Inner Mind Theatre

Bi women are kinda expected to just not be with men if they have like. Common sense or something. You see it everywhere. Victim blaming attitudes towards bi women with men from within the bi community usually along the lines of “if she hadn’t been with a man that wouldn’t have happened”

And a recent examoke is the anon I got the other day saying (to what degree of seriousness who knows lol) sleeping with men makes u a class traitor.

So anyways these attitudes can force bi women to choose between community and a relationship that can serve in some cases where the man is abusive to further isolate bi women.

And I’ve seen some people say welll ok if they’re with men then why don’t they go to str8 resources. And it’s like ok. Well for one they aren’t straight that should be enough but let’s go a bit further. Bi women experience unique types of abuse at the intersection of misogyny and biphobia and connected to misconceptions about bisexuals in general. They are also more vulnerable to abuse than straight women because again - they face abuse unique to bi women.

some say the solution is for bi women to just. Not date men. Especially when a bi woman dares criticize or express anger towards men. Which literally isn’t possible for some who for example may live where they can’t be out as a bisexual, where there isn’t much of an lgbt community. And umm sometimes you just fall in love with a man because that’s the whole thing with bisexuality lol.

as you said, bi women face significantly higher rates of abuse than straight women (particularly in ways that are tied to their bisexuality, like A Certain Prominent Celebrity isolating his bisexual wife from her female friends based on accusations that she would cheat on him with them). 

being told ‘oh bi women experience high rates of abuse because they choose to date men’, on top of being some severe victim blaming, makes no sense when 28% of bi people report experiencing spousal abuse compared to 7% of straight people. directing bi women to resources that are unequipped to handle the root causes of why bi people specifically experience high rates of abuse is useless at best and actively harmful at worst. 

even beyond active material resources, when a bi woman is in an abusive relationship with a man where her bisexuality is used as a point of shame, shutting bi women out from lgbt+ pride-related events and telling them they cannot express their orientation proudly in these spaces regardless of their relationships will simply make her more vulnerable to further abuse and less able to access a community that promotes taking pride in your orientation.

but beyond that, bi women have MUCH worse health outcomes than straight women on the whole, both with regards to mental health and physical health. bisexual women also earn on average 11% less at work than straight people, which is the highest number out of any LGB group (trans people weren’t surveyed in this study). bi women are also twice as likely as lesbians to live below the poverty line, which i add not to claim bi women are More Oppressed Than Lesbians (they aren’t, both groups face unique forms of oppression but have more in common than anything else), but to acknowledge that proximity to men does not magically remove the oppression of any lgbt+ woman. 

the existence of worse health and financial outcomes for bi women than for straight women isn’t just a weird coincidence; it’s because of biphobia and misogyny. these forms of oppression arise regardless of who (if anyone) bi women are dating. simply directing bi women to resources geared primarily towards straight women is always going to ignore unique conditions of bi women’s oppression.

I’m mostly making this so I can link people who can’t be bothered to do their own research and constantly ask me what he’s done wrong to this post. That being said, this is effectively a more complete version of the post with links I made recently, and a post containing a sc of a tweet that was taken out of context to appear homophobic has been removed to stop people from focusing on that misinformation, so please reblog this version instead.

queerbaiting

more queerbaiting

more retroactively making characters gay after explcitly saying they weren’t for 30 years

disrespect and ignorance relating to lgbt identities

gets away with these things by pretending he intended for aziraphale and crowley to be asexual/agender representation so he looks more woke than he ever bothered to be

racism

racism in good omens

transphobia

disgusting conduct towards fans (another example is here, but the person it affected has requested they be kept anonymous, so I cannot provide concrete evidence of this happening.)

literally defending child porn (and a summation of that blog post so you don’t have to read it)

oh, and his wife is a shitty person too

“Since I’ve had to be without your sweetest presence, I have not wished to hear or see any other human being, but as the turtle-dove, having lost its mate, perches forever on its little dried up branch, so I lament endlessly till I shall enjoy your trust again. I look about and do not find my lover — she does not comfort me even with a single word.

“There is clearly something happening in this community,” State Fire Marshal H. Browning said in a statement on Thursday. “That is why it is imperative that the citizens of this community be part of our effort to figure out what it is.”

The three fires occurred on March 26, Tuesday and Thursday in St. Landry Parish, north of Lafayette. A fourth fire, a small blaze that officials said was “intentionally set,” was reported on Sunday at a predominantly black church in Caddo Parish, about a three-hour drive north.

“But just as we haven’t connected the three in St. Landry, we haven’t connected the one in Caddo,” said Ashley Rodrigue, a spokeswoman for the Louisiana Office of State Fire Marshal, on Friday.

Local officials said that they were still investigating the fires, and did not say if they knew of any suspects, a motive, or whether racism was an element.

“There certainly is a commonality, and whether that leads to a person or persons or groups, we just don’t know,” Mr. Browning said at a news conference on Thursday.

The F.B.I. and federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives are involved in the investigation, said Jeff Nowakowski, a spokesman for the A.T.F.’s New Orleans field division.

The Rev. Gerald Toussaint, pastor at Mount Pleasant Baptist Church in Opelousas, La., was driving to work on Thursday morning at around 4:45 a.m. when his wife called him to say she had seen on social media that their church was ablaze.

Mr. Toussaint was aware of the two other fires that had been set at nearby houses of worship, St. Mary Baptist Church in Port Barre, and Greater Union Baptist Church in Opelousas. He rushed to the scene.

The church, which was founded in the 19th century, had undergone extensive remodeling two years ago. Now it is nearly gone, he said, except for a brick wall and corridor in the front.

“I’m trying to find out who did it, why they did it, did it have anything to do with me,” said Mr. Toussaint, who drives trucks for a living. “I don’t know none of this.”

He also said he did not want to speculate, for fear of angering potential arsonists, or prompting copycat crimes.

St. Landry Parish is a rural area studded with crawfish ponds and bayous in the heart of Cajun and Creole country. It is 56 percent white and 41 percent black. Mr. Toussaint said that relations were generally good between black and white residents.

Science fiction scholar Lisa Yaszek’s recent book The Future Is Female! 25 Classic Science Fiction Stories by Women, from Pulp Pioneers to Ursula K. Le Guin, is a secret history of women in science fiction, reframing the story of exclusion (“women weren’t welcome in early sf writing circles”) as one of erasure (“women made vital contributions to early science fiction, and these were systematically expunged from the record when the first wave of historical sf anthologies were published, as part of a backlash against first-wave feminism”).

Yaszek’s work is very personal to me, dealing extensively with Judith Merrill, the great feminist sf writer, editor and critic, who was my mentor growing up in Toronto.

In a new interview with the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast (MP3), Yaszek elaborates on her work and its ramifications for how we think about the story of the future.

You may have heard about AOC catching a lot of flack from conservatives for claiming that computer algorithms can be biased – in the sense of being racist, sexist, et cetera. How, these people asked, can something made of math be biased? It’s math, so it must be objectively correct, right?

Well, any computer scientist or experienced programmer knows right away that being “made of math” does not demonstrate anything about the accuracy or utility of a program. Math is a lot more of a social construct than most people think. But we don’t need to spend years taking classes in algorithms to understand how and why the types of algorithms used in artificial intelligence systems today can be tremendously biased. Here, look at these four photos. What do they have in common?

You’re probably thinking “they’re all outdoors, I guess…?” But they have something much more profound in common than that. They’re all photos of giraffes!

At least, that’s what Microsoft’s world-class, state-of-the-art artificial intelligence claimed when shown each of these pictures. You don’t see any giraffes? Well, the computer said so. It used math to come to this conclusion. Lots of math. And data! This AI learns from photographs, which of course depict the hard truth of reality. Right?

It turns out that mistaking things for giraffes is a very common issue with computer vision systems. How? Why? It’s quite simple. Humans universally find giraffes very interesting. How many depictions of a giraffe have you seen in your life? And how many actual giraffes have you seen? Many people have seen one or two, if they’re lucky. But can you imagine seeing a real giraffe and not stopping to take a photo? Everyone takes a photo if they see a giraffe. It’s a giraffe!

The end result is that giraffes are vastly overrepresented in photo databases compared to the real world. Artificial intelligence systems are trained on massive amounts of “real world data” such as labeled photos. This means the learning algorithms see a lot of giraffes… and they come to the mathematically correct conclusion: giraffes are everywhere. One should reasonably expect there might be a giraffe in any random image.

Look at the four photos again. Each of them contains a strong vertical element. The computer vision system has incorrectly come to the belief that long, near-vertical lines in general are very likely to be a giraffe’s neck. This might be a “correct” adaptation if the vision system’s only task was sorting pictures of zoo animals. But since its goal is to recognize everything in the real world, it’s a very bad adaptation. Giraffes are actually very unlikely.

Now, here’s the clincher: there are thousands and thousands of things that are over-represented or under-represented in photo databases. The AI is thoroughly giraffed in more ways than we could possibly guess or anticipate. How do you even measure such a thing? You only have the data you have – the dataset you trained the AI with in the first place.

This is how computer algorithms “made of math” can be sexist, racist, or any other sort of prejudiced that a human can be. Face photo datasets are highly biased towards certain types of appearances. Datasets about what demographics are most likely to commit crimes were assembled by humans who may have made fundamentally racist decisions about who did and didn’t commit a crime. All datasets have their giraffes. Here’s a real world example where the giraffe was the name “Jared.”

Any time “a computer” or “math” is involved in making decisions, you need to ask yourself: what’s been giraffed up this time?

Thanks to Janelle Shane whose tweet showing her asking an AI how many giraffes are in the photograph of The Dress prompted this post.

“Laura Clayson, 28, who was president of Lancaster University Student Union up to 2015, went on trial with 14 other people after helping to block a deportation flight to Nigeria, Ghana and Sierra Leone.

The Stansted 15 protesters, who stopped the government deportation flight from taking off in March last year, have been found guilty of breaching terror laws.

Lancaster MP Cat Smith said the verdict is a sad day for human rights.

Ms Clayson, along with 14 other activists, was charged with intentional disruption of services at an aerodrome under the 1990 Aviation and Maritime Security Act, a law passed in response to the 1988 Lockerbie bombing. It has only been used once before in 28 years.

The court heard the protesters secured themselves around the nose wheel and wing of the Boeing 767, with pipes and foam, having cut a hole in the perimeter fence.

They had all pleaded not guilty, but a jury at Chelmsford Crown Court returned a guilty verdict and they now face up to life imprisonment.

…

Responding to the verdict in a statement the Stansted 15 said: “We are guilty of nothing more than intervening to prevent harm. The real crime is the government’s cowardly, inhumane and barely legal deportation flights and the unprecedented use of terror law to crack down on peaceful protest. We must challenge this shocking use of draconian legislation, and continue to demand an immediate end to these secretive deportation charter flights and a full independent public inquiry into the government’s ‘hostile environment’.

Justice will not be done until we are exonerated and the Home Office is held to account for the danger it puts people in every single day. It endangers people in dawn raids on their homes, at detention centres and on these brutal flights. The system is out of control. It is unfair, unjust and unlawful and it must be stopped.”

…

A man who was set to be deported on the flight but has since been granted a right to remain in the UK said: “The Stansted 15 have been found guilty of breaching a barely used terror law. Though the jury were convinced that their actions breached this legislation, there’s no doubt in my mind that these 15 brave people are heroes, not criminals. For me a crime is doing something that is evil, shameful or just wrong - and it’s clear that it is the actions of the Home Office tick all of these boxes - and the Stansted 15 were trying to stop the real crime being committed.