Thorns

Hacking at Education: TED, Technology Entrepreneurship, Uncollege, and the Hole in the Wall The anti-social libertarian intellectual emptiness underlying a lot of TED-esque ideas.

On political and value neutral Everything with any message at all has a political subtext.

Why I don't like the dragon argument Points out that "if you can have dragons why can't you have POC" has some unfortunate implications that work against it.

words against communication and Also you get things like... The way worrying about appropriation/stepping on disabled people's toes can stop some people from realising they are disabled themselves. (Not that able bodied people shouldn't worry, just that it's complicated!)

Refusing to have the “What You Did” conversation "1 The ‘what you did’ conversation implies the ‘what you are’ conversation. 2 The ’what you are’ conversation is uncivil and silencing. 3 Therefore, it’s uncivil and silencing to discuss ‘what you did.’"

Frustrations of being a black gamer playing BIOSHOCK INFINITE

Sweatshops still make your clothes

Meet the 28-Year-Old Grad Student Who Just Shook the Global Austerity Movement

Vilification and 'just having a laugh' About the racist jokes in my old Uni's satirical newspaper

Righteous Wroth Rarely Is OMG a criticism of excessive social justice where the group making the criticisms (in this case, women) are the victims of the oppression ostensibly being attacked with too much zeal (eg sexism) I have Thoughts about the very complicated way mental illness (which often creates an inability to behave in the way society demands) interacts with the somewhat narrow sets of behaviours expected of a Good Ally/Activist but am not quite up to articulating them.

$300 for Julia Gillard's NDIS scheme? Please, my wheelchair costs $22,000 Apparently some Australians are ok paying taxes and levies for roads and schools but draw the line at helping disabled people.

And from the hahaha what department...
( Worse than global warming??? #followateen )

I've been slowly working through this book, it's fairly light but still a bit dense for my foggy hard-science-oriented brain.

Basically it's about demolishing gender essentialist pseudoscience.

The first part is a whole bunch of examples of how amazingly easy it is to affect people's decisions and abilities by "priming" them with stereotypes, either by putting stereotypes into their heads or just by reminding them of the stereotypes they've already been exposed to. Just putting a gender tickbox at the start of a maths test lowers women's scores, since they go "That's right, I am a woman. Women are bad at maths." (And thinking "I AM NOT BAD AT MATHS DAMMIT" still takes up valuable mental energy that could be spent calculating) And of course there's all the examples of exactly the same resume being judged differently depending on the gender/race etc associated with the name attached. People THINK they're being objective but really aren't, and will come up with complicated justifications for why their choice is logical, eg if you swap the "male" and "female" names on a pair of different resumes suddenly the traits that were unsuitable for the job when they belonged to a woman make a man the perfect choice.

She also demolishes some of the specific claims of Bad Gender Science, like "girl babies look longer at faces therefore women are naturally more intuitive therefore men are better at hard sciences" and so on (and of course as gender roles change the arguments have to twist themselves into stuff like "Women are attracted to forensic pathology and microbial biology because they...like faces and people")

Overall I'm finding it really informative but I am annoyed by how it assumes the reader is a cis het woman living in Australia/the US etc who is probably going to get married and have babies. She does acknowledge trans people, intersex people, same sex relationships, people from other cultures etc but mainly for what they can teach us about heterosexual cis etc people rather than as examples of everyday people who have to deal with gender stereotypes themselves. And, ok, most of her arguments are statistical and so the "average" woman is what matters, but she could still do better on being inclusive and intersectional. She does mention assumptions about race every now and then, but not in a very meaty way.

I'm onto part two now and she seems to be implying that there is some evidence for men and women (and male and female primates in general) being biologically hardwired differently in one particular way: men care about fitting into the male gender norms of the culture they've been brought up in whatever those norms happen to be and the same goes for women(*). The nice thing about this theory is that it says that specific gender roles are socially defined rather than innate, but that gender identities and divisions themselves are hardwired enough to debunk radfem etc dismissal of the trans experience.

(Second post)

(*)Non binary gendered people seem to be entirely off her radar, though being a small and poorly defined/understood group I guess it would be hard to come to many useful conclusions right now.

I may have already posted some of these, sorry!

Objecting to Objectification A post that really annoyed me. It basically says that queer women shouldn't, say, check out another women's breasts without stopping and thinking seriously about her ~thoughts~ and ~feelings~. Personally I am totally fine with random strangers (regardless of gender!) thinking I'm hot without wondering about my inner life, as long as they treat me like a person should we actually interact.

I really dislike the way ALL sexualisation of women is demonised within certain progressive spaces (while other "sex positive" progressive spaces are more likely to celebrate the sexualisation of women by men), meaning that there is pretty much nowhere it is accepted and normalised for women to sexualise other women. I realise that some women want safe spaces where they don't feel sexualised, but there's a difference between "Please don't sexualise women in this space" and "sexualising women is bad".

A criticism of yarn bombing

Identity should always be part of the gameplay N K Jemisin talking about how oppression and privilege are dealt with in the Dragon Age world. I know some people prefer fantasy worlds with no sexism/racism etc, but personally I tend to enjoy ones which DO have some bigotry as long as it's handled well and in a way that allows for happy endings.

The Naked and the TED A criticism of various books to come out of TED and TED in general.

The missing stair, My friend group has a case of the Creepy Dude. How do we clear that up?, “I am the Lorax, and I speak for the creeps!” Posts on dealing with creepiness (and worse) in other people

Fallacy Watch: No True Klansman Redefining terms like "racism" to refer to attitudes so heinous that nobody actually believes them, thus allowing the speaker to avoid being labelled with the term.

self-care: a buncha links, or something Not all self care can be ~enlightened~ acts like doing activism or eating organic free trade vegetables, but it's still necessary.

Lincoln Against the Radicals "Lincoln is not a movie about Reconstruction, of course; it’s a movie about old white men in beards and wigs heroically working together to save grateful black people."

Following on from my post about monster women and again via the_school_of_philosophy: the seam of skin and scales, in which a trans woman refuses to be see her body as a trap.

She doesn't mention disability explicitly, but almost everything she says rang very true for me, and trans people and disabled people are both very much left on the outskirts of white-young-feminist ideas about "loving your body". (In different ways of course, and I don't mean to flatten out the differences, especially since my disabilities are frequently invisible)

I am having a very interesting discussion with capriuni on a post she made about disability and monstrousness, and realised it may not be entirely a coincidence that I felt like drawing monster girls shortly after starting to go out more in my wheelchair and having to deal with the way that makes people look at me (and the way it makes me look at myself).

Paula Stiles on Why Multiculturalism Makes You a Better Writer

You’ll Probably Ignore Me Because I’m An Evil Straight White Dude, But…

10 rules for women blogging about their relationship woes

The E-Racing of The Hunger Games : Race & Cultures in Fiction There's more to writing non-white characters/POC than making them brown.

The Water Keeps Flowing The treatment of indigenous peoples is not "water under the bridge".

Field Guide: How to Recognize a Bad Boy Woobie I remember I had something to say about this, but not what it was.

Yeah, nobody cares about this movie any more. I just watched it, so you get my thoughts anyway. In the end I'm glad I watched it but I didn't have a super good time doing so. I can see why some people love it and others hate it.

Overall: A cheesy, clunkily written, exploitative film with some cool visuals and action overlaying a moderately successful story of women making a small but determined effort to fight back together against degradation and oppression while being kickass. I felt that the degradation was laid on a bit thick, I can see the film being pretty triggery for a lot of people.

I thought that might be the thing that put me off but actually my main issue is that there's scenes that are clearly meant to be symbolic/metaphorical where 90% of the stuff that happens doesn't actually seem to be symbolic/metaphorical for anything, it's just there to look cool. Which made them feel empty and meaningless, even if they did look pretty.

I thought it got some gender things right and some others wrong, it could have been much better and much worse in that respect. It did pretty badly on race, though (POC and non-Western cultures are very much the background to the stories of pretty blonde white girls), and I didn't like the treatment of mental illness. (Or fat people with skin conditions, what is it with stuff set in asylums…)

Also: There were no positive portrayals of romance or sex, except as ways of asserting power. All positive relationships were platonic and between women. That was interesting.

I've seen Sucker Punch compared to Madoka Magica and I can definitely see the similarities, though I liked Madoka Magica more.

Cam didn't like it at all, he thought it was voyeuristic and shallow.

And now, spoilers!
( spoilery thoughts )

Where are all the female anime fans? I don't read anime blogs, so can't speak to that, but in terms of meatspace fandom: am I wrong in remembering JAFWA (the local anime club) as having a lot of female members? I recall there being a reasonable number of women at the anime panels at Swancon too. Of course this is Australia, which may have a very different fan culture to the US.

Also I find her definition of "fan" unhelpfully ambiguous, it feels like anyone who isn't fannish the same way she is gets excluded. And that's not even getting into her very dubious explanations for this apparent effect, she completely ignores the possibility of sexism within anime fandom making women feel unwelcome. While most of the people I talked to were lovely, there were definitely some weird creepy guys at JAFWA.

The Unintended Consequences of Cyberbullying Rhetoric

Teenagers say drama when they want to diminish the importance of something. Repeatedly, teenagers would refer to something as “just stupid drama,” “something girls do,” or “so high school.” We learned that drama can be fun and entertaining; it can be serious or totally ridiculous; it can be a way to get attention or feel validated. But mostly we learned that young people use the term drama because it is empowering.

Dismissing a conflict that’s really hurting their feelings as drama lets teenagers demonstrate that they don’t care about such petty concerns. They can save face while feeling superior to those tormenting them by dismissing them as desperate for attention. Or, if they’re the instigators, the word drama lets teenagers feel that they’re participating in something innocuous or even funny, rather than having to admit that they’ve hurt someone’s feelings. Drama allows them to distance themselves from painful situations.

This reminds me of the way some people in online fandom use the term "wank".

Cleaning out my "ready to post" folder, I wrote this ages ago but I can see it being useful to link to at some point.

I just saw Pretty Woman for the first time. MY GOD SO CREEPY. It's one long male power fantasy of having enough money to make a pretty, sweet natured lower class girl fall in love with you, and do and be whatever you want without once having to make a commitment or say "I love you" (seriously, never. Not even at the end). Because you see she's a sex worker, so her standards are so low that not being a complete douchebag all the time is more than she would ever expect! You don't need to show her respect or care about her feelings, as long as you give her enough gifts and say the odd nice thing from time to time she will be blissfully happy.
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I've often linked to stuff where people in fandoms I'm in have made me really annoyed by being thoughtlessly racist/sexist/ablist etc. Thus I feel it's only fair to acknowledge having the opposite experience: I've been reading a lot of meta about the character Fenris from Dragon Age 2 and other fans have been consistently better at noticing and articulating problematic stuff in the text etc than I have. (I mean, not all the other fans. But often at least one or two per conversation)

No spoilers in this post, and I've tried to explain the context.
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Utterly utterly brain dead today (I have down graded my plans for the day to "Don't fall asleep again until bedtime") but have been annoyed at the overly simplistic framing of the accusations against Julian Assange, while also finding the broader attacks on Wikileaks disturbing for what they say about the lengths power will go to to defend itself. And it's such a huge thing I just feel like saying…Wow. This is a thing. (Did I mention braindead? Yeah)

Anyway. Have some links (plausibly triggery)