Riot Rage

“Being poor now just leads to being more poor later. Can’t pay to clean your teeth? Next year, pay for a root canal. Can’t pay for a new mattress? Next year, pay for back surgery. Can’t pay to get that lump checked out? Next year, pay for stage 3 cancer. Poverty charges interest.”

“Two New York state lawmakers are sponsoring legislation to ban doctors from “performing or supervising virginity examinations” after rapper T.I. said he demands a gynecologist check his daughter’s hymen to verify his daughter’s virgin status.

Here’s text of the New York State Senate Bill S6897, sponsored by state Sen. Roxanne J. Persaud. Here is its state Assembly corollary, sponsored by state Assemblywoman Michaelle Solages and co-sponsored by Rick Gottfried, Andrew Hevesi, and Walter T. Mosley.

In the Senate bill’s justification memo, Persaud’s bill notes that “virginity” is not a medical term but a social construct used to further discriminate against women and girls. “These examinations are not only a violation of women’s and girls’ human rights, but in cases of rape can cause additional pain and mimic the original act of sexual violence, leading to re-experience, re-traumatization and re-victimization,” according to the memo. “Many women suffer from adverse short- and long-term physical, psychological and social consequences of this practice. This includes anxiety, depression and post-traumatic stress.”

Vagina-having people have a shorter urethra, which means we’re more prone to UTIs because the bacteria doesn’t have to travel as far to get up into your bladder and cause a problem.

Which means if you’re exposing your bits to bacteria (as with sex), peeing will flush out bacteria in the urethra. (Urine isn’t actually sterile - that’s a myth - but you’re *supposed to* have a little bit of bacteria - that’s how bodies work. But it still flushes things out that shouldn’t be there.)

If you’re one of the people saying “You meant ‘women’”, fuck you. I meant “people who have a vagina, regardless of their gender or lack thereof”, and you can go fuck yourself with a cactus.

And, of course, they get over 20 to hit:

Sad, angry, jealous, and guilty feelings can make you a healthier person. Figuring out the reason for your negative emotions and learning from unpleasant experiences makes you stronger, and that success can bring happiness- but when you suppress and ignore negative emotions, you eliminate the balance of good and bad. Because the contrast of feeling sad is what makes feeling happy so wonderful, happiness wouldn’t really exist if you’d never truly embraced your sadness. 

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“For a question with so much riding on it—does using politically correct language actually make a person less of a jerk?—the test was deceptively simple.

Here’s what you do: Show people a sketch of a cartoon person—circle-for-head, ovals for arms and body—with a dotted line linking it to an equally cartoony thing, a balloon-animal dog. Over the person’s head loom two thought bubbles, a round one containing three question marks and a jagged one with three exclamation points. That’s it. And the test is, describe what’s happening.

Importantly, the people being tested, upwards of 2,000 of them, were all native speakers of Swedish, an old language that has learned a new trick. Like English, Swedish used two pronouns to indicate the gender of a person, hon (she) and han (he). But in 2012, a new word dropped into Swedish discourse: hen, a nongendered pronoun that could replace either or both.

So this was the real test. Would native-speaker Swedes, seven years after getting a new pronoun plugged into their language, be more likely to assume this androgynous cartoon was a man? A woman? Either, or neither? Now that they had a word for it, a nonbinary option, would they think to use it?

And they did. Not only did the Swedish speakers use the nonbinary option to describe the, let’s face it, nonbinary human, but in other surveys they deployed hen (as well as han, but the feminine hon, too) to describe people in stories when their genders weren’t specified. Now, it’s true the researchers don’t have comparable tests from before 2012, before hen. So this result is, as UCLA political psychologist Efrén Pérez says, merely suggestive. Still, though, “this word has no biological associations. It’s from scratch. And it’s performing the way some proponents argued it would,” says Pérez, coauthor of a paper describing these tests in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “These language changes can nudge people in directions some folks find normatively worthy.”

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