In which there’s a clarification.
In case you don’t know, internet parlance uses “jew” to mean the 1% far more often than the race. It’s extreme stereotyping parody.
Is it still racism, to hyper-attenuate a quality typically associated with a particular race and use that word to mean certain financial activities?
Is all stereotyping racism?
There’s still a blogosphere, sorta.
Entirely by accident — I was looking for recipes for leftover fried fish — I found a blog written by a middle aged white woman. I read a couple of her posts (one entirely about a jacket; another, about internet anxiety and unfriending people on Facebook and not really using certain platforms), and then I clicked through her blogroll.
The blogging experience we all had ten or fifteen years ago, and think of as “over”? Is still happening.
I clicked through to one and the author’s been dead of breast cancer for two years. Another featured a year-old post about how the blogger’s giving up blogging because of fatigue and a fucked up family. But another was current and about buying and using makeup. Another was also current, with brilliantly written little posts about everything, about anxiety and a sort of timidity about enjoying things.
And they all link back to one another and all have or had non-ironic readers who comment. They have layouts and themes even older than this one. It’s so great.
It’s also really weird, because every blog I read back in the day is dead… most of the links in my blogroll haven’t been updated in years, and three of the domains are expired.
I remember blogging earnestly and non-ironically. I remember how the internet was, in various corners, before the wonderful and terrible shit-show that is social networking and trolling and painful awareness of privilege. I remember it so well that now I keep an analog diary now and rarely post here, even though I pay for the hosting and the domain year after year after year, even though nobody reads it but me and maybe Stanley.
I love goblinbox, though, and my dad still blogs here, so it’s worth it just to host that.
As for my “what should I be wearing at my age” question, apparently middle-aged white women wear skinny jeans, expensive shoes, expensive tee shirts, leather bomber jackets, carry an expensive handbag and, for a pop of color, wear name-brand red lipstick. So, that’s me in sweats forever, then.
In which rape culture concept is a fabrication. It is false and dangerous, terribly damaging to males, and it selfishly diverts time and energy away from real crises.
In feminist theory, rape culture is a setting in which rape is pervasive and normalized due to societal attitudes about gender and sexuality. The sociology of rape culture is studied academically by feminists. There is disagreement over what defines a rape culture and as to whether any given societies meet the criteria to be considered a rape culture.
“Rape culture” came up on Twitter again, and I said what I usually do, which is more or less something along the lines of “lol no rape culture is a myth.”
The tweets below happened, and I wanted to respond in long form, hence this very long post:
Well, for one: “guys think it’s okay” to trick girls into getting drunk enough to rape? Which guys? Since when? Where’s your evidence for this? Walk down the street, ask a hundred men, and they’ll say fuck no because their moms, sisters, wives, and daughters are women, and they’d beat the shit out of anybody who got any of those women drunk and assaulted them. The percentage who say otherwise are trolling, lying through their lips for the shock value and to prove their bravery to their young college comrades; the fewer guys who actually do otherwise are bastards and we, as a society, put them in jail.
And two: why don’t campus rapists get charged more?! Are you serious?! Unlike the campus rape crisis, which is fabricated, rape accusations are an epidemic these days, and our culture is so anti-rape that this new trend is ruining young men’s lives. Once you’ve been accused of rape, you’re a rapist for the rest of your life even if you’re exonerated. Enjoy your diminished (or absent) prospects for mates and jobs, now that some college girl ruined your reputation by accusing you of being a violent and deviant criminal!
~+~+~
Women who have experienced actual assault and rape are victims. Women abducted by ISIL and the Taliban are victims. Women and girls (and boys and men) who are trafficked are victims.
Privileged American university women are not victims. Their lives are not statistically dangerous; their experiences with sex and sexuality and the opposite sex are the result of their own decisions and actions rather than those of outside agency; they are the single safest, richest, healthiest, longest-lived, and most educated class of human beings ever.
Rape culture is a fabrication. It is dangerous and misleading because equating mild social discomfort (“a man on the street complimented my looks and I felt pressure”) with actual suffering (“ESCAPEES FROM ISIS RECALL RAPE, SLAVERY“) is absurd. The two conditions are not similar and cannot be equated.
The very idea so muddies and confuses the conversation that real topics of human rights abuses can’t be discussed without also including the irrelevant and petty feelings of a highly privileged class, namely Western university girls and their feminist mentors.
~+~+~
Most feminist statistics are wrong. Wrong as in incorrect and untrue.
They say 1 in 5 women are assaulted; the CDC says it’s 1 in 50. They say women earn less than men for the same work; there is literally zero evidence of this (if it were true, businesses would replace male workers with female workers). Their stats on domestic violence, female land and business ownership, and slavery: all grossly wrong.
Any entity that is routinely wrong in its numbers is highly suspect in its motives.
~+~+~
I do not lack compassion for victims of rape and assault. I’m a “survivor” of sexual abuse myself (even though my life was never in danger, and I think the use of the word “survivor” in non-life threatening conditions is ridiculous hyperbole and inappropriately used).
If you’ve been raped or assaulted, my sister (or brother), I’m sorry. Very sorry.
But if you’re a member of a privileged class merely incapable of taking responsibility for your own actions, well, I have little sympathy for your problems.
~+~+~
YES, as a species we still have slavery and sex-trafficking. YES, rape and violent assault exist, and YES they’re terrible and it is our bounden duty to address these issues to the best of our capacity. But the fact that rape jokes exist doesn’t indicate we live in a “rape culture.” There are women driver jokes too, but I still have a license.
Listen, if you’re a man who believes America is a “rape culture,” then ipso facto you consider yourself a potential rapist. All men who support the misandrist idea that all men are literally just one situation away from committing rape are disturbing to me. Grow a pair, for fuck sake. (That’s what women really want, no matter what they — we — say. Don’t coddle us when we’re being ignorant; require us to be our best. Just as you require yourself to rise above your feelings and not commit rape.)
Oh, and listen, if you think you’re exempt, if your feminist sisters go on and on about repeatedly debunked “1 in 5” assault statistics [it’s 1 in 50, which is still too many, but certainly not 1 in 5] in front of you and you’re male, even if you’re gay, she’s calling YOU a rapist, to your very face, because that’s what “rape culture” means: that you’re a victim of your culture and unable to make your own decisions and will eventually rape somebody because that’s what men do.
It’s just that in your case, if you’re gay, you won’t be raping her, so she’s fine with it. It’s fine to rape men. We know this because feminism rarely mentions our brothers’ suffering, unless it’s to draw attention to their own agenda.
Continue reading “The problem is that they are bastards, and that’s why they commit rape.”
In which I’m kind of a dick about people trying to wean themselves off of their identification with their belongings (which is a very important stage of development, of course, but seriously, this has to be the hundredth blog post I’ve read about how deeply attached bitches are to their Harry Potter books, and I’m like, You were literally raised in the cheap portable personal electronics age, and your attachment to books, to actual paper printed books, is, compared to those who went before you and truly used books in a way you never needed to, tenuous at best, and yet here you are talking like you were a monk illuminator who just watched his whole life’s work burn to the very ground).
I love to read, but this maudlin affectation about book collecting currently infecting our group consciousness is getting silly. “I really love books!” is turning into some sort of off-kilter, past-worshiping, item-hoarding cult. We get it: you love the smell of books and the feel of a favorite volume in your hand. So does everybody else. Shut up already.
The vast majority of books you read aren’t that good, and won’t need to be read again. And reference is all online now, you don’t need encyclopedias or dictionaries or histories. You can put a thousand years of human knowledge on a single eReader, but you’ll still probably read throw-away pop fiction. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that!)
The old fashioned library is dying, and in many ways, yes, it sucks, but let it go. Jesus. The TERRIBLE STRUGGLE you go through trying to pare down your embarrassment of stuff, to minimalize, to quit decorating with books you’ve never even read, truly verges on the absurd. You’re having crazy romantical identity feelings about a particular style of inanimate object. If you talked like this about rolls of aluminum foil, we’d tell you to see a specialist.
(I realize the analogy breaks down, because while aluminum foil is incredibly useful, it’s not potentially filled with knowledge in the same way a book is, but books aren’t dying: the format is changing. As are our lifestyles: we don’t have family seats where libraries can live for generations; we move every few years. The energy expended in moving a library of paper books that you could store on a six ounce device just for false nostalgia is wasteful. Period. And there are more books being published every day than used to be published in entire years.)
I get that it’s hard the first time, when you’re ten or eleven or so, and, because you spent all Saturday fucking off and not cleaning your room, your dad stuffs “everything that isn’t schoolwork or clothing,” meaning all your books and toys, into trash bags and throws it all out: yeah, you’re a kid, and you cry because you just lost your purple teddy bear for disobeying, and losing your beloved things is hard.
But if you’re old enough to have a book collection, you’re old enough to know that you are not your stuff, and that reading itself, that magical alchemy in which somehow an entire world fits inside you and lives there, isn’t going away, and everything in your books and papers can be digitized and stored in a smaller, lighter, more easily searchable format, and your maudlin attachment to a data format is too forced and common to really seem genuine.
I recently started learning how to make bread. It turns out that holding a ball of soft, living bread dough in your hand feels an awful lot like holding a book: it’s an act that belongs to everyone of us, it reaches backwards and forwards through time, it contains potential, it nourishes, and, honestly, you really have only a vague idea of how it’s going to turn out.
All of which is to say, hey, if getting rid of some treeware is truly heartbreakingly difficult for you, then you’re basically a Disney princess in terms of level of real world difficulty. Lucky you!
In which I do a meme.
A quick google doesn’t reveal to me where it came from originally, but the 12 of 12 idea is that on the 12th day of the month you take 12 pictures and put ’em on the innertubes. Vuboq does it sometimes. It’s what I did today.
Behold, twelve images of my twelfth of July:
I made eggs for breakfast. Mexican eggs. This is mainly because all I had in the pantry was tortillas and a can of tomatoes, and not because I love huevos rancheros. Honestly I’m pretty indifferent to the dish, but it fills the belly. Plus: it’s Mexican food.
I worked on a data entry project for NLW. It was pretty fun until the upload failed and I couldn’t fix it ’cause I had no freakin’ idea what to put in the PID field, since there were successful uploads with blank PID fields. I was all, WTF, AMAZON DOT COM, YOU COQUETTISH BEAST, YOU.
In which Naughty made me do it.
This picture was taken in 2005 by my university friend Aimée in Patty‘s apartment in Manhattan:
The purpose of the gathering was a vocal rehearsal for my friend Barbara‘s a capella project. She writes the most amazing modern madrigals in her head; they’re literally a joy to sing. I met her when she spent a couple of years in Iowa and learned and performed her a capella material with her there. I was super stoked when she called me to come to New York to sing.
Two days after the picture was taken, an album was recorded at Live Wire, but the choir was too big and the energy too low and the recordings weren’t really usable. (It happens that way sometimes; you can’t order people to be brilliant just because you’re burning money on studio time.) Barbara’s dreams of a complete, professionally-recorded album of her a capella material remain unfulfilled, as far as I know.
Here’s Sweet True Love from that session. (I have a solo at the end; it starts at 3:59.) I remember that I loved getting a solo and singing in a pro studio, but also that I was starving, so I called the second take good and went to join the rest of the choir at dinner break as fast as my little legs would carry me.
I *heart* New York.
Rules:
1. Go to your first photo file and pick the 10th photo in it.
2. Tell the story behind the photo.
3. Tag 5 other people to do likewise.
I tag:
– anyone interested in doing this!