently Cohen writes, “How to Support Your Bisexual Husband, Wife, Partner“:
As previously discussed, bisexuals have much higher levels of anxiety, depression, self harm and suicidality than any other sexual orientation. One of the biggest sources of these internal stressors for bisexuals is the conflict between coming out as bisexual, or questioning, or confused, to a spouse or partner.
“This is not what I signed up for!” one woman told her wife upon discovering she is bisexual. Would she have responded the same way had she learned her wife had cancer? Or was dealing with depression? Or had lost her job?
Of all the unexpected circumstances which take us by surprise along the road through life, bisexuality is not something to fear.
Foz Meadows writes at What Happens Next: A Gallimaufry, “Female Bodies: A Weighty Issue“:
Clearly, these women all wear different size clothes for reasons that have absolutely nothing to do with their weight, and everything to do with height and bodytype. But because of the fashion industry’s obsession with tall, thin, white, ectomorphic models – women chosen, not because they’re a representative sample of the population, but so their minimal frames can better serve as coathangers for clothes that privilege a very specific aesthetic over function – we have learned to correlate small sizes with healthy bodies, the better to justify their primacy on the runway, in advertising and on screen as a healthy ideal. Never mind that modelling agencies have been known to recruit at eating disorder clinics, with store mannequins more closely resembling the bodies of anorexic girls than average women, models eating tissues to stay thin and rail-thin models photoshopped to hide their ill-health and prominent ribs: because “plus size” models – that is, women whose bodies are actually representative of the general population – are treated as a separate, exceptional category, the fiction persists that “plus size” is a synonym for “overweight”, “unhealthy” or “obese”: women too enormous to wear “normal” clothes, even though the norm in question is anything but. As such, plus-size models are frequentlyderided as fat, a joke, unhealthy and bad role models. Today, catwalk models weigh 23% less than the average woman, compared to 8% just twenty years ago – yet whenever this disparity is pointed out, the reaction of many is to just assume that average women must be overweight, and that using plus size mannequins will only encourage obesity. Throw in the fact that women’s clothing sizes aren’t standardised, but fluctuate wildly from brand to brand – or within the same brand, even – and the idea of judging a woman’s health by what size jeans she wears becomes even more absurd.
Amy Cato at Women’s Agenda writes, “An open response to a man offended by all-female shortlists“:
My own path wanting to spend my career assisting experienced women get positions with great companies stems from many years involved in recruitment and women’s charities. Professionally, I was tired of hearing excuses during the recruitment of leadership and technical roles that the women candidates ‘didn’t exist’ or ‘are too hard to find’, so I put my money where my mouth is and launched Executive Women Shortlists. To clarify the business raison d’etre, one of the main services is the supply of additional senior women to add to a company’s existing pool of applicants, meaning men do not need to be excluded from the opportunity.
Not only is it good for collaboration and idea generation to have a more inclusive management team but also companies that have higher female representation at the senior levels of business outperform those that don’t by 34% according to McKinsey Global research. So, whether like me, you are passionate about getting more capable women into chief executive vacancies on the ASX 200 (currently we only have 3.5%) or whether you are simply interested in improving company financial results, the focus on hiring more women remains the solution.
Laurie Penny writes at New Statesmen, “The slippery slope of gender: why shaving and snacking are feminist issues“:
First, a spectacularly misogynist and homophobic (and now withdrawn) advert from Veet, manufacturers of hair-removing goo, claimed that failing to remove your leg-hair with the help of Veet products will turn you into an actual bloke. Then there was the equally repugnant site set up to shame “Women Eating on the Tube”, featuring non-consensual pictures of women doing just that, because there’s nothing worse a female person could possibly do than demonstrate in public that she has a body which gets hungry. There have already been some stellar pieces written about this round of gender policing, the best of which have been by Paris Lees and Ellie Mae O’Hagan respectively.
At Alas a Blog, “Panti Bliss Lectures About Being Lectured About What Is Not Homophobia“.
NK Jemisin writes, “Confirmation bias, epic fantasy, and you“:
I suspect this was not aimed at GRRM, specifically. MedievalPoC has made the same point about “historically accurate” medieval European video games that make conspicuously inaccurate choices in development, and so forth. MedievalPoC points this problem out as endemic to the genre in general, which isn’t really a surprise since it’s endemic to our society. The blog is dedicated to pointing out the literal erasures and revisions that have been inflicted on art of the era to make it conform to modern — and quintessentially white supremacist — beliefs about how medieval Europe “should” have been. (And if you haven’t figured it out yet, you should be following MedievalPoC. Like, now.)
Avicenna writes at A Million Gods, “World Vision (Except for the Gays)“:
World Vision are no longer a humanitarian organisation in my eyes.
See living in the UK, World Vision don’t push their Christian Credentials, so it was rather surprising to find out that they are a Christian organisation. So I went to check their American website. So while the British one has a vague reference to “God” the American one is explicitly Christian.
But this one line from their site got me.
We work in nearly 100 countries, serving all people, regardless of religion, race, ethnicity, or gender.
But not sexual orientation, but then World Vision is not a force for equality. Okay it may have forgotten that serving all people includes the GLBT?
Annie P Waldman writes at Vice, “Inside the Kafkaesque World of the US’s ‘Little Guantánamos’“:
Prisoners describe the communication management units, or CMUs, as “Little Guantánamos.” In 2006, the Bureau of Prisons created two of these units to isolate and segregate specific prisoners, the majority of them convicted of crimes related to terrorism. The bureau secretly opened these units without informing the public and without allowing anyone an opportunity to comment on their creation, as required by law. By September 2009, about 70 percent of the CMU prisoners were Muslim, more than 1,000 to 1,200 percent more than the federal prison average of Muslim inmates.
In the CMUs, prisoners are subject to much stricter rules than in general population. They are limited to two 15-minute telephone calls per week, both scheduled and monitored. Visits are rarely permitted, and when family members are allowed to visit, they are banned from physical contact, limited to phone conversations between a plexiglass window. This differs from the general population, where prisoners can spend time with their visitors in the same room. To further the isolation, some of the CMU prisoners are held in solitary confinement, with only one hour out of their cells each day.
Andy Khouri writes at Comics Alliance, “Fake Geek Guys: A Message to Men About Sexual Harassment“:
Can you imagine, gentlemen, receiving that threat from a potentially dangerous man whose identity you have no hope of discovering but who knows your name, what city you live in, what you look like and where you work?
Now imagine receiving messages like that from men so frequently that you’re no longer bothered by it.
Now understand how f*cked up it is that you’re no longer bothered by it; that you’re no longer bothered by men’s anonymous threats of brutal sexual violence, because they’ve become just as common as a train not arriving on time.
Aja Romano at The Daily Dot writes, “The Mako Mori Test: ‘Pacific Rim’ inspires a Bechdel Test alternative“:
In response to this post, and in the process of running down numerous arguments for why the Bechdel Test can’t and shouldn’t be the only measurement by which feminist films are judged, Tumblr user chaila has proposed the Mako Mori Test, “to live alongside the Bechdel Test”:
The Mako Mori test is passed if the movie has: a) at least one female character; b) who gets her own narrative arc; c) that is not about supporting a man’s story. I think this is about as indicative of “feminism” (that is, minimally indicative, a pretty low bar) as the Bechdel test. It is a pretty basic test for the representation of women, as is the Bechdel test. It does not make a movie automatically feminist.
wolsey at Queereka writes, “Planned Parenthood“:
The first time I went to a Planned Parenthood personally, I was barely 15 years old. I had been sexually active for the very first time with my then boyfriend. It had been a blood filled fiasco wherein the condom broke. Being a person with a uterus, this was a problem.
The events had occurred the evening before, and I shown up to sit on the concrete in front of the doors to the clinic waiting for it to open. This was not how I had envisioned losing my virginity.
I was driven to seek help not just for my fears of pregnancy, but because the very concept of pregnancy froze me with terror. There are not many things that give me dysphoria, as a transgender man, but the idea of being pregnant in this body was the nuclear option when it came to dysphoria.
Michi Trota at Geek Melange writes, ““Letting the Jerks Get to You” Isn’t Really the Problem“:
Leaving aside for the moment how it’s both laughable and depressing that once again, it’s the opinion of men in the comics industry that’s solicited in determining whether or not things are “vastly improving” for women dealing with sexism and misogyny, rather than the women who are actually dealing with it and therefore might have a rather different perspective and metric for determining what “vastly improving” actually means, let’s look at Bendis’ answer:
“I get a lot of crap for being Mr. positive from people who are having a hard time seeing the cup half-full but I completely agree with you.
I think things are vastly better than they were and that only makes the shitheads stand out even more. Things are not perfect, all of society’s problems are not solved, but I do think the good guys are winning.“
Ah yes, because it’s terribly hard having your optimistic bubble popped by people who might be dealing more directly with the fact that their cup looks very much to them like it’s not only half-empty, the water is fracking-contaminated as well. It’s rather easier to think that the water’s getting cleaner when you’re not the one who is actually having to drink it, isn’t it?
Trudy Ring at Advocate writes, “Study: Childhood Bullying’s Effects Persist for Decades“:
Childhood bullying, the bane of many an LGBT youth’s existence, has social, physical, and mental health effects that are still evident in survivors 40 years later, according to major new research findings from the Institute of Psychiatry at King’s College London.
The data comes from the British National Child Development Study, which follows all children born in England, Scotland, and Wales during one week in 1958. The new findings, published online Friday by the American Journal of Psychiatry, covers 7,771 children whose parents provided information on their child’s exposure to bullying when they were aged 7 and 11. The children were then followed up on until the age of 50.
shweta narayan writes, “A thought on playing at the lowest possible difficulty level, and telling other people what’s easy“:
Okay now let’s imagine we’re all playing a massive roleplaying game called The Real World. There’s an area of this game, let’s call it the “Speculative Fiction community”, that has interesting enough storylines and characters that players keep coming back to it, but it also has a number of nasty monsters. Let’s call them… trolls.
Now: here is a secret* about the trolls in this region. They are ridiculously nerfed on the easy setting. When you’re playing the game on hard, or gods forbid on multiple-marginalizations, these trolls do a ton of extra damage, and have endless adds, and an “uncomprehending/dismissive” buff that lets them ignore most anything coming their way.
None of this matters on easy mode, mind. They’re annoying, but like most things in the game, pretty easy to take on. You don’t have to worry much about strategy or conserving resources when you’re on easy mode! You just need to run in and wave your sword around! But those of us playing the game on harder settings, we’ve figured out strategies, and we’ve figured out where not to go. We know the best approach is to avoid these monsters entirely, and avoid even indirect contact. We know that any item connected to them could be cursed on hard mode, and do further damage. We’ve figured this out from painful experience. So, when a couple trolls manage to infiltrate a high-status area of the region, and people comment that they’re going to avoid them…
…and in comes someone who is playing the game on the easiest fucking mode there is, right, who has set himself up as so sympathetic to people playing on hard. And he uses this platform to tell us that we’re playing the game wrong, we mustn’t protect ourselves because it’s not sportsmanlike.
Natalie Nourigat draws a beautiful comic at Home is where the Internet is called, “Don’t let fear stop you from traveling!”
JA McCarroll writes at SheRights, “The Language of Dude Feminism”
Rather than attacking the institution of masculinity itself, several recent campaigns have attempted a sort of masculinity triage, trying to eliminate violence against women, while still flattering men with the label of protector. These campaigns, such as “real men don’t buy girls,”“my strength isn’t for hurting,”are various incarnations of “how would you feel if someone said that to your mother /sister /girlfriend,”and have proven to be enormously popular, achieving prodigious re-blogs, conferences, and media airtime.
They are, by many metrics, successful, and have gotten institutions long silent on the rights of women to speak up. I believe we are the better for them, but I also believe that they do not go far enough, and we all must, as feminists, radicals and progressives, push against our comfort zones.
Colin Schultz at Smithsonian.com writes, “A Scientist’s Gender Biases Mouse Research“:
Duhaime-Ross reports on a new study, which found that mice are scared of men. When a male researcher works with a mouse, the mouse’s body courses with stress hormones. This doesn’t happen when a woman scientist is doing the work. The difference in how mice respond to male and female researchers could potentially skew everything from behavioral studies to cell research.
It’s not so much that mice are scared of male researchers as it is that mice are scared of male mammals. A whiff of testosterone from any male mammal is enough to trigger this fear, says Jef Akst for The Scientist. “In all likelihood, mice just haven’t developed a way to discriminate between the smell of a male mouse and the smell of other male mammals, so men also elicit a fear response,” says Duhaime-Ross.
Alexandra Bolles writes at GLAAD, ““But you don’t look queer”: students challenge stereotypes with viral campaign (PHOTOS & VIDEO)”
SBS provided us with, “Aust trackers forgotten in foreign land“:
A Queensland researcher is investigating the fate of up to 50 Aboriginal trackers who assisted Australian troops in South Africa only to disappear from the record books.
It’s possible some died but others may have fallen victim to the new White Australia Policy.
Griffith University’s Dr Dale Kerwin has spent more than 15 years trying to find the lost indigenous men of the Boer War.
Annalee Newitz at io9 writes, “Hey Star Wars — Where the Hell Are the Women?“:
So when I looked at that Star Wars cast list, Hannah was on my mind. Surely in the second decade of the twenty-first century, she’d be given more awesome female characters to choose from in this contemporary incarnation of Star Wars. Leia would still be there, as the fighting princess — but maybe there would be a female fighter pilot whose swagger could rival Han Solo’s, or a female Sith strutting through some scenery-chewing lines. Nope. There’s one female name other than Carrie Fisher’s on that cast list: the relative unknown Daisy Ridley, whom fans are speculating might play the daughter of Han Solo and Princess Leia. Of course, more cast members will be announced, but this is probably our core cast — the main characters.
Having Ridley is great, but one new female lead in a cast of men? That’s how we launch ourselves into the future of this series, which inspires little girls with pink swords, as well as old girls like myself who graduated to sharper weapons long ago? Are we seriously still pretending that the universe is comprised almost entirely of men (and mostly white men at that)? Mythic tales are supposed to open up possibilities, not shut them down.
Adam Grant writes at The Atlantic, “Why So Many Men Don’t Stand Up for Their Female Colleagues“:
The traditional explanation is sexism. Psychologists Peter Glick and Susan Fiske have eloquently highlighted two different kinds of sexist ideologies that cause men to justify gender inequality and resist sharing their power and wealth. “Hostile sexists” believe that men are superior beings who deserve to rule the world. “Benevolent sexists” are more pro-women—just not in leadership. They view women as beautiful, fragile creatures who ought to be protected by men, not be followed by men. And, of course, some men are comfortable with the status quo: They’d like to preserve hierarchies—particularly those they benefit from—rather than destabilize them.
Although there’s little doubt that these reasons prevent some men from being better advocates for the women around them, a more subtle cause has been overlooked. Some men want to voice their support, but fear that no one will take them seriously because they lack a vested interest in the cause.
Liam Croy at the West Australian writes, “Review rejects Hawkins appeal“:
Ms Hawkins, who has osteogenesis imperfecta or “brittle bone disease”, was working as a Legal Aid lawyer until her contract ended in February.
The 33-year-old reapplied for the disability pension while she tried to find a new job – no easy task, given her severe physical restrictions.
Much to her surprise, her claim was rejected last month on grounds she was not impaired enough.
A Self Made Woman writes, “On Being Cissed, or, The Night That Janet Mock Mistook Me for Cisgendered“:
To be cissed is to feel like your world isn’t yours. It feels like a hand has reached across time to shove that part of you that didn’t know if you could or should, and tell him, her that he, she doesn’t exist. To be cissed is for your tribe to cast you out without knowing it, leave you to languish in that dark place between who you are and who they think you are.
Cameron Kunde at Affect Magazine writes, “The Bisexual Block“:
That same year, the nonprofit advocacy group BiNET USA (http://www.binetusa.org) reached out to Google when it discovered that the word bisexual was blocked from Google’s autocomplete function. When you type in gay, lesbian, or transgender, Google will automatically suggest common searches pertaining to those terms. When you type in bisexual, however, you get a blank screen.
In the five years since, Google has responded more than once by blaming algorithms, saying that the search term bisexual is blocked from the auto-complete feature because of a high correlation to pornography. This logic is highly flawed because a search for “gay porn” yields over 400 million more results, and “lesbian porn” yields over 20 million more results than a search for “bisexual porn”. The terms gay and lesbian are undoubtedly used to search for porn more frequently than the term bisexual. In 2012, Google announced that it had unblocked the word and suggested that phrases would soon pop up like “bisexual quotes”, “bisexual rights”, and “bisexual parenting”. It has been over two years since this announcement and the term bisexual continues to yield an auto-complete void.
Foz Meadows at shattersnipe: malcontent & rainbows writes, “Silence Is Not Synonymous With Uproar: A Response To John C. Wright“:
Do you see the issue? You cannot state, as your opening premise, that SFF fandom is being handicapped by silence and an unwillingness to speak out, and then support that premise by stating the exact polar opposite: that there has, in your own words, been vocal uproar. Doubtless, what Wright meant to imply is that the persons against whom the uproar is directed are being silenced by it – that he, and others like him, such as Larry Correia and Theodore Beale, are now suffering under the burden of enforced quietude. But given that all three men are still writing publicly and vocally, not just about the issues Wright raises, but about any number of other topics, the idea that their output is being curtailed by their own “unwillingness to speak for fear of offending” is patently false. Indeed, by their own repeated admission, Correia, Beale and Wright are wholly unafraid of causing offence, even sometimes going so far as to seek outraged reactions. So if Wright and his fellows proudly don’t care about being offensive, then who does: who really fears to speak? By untangling the nonsensical web that is Wright’s attempt at logic, a paradoxical answer emerges: that the people who actually do care about causing offence – the apparent victims of silence – are simultaneously the same gossipy, vocal detractors responsible for silencing… ourselves, as it turns out. Where “silence” is a synonym for “uproar”.
At A Paper Bird, “Too brown to be heard: The Brunei brouhaha“:
I’ve said my bit on the recent burst of outrage over Brunei here, at PolicyMic. Briefly, I wrote that despite the exclusivist furor in the US and UK over the “antigay” impact of the measure, shari’a is much more likely to affect the rights of women. And I said that Western activists’ reluctance to acknowledge the multiple dimensions of the issue, much less the pioneering work of women’s rights activists across southeast Asia, was a disgrace.
I got some nods, some hate mail, and more than the usual amount of incomprehension. I had an argument on Twitter (an oxymoron, anyway), with an eminently earnest man who responded to me at complete crosspurposes. Why, I kept asking, wouldn’t you check with women’s groups or sexual rights activists across the region, who have experience with context and culture, in planning a boycott? “There are no LGBT groups in Brunei,” he kept answering, as if this meant there was no one to talk to about the issue anywhere except Los Angeles or London: no relevant expertise outside his postal code. Meanwhile, the tempest kept growing. Britain’s chief LGBT lobby group, Stonewall, declined to endorse a boycott of the Brunei-owned chain of hotels. Its acting head, Ruth Hunt, wrote in the Telegraph:
We only implement actions that we can calculate will have an impact. … I do, however, fear that the boycott could do very real harm to the lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans people of Brunei. By turning the issue into a battle between gay people and the Sultan – which it isn’t, it affects everyone in Brunei, not just gay people – we limit the opportunity for dialogue and put the lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans people of Brunei at far greater risk. A group of people, I hasten to add, who’ve yet to publically call for a boycott.
Lesley at XOJane writes, “It’s Always A Radical Act When A Fat Woman Shares A Picture Of Herself Online“:
In another life, when I had aspirations of being a proper academic, I used to give guest lectures at colleges and universities. I’d get up in front of rooms full of quarrelsome and bright young adults and present a bare-bones introductory version of the subject in which I’d spent the better part of my life developing my expertise: deep cultural analysis of the ways in which women’s bodies, particularly fat bodies, are represented in media.
Part of my lecture included a comparison between two images. One was an image of four nude women, lounging strategically over one another to cover crotchparts and nipples, taken from Cosmopolitan magazine. The other was an image of a group of nude fat women, from Laurie Toby Edison’s art photography book Women En Large.
Rebecca Moore at The Life and Times of an Exceptionally Tall Mormon writes, “University Study on Sexism In BBC’s Doctor Who (Infographic)“:
Conversations were allowed to pass if they were not centered around a man but did briefly mention one. This was to allow for a companion to be able to mention the Doctor, for example if someone were asking where they were from they could say “Oh, I came here in a box with a man called the Doctor,” and then carried on. Or also perhaps two women discussing something where they may briefly mention their brother, employer, etc. If the mention of the man was removed from the conversation, the purpose of the conversation would still stand. An episode could also pass if the conversation(s) happened in the presence of/with a man as long as it was still between at least two women who were actually conversing with each other (i.e. more than one or two lines and was clearly directed at each other), and about something besides a man. However, conversations where two women were addressing the Doctor (or another man), and not really talking to or acknowledging each other, were not included. This was to allow for three (or more) way conversations, since the test did not say that a man/men observing/participating in the conversation with two or more women disqualified it. A simple address was not considered as a conversation. The women had to have more than a two line exchange. (See end of post for a full list of failed episodes.)
Can you imagine, gentlemen, receiving that threat from a potentially dangerous man whose identity you have no hope of discovering but who knows your name, what city you live in, what you look like and where you work?
Now imagine receiving messages like that from men so frequently that you’re no longer bothered by it.
Now understand how f*cked up it is that you’re no longer bothered by it; that you’re no longer bothered by men’s anonymous threats of brutal sexual violence, because they’ve become just as common as a train not arriving on time.
Read More: Fake Geek Guys: A Message to Men About Sexual Harassment | http://comicsalliance.com/sexual-harassment-online-rape-threats-comics-superheroes-lessons-men-geek-culture/?trackback=tsmclip
Can you imagine, gentlemen, receiving that threat from a potentially dangerous man whose identity you have no hope of discovering but who knows your name, what city you live in, what you look like and where you work?
Now imagine receiving messages like that from men so frequently that you’re no longer bothered by it.
Now understand how f*cked up it is that you’re no longer bothered by it; that you’re no longer bothered by men’s anonymous threats of brutal sexual violence, because they’ve become just as common as a train not arriving on time.
Read More: Fake Geek Guys: A Message to Men About Sexual Harassment | http://comicsalliance.com/sexual-harassment-online-rape-threats-comics-superheroes-lessons-men-geek-culture/?trackback=tsmclip
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