She Blinded Me With Linkspam

Literacy Privilege: How I Learned to Check Mine Instead of Making Fun of People’s Grammar on the Internet

Some kinds of checking your privilege are more difficult than others.  Accepting that I get shedloads of unearned advantages because of being white, Western, cis and middle-class, and that I should do something about that? Not a bother. Coming to terms with the fact that my beloved Eats, Shoots and Leaves might be a bit on the problematic side? IT IS KILLING THE KITTENS OF MY BRAIN. But here you have it:

It’s one thing to take an erudite journalist or grandiloquent blogger (don’t know any of those, myself) down a notch, although there are valid arguments against even this; grammatical exactitude can suffocate creativity and clarity, and many prescriptive rules were totally fabricated by Latin-centric snobs. But when a poor newbie on a discussion forum introduces himself with “hi im jonny n i like wachin x facter” and gets linguistically skewered by someone because they personally hate the pants off of Simon Cowell – well, that is a different kind of problem.

It’s like they got right into my brain. Damnit.

Empathy for the Devil

This one is similar in brain-breaking but with far more trigger warnings, for bullying and rape. TW for the following quote as well:

You and I might be appalled by the idea of being a rapist dear reader, but we can’t understand rapists unless we leave open the door to the possibility that they do it because they like it, and feel good about it afterwards. In the original article that triggered a Twitter storm and aroused the writers at Feministe, Alyssa Royce sought to explain why nice guys commit rape, but for whatever reason she sought to exclude the possibility that rapists pass themselves off as nice guys. If we want to empathize with rapists we have to be able to understand, at a visceral level, that they might be enjoying themselves, that it might be the culmination of every wank they’ve had since puberty.

Returning to Mel Greig and Michael Christian, we have to be brutally honest. They might be nice people who got sucked into doing someone else’s dirty work, or they might just enjoy being bullies. We don’t know. Empathy is not sympathy, and if you wish to empathize with the devil, you have to consider the possibility that people do the devil’s work not because they have fallen, but because he has all the good tunes and they like to dance. (emphasis mine)

I Learn So Much from Twitter: Why Marriage Matters

The ever-awesome Dusty Rose over at Tutus and Tiny Hats talks about marriage, practicality and the dodginess of being more-radical-than-thou.

[D]espite Jenn’s insistence that marriage is inherently linked to capitalism,  ”people get married in socialist countries, communist countries, tribal cultures that have no monetary system.”

I think this is a really important distinction. Marriage can definitely be a vehicle for consumerism, but it doesn’t have to be, any more than it has to be a vehicle for sexism. It seems sort of…closed-minded to assume otherwise.

The Space We Need

One of the things it has triggered a lot of thinking about lately is how those of us with fat bodies negotiate our way through the physical spaces of the world.  I got to thinking about just how conscious I am of the space my body takes up, and how I have to negotiate my body in a world that marks me as “abnormal”.  The more I paid attention to it, the more I noticed that almost every aspect of my life is framed around this process of moving my body around in the world.

On a similar (yet more fabulous) note, check out awesome Irish fatshion blogger Haute Proportions! And throw her a ‘like’ over on Facebook while you’re at it.

Surviving the Holidays as Queer People of Colour: Give the Gift of Media

I discovered Saving Face, a film drama-comedy about two lesbian Chinese-American girls navigating family expectations about career and marriage. That film was the closest I had to reflecting the complexities of my identity as a queer person of color who was also an immigrant — another narrative that is also missing from mainstream media.

I remember making my sister watch the film, and noticing afterwards–even though she may not have–how it changed our conversations and relationship for the better. She loved the film so much because she could relate to the immigrant-in-America theme, the plight of the main character, who was torn between following  family tradition and making her own choices. After watching the film, my sister saw my own circumstance in a new light, making her my biggest advocate and ally within my family.

And finally, I rediscovered an oldie-but-essential from Crommunist: You’re Not A Racist, You’re Just Racist

Racism is best understood as the product of ideas, both conscious and unconscious, about other people, and our tendency to try and reduce people to convenient labels (like… oh, I dunno… ‘a racist’). I can certainly understand why people like to use this term, because it allows them to preserve their self-concept of being a good person and scapegoat racist activities as the product of “racists”. Once blame has been assigned in this way, then the speaker can dust her/his hands off and say “it’s not my problem – I’m not a racist.” However, that simply means the problems never get solved, because the only people whose self-concept allows them to brand themselves as being “a racist” are proud of that appellation.

Happy Tuesday, everyone!

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She Blinded Me With Linkspam
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One thought on “She Blinded Me With Linkspam

  1. 1

    My father works in the civil service as an Engineer. He was once cc’d on an email to someone in a management position over his department, that email contained several spelling mistakes and grammatical errors but my Dad knew the guy writing it as he was also an Engineer and a very talented one at that. As the email was criticising some element of planning or implementation of some plan someone on the list of recipients felt it was appropriate to grammar troll, accidentally hitting reply to all on the comment “Maybe X should learn to spell…”. The fact that X had worked his ass off to overcome Dyslexia and get an Engineering degree appeared to go over the head of the grammar troll. I always try to remember this story when I read crazy wordage on the interwebz and look beyond it to the substance of the argument. I don’t always succeed, but, I try again next time.

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