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I do find it pretty 'funny' how Americans who gets real pissy about being called cunt are also nearly always happy to call a woman a bitch.

liskantope

In my experience as an American who has spent three and a half decades in the US, it is not anywhere near most ("nearly always") in that group who are happy to call a woman a "bitch". But setting that aside...

In different Anglophone cultures, there can be differing levels of severity for particular derogatory words -- that is how language-as-tied-in-with-culture works. In American English, the word c*** is a vicious slur in a way that it apparently isn't in British English, while bitch may be insulting and have misogynistic implications but does not quite have the same status.

I know this reblog is probably "Amerisplaining" something the OP and most others who read this are perfectly aware of in principle, but the way the OP is written comes across as really having no idea that degrees of offensiveness for particular words can differ across cultures, the implication of which is that there's nothing particularly interesting or strange about Americans getting super worked up over c*** in a way that may to a non-American naively seem out of place or inconsistent with other attitudes.

#words words words #slurs #the anglosphere #i don't know the op and prob shouldn't be engaging with this #it was just a sort of quick drive-by post #and maybe i shouldn't expect others to approach posting in my style #of making sure to acknowledge relevant context everywhere #i have been sometimes taken aback at how happy to use “bitch”#some male feminist / sj-ish liberals i've known are #at least i knew a few back in grad school (earlier 2010's)#who would refer to particular women they hated as “a bitch”#while being very genuinely super into sj pop feminism #i've also known quite liberal women use “bitch” against other women #but this was all rather long ago and is not at all “nearly always”

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I know this single data point goes only so far, but the other day I went to a fairly large-scale Pride festival (the main Pride event of a major city in my geographic region) and stayed for between two and three hours, talked to people at tons of booths, saw a bunch of shows on their stage, etc. And not one single indication of anything related to Israel and Palestine so much as came up anywhere -- not so much as one slogan or symbol, let alone a mention of it in anyone's speeches or a booth with a fundraiser for combating starvation in Gaza or "justice for Palestine" or whatever. By the way, the friend who invited me to join her at the event is Jewish and enthusiastically identifies as a member of the queer community, even organizing smaller-scale Pride events herself.

I bring this up because I got myself in hot water at some point last year over my denial that there's some ubiquitously pervasive antisemitism problem in queer spaces/culture. I don't deny that some militant queer organizations have insisted on embracing anti-Zionism as part of the omnicause and have enforced this in a way that veers into antisemitism. But claims of "the queer community is tainted with a strong antisemitism streak" continue to not hold water for me, unless one looks at the strong leaning among younger progressives towards being pro-Palestine/anti-Israel especially since October 7th, 2023 and equates that geopolitical leaning with antisemitism in a way that overrides the fact that in the context of larger numbers of people at an event the topic seems to be considered off-limits out of respect for the fact that different parts of the queer community (even skewed in proportion) have strong feelings on different sides of it.

#pride events #queer community #antisemitism #war in gaza

Having been on the dating sites for six (unsuccessful) years now, I can't help but think that there are a lot of women who would rather be single than give someone who doesn't meet all of their preferences a chance.

Is that your sense, or am I being too cynical here?

I'm getting serious deja vu here. Ah [searches via tags on blog]... okay, several asks invoked ideas just adjacent to this one, but this notion has been trodden on enough that it feels like I've engaged with it a ton even if there's not one particular post I can point to.

[Disclaimer for the rest: I haven't been active in online dating for somewhere around a year, because of the whole Searching For A Job That Would Be Probably Somewhere Else situation.]

I think, first of all, a lot of recent studies and social commentary show that fewer women than ever before are committed to the idea of having a partner (a lot of this has to do with the continued liberation of women and how we're getting farther and farther away from the era of women having to be "owned" by a husband right after being "owned" by her father just for basic security), which goes hand-in-hand with recent studies and social commentary about how women are getting higher standards for men.

I'm not sure I specifically see this with my own eyes. What's been much more directly apparent to me is that the "gatekeeper" "can and should be super selective" role for women is greatly magnified in the online dating realm; the phenomenon of the "top" 10% of men getting most of the attention on dating apps, while attention for women seems to be somewhat more evenly distributed, seems anecdotally to be true in my vicinity.

The whole "need my man to be this many inches taller than me" thing is openly stated on dating profiles and does strike me as evidence of women who are stubborn about certain hard-to-meet preferences, but I'm not sure how common that is versus men perhaps not stating in their profiles but to themselves insisting on certain superficial standards as well.

These years, I personally perhaps don't really have much room to judge too many women for choosing continued singleness over compromising on some of their less realistic preferences, since, I mean, my fundamental preferences apparently (at least in practice, as far as I can see) don't seem to be that commonly fulfilled at my age, particularly the one about my potential partner not already having kids, which I've stuck to as a deal-breaker pretty stubbornly even though I know I really should grow up and give in on it.

#online dating #gender relations #height

A Facebook friend posted a meme which shows a headline from New York Magazine titled "man develops app to reveal what women look like without makeup" (and from the picture it shows, the implication is that the app takes as input photos of women with make-up and generates photos of what they probably look like without make-up), with a comment under it saying:

Men who have actual relationships with women usually know this because they see us without makeup and even naked sometimes.

Never have I, in the succession of like four seconds, wanted to hit that "like" button so enthusiastically while simultaneously being repulsed by a meme. I want to endorse it because I'm so emphatically on the side of that type of feminism where pressure to use make-up and male worries about "what will she look like without make-up?" are concerned. But my revulsion towards shameless and gratuitous romantically/sexually-unsuccessful male shaming is still going to win out here. Kind of wish it didn't continue to be so in vogue within online progressive culture after so many years.

#liskantope sees a fb post and feels the need to rant about it yet again #feminism #make-up #need a tag for men who are unsuccessful in the dating market

I currently know a group of theater people (not connected to my professional life, but for those who haven't experienced theater social spheres, they tend to lean almost as far left on social issues as academic spheres although with much more traditional religiosity), and one within the group is a millennial whose career is essentially that of a passionate left-wing activist for social justice (although the kind that really makes a concrete on-the-ground difference, not at all like being a capital-S-J Social Justice keyboard warrior!). She and I were having a conversation last night where I brought up how I'm moving to a position within academia in a more conservative part of the country but am inspired by the fact that it'll be in a state whose politics are more contentious and where I can hope to make more of a difference. She said that was great, and I could tell she almost made the comment about how glad she is that that state will have another Democratic voter, but instead she added, "Not that I want to presume anything about which way you'll vote -- I don't know your politics!" And she said it in a genuine and warm way.

Then this morning, someone else in that group, a boomer-age man who seems well-meaning but has a consistently questionable command of social appropriateness sometimes in ways that are stereotypical of boomers, made a long post on Facebook about how someone falsely accused him of saying something offensive and brought the complaint to other people rather than coming to him first to sort it out. He explained that he's aware of being off-color and occasionally stepping over the line sometimes in what comes out of his mouth and/or sometimes being misinterpreted, but that none of it is ever meant to insult or demean and that he'd rather people confront him if they're upset by something he said than that they talk about it behind his back. The millennial woman I described above commented under his post with a staunch defense of him and his feelings, saying that she knows of his good character and that if someone else is put off by a thing he says but doesn't take the time to know who he is as a person and acknowledge his well-meaning heart, that's their problem.

I'm not inclined to be quite as generous to the guy as that, but then again I doubt I've known him as long as she has, and it's beside the point. My point is that I'm taken back at the intensity of my own reaction in finding the mindset of this woman (as displayed in both of these anecdotes) so incredibly refreshing that it makes me want to cry. And it makes me realize more fully than ever how badly I wish they made more passionate left-wing activist types in that mold.

Maybe... maybe in the more conservative state I'm moving to, where being liberal doesn't put you in the comfortable majority practically everywhere, I will encounter more liberals like that?

#personal #story from my current life #activism culture #political polarization #i do not consider myself that type of liberal #not bc i'm not liberal and not bc i'm cancel-culture-ish #but bc i'm not accomplished in terms of concrete activism #even though i aspire to self-improve enough to be more like that

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cruelfeline

I don’t know why this is so funny to me, but it is.

derinthescarletpescatarian

This is what 22 year olds on Tumblr are like

liskantope

You know what? I'm going to stand up for Tumblr-ish 22-year-olds here.

(Yes, those words appeared under a reblog showing Liskantope in the heading; you do not need to adjust your reading glasses or your screen.)

The years of my life specifically between turning 18 and turning 22 -- that is, basically my four years of college -- were massively, massively formative for me, so that I felt in many ways like a drastically different person by the time I turned 22 than I did at the time I turned 18. (And the few months leading up to and including my 18th birthday were also particularly dramatic and formative in a way that made me feel like I was changing rapidly.) As we get older, our development tends to monotonically slow down I suppose, but arguably I evolved more between 18 and 22 than I had between 14 and 18, or at least so it feels in retrospect (and perhaps during: I remember feeling frustrated at my relative lack of evolution during high school while it was happening).

I have, since being 22, never quite gotten over the desire to go through another several-year time span where I can re-experience the high of growing that much that quickly. Although at the same time, I have enough sense to realize that it would be a disaster to go through another spurt like that: society expects someone in their 30's to be a lot more stable, so it's for the best.

But anyway, yeah, the experience of being 18 can legitimately feel quite remote to a 22-year-old, so while the way the dialog is written in the OP is kind of funny, the feelings of the jaded socialite there might be quite valid. All that said, this should be assumed to be a universal trend, and I'm not saying it should be assumed to imply that 18-year-olds are precious little children or that a 22-year-old dating an 18-year-old is evil on the basis of being an unacceptable power differential.

#personal growth #age #crucially the 18-to-22 period is that of my first relationship #which grew and evolved me more than anything else #i've been reliving it through reading the old emails 20 years later #it's kind of thrilling to have gotten most of the way through year 1 #and know how much drama and change there is just ahead

I can't say it was entirely fun in the last few days to see that most of my notes come from some reblog of my (not showing my best self) exasperated rejoinder from many weeks ago to spitting-fanatic anti-feminist Brazenautomaton, pointing to my slip-up about assuming that rates of victimhood of made-to-penetrate rape largely come from the context of prisons as just a typical sign of the usual despicable feminist brainwashing into the evil feminist memeplex that's controlling society.

I mean, I'm mostly pleading to the choir here I suppose, but given that males of our species have the protruding organ that they have sexual urges to poke inside of other humans and are biologically granted the higher sex drive and are also more prone (culturally and biologically) to physical violence and are also (culturally and biologically) put into the role of actively pursuing sex (and typically, anti-feminists proudly refuse to shy away from acknowledging the biological element!), am I brainwashed into male self-loathing by feminists if I imagine the common-sense default outcome is that a solid majority of the raping within humanity is done by men? (Not that this overrides actual data or excuses my misreading of data.)

I'd be curious if those in my audience who aren't anti-feminist fanatics devoted to interpreting everything to do with feminism and individual feminists in as damning a light as possible have a take on what to make of the rape gendered perpetrator/victim data being discussed in the above-linked long thread, given the common-sense backdrop I described above.

#feminism #rape #sociological data #sex differences

luulapants

My elderly father started talking about how frustrating he finds “the pronouns thing” and I was like. Oh no. He had such a good stand on this, he’s been they/them-ing his cishet siblings for god’s sake! Is he regressing?? And he was talking about how difficult it is to remember, and how onerous it feels to expect strangers to keep track of it, and I’m like oh no oh no.

Then he says, “I mean, the problem isn’t the gender thing. The problem is four words: she, her, he, and him. We got rid of stewardess and turned it into flight attendant. It doesn’t matter if the flight attendant is a man or woman, so we got rid of it. We just need to get rid of those. I don’t need to know.”

“You don’t need to know… people’s gender?”

“No. I don’t care, I don’t need to know, and I don’t want to remember it.”

So we can relax. It’s just a continuation of his crusade to they/them the world. He doesn’t want to remember anyone’s gender. He’s abolishing the genders.

teaboot

Your dad is so powerful

derinthescarletpescatarian

He is so so correct

liskantope

I don't know, I kind of partly agree. There's a lot of pain and headache with having to indicate people's gender when referring to them with a personal pronoun, and that trouble is multiplied a lot in the context of very recent cultural changes, and it would be more elegant and logical just to get rid of it as a number of other languages do. On the other hand, (1) while I think some dialects of Indonesian or Malay and a few other languages around the world manage to get by with a unigender third-person pronoun used for both singular and plural, they/themming absolutely everyone is going to create a lot of ambiguity both with number of people referred to and which people referred to (having gendered pronouns does have an advantage in that it lets you discuss multiple people and unambiguously refer to each of them shorthand), and (2) however much some people in the movement making waves in how we think about gender want to just abolish gender, externally acknowledged gender identity seems incredibly important to some binary people, certainly some binary trans people as well as (I'm sure, in a different way) some cis people, and I don't think they're going to go for a default norm of "other people's gender is none of my business".

I guess something pretty adjacent to this was recently touched upon on my blog here.

#gender identity #pronouns #languages #also sorry but i guess i'm... not ready yet for the idea #that it's a sign of wonderful progress that an elderly man #now uses “they/them” on fellow cishet boomers in his life #but i can't entirely defend that feeling

I watched Obsession in the theater the other day. It's a little bit sad that the primary emotional residue from watching a slasher horror equal-parts-scary-and-silly-and-slightly-nonsensical movie like that for me is bitter nostalgia for being the age of all the characters, where most of my peers were single and had unencumbered social lives and messy and malleable interpersonal dynamics and so on. Maybe my secondary emotional reaction is a slight bit of something like relief over a depiction of a young man even more severely loveshy than I am/was.

Anyway, here are what I would call the three most important moral takeaways (only very vague spoilers here), the first of which is a platitude found in the moral message of like a quarter of all stories, the second of which is a common-sense message perhaps not given often enough in fictional media, and the third of which is most specific and also least necessary to propagate of all.

#nostalgia #social dynamics #loveshyness #cw for something that doesn't have a clear label heheh

brighterflowers-rebooted

Crazy how the gay marriage debate basically just went away, huh (well I guess it got eclipsed by trans issues)

I venture that it's because the legalization of gay marriage didn't really change anything (even in the deep blue areas in which I've lived, gay marriages seem vanishingly rare). And even if someone doesn't think a gay-married couple is "really" married, it just doesn't come up unless someone really goes out of his way to be a jerk to people about it

Trans stuff at least has the appearance of requiring greater social shifts

And I think abortion will just forever be an extremely contentious issue bc people on both sides feel so strongly about it

brighterflowers-rebooted

Possibly the Gay Marriage Wars were more about recognizing/coming to terms with Christianity diminished influence on the culture than they were about actual gay people

It's interesting, right, because in many ways I feel that a broadly-christian culture is better than a broadly-secular one. Actual faith (being an internal matter) aside, the way of living and relating to others/the world seems to work best for most people. But at the same time, cultural Christianity is different from actual christianity and i think it is bad for people and bad for the faith when it is socially mandated to pay lip service to a faith you might not really believe

The kingdom of God is within you, right. Social trends are gonna trend and you will be disappointed if you expect your society to do your religion for you. But then we're back at the beginning, bc Christianity's influence on societies seems obviously better than what came before and much of what appears to come after

Long winded way to say I dont really have a consistent Hot Take

Probably if (some version of) christianity were to again become dominant in the US then different kinds of Christians would go back to being at each other's throats, as opposed to being more or less friendly in the face of broader secularism

liskantope

I agree with the top post more than the second, since I tend to take a dimmer view of how Christianity affects society and social well-being, although that is possibly colored by my rather disproportionate exposure to (1) people who had a traumatic experience with Christianity and/or (2) academics in academia subculture where any kind of traditional religiosity or even God-belief is fairly unusual and everyone seems to get by just fine with viewing the world within an ethical framework and relating to each other. (And I count myself among those atheists in academic subculture who fit in just fine in that regard. Although arguably one downside is that people in academia and other secular progressive subcultures tend to fill a religion-shaped hole with certain religion-like ideologies, which is a trend I don't fit in with very well.)

I basically want to second all the rest and mention that I appreciate seeing someone else besides me say it. (Perhaps I just don't have as good a way of saying these things, but when I try to express some of them on Tumblr, in return I get a good bit of flak.) Yeah, the gay marriage debate is basically yesteryear's major culture war battle and represented how that old culture war really revolved around Christianity vs. secularism (with each waging war in a different way against Islam). Yeah, it mainly got supplanted by trans issues -- that's what both social conservatives and social liberals decided around the same time to focus on, once gay rights by and large became a done deal on the legal front and was established in the hearts and minds of a solid enough majority of Americans. I'm not sure I'd call gay marriage "vanishingly rare" from my experience (one of my current colleagues is in a same-sex marriage, and I know other academics in such as well, for instance), but it doesn't seem to be something the whole gay community has jumped to either. Yes, trans issues are different from gay rights issues in a number of key ways (this is the part I get in trouble for, and I don't want to suggest it's exactly what you're saying because it isn't), including requiring the appearance of greater social shifts (I would go further and claim, actually requiring greater social shifts).

The trans issues culture war battleground is not a proxy for Christianity vs. secularism, even though some parts of the anti-trans side comes in a conservative Christian flavor and is held by conservative Christians, and even though the liberal side seems determined to brand the debate over trans rights as the Gay Rights Debate 2.0 (and perhaps the conservative side does this as well, although I doubt it since it would be disadvantageous branding given that they lost the gay rights debate?).

Yeah, I've always said that abortion is always going to be a contentious issue and I don't see how that will ever change, because it involves a legitimately deep philosophical/ethical conundrum that can't be boiled down to getting rid of "hostility to, discomfort with, and resistance towards accommodating people who are different along some axis" -flavor conservative ideas that inevitably will eventually decline, as applies to gay rights stuff and many aspects of trans rights stuff.

Probably if (some version of) christianity were to again become dominant in the US then different kinds of Christians would go back to being at each other's throats, as opposed to being more or less friendly in the face of broader secularism

I don't know. Christianity was still fairly dominant when I was growing up, in the days before New Atheism had begun to really gather strength. It was certainly quite dominant in the '80's as well. It's true that if you go back far enough -- to a century ago, say -- there was a lot more friction in the US between Catholics and Protestants than we see now. But throughout most of living memory, I'm not sure such conflicts have been very prominent.

alarajrogers

The actual abortion debate is a red herring, though.

Let's say you're a person who genuinely believes life begins at conception, and thus, abortion is murder. Right? So you want to prevent abortion. Well, the first thing you'd do is prevent pregnancy in anyone who wants to prevent pregnancy. Life is precious, so it shouldn't be started in someone who won't or can't give their all to it. You would also want to eliminate economic reasons for abortion. So, strong protection for pregnant workers, paid maternal leave, universal health care for mothers and babies, and government-run day care, because the pressure of "if I have another baby I'll have to quit my job" might lead women to want an abortion. These are pretty basic causes of abortion. Unlike the murder of born people, we can actually zero in on the reason for a lot of abortion and prevent it with simple social policies.

They're against those. Not just, not stumping for them. Against.

The truth of the matter is that what they really, really want is adoptable white babies. They want white women to have more kids, and they want middle-aged Christian couples to be able to adopt from teen girls who got pregnant, so that means, bring back the stigma of pregnancy. Make pregnancy financially difficult unless there's a well-established career man backing you, and then make abortion impossible, and this will create more adoptable white babies. It'll also be a huge setback to women's rights and prevent a lot of divorces... which in their eyes is a plus. They want a world where men control women, everyone is Christian, and white people are unquestionably on top of the social hierarchy.

But those are wildly unpopular ideas outside of evangelical circles and extreme white supremacism. So, they positioned it as "save the babies". And there are probably some pro-lifers who really do have a principled objection to "killing babies", but if no part of their motivation is wanting to make sure women get punished for having sex with the wrong men, then they'd probably be in favor of making it easier to avoid pregnancy, thus preventing a lot of abortions.

It's also quite recent that the argument against abortion was "but the babies!" The original argument against abortion, which got it made illegal, was that it kept killing women. When the technology improved to the point where the only reason it was killing women was the lack of regulation caused by it being illegal, we got it legalized. The right wing didn't spin up their anti-abortion thing in full until the early 80's.

liskantope

Discussing what might Actually Be Behind The Abortion Debate is a bit of a digression, and I don't know that I'm up for turning this thread (which wasn't mine to begin with) into a discussion of that and anyway am about to travel for a few days without my Tumblr-writing laptop so won't be able to respond much. But regardless of what may or may not be the history behind the initial illegalization of abortion in the earlier 20th century (and what you're claiming about that is extremely interesting in its own right), I prefer to treat the debate that has been happening throughout my lifetime, reflected in the fervent convictions of people that I've actually encountered over the last quarter-century.

I've become very tired of the memes I've seen over years and years where Republican beliefs about restricting sex education and welfare and support for new parents and etc. are invoked to conclude that "actually, you see, it was never about protecting the lives of fetuses" or "if they actually cared about fetuses/babies, they'd favor providing X, Y, and Z". Don't get me wrong: I'm absolutely fine with complaining that the Republican platform calls for banning abortion but completely fails to provide initiatives for preventing unwanted pregnancy or support for people with children they're ill-equipped to begin raising, and even fine (to a certain extent) with using this grievance as a sort of political bargaining chip ("if you're going to push for restricting abortion, at least allow us to advocate condom use in schools and give us universal health care for mothers and new babies"). But, I generally believe that deciding, over the explicit rhetoric of another group, that you know what they're "really thinking" instead, is very dangerous to the goal of using cognitive empathy to reach those in the opposite camp from you and figuring out how to change cultural beliefs. Eventually it can and sometimes should be done, but I think we need to hold ourselves to a standard of fairly strong evidence that a group has a different "real reason" from the one they explicitly give. In particular, I don't like jumping to conclusions about the "actual motives" of a group based on other contentious policy positions they separately hold because that often runs the risk of failing at theory of mind regarding the model of the world the other side would have behind those other policy beliefs. For instance, there are a multitude of ideologically conservative reasons for opposing government-funded social support and, while I may feel most of them are unreasonable and in practicality amount to a certain degree of callous ignorance of other people's legitimate difficulties, I'm not going to assume they add up to "actually Republicans want new parents to be poor and their babies to not be able to live".

In the case of pro-life conservatives, I will go as far as stipulating that the desire to "protect the lives of fetuses" is just part of a cluster of related conservative ideological beliefs which reflect a severe discomfort with anyone (particularly women) having sex out of the sanctified structure of marriage and a neurosis about how everything at every stage of human reproductive function is to be left to God and Not To Be Messed With. I base this upon a lot of the rhetoric that does quite visibly exist among evangelical conservatives and how well it explains other hard-line socially conservative policy beliefs such as being against birth control, stem cell research, and IVF. I would add that the idea of sex/reproduction stuff being Not To Be Messed With has been an ingredient in both the opposition to gay rights (a lot of which was framed in terms of marriage being for the purpose of binding two people who at least in theory would have the equipment to procreate) and the purely conservative opposition to gender medicine. And that is the type of conservatism that overall could wane -- I suppose the "no sex outside of marriage" part has already waned massively -- which helps push things in favor of pro-choice. But I contend that when abortion rights are taken in isolation, the fundamental principles behind supporting or condemning the moral right to abortion are grounded in an even deeper and more difficult philosophical place that shows no sign of being collectively "resolved" by humans anytime in my lifetime, and so I'm not holding my breath for us to stop being divided on this issue as a society.

You go much further than that into the territory of claiming that the real intention of pro-lifers is to increase the number of white babies available for adoption and seem to treat this as not only ultimately behind the opposition to abortion but a desire to "stigmatize pregnancy" (you mean, outside of marriage? in other words, the white babies thing lies upstream of the longstanding conservative value that sex outside of marriage should be stigmatized? it seems that pregnancy within marriage has traditionally not at all been stigmatized and that Republicans quite recently have been raising hell over the fact that fewer people are getting pregnant nowadays!). I acknowledge that you included the nuance that not every pro-lifer individually cares about the availability of white babies for adoption, but drawing up a bunch of tenuous causal relationships between various conservative attitudes and the availability of white babies for adoption, and then concluding that the conservative movement collectively sees all those same relationships and therefore has "more white babies for adoption" as its true ultimate goal behind almost everything else related to abortion, is completely wild as far as I'm concerned.

I once encountered someone who I presume to be a pro-lifer (I decided on the spot that I didn't feel like getting into a frank discussion about abortion rights with him) who claimed that one possible motive for being pro-choice which totally exists among some pro-choicers is to reduce the number of black babies to make society more white. No, hear him out: black people in the US have a higher birth rate than white people, so if we make abortion more available, more black fetuses will get aborted and the proportion of black people in the US will be decreased, so this is clearly the motive behind some pro-choice sentiments! While I agree with him about the basic cause-and-effect relationship he gestured towards, and while I acknowledge that you can find some pro-choice rhetoric that wanders into the realm of discussing how many babies are born in certain underserved communities that are not equipped to raise them with sufficient resources for a good life and how it would be better to decrease the disproportionately high birth rates in those communities, I find his jumping to "decrease the number of black people because they don't like black people" as a contributing motive behind the liberal pro-choice position to be pretty absurd -- and note that he wasn't even suggesting that it's been the ultimate unified motive behind supporting reproductive rights, just a motive of a certain contingent of pro-choicers! I think deciding that pro-life-ism is ultimately based on a desire to maximize the number of white babies in the adoption market is on similarly unjustified ground.

#theory of mind #birth control #reproductive rights #stem cell research #ivf #patriarchy #pregnancy #extramarital sex #racism

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brighterflowers-rebooted

Crazy how the gay marriage debate basically just went away, huh (well I guess it got eclipsed by trans issues)

I venture that it's because the legalization of gay marriage didn't really change anything (even in the deep blue areas in which I've lived, gay marriages seem vanishingly rare). And even if someone doesn't think a gay-married couple is "really" married, it just doesn't come up unless someone really goes out of his way to be a jerk to people about it

Trans stuff at least has the appearance of requiring greater social shifts

And I think abortion will just forever be an extremely contentious issue bc people on both sides feel so strongly about it

brighterflowers-rebooted

Possibly the Gay Marriage Wars were more about recognizing/coming to terms with Christianity diminished influence on the culture than they were about actual gay people

It's interesting, right, because in many ways I feel that a broadly-christian culture is better than a broadly-secular one. Actual faith (being an internal matter) aside, the way of living and relating to others/the world seems to work best for most people. But at the same time, cultural Christianity is different from actual christianity and i think it is bad for people and bad for the faith when it is socially mandated to pay lip service to a faith you might not really believe

The kingdom of God is within you, right. Social trends are gonna trend and you will be disappointed if you expect your society to do your religion for you. But then we're back at the beginning, bc Christianity's influence on societies seems obviously better than what came before and much of what appears to come after

Long winded way to say I dont really have a consistent Hot Take

Probably if (some version of) christianity were to again become dominant in the US then different kinds of Christians would go back to being at each other's throats, as opposed to being more or less friendly in the face of broader secularism

liskantope

I agree with the top post more than the second, since I tend to take a dimmer view of how Christianity affects society and social well-being, although that is possibly colored by my rather disproportionate exposure to (1) people who had a traumatic experience with Christianity and/or (2) academics in academia subculture where any kind of traditional religiosity or even God-belief is fairly unusual and everyone seems to get by just fine with viewing the world within an ethical framework and relating to each other. (And I count myself among those atheists in academic subculture who fit in just fine in that regard. Although arguably one downside is that people in academia and other secular progressive subcultures tend to fill a religion-shaped hole with certain religion-like ideologies, which is a trend I don't fit in with very well.)

I basically want to second all the rest and mention that I appreciate seeing someone else besides me say it. (Perhaps I just don't have as good a way of saying these things, but when I try to express some of them on Tumblr, in return I get a good bit of flak.) Yeah, the gay marriage debate is basically yesteryear's major culture war battle and represented how that old culture war really revolved around Christianity vs. secularism (with each waging war in a different way against Islam). Yeah, it mainly got supplanted by trans issues -- that's what both social conservatives and social liberals decided around the same time to focus on, once gay rights by and large became a done deal on the legal front and was established in the hearts and minds of a solid enough majority of Americans. I'm not sure I'd call gay marriage "vanishingly rare" from my experience (one of my current colleagues is in a same-sex marriage, and I know other academics in such as well, for instance), but it doesn't seem to be something the whole gay community has jumped to either. Yes, trans issues are different from gay rights issues in a number of key ways (this is the part I get in trouble for, and I don't want to suggest it's exactly what you're saying because it isn't), including requiring the appearance of greater social shifts (I would go further and claim, actually requiring greater social shifts).

The trans issues culture war battleground is not a proxy for Christianity vs. secularism, even though some parts of the anti-trans side comes in a conservative Christian flavor and is held by conservative Christians, and even though the liberal side seems determined to brand the debate over trans rights as the Gay Rights Debate 2.0 (and perhaps the conservative side does this as well, although I doubt it since it would be disadvantageous branding given that they lost the gay rights debate?).

Yeah, I've always said that abortion is always going to be a contentious issue and I don't see how that will ever change, because it involves a legitimately deep philosophical/ethical conundrum that can't be boiled down to getting rid of "hostility to, discomfort with, and resistance towards accommodating people who are different along some axis" -flavor conservative ideas that inevitably will eventually decline, as applies to gay rights stuff and many aspects of trans rights stuff.

Probably if (some version of) christianity were to again become dominant in the US then different kinds of Christians would go back to being at each other's throats, as opposed to being more or less friendly in the face of broader secularism

I don't know. Christianity was still fairly dominant when I was growing up, in the days before New Atheism had begun to really gather strength. It was certainly quite dominant in the '80's as well. It's true that if you go back far enough -- to a century ago, say -- there was a lot more friction in the US between Catholics and Protestants than we see now. But throughout most of living memory, I'm not sure such conflicts have been very prominent.

#christianity #secularism #same-sex marriage #trans issues #abortion #social conservatism

Well, it's official. I've run into ads for a product on the market whose existence is even more depressing than that of the Flumpee which I saw ads for last summer: the Cuddle Clone.

I find having a fake version of your dead pet to cuddle in bed both psychologically unhealthy and Black Mirror -ish in ways I don't think I have to explain.

#stuffed objects #loneliness #pets #black mirror #these times feel so dystopic #pulled up my flumpee post to link to and just stole 4 of its tags

I think I've run across a good writer who thinks on my wavelength in terms of the "gentrification of mental illness / neurodivergence", and he wrote an excellent essay criticizing a recent book of Devon Price (a blogger/writer/activist I've run across and felt critical of for years; once known as "E. Price", they wrote that famous "Laziness Does Not Exist" post which I made an effortpost about way back in my days of Wordpress blogging and going on about low-agency vs. high-agency goggles). To be fair, I should say, Jon Machnee's post is an excellent review of Price's book modulo the fact that I haven't read Price's book.

Here is a passage I find particularly striking, even if it's purely anecdotal:

Recently, I attended a BBQ at my sister’s house. She knew I had nothing on that weekend and wanted me to work the grill so her and her friends could hang out in peace. I obliged, as any good brother would, and was surprised to learn that her whole friend group had autism. I have spent the better part of 12 years talking with, studying, and researching autism, and while I know you can’t diagnose or undiagnose someone at a party whilst also grilling hotdogs, I would bet my entire life savings that not a single one of them had an actual autism diagnosis or would get one if they were assessed. At one point, they told me that my sister, who does not have autism but does have ADHD, was the most autistic of the group. One of them even asked me what I thought of Price’s book and expressed how much it meant to them. This is particularly funny in hindsight because a few month later my sister reported that not only did they not have autism, but when they went to talk to a professional about it, they became distraught upon learning that they weren’t even remotely close to meeting any of the criteria. Apparently after the BBQ, some of my sister’s allegedly autistic friends asked her what was wrong with me, and she had to inform them, and I quote, “Oh, he has, like, real autism.”

#autism #diagnosis #jonathan machnee #devon price

It really messes me up psychologically when I experience a surge of anxiety while complaining to peers that I feel tired and distracted and overwhelmed by X or Y going on in my life, when those peers are parents of pre-adolescents, a situation I'm like 100% sure creates more tiredness/distraction almost every single day of this period of their lives than my situation X or Y (and we're not even getting into 30/40-something parents whose kid or whose own aging parent has a major health problem they're dealing with). The anxiety is both over how inadequate it makes me feel when I consider the perspective of how their life is more distracting and exhausting almost every day, and over how unqualified it makes me feel to have children of my own even though I've always hoped for that to happen eventually.

Although one or two such peers have kind of called me out in a way that validates this insecurity, the vast majority of the time they show sympathy with my struggles, but every single time I'm in a conversation where I bring up that I'm tired and overwhelmed by such-and-such to someone who is raising a kid, I can't stop myself from imagining what they "must" be thinking but not saying.

#personal #anxiety #parenting #self-disappointment

I don't really want to draw the attention of the Tumblr-user whose blog this is on since I've picked on them enough, but right after making a couple of Animorphs-related posts and after my commentary on the ethos of their blog being dedicated to strenuously reading queer stuff into Animorphs, my dashboard gave me another possibly even clearer exhibit of this.

Ignoring the whole "Tobias is trans" idea and its likelihood from the text on the grounds that the thread isn't claiming this time that it's textual but rather imagining a hypothetical alternate universe where Tobias is a trans girl, it looks like evidently Rachel isn't straight after all, which supposedly should have been clear the whole time since Tobias lives by default as a bird, thus her attraction to Tobias has nothing to do with his physical form (as if she never knew him, or periodically still hung out with him, when his form was that of a human boy); let us leave aside this argument's implication that Rachel just doesn't experience sexual preferences for anything physical which is contradicted blatantly in the books. And evidently Rachel, one of whose defining characteristics is being superficially extremely conventionally feminine to the point of being obsessed with the art of "how to be a girl in superficial presentation" in late '90's teenage girl culture, would be totally happy to dress partly in men's clothes.

I used to only observe this in the webcomic Questionable Content, where it seems the cartoonist wants to make almost every single character, no matter how straight they initially appeared, turn out to be bi or queer in some other way, but it's clear to me now that this feeds into a much larger subculture, and I have to lean towards Tumblr user northshorewave's explanation that this comes from a "folk religion" of no universe being interesting or worth investing in and nobody being worthwhile unless a queer identity is involved.

As I've said before, in the grand scheme of things it's harmless and I shouldn't pick on it, except as far as my believing it to be important that people are aware of when they're immersed in it.

#animorphs #qc #gender identity #queer culture

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I think I must have commented on this before, but it's strange for me to compare and contrast the authors of the two most influential book series to my life growing up: Animorphs (late childhood) and Harry Potter (throughout adolescence).

The Animorphs author, K. A. Applegate, had a sort of "tough love" online personality as far as my late childhood self was concerned, with a sharp-tongued sarcastic wit and a no-nonsense and occasionally finger-wagging manner to her when answering questions (at least outside of formal interviews and in the context of interacting with fans on the then-very-young World Wide Web). For a children's author, she didn't come across at all soft and gentle, which I now that I think of it is reflected pretty well by the content of her books. J. K. Rowling was the far kinder, sweeter, and more nurturing public personality that I would have expected from a children's author.

Then in the 2010's and 2020's, social media warped the way a lot of public personalities were calibrated, and transgender issues came to the forefront of our societal reckoning and began to tear us apart on the culture war battleground, and KAA came through it as a beloved figure with a lovely relationship to fans and with a trans daughter she was supportive of, while JKR came through it as ugly militant culture warrior who is a completely disgraced evil antagonist in the eyes of a massive swath of the more progressive in our society.

#animorphs #k a applegate #harry potter #jkr #social media #culture war #i was at a purim event this year where several figures were named #as haman-level villains including elon musk and jkr #i felt a little uncomfortable about rattling the grogger for jkr #as a total comic book villain alongside the likes of elon musk

thejakeformerlyknownasprince

Pacing in circles at work somehow led me to the idea of trans woman Jake. Copying Rachel when they were little, over the course of the war either letting the identity settle as fact and not outwardly worrying about it too much, or retreating back into the closet as they get closer to the endgame. I can’t tell if this is a great idea or a boring one but what do you think?

Aw man, I can imagine during the series Jake's gender being "I'm probably a girl, but I have a war to fight in the morning so I don't care about that right now." Because in this scenario I feel like she would. She's got Animorphs to lead, a planet to save, God's Own Angst to chew on at night... and, okay, everyone gets her gender wrong. But that last is just... she just can't deal with it right now. Her friends and her brother and her entire species all have to come first.

And then after the war? Healing looks like retreating from the public view. Healing looks like letting the TV networks and armchair historians have that boy called Jake whom they've mistaken her for, and quietly building her own identity. Healing is trying on dresses, trying on eyeliner, and letting herself move ever further away from that guy called Prince that someone wants to carve into a mountain and 20,000 strangers want to be president. At some point she just disappears from the public view entirely, and at some point soon after that there is no one legally called Jake Berenson anymore, and the inaccurate name goes down in the history books as the real person lives on.

thejakeformerlyknownasprince

Also: I just remembered that the woman after whom Jake was named came out as trans! I wonder how she feels about a famous fictional character having her deadname. Regardless — Jake was originally inspired by a trans woman!

liskantope

I'm not so sure about the timing of that. My recollection is that KAA's "son" was born long after the first Animorphs books were written. I remember the fact of her having a baby she named Jake coming out in an interview article at the time where she stated that her naming the baby Jake when one of the Animorphs characters was named Jake was a total "coincidence" and me suspecting that couldn't possibly be true, but at the age I was at the time I couldn't confidently tell when someone was joking tongue-in-cheek about something like that, especially in print. (KAA had a fairly caustic type of sarcastic humor.)

All I can find on Clara's (formerly Jake's) birthday is that she was born in 1997 very premature. According to Google AI (which can't entirely be trusted on these types of things), KAA began dedicating her books "for Jake" around #14, which came out at the start of 1998, and of course there may have been some delay between her writing the dedication and the book being published. Still, this evidence tentatively points to her not having even conceived the child that would be named Jake yet, let alone had that child, when she first began writing Animorphs in early-to-mid 1996, suggesting that her "son" was named after the character more than the character was named after her "son".

#animorphs #k a applegate #google ai

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