May 17

Great scene from Shriver’s novel … disciplinary charges for threatening behavior…

An excerpt from Lionel Shriver’s The Motion of the Body through Space

The whole tribunal, wherein an older white man is “hauled up on disciplinary charges for threatening behavior and racially and sexually aggravated assault”), indeed the whole chapter, is WELL WORTH the read.

***

REMINGTON: Just because she felt threatened doesn’t mean she was threatened.

TRINITY: I’m afraid it means exactly that.  You can’t argue with what people feel.

…

TRINITY: Our frame of reference is progressive contemporary mores …  Well, times have changed.

REMINGTON:  What has not changed—what has always been the case with human beings—is that “feelings” are no more factually sacrosanct than any other form of testimony.  So you can “argue with what people feel.”  Because people lie about what they feel.  They exaggerate what they feel.  They describe what they feel poorly, sometimes out of sheer verbal inadequacy.  They mistake one feeling for another.  They often have no idea what they feel.  They will sometimes mischaracterize their emotions with an eye to an ulterior motive—such as to slander a man who does indeed “threaten” them, but only with his comparative professional competence.

…

May 12

Dysphoric – “fleeing womanhood like a house on fire” – a four-part documentary series by Vaishnavi Sundar

Well worth watching!

May 11

Sexist Shit that Pisses Me Off (2nd edn)

Sexist Shit 2nd Ed - EBOOK COVER

NOW AVAILABLE! in print and ebook, 374p

FREE EPUB to site visitors; contact me!

The title says it all.

A collection of close to two hundred exposes and analyses of everyday sexist shit (and gender shit, since gender is aligned with sex) that pisses me off.

Includes pieces previously published in The Philosophers’ Magazine, Philosophy Now, Herizons, fbomb.org, Humanist in Canada, and Victoria Times Colonist, as well as a great many previously unpublished pieces.

Note: This second edition includes all of the pieces in the first edition, plus seventy additional pieces.  Also, note that it includes all of the pieces from the four Shit that Pisses Me Off volumes that address sexism.  (The other pieces are anthologized in Just … Think about It!)

________

about the 1st edn

“Woh.  This book is freaking awesome and I demand a sequel.” Anonymous, barnesandnoble.com

“I recommend this book to both women and men. It will open your eyes …” Seregon, Goodreads

May 09

Why don’t men sell sex?

Check this out:

https://uploads.ovarit.com/390523a9-9760-5cfe-a3ce-ef6d5486cffe.jpg

May 07

“For All Mankind” (an apple tv series)- absolutely appalling

I know.  Given the title, I never should have bothered.  And I certainly shouldn’t’ve expected, let alone hoped, for anything remotely alternative (the series is billed as ‘alternative history’).  Alternative to the male dominance, the white male dominance, the relentlessly juvenile competition and all the rest of disgusting masculinity (when the Soviets landed on the Moon before the Americans, the American astronauts were told, by their superior [sic] ‘Go, get angry, kick your dog, do whatever you have to do …’ [instead, many of them get in their hot cars and drive so dangerously, they put everyone on the road at risk of serious injury and death] — not one could cheer that humans had travelled to the Moon) … I lasted fifteen minutes.

Then I skipped ahead to episode three, because it looks like there’s an all-female crew … and lasted until the man said to the woman he was teaching to fly something like ‘Take it easy, hon’ …”.  Hon’?

So.  If this is not imaginative, but realistic, well, it’s worse than I thought.  

May 04

something fundamentally male about escaping to Mars…

“And there is something fundamentally male about this narrative of exit [establishing colonies on Mars, for example], of escape as a means toward the nobility of self-determination.  The cultural critic Sarah Sharma has argued for an understanding of exit as an exercise of patriarchal power, ‘a privilege that occurs at the expense of cultivating and sustaining conditions of collective autonomy.’  It’s a force that she places in opposition to the more traditionally maternal value of ‘care.’  The politics of exit are pursued, she insists, at the expense of pa politics of care.  ‘Care,’ she writes, ‘is that which responds to the uncompromisingly tethered nature of human dependency and the contingency of life, the mutual precariousness of the human condition.  Women’s exit is hardly ever on the table, given that women have historically been unable to choose when to leave or enter inequitable power relations, let alone enter and exist in a carefree manner.'”  (p.131, italics mine)

from Mark O’Connell, Notes from an Apocalypse

May 01

A sexy pout??

So I read the phrase “a sexy pout” and realized yes! That’s what that look is, when women thrust out their lips and look so sad. They’re pouting. And they do it to look sexy. Wait, what?

Why is a pout sexy?  Children pout.  So if a pout is sexy, that means that men are sexually aroused by children.  Well, we know that, I guess.

Is it hard-wired? Well, that wouldn’t make evolutionary sense. It doesn’t ‘contribute to reproductive sex’ to ejaculate into a female child; she can’t get pregnant.

Is it because sex is all about conquest for men, and children are easily conquered?

And, but, why is sex all about conquest? Why is ‘power over’ sexually arousing? Is that hard-wired? Or socially conditioned?

Whatever, women who pout to be sexy are encouraging child abuse. So just stop it.

And men? Oh, what’s the point. They won’t listen. They don’t care. They’ll just carry on hurting children.

Apr 19

How to be Successful without Hurting Men’s Feelings, Sarah Cooper

A light fun read with a few great punches:

– re the perfect voice pitch for women … too high and you’re shrill, too low and you’re gruff, just right “not yet achieved by any woman”

– chap 2 – lots of ‘When a man says X, it’s Y, but when a woman says X, it’s Z’

– “Try to keep your pregnancy a secret until your child is at least eighteen years of age.”

– How to say ‘yes’: I’d love to!  How to say ‘no’: Sure.

– the illustration on p99 is excellent (about getting interrupted – how to respond in a threatening way, and in a non-threatening way)

– chap 7 – really insightful – and I wonder how did men get so good at that?  esp if they’re supposedly so bad at communication?  Ah.  They’re bad at speaking the truth, but good at manipulation because they’ve been steeped in that culture all their lives.  So it’s not like they’re applying all the strategies they learned in The Art of War; it’s probably unconscious—they’re just saying the shit that all the guys they know and hang around with say.

– another great chapter (Men’s Achievement Stickers)

– and finally, p187: a comparison between a toddler and a CEO – I love it!

Apr 14

The Sexual Politics of Meat – Carol J. Adams

Highly recommended. The title says it all.

Among a whole lot of ‘worth mentioning’, I’ll mention the reference to Irving Fisher’s study (p.43) involving meat-eating athletes, vegetarian athletes, and vegetarian non-athletes. Vegetarians, whether athletes or not, had the greatest endurance (as measured by three strength tests). “Even the maximum record of the flesh-eaters was barely more than have the average for the flesh-abstainers.”

And it got me thinking again about why men suddenly do the cooking when it involves barbecue. I’d thought simply it was because one barbecues outdoors. Women=indoors. Men=outdoors. But now, I’m seeing too it’s fire. Danger! And, of course, meat. Status. A perfect trinity.

Apr 12

Leigh Anne Jasheway – brilliant!

I’ve recently discovered the brilliant and hilarious work of Leigh Anne Jasheway.

Her’s a great starting point: “20 Headlines from an Alternate Universe“

But take a look through (ALL OF) her other posts!

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