having the power of one Gillette

The jeans problem was the favorite lecture one of my philosophy professors in college gave about the history of jeans and how it ties into capitalism/mainstream culture absorbing and monetizing any counterculture it encounters. So prior to the 1950s jeans were mostly an item of work-wear that you wore on the job as a farmer or factory worker or miner because they were cheap, durable, and hard-wearing. If you were off the job you'd wear what we'd call now dress pants or slacks. This changes in the 1950s when youth culture start wearing jeans as regular clothing, again because they're cheap, durable, and hard-wearing. But then jeans get absorbed by the culture and we start getting designer jeans, acid-washed jeans, pre-ripped jeans, and now we got people shelling out hundreds of dollars for "povertycore" aesthetic. And now jeans aren't even cheap, durable, and hard-wearing.

I have not managed to find anyone who thinks that in the wild, but it is so damn funny.

A) resource guarding

And

B) Harry Potter

So naturally, every time someone didn’t have a pencil she would charge them 10 house points (which, even in schools where there is an actual house point system, probably doesn’t fucking happen). She openly held the belief that she had to ascribe value to these precious writing implements or else no one would appreciate them, a concept evidenced by, i kid you not, how when homeless people are given houses for free they let them fall into disarray, because they didn’t pay for the house and therefore didn’t care about it. I, a pissed off 13 year old with a vendetta against power hungry teachers and also JK Rowling, brought a 100 pack of pencils to school so that whenever someone had to ask for one, instead of being charged a fictional currency and upsetting their fellow, deeply competitive students, i would just give them one. If the pencil didn’t come from the teacher, she couldn’t charge points for it.

This upset her. She couldn’t assert her power over the 1st period Advanced 8th Grade Math Class anymore. For i, The Pencil Liberator, had come to put an end to her tyrannous behavior.

Cambridge professor of sociology Jason Arday is accused of plagiarism by another academic

the accuser is a "race realist" who believes that in a true meritocracy all university professors would be white. this is somehow not acknowledged much during the entire ordeal

this leads to several days of media coverage demanding an investigation, or that Arday is expelled from his post immediately

somehow this accusation that has no effect on the lives of 99.99% of the population becomes FRONT PAGE NEWS in all the newspapers for multiple days, above anything else happening in the UK or the world at large

following intense media scrutiny, Arday resigns his post as a Cambridge professor

today, august 14th, days after resigning, Arday is found dead at his home in Battersea

This article by professor Kehinde Andrews clarifies more about the story of racist harassment Arday has been suffering since he fucking got a teaching job at Cambridge in the first place, in 2023, as the FIRST Black professor in that fucking stupid institution, who sure is taking it's sweet time defending their worker, despite already fucking checking his work for plagiarism and saying he didn't do it:

https://www.voice-online.co.uk/opinion/comment/2026/08/07/ardays-resignation/

1. He wasn’t the first Black Professor at Cambridge, but he WAS the youngest X

2. He was ALSO autistic, and nonverbal for the first 11 years of his life X

Gendered socialization is unequivocally real. Boys and girls are treated and socialized differently before they're even born.

Female babies are disappearing en masse, because male babies are more valued.

From an extremely early age, parents respond to their childrens' emotions differently based on gender. Mothers over-estimate the crawling abilities of their infant sons compared to infant daughters.

Mothers speak to their infant daughters more and talk them more about emotions than they do their sons.

By the age of 2, boys already show an avoidance to the color pink and other items traditionally seen as feminine, laying the ground work for early demonstrations of misogyny in childhood.

When children enter pre-school, there is no difference in math abilities between boys and girls. But such gaps begin to appear as children grow older.

The vast majority of girls report feeling unsafe going outside, and at least 2/3 of girls have reported experiencing sexual harassment at school by the time they 16.

Further on in education, women will understimate their scores, while men will overestimate their scores. Women will perform worse on tests when first told that women, on average, perform worse.

Researchers argue that the prevalence of sexual assault against women is so high specifically because of early gendered socialization. The men who commit sexual violence consistently demonstrate specific ideals about gender and perform hostile masculinity.

The patterns reach well into adulthood, influencing occupational choices.

I could literally go on and on and on. There are countless studies and entire fields of academia dedicated to researching this. The fact that children are socialized differently paced on assigned or percieved gender is really not debatable.

I am sympathetic to the fact that transphobes have warped the concept of socialization to insinuate that trans women are destined to be violent or predatory, or that trans men are destined to be submissive and helpless. However, people weaponizing these frameworks does not mean that the phenomenon does not exist.

Furthermore, individual people's nuanced experiences with gendered socialization does not mean that these patterns don't exist on a large scale. Any interaction with society will confer the influence of gender biases, especially upon children to are extremely vulnerable to both subtle and overt social cues.

Thinking of it as like a language, where so much stuff is taught by exposure, all the "gendered manners" that are taught in single-sex situations (the proverbial thing of "girls act differently when there are no boys present/boys act differently when there are no girls present") which are the situations where a kid is taught how to perform "their" gender in the most nuanced and complicated ways that signal to other people of the same-gender that "we are the same type of person" - and, trans people are often cut off from that until they come out, meaning that they have to learn the "basics" as adults.

Likewise I see so many trans people say "Bold of you to assume I was socialised! I was treated as a weird thing." And I don't know how to point out that the things that get a child treated as a "weird thing" and put outside of the bounds of propriety are themselves different for children being raised-to-boyhood or raised-to-girlhood. Thinking about England because I don't want to extrapolate outside of where I personally know, a "girl" might get treated as a tomboy-outsider-weirdo for wanting to play toy soldiers or play in the woods, but a "boy" would probably be seen as normal for that. Likewise, a "boy" might be punished really badly for liking makeup and dresses, but a "girl" wouldn't be. Seeing "You can't say I was socialised as a boy, I was constantly getting in trouble for putting on my sister's clothes, and treated like I was disgusting for crying and being emotional!" And just... Yes! Because people that the patriarchy wants to turn into "boys" will be punished for showing femininity, that is how male socialisation works! Likewise "I was treated as a tomboy and put in a third gender category because I was sporty and outdoorsy, and punished and called monstrous and sent to see a psychiatrist for not playing with dollies" - That's female socialisation, because a "boy" who was sporty wouldn't be put into into third gender category for it, and wouldn't be called monstrous for having no interest in dolls.

Obviously the exact things that are gendered change from culture to culture, but that applies to everything, everything is culturally bound and affects different people in different ways and to different degrees, but we still try to talk about the broad trends which carry through cross-culturally (which has been a big part of feminist consciousness- Recognising that although the ways that women are treated worldwide aren't the same, that there are repeating themes...)

It's common enough that young black kids are told to keep any identifying information on them at all times just in case someone reports a black kid breaking and entering by walking into the house they've lived at since they were born. Because that has happened.

When you add mental illness and the healthcare industry into the mix, things only get worse from there. To be clear, you don't need to be black or mentally ill to be treated poorly by a doctor or nurse that's decided they know you better than you do. But it sure doesn't make things easier.

And people have died as a result- or have we already forgotten the death of Adriana Smith who went to THE HOSPITAL SHE WORKED AT AS A NURSE reporting severe headaches and was dismissed as exaggerating and imagining the severity, only to be declared brain dead upon arrival less than 24 hours later and artificially kept alive to force her dead body to carry her baby to term- which couldn't even happen and they had to remove him via C-section anyway.