For those of you who simply can’t get enough of my rambling about gender issues, or who just want to hear about my most enormous personal failure, I’ve got a post up at the Good Men Project, all about success and beauty and porn and whatnot. Enjoy.
The Success Myth
Noah Brand tells of his greatest professional failure, explaining his theory of The Success Myth, and introducing the idea of the female gaze.
Hegemonic Heterosexuality
We’ve talked before about hegemonic masculinity, the constant societal drumbeat of nonsense about what a man is supposed to be. Tall, successful, competitive, into sports, violent, et cetera ad nauseam. What I’ve been thinking about lately is how this fits into another incessant social narrative, one I’m going to call hegemonic heterosexuality, because the alternate…
A Journey To Nice Guy Syndrome With Jonathan Coulton
Like a lot of pasty white people who have strong opinions about comic book continuity, I enjoy the music of Jonathan Coulton. I like that he’s a nerd musician whose work contains enough conceptual depth of craft to stand up to a bit of analysis. One of the recurring themes in his work is sympathy…
You Are The 1,000,000th Visitor!
Around the time I hit Publish on this post, this blog will pass one million hits. We started in June of 2011, so that’s just over six months to get to this point. Wow. You people are awesome. Pretty clearly, these are issues people care deeply about and want to get into, and evidently you…
Spam Messages On Dating Sites
Here in the Weird Alternate Future, the internet has proven, despite its serious problems, to be something of a gender leveller. Yeah, there’s a lot of ingrained sexism in internet culture, but it’s not like that’s somehow absent in meatspace culture, and there are a lot of places where the everyone-is-text phenomenon allows men and…
Rick Santorum Is Full Of Santorum
In his latest attempt to double down on his right-wing-religious-asshole bet, Rick Santorum has clarified his position on abortion in cases of rape: rape’s bad, but if you get pregnant from it, hey, free baby! Who’d want to turn that down? Normally when we talk about a political candidate being full of himself, it’s not…
Born This Way: Black Box Sexuality
I was arguing with a friend a while back; we’re both atheists, but he’s one of the ones who feels compelled to be rude about it. He was asking where the notion that one has to respect other people’s religion came from. Why shouldn’t religion be subject to rational inquiry in the public sphere, he…
SOPA Is Un-American And Anti-Capitalist
Along with everyone else who knows anything about the internet, we at NSWATM are firmly opposed to the Stop Online Piracy Act, which effectively turns control of the internet over to the entities who have demonstrated they can least be trusted: the legal departments of large corporations. Some people might call that an exaggeration. Some…
Freshly-Hatched Gynocratic Rage
The title of this post, “freshly-hatched gynocratic rage”, is a phrase I came across in an issue of Bitch magazine, lo these many years ago, and I apologize for not being able to dig up the name of the author who originally coined it. She described it, more or less, as the phase every feminist…
Merry Christmas In Various Forms
I celebrate Christmas in a basically secular fashion, and so on Christmas Eve, I offer my traditional benediction. In every part of the world that has a serious winter, we find the same form of celebration. In the deepest, darkest part of the winter, when everything’s been cold and dead for months and you’ve been…
Melissa Tempel Is Doing It Right
This inspiring article has been Tumblred and Facebooked and [whatever else you damn kids do when you’re not on my lawn] all over the place, and with good cause. It’s by a kindergarten teacher who’s taking simple, common-sense, nonthreatening steps to educate the kids in her class about gender roles, what they are, and that…
This this this
I know, I’m probably the millionth friggin’ person to reblog this, but Christmas is coming up and it made me smile, and also tear up a little. [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vS9H3vc49kY] This is what we’re fighting for. A world where people can love and be loved and act like complete dorks on home video, and gender doesn’t…
Achievement Unlocked: Human Woman
I’ve been feeling a bit low just lately, what with it getting dark at 4:30 in the afternoon. It’s the kind of lifestyle in the kind of latitude where you realize that it’s entirely possible that you became a vampire weeks ago, and you just haven’t noticed because sunlight hasn’t touched your skin since god…
Kurt Vonnegut vs. My Mom: Girls Are Dumb
Beware what books you read when you’re fourteen. Wait… just about everyone reading this is long past fourteen. Too late, then. When I was fourteen, I read Jailbird, by Kurt Vonnegut, and it remains perhaps my favorite of his novels. Vonnegut was, of course, one of the secular saints of American literature in the 20th…
The Beauty Myth And The Success Myth: Ozy’s Law In Action
Over Thanksgiving weekend, I was talking with my brother, and we were bemoaning something I’ve bemoaned with other men on many occasions: the bloody impossibility of convincing the women we love that they’re beautiful. Those with a woman that they love know how it is: she’ll get it into her head that her weight or…