“If a society puts half its children into short skirts and warns them not to move in ways that reveal their panties, while putting the other half into jeans and overalls and encouraging them to climb trees, play ball, and participate in other vigorous outdoor games; if later, during adolescence, the children who have been wearing trousers are urged to “eat like growing boys,” while the children in skirts are warned to watch their weight and not get fat; if the half in jeans runs around in sneakers or boots, while the half in skirts totters about on spike heels, then these two groups of people will be biologically as well as socially different. Their muscles will be different, as will their reflexes, posture, arms, legs and feet, hand-eye coordination, and so on. Similarly, people who spend eight hours a day in an office working at a typewriter or a visual display terminal will be biologically different from those who work on construction jobs. There is no way to sort the biological and social components that produce these differences. We cannot sort nature from nurture when we confront group differences in societies in which people from different races, classes, and sexes do not have equal access to resources and power, and therefore live in different environments. Sex-typed generalizations, such as that men are heavier, taller, or stronger than women, obscure the diversity among women and among men and the extensive overlaps between them… Most women and men fall within the same range of heights, weights, and strengths, three variables that depend a great deal on how we have grown up and live. We all know that first-generation Americans, on average, are taller than their immigrant parents and that men who do physical labor, on average, are stronger than male college professors. But we forget to look for the obvious reasons for differences when confronted with assertions like ‘Men are stronger than women.’ We should be asking: ‘Which men?’ and ‘What do they do?’ There may be biologically based average differences between women and men, but these are interwoven with a host of social differences from which we cannot disentangle them.”
Written documentation of our past is often based on European colonists’ reactions to Cherokee gender, who thought that *all* of our genders were “variant.” Colonists likely saw female warriors or women in positions of leadership as living as men, even though these were acceptable—and important—roles for women in Cherokee gender systems. Trying to glean from colonial accounts which of these female-embodied people might now be called “Two-Spirit” and which were simply acting in accordance with Cherokee traditions for women is very difficult. We must remember these kinds of complexities as we continue to uncover our past and re-weave our present.
Humans had enough trouble seeing other humans as human. We are not even remotely smart enough to know how smart animals are. We would have a huge existential crisis if we realised other creatures are as sentient and aware as we are.
Its also important to recognise that this is not just human ignorance, we all have a vested interest in pretending animal intelligence cannot ever compare to ours. How intelligent an animal is when compared to humans shouldn’t even matter, but it turns out it is much easier to exploit and kill animals if we pretend they are mindless automaton.
This is all true, and important, BUT animals deserve bodily autonomy regardless of their intelligence. Intelligence is not a marker of worth. To suggest otherwise is ableist.
The idea that being born with a penis/testicles means that you’re biologically programmed to be an aggressive, domineering, violent, selfish asshole and there’s simply no way to avoid it is patriarchal propaganda meant to excuse men’s violence (especially against women), and to convince women to blame themselves when men are violent against them, and any feminist who tries to repackage this view in their analysis of “biological sex” is what 11/10 experts call a sucker
Not to mention that numerous anthropological accounts have already disproven any kind of ‘natural’ relationship between ‘biological sex’ and cultural behavior. Thinking that ‘biological sex’ has a universal set of behaviors cross-culturally is not only ethnocentric but complicit in reproducing colonialist and imperialist discourses that work to impose a EuroAmericanist worldview, by force, onto others.
The internet is real. The internet exists in the world and it affects the rest of the world.
I’m a person all of the time. I don’t stop being a person when I log on, and neither do you. It matters how we treat each other, and it matters what kind of culture we build through online interactions.
Further, no one can opt out of being affected by the internet. The interactions that take place online impact the whole culture, not just those who are directly participating online. For instance, whether or not someone ever uses a smart phone or takes a selfie, if they spend any time in cities, they’re going to encounter others doing so — and if they go to events, they’re likely going to encounter backdrops made for that express purpose. There’s no way to opt out of being affected by the existence of selfies and selfie culture.
There’s also no way to opt out of the way the internet can be used to attack people. For instance, for over a decade, ratemyprofessors.com had a hotness rating, and female professors couldn’t opt out of being affected by the way that encouraged sexual harassment. Similarly, Monica Lewinsky and others who have faced internet-aided attacks could not have made them go away by logging out.
Online interaction is even being used as a form of warfare. Most notoriously, Russian intelligence agencies successfully used Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr to interfere with the United States presidential election in 2016. Even if I logged off today and never touched a computer again, I could not opt out of being affected by the fact that Donald Trump became President of the United States in early 2017.
At the same time, marginalized people are also using the internet to build forms of power and solidarity that we didn’t have before. Before I found disability selfie culture online, the only images of people like me I’d ever seen were all illustrating tragic stories about our parents. Connecting with other disabled people online made it possible for me to realize that I could be fully human without being cured — and that I could be taken seriously without becoming normal.
Similarly, not everyone uses Twitter or hashtags, but everyone lives in a culture in which #BlackLivesMatter, #YesAllWomen, and #MeToo are uningnorable. Privileged people have lost some of their power to silence and isolate people — and marginalized people have gained a lot of power to find and support each other.
The internet is real, and the things we do online matter. We can make better choices when we remember that what we’re doing is real.
(Reposted because original poster is a terf/transphobe)
I’m so tired of white guys on TV telling me what to eat. I’m tired of
Anthony Bourdain testing the waters of Korean cuisine to report back
that, not only will our food not kill you, it actually tastes good. I
don’t care how many times you’ve traveled to Thailand, I won’t listen to
you—just like the white kids wouldn’t listen to me, the half-Korean
girl, defending the red squid tentacles in my lunch box. The same kids
who teased me relentlessly back then are the ones who now celebrate our
cuisine as the Next Big Thing.
I grew up in the Pacific Northwest, in a small college town that was
about 90 percent white. In my adolescence I hated being half Korean; I
wanted people to stop asking, “Where are you really from?” I could
barely speak the language and didn’t have any Asian friends. There was
nothing about me that felt Korean—except when it came to food.
At home my mom always prepared a Korean dinner for herself and an
American dinner for my dad. Despite the years he’d lived in Seoul,
selling cars to the military and courting my mom at the Naija Hotel
where she worked, my dad is still a white boy from Philadelphia.
So each night my mom prepared two meals. She’d steam broccoli and
grill Dad’s salmon, while boiling jjigae and plating little side dishes
known as banchan. When our rice cooker announced in its familiar robotic
voice, “Your delicious white rice will be ready soon!” the three of us
would sit down to a wondrous mash-up of East and West. I’d create true
fusion one mouthful at a time, using chopsticks to eat strips of T-bone
and codfish eggs drenched in sesame oil, all in one bite. I liked my
baked potatoes with fermented chili paste, my dried cuttlefish with
mayonnaise.
There’s a lot to love about Korean food, but what I love most is its
extremes. If a dish is supposed to be served hot, it’s scalding. If it’s
meant to be served fresh, it’s still moving. Stews are served in heavy
stone pots that hold the heat; crack an egg on top, and it will poach
before your eyes. Cold noodle soups are served in bowls made of actual
ice.
By my late teens my craving for Korean staples started to eclipse my
desire for American ones. My stomach ached for al tang and kalguksu. On
long family vacations, with no Korean restaurant in sight, my mom and I
passed up hotel buffets in favor of microwaveable rice and roasted
seaweed in our hotel room.
And when I lost my mother to a very sudden, brief, and painful fight
with cancer two years ago, Korean food was my comfort food. She was
diagnosed in 2014. That May she’d gone to the doctor for a stomachache
only to learn she had a rare squamous cell carcinoma, stage four, and
that it had spread. Our family was blindsided.
I moved back to Oregon to help my mother through chemotherapy; over
the next four months, I watched her slowly disappear. The treatment took
everything—her hair, her spirit, her appetite. It burned sores on her
tongue. Our table, once beautiful and unique, became a battleground of
protein powders and tasteless porridge. I crushed Vicodin into ice
cream.
Dinnertime was a calculation of calories, an argument to get anything
down. The intensity of Korean flavors and spices became too much for
her to stomach. She couldn’t even eat kimchi.
I began to shrink along with my mom, becoming so consumed with her
health that I had no desire to eat. Over the course of her illness, I
lost 15 pounds. After two rounds of chemo, she decided to discontinue
treatment, and she died two months later.
As I struggled to make sense of the loss, my memories often turned to
food. When I came home from college, my mom used to make galbi ssam,
Korean short rib with lettuce wraps. She’d have marinated the meat two
days before I’d even gotten on the plane, and she’d buy my favorite
radish kimchi a week ahead to make sure it was perfectly fermented.
Then there were the childhood summers when she brought me to Seoul.
Jet-lagged and sleepless, we’d snack on homemade banchan in the blue
dark of Grandma’s humid kitchen while my relatives slept. My mom would
whisper, “This is how I know you’re a true Korean.”
But my mom never taught me how to make Korean food. When I would call
to ask how much water to use for rice, she’d always say, “Fill until it
reaches the back of your hand.” When I’d beg for her galbi recipe, she
gave me a haphazard ingredient list and approximate measurements and
told me to just keep tasting it until it “tastes like Mom’s.”
After
my mom died, I was so haunted by the trauma of her illness I worried
I’d never remember her as the woman she had been: stylish and
headstrong, always speaking her mind. When she appeared in my dreams,
she was always sick.
Then I started cooking. When I first searched for Korean recipes, I
found few resources, and I wasn’t about to trust Bobby Flay’s Korean
taco monstrosity or his clumsy kimchi slaw. Then, among videos of
oriental chicken salads, I found the Korean YouTube personality Maangchi.
There she was, peeling the skin off an Asian pear just like my mom: in
one long strip, index finger steadied on the back of the knife. She cut
galbi with my mom’s ambidextrous precision: positioning the chopsticks
in her right hand while snipping bite-size pieces with her left. A
Korean woman uses kitchen scissors the way a warrior brandishes a
weapon.
I’d been looking for a recipe for jatjuk, a porridge made from pine
nuts and soaked rice. It’s a dish for the sick or elderly, and it was
the first food I craved when my feelings of shock and loss finally made
way for hunger.
I followed Maangchi’s instructions carefully: soaking the rice,
breaking off the tips of the pine nuts. Memories of my mother emerged as
I worked—the way she stood in front of her little red cutting board,
the funny intonations of her speech.
For many, Julia Child is the hero who brought boeuf bourguignon into
the era of the TV dinner. She showed home cooks how to scale the
culinary mountain. Maangchi did this for me after my mom died. My
kitchen filled with jars containing cabbage, cucumbers, and radishes in
various stages of fermentation. I could hear my mom’s voice: “Never fall
in love with anyone who doesn’t like kimchi; they’ll always smell it
coming out of your pores.”
I’ve spent over a year cooking with Maangchi. Sometimes I pause and
rewind to get the steps exactly right. Other times I’ll let my hands and
taste buds take over from memory. My dishes are never exactly like my
mom’s, but that’s OK—they’re still a delicious tribute. The more I
learn, the closer I feel to her.
One night not long ago, I had a dream: I was watching my mother as
she stuffed giant heads of Napa cabbage into earthenware jars.
What that would even mean is…not necessarily consistent.
However much sarcasm Hausman may have been throwing in for effect, he did kinda have a point. (And I am reminded to reread that book.) Not too surprised that I never encountered that other version growing up–and likely would have interpreted it rather differently if I had.
There really are some reasons for most of my berserk buttons, going back around to one point in the first linked post. A lot of them involving domineering behavior. And no wonder a lot of people don’t get why.
In the American suburbs everybody “goes up the wall” if you don’t wear just the right kind of clothes. One of the motors of Western civilization, as you know, is self-doubt. That’s the reason we go out and build careers and rocket ships and fortunes and empires.
some hipster post on tumblr: “What if instead of intense fight scenes, compelling romance, or nuanced characterization character X and Y just accepted eachother from the start and became platonic friends who cuddled and did quirky things together like knit plaid blankets and sell them to the townspeople??”
50,000 of y’all: “SO MUCH THIS”
Me: “That sounds boring as shit.”
THANK GOD SOMEONE SAID IT JESUS CHRIST
It only sounds boring if you expect that to be the main story arc. If, however, characters x and y are best friends who deal with external problems together, that would be wonderful. Crime fighting team? Heck yeah! Person, x is person y’s rock through life crap? Sounds great! Platonic couple figuring out a new world together? Definitely!!! Sometimes we want interesting stories without personal and relationship drama as the default side plot.
I only discovered there was a name for “Zero Attraction to Anyone” sexual orientation a little over a year ago (that name is “Asexual”).
The reason I knew this name fit me, BTW?
To me, it was all that “romantic / sexual tension,” in every TV and Movie ever that had always been
Boring.
As.
Shit.
It’s as though, to my brain, and my senses, the whole sexual-romantic energy thing might as well be in shades of ultraviolet.
And all the people around me who get excited about that stuff are like strange insect people who are seeing a whole range of colors that all just look like slight variations in gray scale, to me.
(My favorite scenes in rom-coms are never the “first kiss” but always: “finally get to meet the weird uncle,” and “sit down with everyone for the family dinner”).
But the thing is: my actual real life is no where near a bland gray scale, especially when it comes to emotional tension with the people in my life.
So I know that there’s a greater palette of emotional color that TV writers could be using, but aren’t … Because of habit – and yes, probably also because “sex sells” (and the only reason shows get made is, ultimately, to sell you the latest model of car).
And if you think that the only way “nuanced characterization” can happen is through “romantic tension” and / or “intense fight scenes,” I feel sorry for your non-fictional friends.
Seriously. Kissing and fighting are not the only interesting ways for charecters to interact.
And also:
I think it depends on the scale of your story.
A 30,000-word novel with that’s nothing but hand-holding and basket weaving? Yeah. That would get old. But a 1,000-word vignette – or even a 1,000-word chapter within a novel?
Gimme!
The real world as we know it is full of fire and flood and war zones (both literal and metaphorical). And a lot of writers feel they have to outdo the drama in the real world in order to hold the reader’s attention, and many writers automatically skip over the more quiet scenes in a story, dismissing them, as “filler.”.
So everything ends up like a Michael Bey movie, turned up to 11.
Sometimes, we need contrast – especially when it feels like our own world is on fire. Short stories, which focus on the quiet, gentle moments between characters, when friendship and trust are already established, can remind us to cherish and nurture the moments of kindness in our own lives.
Another quote from the same book, which jumped out again doing some skimming. This one from Florence Soap, who was also Wilma Mankiller’s mother in law:
My mother taught me how to be a woman.
She kept a beautiful garden with beans, corn, potatoes, yams, tomatoes, cucumbers, lettuce, and mustard. We canned everything we ate back then. We made hominy out of the corn, and we ground our own cornmeal. We made our own flour with wheat. We were able to store potatoes through even the coldest winter weather by lining the potatoes on hay and then covering them in hay. We made big barrels of sauerkraut. We ate squirrel, rabbit, fish, and hog meat, which we dried, preserved with salt, and stored in our smokehouse.
When we were children, we would all go hunting for rabbit. When it snowed, we would wrap our feet in (burlap) and go out and hunt rabbit. At night we would find robins and use a flashlight to startle them, then hit them on the head. The elders would stay up late cleaning the robins or rabbits we brought home.
There was no separation between the boys and the girls. The boys helped out with the household chores and the girls went out to hunt, even in the snow. We very rarely had free time, but when we did have a little time to ourselves, the girls and boys played marbles, hide-and-go-seek, or other games we made up from our own imagination.
We lived in a log house with no windows. During the day in the wintertime, we never closed the door so we would have light in the cabin. We only had one room with a stove, a table for our meals, and shelves to store things. Mom and Dad had a bed, but the children all slept on a blanket on the floor.
We had a lot of chores: hoeing cotton and corn, cutting and gathering wood, pulling weeds, or doing other work. During the summer, we would hunt huckleberries all day long. We could sell the berries for twenty-five cents a gallon in town. We would use the money to buy salt or coffee. This practical knowledge and ability to make do with what I had was very helpful to me as an adult.
(I added some paragraph breaks, so it’s not one big solid wall of text as originally formatted in this Kindle edition, at least.)
I don’t have that many wording spoons to comment now, but that reminded me of my Nana talking about everyday life growing up. ( Very much in some places, actually.) They were also probably in close to the same age group, if she wasn’t a little older than my Nana, considering that her daughter in law was a few years older than my parents.
It sounds like my Nana’s family had a bigger farm, and I had never heard of anybody eating robins before. (Making do…) But, so many similarities underneath the details.
I mean, I’ve talked about that some before. But, that’s really not the same kind of role models and attitudes a lot of other people in the dominant culture have grown up with. As a big part of their own “how to be $gender” toolkit.
Enough that it can be kind of hard to relate sometimes, around certain subjects–and I am sure that goes both ways!
Some different experiences and perspectives, once again. Leading to some rather different challenges and useful ways to approach them. Not everybody seems to keep that in mind, though.
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 