Occasional Link Roundup

Here, have some super-old but still-good links because I waited way too long to do another link roundup!

1. Greta posts a much-improved version of the creepy Christmas song “Baby, It’s Cold Outside,” along with some great commentary:

Yes, there probably are some women — and some men — who say No as part of a flirtatious game, to get their pursuers to pursue them. That is also part of rape culture. The idea that you really know someone wants you when they ignore your boundaries and keep pushing past your objections… this is also part of rape culture. (It’s also really sex-negative, reinforcing the idea that it’s bad and wrong to enthusiastically say Yes to sex when you want it.) I don’t like it when pop culture encourages, celebrates, and reinforces this idea.

When pop culture reinforces the idea that ignoring boundaries is part of a flirtatious game, it doesn’t just encourage the recipients of attention to say No when they really mean Yes, and to think that if someone takes No for an answer it means they really don’t like them. It encourages pursuers to think that No means Yes, or that it means Maybe, or that it means “I want you to keep trying.” And that makes them more likely to push past someone else’s boundaries.

2. Suey writes about being a student with anxiety and the unhelpful responses that people make.

There are some very warm-hearted and lovely people I know that have quit graduate school because it felt more like The Hunger Games than a collaborative learning environment. We need to stop applying a “survival of the fittest” mentality to academic success, wherein intelligence is linked to ability to endure rigor. I think it’s a huge loss of the academy that people I know to be brilliant and life changing have quit due to a lack of support.

3. The Feminist Griote writes about selfies in the wake of that one awful Jezebel post:

Fat people, queer people, trans* people, femmes, disabled people, POC need and deserve affirmation too! For many of us taking selfies is an exercise in putting our self-love into praxis. The act of loving, seeing, and accepting oneself in real time. Also, so what if people take pride in the likes and comments that their selfies garner?! There is nothing wrong or gross about freely accepting compliments. Folks need to stop pathologizing those who relish in the compliments that they receive. It takes lots of work and practice to be able to freely accept a compliment, especially when you struggle to see yourself as worthy and never was accustomed to receiving them!

4. Shanley writes about how misogyny in the tech industry is often attributed to autism or mental illness in a way that both stigmatizes autism and mental illness and excuses misogyny:

Importantly, these appeals do not represent any actual engagement with mental illness — something that is sorely needed in the technology and startup industry, where many of us suffer in shame and silence with undiagnosed or untreated conditions, where mental illness is incredibly stigmatized, and where very little community support is available.

Rather, it represents a dangerous armchair psychology — expressing no actual knowledge of, nor empathy towards, mental illness, just co-opting the ill-informed and stigmatizing representations of mass media to avoid actual engagement with behaviors and trends in the community.

5. Over at Social (In)Queery, a fascinating deconstruction of straight male displays of faux-homosexuality:

Public proclamations of support on the part of heterosexual men to end homophobia are significant and important in changing opinion about GLB identities. But, asking what these men are getting out of the performance complicates such an easy analysis. This sort of “bro-ing” of anti-homophobic stances does not necessarily have the effect of challenging the naturalness and inevitability of sexual and gender categories. Much like the anti-Chick-fil-A video made by two straight, white men to protest the restaurant’s homophobic policies, Macklemore and the Warwick Rowing Team’s gender and sexual practices and proclamations reinscribe their heterosexuality as so powerful and inevitable that even an anti-homophobic stance can’t call them into question.

6. Julia writes about the importance of communicating clearly as mental health professionals, which includes not using jargon when non-jargon will do:

Because social work occupies a weird non-medical niche in a medical world and we have a chip on our shoulders about the fact that we do real clinical work, our notes have to be more formal than the doctors’ notes. Specifically, social workers tend to refer to themselves as “this writer”, which drives me bananas. As in, “This writer attempted to meet with client, who was unavailable due to being in the shower.” I’m not sure why an awkward writing style proves our professionalism.

7. Remember those weird high-tech anti-rape panties? The Belle Jar Blog explains why they won’t work:

It also bears mentioning that idea behind this clothing operates off the assumption that most rapists are strangers, who attack women in dark alleys late at night, when actually the opposite is true – most rapists are acquaintances with, or even romantic partners of, the victim. So what would happen if a woman did have AR Wear’s Anti-Rape clothing on, removed said clothing of her own volition, and then was raped? It would be so unbelievably easy for a judge to rule that it couldn’t possibly have been rape, because the victim chose to take off her own protective clothing.

8. Tressie writes about the purchasing decisions poor people make, and why they’re not as “stupid” as many people make them out to be:

I do not know how much my mother spent on her camel colored cape or knee-high boots but I know that whatever she paid it returned in hard-to-measure dividends. How do you put a price on the double-take of a clerk at the welfare office who decides you might not be like those other trifling women in the waiting room and provides an extra bit of information about completing a form that you would not have known to ask about? What is the retail value of a school principal who defers a bit more to your child because your mother’s presentation of self signals that she might unleash the bureaucratic savvy of middle class parents to advocate for her child? I don’t know the price of these critical engagements with organizations and gatekeepers relative to our poverty when I was growing up. But, I am living proof of its investment yield.

9. Crommunist writes about the myth that feminist men are just pretending to be feminists in order to get laid:

Now far be it from me to say that being a cishet guy feminist doesn’t give you some kind of advantage in certain circles. I’ve had sexual partners who I’m sure wouldn’t have slept with me if I hadn’t lived my belief in equality among genders. I’ve had a couple outright tell me that they were attracted to me, at least in part, because of my feminist beliefs. That being said, I’m sure I have a bunch of sexual partners who wouldn’t have fucked me if I had reeked to high heaven of the previous week’s physical exertion because I couldn’t be arsed to work a faucet. I’d imagine… all of them would agree if you asked them.

So yeah, feminism might help some guys get laid. So does showering. And the reason feminist women don’t want to fuck anti-feminist cishet guys is the same reason that women with functioning olfactory faculties don’t fuck guys who don’t shower: it’s because y’all stink.

10. Ferrett’s post about evaluating your feelings based on evidence really hits me in the feels (TW: suicide):

Being a depressive is generally living in the Land of Suck, but you do have to learn one vital secret of life in order to survive: A thing can be emotionally true and factually a lie. Which is to say that I wake on certain mornings consumed by the idea that nobody in this world loves me, that everyone would be much happier if I drank the Drano, and that my funeral would be attended by no one. This is not how I feel; this is how things are, so much so that on three occasions I’ve actually tried to end my worthless life.

Then, slowly, I gather the facts around me: My wife is cuddled up next to me, evidently content. My phone contains texts from people who wanted to talk to me. My blog occasionally contains some nice comments.

And I think: Though I feel as though no one cares, the evidence around me suggests otherwise. And, gripping the facts like I would the rungs on a ladder, I haul myself back to reality.

11. At Shakesville, Kate writes about the ways in which trans* people are expected to self-harm and/or be suicidal as a condition for receiving the healthcare they need (TW):

See, if we can’t say with conviction that we’re going to off ourselves if we don’t get the healthcare we need in a timely fashion, insurers, providers, and governments are always going to be able to deny us on the grounds that our needs aren’t real. Don’t get me wrong. Trans* people who publicly confess to thoughts of self-harm aren’t lying. It’s just that they’re frequently going through an exercise for the benefit of cis people. It sure as hell isn’t for our benefit, people.

12. Also at Shakesville, Melissa writes about the harms of the trope that sex is “natural”:

Sometimes partners who want each other more than anything and have no other ostensible barriers just happen to have bodies that don’t line up right, that don’t fit together perfectly. When it can take experimentation just to achieve the basics, the “sex is natural” trope can make people feel like failures at the whole sex thing, which adds a whole other layer of unnecessary pressure. Virgins often expect sex to look like it does in the movies, instead of the fumblefucking that our first time looks like for many of us.

For lots of people, sex takes some planning, some creativity, some ingenuity. And it also takes communication.

13. Aoife on telling bi people to just come out already:

One of the profoundly annoying things about being out as a bi person, you see, is the way you keep on having to defend yourself. And not just in the ordinary way that all of us queer folks have to defend ourselves from the homophobes of the world who figure we’re all a bunch of filthy sinners (blah blah blah ad nauseum). As a bi person, you don’t just have to defend being queer and also a decent human being. You have to deal with the fact that, unless you give sufficient proof, nobody will believe you

14. A great slightly older post on what consent looks like in practice:

If your partner is consenting, you will see them meeting you halfway on stuff, responding to your touch, touching you back, making approving noises, positioning their body helpfully, making occasional eye contact, smiling, giggling, kissing you, smelling your skin.

If your partner pulls away, flinches, draws back, goes still, goes limp, freezes, is silent, looks unhappy, starts holding their breath, goes from meeting you halfway to merely allowing your touch: stop and check in with words. Maybe they’re ticklish? Maybe they want to stop.

What have you read or written lately?

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Occasional Link Roundup
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6 thoughts on “Occasional Link Roundup

  1. 2

    Re: 9: I don’t know about pretending to be feminist explicitly to try to get laid, but I have met a fair number of men who say feminist-sounding things for what seems to be the social cachet (I am fortunate to have social circles where that’s even possible), while their other words and actions seem to indicate that they haven’t really internalized what I consider to be the motivations behind feminism. May be a case of No True Scotsman but my annoyance at their extreme inconsistency and apparently utilizing popular social movements for personal gain remains.

    1. 2.1

      Yeah, I meet these people as well and find that phenomenon disturbing. I’m also hesitant to try to No True Feminist them, but I do think that many of the men doing the whole “I’m really nice to women and women are great and deserve rights yay abortion rights” don’t necessarily think they’re feminists, just nice liberal guys.

      Pretending to be a feminist to get laid makes little sense because for many women, feminism is a dealbreaker in a guy. It would make much more sense for people to look for partners whose political views resemble their own enough to prevent any serious issues. Humans are weird.

  2. 3

    Over at Social (In)Queery, a fascinating deconstruction of straight male displays of faux-homosexuality

    Having read that article, I don’t think it this is an accurate description of its content, insofar as it addresses non-GLBT-identified men explicitly mentioning this fact as a side note in the context of expressing support for GLBT rights, not “displays of faux homosexuality.” (Or, well, that was the part I remembered; I suppose it might have mentioned the latter in order to equivocate with the former.)

  3. 4

    If your partner pulls away, flinches, draws back, goes still, goes limp, freezes, is silent, looks unhappy, starts holding their breath, goes from meeting you halfway to merely allowing your touch: stop and check in with words. Maybe they’re ticklish? Maybe they want to stop.

    In my experience, it’s an obvious tell. The transition between reciprocation and acquiescence is stark; the body language is completely different.

    (Of course, it still relies on reading body language, something not everyone (such as my partner) is capable of doing)

  4. 5

    I don’t read very many blogs, but I think John Scalzi has been on a roll lately. I don’t agree with all of his politics, but the man is a great writer.

    This one is older but I thought it was very interesting. It’s specifically in the context of socializing at conventions, but I’d say it’s a healthy way to approach all kind of interpersonal interactions.

    http://whatever.scalzi.com/2012/08/16/you-never-know-just-how-you-look-through-other-peoples-eyes/

    Your self-image is not the same as the image of you others receive. People will often see you entirely differently than you want them to. No one’s required to see you the way you see yourself, and you probably can’t make them do that even (or often especially) if you try. If you try to insist that they must, the likelihood of you coming across as petulant and unpleasant rises significantly.

    And then this is just an interesting post about obituaries and living for posterity and how that is probably going to be futile:

    http://whatever.scalzi.com/2013/12/11/dont-live-for-your-obituary/

    As well as you can, live the life you want to live and make the work you want to make. After you’re gone, it’ll all be sorted out or not. You won’t be around to worry about it. Focus on the parts you’re around for.

    As for things outside of Whatever, I think this made the rounds pretty thoroughly, but it really is a neat article:

    http://gawker.com/on-smarm-1476594977

    What is smarm, exactly? Smarm is a kind of performance—an assumption of the forms of seriousness, of virtue, of constructiveness, without the substance. Smarm is concerned with appropriateness and with tone. Smarm disapproves.

    Also, I have been reading some books and stuff, now that I have a little bit of free time. Specifically, at the moment I’m about halfway through Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song, and it is brilliant and riveting and sad (and highly recommended).

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