Auld [Link] Syne

I’m home from staffing the Chicago International Model UN conference! I no longer have a radio in my ear, I’ve had a whole night of sleep, and I think my blood is no longer more coffee than platelets. So, to celebrate, I wrote the eight page paper that was due today.

Finals week, man.

Because I’m still exhausted and I can’t see the floor of my room for all the mess, this is a links-and-blurbs post. But, lest ye fear, I’ve got sitting in nebulous drafty form posts on…[inhale]

asexuality, cognitive adaptation training for schizophrenia, common confusions about different mental disorders, The DSM 5–What Does It All Mean, the problems with the Transvestic Disorder diagnosis, this horrible article, diva cups, assigning moral value to food, and dissociating.

[exhale]

So. Links.

Paul talks about therapy, his experiences, and ‘cures’.

So I’m not “cured.” I don’t think I ever will be, and quite frankly, I don’t want to forget. I don’t want to lose what will now forever be a part of my story, a part of who I am. What the work helped accomplish was making the attack no longer define who I am. And it began the work of not letting all the darkness that came before it define who I am — the years of mockery, bullying, and harassment all through middle and high school, the professional failures and life mistakes made in adulthood, my hangups and neuroses. Not exclusively define me, anyway. They will all always be a part of me, but I learned that they’re not all that I am.

Also, he’s new, and I forgot to mention it. Go take a look at Near Earth Object.

Speaking of new things, there’s a new blog format! I like it–do you? There’s more space, the editing dashboard is all pretty, and it looks clean and crisp. Plus, screenreader compatible!

Finn Gardiner on Autism Speaks, and why the organization is not an ally for those with autism. Not one bit.

My existence is not tragic. I do not deserve people’s pity. I am not merely a burden on society, and I do not necessarily seek a “cure.” I don’t claim that my life is perfect, but I do think that there are both benefits and drawbacks to being autistic, and to “cure” me would be to fundamentally alter my psyche to the point that I would no longer exist in any recognizable fashion. All I ask for is equitable treatment and the right to access the services I need in order to live the best life possible.

Oh, and Autism Speaks also supports Jenny McCarthy. That’s not just being a bad ally, that’s actively supporting dangerous policies and pseudoscience.

The Good Men Project has posted two different articles filled with rape apologia this week. (Link is to a Feministe examination.) Want a good site for social justice writing for men, that doesn’t condone rape? Oh hey, here’s some:

Add your suggestions in the comments–I’d love more.

Ryan on sexualization of men in comics.

If you are either brave or foolhardy enough to scroll to the bottom of the internet, you are likely to find a panoply of commenters telling us that men are just as sexualized in comics as women. The big bulging muscles, the skin-tight spandex, that’s totally man-sexy… right? I honestly thought it was, before I asked an actual female of the species. It seems that most of the men in comics and games are not actually physically attractive. This was news to me more recently that I’d like to admit.

What say you?

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Auld [Link] Syne
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3 thoughts on “Auld [Link] Syne

  1. 1

    Men in comics are sexualized – by men/the male gaze. They are male power fantasies, both sexual (men are normatively strong, agentic, in-control in sex) and not. A lot of comics ooze homoeroticism for that very reason. This shouldn’t really be surprising, though. Masculine beauty norms are male-defined just like feminine beauty norms because men tend to dominate the hegemonic cultural discourse that constructs all of our beauty norms. Asking “an actual female of the species” is asking the wrong informer, because men aren’t being sexualized by women or a female gaze; the mistake is to think that because of heteronormativity, women would be the ones defining masculine beauty norms. This is not likely to happen in a patriarchy, as giving women collectively the power to define any part of normative masculinity would be extremely subversive to the patriarchal project (the flip side is that male objectification and beauty norms are all pretty gay; I think this double-bind for insecure straight men – allow women to judge your sexual attractiveness and grant them that power over you or, perhaps worse, allow other MEN to potentially judge you as sexually attractive and objectify you – is a major motivator of a lot of normalized misogyny and homophobia).

  2. 2

    As someone else posted in the comments of the article in question, the best way to get more accurate portrayals of ‘sexy’ men is to have more women in the art side of the industry, especially in position to call the shots.

    Of course, “sexy” and “sexually objectified” are two different things, which is part of the issue, too. The article mentions that there’s a ‘formula’ for sexualized depictions of women, but the only reason that’s true is because women are objectified by the patriarchy (as John@1 notes). You can make a woman sexy by writing a dynamic, intriguing and entertaining character–or you can follow the ‘code’ and get much the same result. Men, OTOH, must be portrayed in-depth, because you can’t just get them declared ‘sexy’ by adhering to a single set of parameters in their physical depiction. So there’s an extremely tempting ‘out’ for any comic book director to just say, “Hell with it, give her a bump to her cup size,” because that requires so much less work.

    Of course, once you get to the part where you need to write the actual stories, the characters who have personalities and depth and so forth are the ones that are easier to write for, so, hey, all of a sudden, even on ‘team’ comics, the plots all center around the menfolk.

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