Thorns

I've decided to go through my tumblr drafts, which are full of posts I felt too nervous to post publicly in case I got reblogged into Discourse, and see which are worth posting here. In most cases I feel like I didn't quite capture my full thoughts on the matter, but sometimes you gotta let yourself be a bit incoherent to flail towards understanding.

So, let's begin with a post about men writing f/f! *starts out intending some mild edits for clarity, ends up doubling the length*

The original post:

People comparing men’s fetishization of lesbians to slash fandom is always so funny like imagine a world where large amounts of men did get extremely emotionally invested in potential romantic relationships between fictional women

I keep seeing posts like this and...that is a thing that exists? As a group they tend to have the same male gazey sexism issues as male het shippers, but they still very much care about the romances.
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The Story is a Spell. The Story is a Curse.
It matters who writes us.

Shock and Care: an essay about art, politics and responsibility

Otaku Blog And Proud
A Japanese woman's complex feelings on Japanese media.

Slash and sex scenes

MM Romance Readership Survey: Results

(Really wishing dreamwidth had a queue/delayed posting right now)

Including some very old links that got mixed up with ones intended for alias_sqbr.

Some interesting discussions on slut shaming in the Lizzie Bennet Diaries yes, from when it had just aired.

A Saami person discusses Frozen

This is how we kill our blacks by @thekooriwoman & @donayrials

How The Peanuts Comic Strip Got Its First Black Character

Open letter to Australian feminists concerned about sex worker exploitation

Remote Indigenous communities are vital for our fragile ecosystems

Pure Queers

“So What If Your Porn Is Feminist?” So, This.

Fatphobia: A Guide for the Disbeliever

“Where’s My Cut?”: On Unpaid Emotional Labor

Debunking misinformation, without attracting trolls

Women of Japan unite: Examining the contemporary state of feminism

I got into an argument on tumblr with someone about aromanticism and I don't feel like engaging with them any more but they are SO INFURIATING I feel the need to rant.

Note: I am not aromantic myself, I apologise if I misstep. You guys have enough crap to deal with.
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An utterly terrible article: Why women lose the dating game

This sort of article feels like it comes from some bizarre parallel universe where everyone is a douchebag who sees all romantic and sexual relationships as a cold, objective calculus of income + attractiveness + status. (Also everyone is straight and binary gendered. Obviously)

Partners of the same approximate value are interchangeable, and the aim is to capture the highest valued partner you can. Once a man gets married he is forced to support his wife forever. But what all men actually want is an endless stream of meaningless sex with high valued women. Marriage appears to be a strictly unemotional transaction: status and children for the woman, a guaranteed supply of sex for the man. To be an unmarried woman past a certain age is to be of shamefully low status and doomed to misery.

The other main difference between men and women is that women's attractiveness steadily drops from the day they turn 23 or so, while men's attractiveness falls much more slowly, so that their overall value tends to increase through their 30s with their income.

And you know what? In such a world it does make sense for women to marry the first decent prospect around their age who comes along, holding onto him as their value decreases and his increases.

But thankfully the world I live in is nothing like this whatsoever.

While drafting a (still unfinished) reply to Real Sex 101 I googled vaginismus to make sure I had the spelling and definition right and discovered that the Wikipedia page assumes anyone with a vagina is a woman. Below is a draft corrected version but I've never edited Wikipedia before and HATE proofreading so am a bit hesitant to post it. I haven't done any major edits beyond ungendering the language, what do people think? It's pretty clunky in places, though not all of that is my fault :)
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Discussions about the ethics of problematic prompts at kink memes:
Dear Holmes/Watson Kink Meme participants asking for [Indian!Holmes and European!Watson]
(I highlighted this particular thread since I think it cuts to the heart of both sides of the argument, but the other comments are worth reading too)
conscientious kink?

I find this sort of topic really interesting, even though I tend to be squicked by most of the sort of border cases people bring up, so it would be very easy for me to blithely tell people to suck it up and not go around hurting other people with their fantasies (and this used to be my default position).

This isn't a topic I feel sure enough about to host a discussion about, really, go read the discussion that's already there.

Since It Looks Like the Post With This Comment Isn't Coming Back . . . About the difference between "Stop being mean to me" and "Don't tell me when I'm wrong". Why is "If I talk about this, people will criticise me" necessarily a bad thing? Not a new idea but this particular example appealed to me.

bratz dolls and appearance politics

And finally: liminal_boundaries

Mostly from my blogroll I think (which would be on Dreamwidth if we had filters yet :/).

New Alice in Wonderland. Looks cool though I hope it doesn't end up creating a good vs evil dichotomy, that lack is one of the charms of the book.

A libertarian argues for an amnesty for undocumented migrants Libertarianism is so totally far from my own cynical pinko tendencies(*) that I find it incomprehensible, so it's really surreal to find it used to argue against racist views I find incomprehensible, you end up with (to me) bizarre statements like It’s true that when you combine something basically moral (free immigration) with something completely immoral (government subsidies for education and medicine) you may get bad results from the combination.

My Life In a G-String: A Round Up of Stripper Memoirs This is EXACTLY what bugged me about "Candy Girl" by Diablo Cody.

Equal pay for equal work (unless you’re creative, in which case “pride” is enough) Not that the Australian Government has a history of ironically doing the exact opposite of what it's preaching while it's preaching it *cough*

Also: I keep meaning to write a post about the Iranian protests but don't feel like I have anything informed to add to the conversation (and assume you all know it's happening so generic "awareness raising" won't make much difference. If not you could do worse than searching for "Iran" on my blogroll). I did set my twitter timezone to Tehran.

(*)I was brought up around rigid socialists, and as a result am both left wing and anti-dogma, so I'm not a big fan of right wing idealistic dogma.