If you read one thing on this link roundup, read this. It’s by Natalie Reed and it’s very long, but it’s about science and skepticism and why they matter, and social justice and questioning whether it’s doing any good, and how sometimes anti-racism is really super racist, and basically it is all the thoughts I’ve been thinking for a really long time but haven’t been able to say. Read it.
If you read two things, (TRIGGER WARNING FOR EXPLICIT DESCRIPTIONS OF RAPE) read this. Holy shit. Honestly probably one of the best and hardest-to-read articles I’ve read about the experience of being raped and why you should not be an asshole.
Boing Boing has an excerpt from a book about the history of sexuality. It hits on one of Noah’s favorite topics, i.e., “normal sex” is basically a series of excuses and justifications for what’s currently fashionable.
Jonathan at Male Femme has a (TW for brief mentions of rape fantasies) really interesting post about radscum asshat Sheila Jeffreys’s beliefs about male transvestites, male submissives, and trans women. Spoiler alert: she’s wrong about everything.
Father’s Day was a few weeks ago, which means there are some interesting posts on it. Slacktivist writes for Father’s Day about great fathers in fiction. AlterNet covers a Father’s Day march against stop-and-frisk and in favor of racial justice and the end of the prison-industrial complex.
Kodi the cat walks her human. Noah says the cat probably has something miswired in its brain, because Noah likes ruining my fun. I still think she’s cute.
The Texas GOP party platform is always good for a laugh. This year they have outdone themselves by declaring that they are against teaching children critical thinking skills because they challenge the students’ fixed beliefs and undermine parental authority. Yes, really. I’m not quoting this out of context. You can look under Educating Our Children, subsection Knowledge-Based Education, if you don’t believe me.
Speaking of silly people and education! Have you heard of Accelerated Christian Education? It’s a textbook series used in some government-funded charter schools that teaches that the Loch Ness Monster exists and disproves evolution. Oyyyy.
The Nation has an interesting article about the debt that new parents often have because we don’t have paid parental leave the way that civilized countries do. Bleh.
The percentage of men in female-dominated occupations has increased from 5% to 6.1%. Which is kind of “yay more gender integration,” and also “one percent really at this rate I’ll be in a job forever.”
Speaking of poor economic news for men: in the past forty years male-dominated occupations have shrunk.
Military veterans have a (TW for discussion of mental illness) startling rate of brain injuries and addictions.
A paper suggesting that boys in the United Kingdom should receive the HPV vaccine. NO REALLY WHAT A SURPRISE.
TW for descriptions of murder. A thirteen-year-old black boy was shot and killed while running away with his hands up, because apparently being a young black men is a death-penalty offense now.
Global Montreal asks whether HPV vaccines should be given to men who have sex with men. Oooh! Oooh! I know! The answer’s yes, right?
Seven Arizona prison inmates have been murdered in the past two years, a homicide rate double the national average. And let’s see here: male, male, male, male, male, male, and male.
TW for child sexual abuse. A harrowing New York Times article about the coverup of the rapes and sexual assault of boys at an exclusive prep school.
Wait up, aren’t both examples of lesbians in the Boing Boing article actually trans men?
Trigger warning for rape culture: He’s right about the common use of ‘rape’ in video game parlance being a recent development. About 2-7 years ago, it was VERY OCCASIONALLY used to describe certain extremely cheap tactics in video games. Still not OK, of course. For example, in this space flight game I used to play, ‘dock rape’ was used to describe blowing up somebody’s spaceship just when they were docking with a space station and therefore couldn’t move. People never constantly said it, NEVER in the first person, and it was mostly used to describe super cheap shots, or alternatively… Read more »
The community for the game Tribes series of games, starting with Starsiege: Tribes in 1998, has long used the term “base rape”, referring to the strategy of repeatedly destroying the structures in the enemy base in order to prevent the enemy team from launching an effective counterattack. It’s worth noting, though, that this is used more in the sense of rapine than sexual assault, and that it was never directed at individuals.
Partially in response to the The Nation article: (Wow, I never thought I’d see a time when it’s grammatically correct to use the word “the” twice in a row) In the U.S. these days, if you’re employed, you shouldn’t have kids. The current mix of corporate culture and child-safety laws makes this highly impractical at best and horribly messed-up at worst. If you’re unemployed and have kids, that’s even worse, unless you have significant access to wealth (half a million saved up, the other parent has a job that pays at least upper-middle-class wages, your relatives are very well off… Read more »
Yay anti-natalism?
Thanks for the plug, Ozy 🙂
I just read the entire thread on “The R Word” and now I feel so very tired. I’ve discussed rape jokes before (rape victim, making it funny helps me cope, but needs to be smart humor ripping on the rapist), but why on earth is it so important for – I’m going to assume and I’m sorry – some middle-class gamers to use a loaded word for funsies? On a possibly hypocritical note, if I admitted to have done research on the difference between (professional and fairly mainstream) fetishized rape videos of males playing victims and fetishized rape videos of… Read more »
It doesn’t seem hypocritical to me, nor sick. Even if the portrayal of rape is problematic, I don’t think that makes examining that portrayal problematic.
As long as you put trigger warnings in appropriate places and so forth, I can’t see that it would give people any reason to hate you.
I agree wholeheartedly with Fnord. Choose your words carefully, construct your writings as respectfully (perhaps even with a borderline clinical tone), and you’ll be fine. Properly conducted and respectful research showing a sexist/hateful measurement of a social construct is not sexist/hateful, the research itself becomes sexist/hateful only when a sexist/hateful bias affects the outcome. Even then it might not be a total loss since if the bias is pointed out and fixed, the research is once again grand. The horror stories one hears about research in sensitive topic revolves around bigoted researchers who refuse to believe that they are bigoted… Read more »