Gender

GoldieBlox commercial wins the internet over

Jason Thibeault, , , , , , , 12 Comments

This commercial’s taking the internet by storm, because who doesn’t love Beastie Boys, girl engineers, and Rube Goldberg devices.

Some time ago, I wrote about the kickstarter for this project, and how I could live with the pinkification it took to sell these engineering projects for girls to parents already steeped in rigid gender roles. Looking at this commercial, though I love the commercial itself, I sort of feel like it’s overselling the product.

See, the actual product introduces a specific goal and a narrative in the form of a story book, drastically limiting the engineering potential of any one set. There’s only so much you can do with the ribbon and sticks and crank, so letting your imagination run wild doesn’t seem really, truly all that possible.

As a gateway into the wider world of toys, though, if GoldieBlox leads any girl to ask her parents for LEGO or K’Nex or some other engineering toy, I feel like it’s worth it — even if it requires not only retraining girls that it’s okay to like “doing things” instead of “being pretty”, but also getting in under parents’ gender policing radars.

And everyone loves a Rube Goldberg device. Hopefully inventive girls with enough toys can invent all sorts of crazy devices, if unfettered by the prescribed play mode.

GoldieBlox commercial wins the internet over
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The Truth Hurts

Jason Thibeault, , , , , , 9 Comments

I’ve been feeling somewhat inured to the constant grind on the soul of people coming forward with tales of their having been sexually assaulted of late. Then along comes Pamela Gay, one of the kindest, smartest, funniest people I’ve had the pleasure to work with, however briefly, and her story has such a ring of familiarity and timeliness that people are speculating that she’s the one DJ Grothe and Barbara Drescher were talking about.

And to make matters worse, Dr. Gay is the one feeling guilty here, despite having personally done nothing wrong. She’s the one facing repercussions within the community for having spoken up last year about harassment. She’s the one being targeted for further harassment and abuse, and she’s the one whose career is on the line. Because she’s the one who has breasts. Because she’s the one who spoke up.

I am just fucking GUTTED now.

With ever increasing difficulty I’ve been dealing with issues of gender related to my career. Right now, I am struggling with hearing that an event I categorized as “A drunk ass tried to grab my boobs,” is now being discussed by witnesses as, “He tried to sexually assault her in a bar while intoxicated.” I had created a euphemism for myself, and having that euphemism striped away is making me realize that I have been hiding from myself the true degree to which I have been harmed.

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The Truth Hurts

The Outrage Brigade

Jason Thibeault, , , , , , , 25 Comments

DJ Grothe, not content with his reputation and desperately lacking a communications director through which he can vet his random personal thoughts (any takers on that job?), posted to Facebook a terribly transphobic thought. Or, at least, so we Outrage Brigaders interpreted it!

No hyperbole: I just saw the worst-passing transsexual I’ve ever seen in the lounge here. It was so disruptive that I am forced to believe it was an intentional way to protest against rigid gender binaries. Or so I’d like to think.

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The Outrage Brigade

Lila Rose, anti-abortionist, tries to steal Malala Yousafzai's activist cred

Jason Thibeault, , , , , , 30 Comments

If you ever decide to unironically compare yourself to a civil rights activist who has risked everything and (almost) lost it all while fighting for, say, a woman’s right to be educated, and your cause is as patently uncivil as preventing women from choosing what to do with their bodies, expect to get laughed at and mocked. A lot.

Especially the moreso when the person you’re comparing yourself to got shot in the head for wanting the right to intellectual autonomy, with a bullet grazing her brain and coming within millimetres of killing her, and you’ve never seen real danger in your entire goddamn life and yet you’re fighting for a cluster of cells less than a millimetre across to have more rights over a woman’s bodily autonomy than the woman herself. All because you did a guerilla video campaign for Live Action, undercutting Planned Parenthood, which is as feminist an organization as has ever gotten national traction. Slow fucking clap.

I bet she didn’t ever say “Yousafzai” because she doesn’t know how. I bet, in fact, she knows almost nothing about Malala Yousafzai or her fight, except what someone told her would make good speech fodder.

Found at Right Wing Watch.

Lila Rose, anti-abortionist, tries to steal Malala Yousafzai's activist cred

Asexual awareness week

Jason Thibeault, , , , 22 Comments

Once upon a time, I was young and foolish, and thinking I was so enlightened about sexuality I suggested at a lunch table with friends that Freud was onto something when he said “the only unnatural sexuality is none at all”. Little did I know a friend at that table with me — about whom I think the world, and would never want to hurt — identified as asexual.

I was mortified to learn this a few years later. Such a casual throwaway comment, made thinking I was flip and clever and progressive, that hurt a dear friend.

I’m happy to see this exists. Maybe I can assuage my guilty conscience a bit by helping promote it. Though I am not asexual myself, I know a few people who do identify as such, and in all our talk about gender and sexuality around these parts, it’s only fitting that we avoid erasing an entire class of people.

From their 101 page:

What is an asexual person?

An asexual person is someone who does not experience sexual attraction. Most individuals find there are certain people they are not sexually attracted to. For asexuals, this includes everybody!

Is asexual another word for celibate?

Unlike celibacy, which is a lifestyle choice, asexuality is a sexual orientation – just like homosexuality, bisexuality, and heterosexuality. Celibacy is a conscious decision not to have sex, regardless of sexual desire. Many asexuals do not consider themselves celibate, as they are giving up no more in abstaining from sex than a gay person is by abstaining from sex with someone of a different gender or a straight person is by abstaining from sex with the same gender. Furthermore, some asexual people do choose to have sex, and therefore are certainly not celibate.

It’s not about simply being celibate — asexual folks can choose to engage in sexual activities with people or with themselves, without necessarily having a sex drive of their own. They can be in romantic relationships. They can climax. They can do everything you can do. They can have an undirected sex drive. They can simply have no sex drive and if left to their own devices, would not seek it out. Or perhaps they even have boundaries that they define with their partners in advance. Or perhaps they have no desire to enter a romantic relationship at all. It’s every bit as varied as every other orientation.

We’d all do well to remember that when trying to be inclusive.

Asexual awareness week

Will 20/20 be Must-See or Must-Miss TV this week?

Jason Thibeault, , , , , , , 16 Comments

Or Must-Not-If-You’re-A-Miss?

Looks like 20/20 is going to be doing a story on the Manosphere’s ongoing campaign to destroy women fight for men’s rights by destroying women. See, there’s this whole contingent of men on the internet who think that feminism is “going too far”, by, you know, wanting equal pay for equal work, the ability to be hired without discrimination, the right not to have politicians legally enforce their baby-factory status, the right to bodily integrity, the right to not be treated as the Homemaker or Baby-Raiser By Default, or the right to do things that men can do without fear or expectation of being raped or sexually harassed, coupled with immediate blame for same.

You see, the manosphere knows the real issues here: women just want to be lazy asses and never work or join the military, they want to be able to choose who to have sex with (HORRORS!), and then when they get too old and ugly (at, like, 25), spermjack men to have their babies against the guy’s will, thus setting men up for a legal hell of child support without ever being allowed to see the children thereafter.

That’s right… both feminists and “men’s rights activists” are generally fighting for many of the same goals, except for the ones that are totally invented in the MRA’s depraved minds and never actually happen in real life.

So ABC is going to do a piece on how these men hope to achieve equality and end all these shameful issues caused by patriarchy, by… you guessed it… mistreating women on the internet.

Trigger warning: Paul Elam. Yes, he’s his own category of trigger warning.
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Will 20/20 be Must-See or Must-Miss TV this week?

Watch Pat Robertson's enlightenment about trans folk evaporate!

Jason Thibeault

Good ol’ Uncle Pat is a mercurial fellow. One day he seems to have some humanitarian concept within his grasp, and flails about almost grabbing that brass ring, then the religious folk criticize him and he has to regain his religious street-cred. So he plays dumb on the topic, and says something incredibly ridiculous. This time, he forgets everything he said the last time I had to grudgingly laud him, losing all the ground he gained on becoming a decent human being with regard to trans* folk.

A horse that’s been castrated becoming a gelding? Really? I don’t even have the words to express how big a category error that is. It’s as tangential to the topic as if you started talking about how sometimes toddlers get into Mom’s makeup.

Watch Pat Robertson's enlightenment about trans folk evaporate!

Fischer talks about "love for gays"

Jason Thibeault, , , 7 Comments

If you know anything about Bryan Fischer, you probably have a good guess exactly what he’s going to say before he even opens his gob.

Pro tip: this ain’t love. It’s barely-contained seething hatred with a thin veneer of Christian brotherly love spray-painted on it. And since we already know that brand of love is anything but love, but rather a demand for conformity to rules written by goat-herds thousands of years ago, it doesn’t even register on the “worthy discourse” scale. I only add it to my blog in the interest of reminding everyone just how hateful a human being this man is.

Fischer talks about "love for gays"