RIP, Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Here is a wonderful Paris Review interview.
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I will click on ANYTHING about Action Park, New Jersey’s best/worst dangerous amusement park, and this one has video.
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Oscar Pistorius is an abusive murderer, so this piece, for me, is just an explanation of why some people in South Africa might believe his cover story, which is that he is a paranoid, trigger-happy, irrational loon who is psychologically obsessed with being attacked by black people to the point where he wouldn’t do a quick pat of the bedclothes next to him to locate his girlfriend, and not an abusive murderer.
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On growing up without gendered pronouns:
Whenever anyone talked about me, they said kanya, siya, niya, pronouns that did not identify me as belonging to either the longhairs or the shorthairs, the skirtwearers or the pantswearers. I was not a son but a child, not a nephew but a nephew-equivalent whose gender was unspecified.
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Sydette Harry on racist friends-of-friends:
No more parties and events where only you feel uncomfortable. If they tell a racist joke, don’t laugh. Make them explain their racism—call them on it. Do not placate the room. If that doesn’t work, keep mad money or the car keys with you. If it gets unbearable, leave and tell them why. Do whatever you feel but make sure that the price of a good evening is no longer your discomfort. Loudly or silently prioritize YOUR feelings.
This is practice for you to get used to knowing what that feels like. Because whatever happens with your partner and Douchebag McRacist, you need to know what it feels like when someone puts your feelings about your culture first. Let that person be you.
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Fake Geek Guys: A Message to Men About Sexual Harassment:
“I will find you. I will hurt you. I will physically violate you… for being wrong about Spider-Man.”
Can you imagine, gentlemen, receiving that threat from a potentially dangerous man whose identity you have no hope of discovering but who knows your name, what city you live in, what you look like and where you work?
Now imagine receiving messages like that from men so frequently that you’re no longer bothered by it.
Now understand how f*cked up it is that you’re no longer bothered by it; that you’re no longer bothered by men’s anonymous threats of brutal sexual violence, because they’ve become just as common as a train not arriving on time.
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Molly Minturn put this Charlotte Gordon poem on Facebook, and I was BREATHLESS:
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Here is the trailer for season two of Orange is the New Black:
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EVERY WORD A DELIGHT:
Aspirin. It’s inevitable.
When asked what medicine they’d want most if they lived in the eighteenth century, the visitors will struggle in silence for few moments. Then, someone will offer, “Aspirin?” Sometimes it’s delivered with a note of authority, on the mistaken notion that aspirin is derived from Native American remedies: “Aspirin.” I modulate my answer depending on the tone of the question. If the mood feels right, especially if the speaker answers with a note of condescension, I’ve been known to reply, “Do you know anyone who’s died of a mild headache?”
I work as an interpreter in the apothecary shop at the largest living history museum in the US.
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Fuck:
A police officer from West Hartford had pulled up across the street, exited his vehicle, and begun walking in my direction. I noted the strangeness of his being in Hartford—an entirely separate town with its own police force—so I thought he needed help. He approached me with purpose, and then, without any introduction or explanation he asked, “So, you trying to make a few extra bucks, shoveling people’s driveways around here?”
All of my homeowner confidence suddenly seemed like an illusion.
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Tags: feminism, link roundup, the internet
I AM EXCITE: Out producer Megan Ellison is bringing the sapphic lives of Greta Garbo and Marlene Dietrich to the small screen.
Maybe in this season of OITNB they’ll learn the word ‘bisexual’!
High five of outrage!
That would be good! I find the way Piper doesn’t really identify as bisexual to be an interesting character choice but the way that none of the other characters ever label her as bisexual makes no sense to me.
THIS. I just want someone to acknowledge that it’s a thing, even if Piper herself doesn’t choose to identify with the term.
On gendered pronouns: I recently found out that nibling is the non-gender specific word for niece or nephew and for many reasons, not least of which is that it’s an adorable word, I think we should adopt it widespread.
NIBLING! Excellent.
I thought I read it was nebling? I mean, it’s a neologism so I guess we can all say/spell it however we want until Society At Large converges on something.
Oh, I’m totally adopting that word. I’m way too lazy to keep talking about my nephew and future niece without a convenient nonspecific noun to pluralise.
My only problem with “nibling” is that it makes me want to eat my cute niece nom nom nom. The trend in Tagalog is that you have no defined gender until you reach puberty, so all the terms that adults use to designate younger people are gender neutral, and all the terms younger people use to designate older people are gendered. Though funny enough, there’s also no word for “husband” or “wife.” You have to say “spouse who is a man” or “spouse who is a woman.”
Slate has a gleeful piece on “The Brilliant Misandry of Orphan Black” up today: http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/201…
I’ve already been hearing about how great Orphan Black is and meaning to watch it, but that article just moved it to the top of my “TV shows to catch up on” list.
I’m only a few episodes into the first season and it’s already great.
Orphan Black irony – made in Canada, not available on Canadian Netfix.
I don’t have TV, but saw one season 1 episode while at my mother’s and instantly wanted more. It’s one of the first shows I searched for when I got a Netflix account last fall. Where’s your Can-con ruling on THIS show, CRTC?
Do you have Amazon Prime? That’s how I”m watching it (in the US)
Can’t get Amazon Prime streaming in Canada, it seems. BUT, I have discovered that Space.ca has all of season one available for us in the entertainment doldrums that is Canada!
Love it! I think Orphan Black might be the only show I’ve ever watched that fails the reverse-Bechdel test (there are no two named male characters who discuss something other than one of the female characters).
OK, I’m sold – time to binge-watch this on Prime!
On aspirin, well, it is the medicine most commonly used (along with Advil, Tylenol, etc.) and I can see why people would think it’s the most important in their lives today. It’s amazing how much we take for granted things like vaccines (well maybe we SHOULDN’T take them for granted anymore) so that we don’t think about the need for medicines to treat other, more dangerous diseases.
Anyway, that was a bit disjointed, but the real point I wanted to make is that while I don’t know anyone who has died from a mild headache, I have certainly experienced migraines that made me think I wanted to die…
I thought it was interesting that penicillin (or some other antibiotic) wasn’t the most common answer, especially if you’re hypothetically going into a time period when hygiene levels at medical institutions were pretty abysmal. Maybe it’s because antibiotics are so commonly available and often quite cheap unless you need super antibiotics to fight drug-resistant bacteria? Penicillin would certainly be my answer!
It seems to me it’s more likely that aspirin et al are drugs people are comfortable administering to themselves, whereas any more serious medication is something a doctor would be handling and the doctors at that period wouldn’t have any better idea than you how to use it? Like, sure, I could vote for penicillin but I wouldn’t feel confident in my ability to take the correct dose in the right circumstance, and that makes it a lot less useful.
Right? The OBVIOUS ANSWER is “antibiotics.”
Yeah, I think it’s that antibiotics have slid into the category of “drugs we don’t give a second thought” — I mean, I think the number of times I’ve been cautioned not to take unnecessary antibiotics (advertising campaigns, school health classes, basically anytime my mom finds out that I have a cold, etc.) is probably higher than the number of times I’ve actually taken them. I can see how, even if penicillin occurs to people as an answer, they’d think, “Well, you’re not supposed to take that unless you really have to… and how often do you really have to… and aren’t some people allergic to it anyway… nah. Aspirin.”
I think for me it’s that Advil is the drug I use pretty much all the time (well, I would want to take my antidepressants, personally, but that is another story). I use antibiotics so rarely that I wouldn’t think about them. How lucky are we.
But the nice thing about antibiotics in the past is that if you were the only one who had them, you wouldn’t have to worry about everyone else taking them unnecessarily! You’d be the only one in the world who could cure most infections, and so you would be their Queen.
Yeah, I assumed people would say aspirin because they’re in an old-timey apothecary and are thinking in terms of its modern equivalent, the pharmacy. They’re thinking in terms of “What over-the-counter medication do I buy/use the most?” not “What medication requires a doctor’s visit and prescription, but is totally a life-saver?” I wouldn’t be surprised if foreign visitors whose countries actually DO sell antibiotics over the counter would be quicker to think of antibiotics.
OBVIOUSLY if you were headed back to the eighteenth century you’d want to take a Z-Pak. AMATEUR HOUR
That gender-neutral pronouns article is fascinating. Think how much easier it would be to conceive of transition, and especially of the idea of being genderqueer or third gender, if our language didn’t predispose us to think in such rigid categories.
That sexual harassment piece is so amazing. It’s really disheartening that I’m like “well, maybe awful dudes will take it more seriously if a man says it,” but. Maybe they will?
I had exactly that conversation on Twitter with Kieron Gillen yesterday. It’s necessary and useful for guys speak up, but it’s depressing as hell that saying something like, “Rape jokes aren’t funny,” is considered more valid if the speaker is a dude. (To his credit, Gillen acknowledged that too.)
I love him. It is nice that my favorite male creators are willing to speak out against stuff like that.
Did you see his sequence where the All-Mother smacks Loki down for using terms like “bitch” and “slattern”? Gillen’s helped bring me back to comics; he and Matt Fraction (where are the Sex Criminals Toast fans?) are doing such sneaky things with sexuality and gender norms, and then G. Willow Wilson’s Ms. Marvel is so smashing. Sigh. Comics! So great! When they aren’t horrible!
I don’t think so? I haven’t finished his JiM run, just Young Avengers. (Someone needs to write a Femslash Friday for Kate and Miss America omg.)
SEX CRIMINALSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS!!!! And everything else Fraction and Kelly Sue and G. Willow write.
JiM 631: “Enough, Loki. No more. ‘Slattern.’ ‘Witches.’ Do not be a thug. You can vilify an evil woman without using language that exists only to vilify women.”
“Syllllvia Poggioooooli.” “Change your safeword every six months. It must include a mix of letters and numbers.” Obamacore. Ugh, I love that book without any critical reserve at all.
Sex Criminals/Fraction/DeConnick fan ovah heeeeeeeyaaahhh!!!
WOO!
I am so frustrated by the state of gender pronouns in English.
we need to make some new ones up. I end up using”they” a lot of the time, which is ungrammatical but not as sexist as ‘he’. Why should males get to be the default? My English teacher used to say, patronizingly (a male) that women were assumed to be part of the generic ‘he’. Nope.
Singular “they” is actually perfectly grammatical. It took me a long time to accept this, being hung up on the pronouncements of an extremely prescriptivist HS English teacher, but the usage history is there and it is legit for singular references. “They” away.
ETA for some source-age: https://motivatedgrammar.wordpress.com/2009/09/10…
And the trainwreck that is the current state of pronoun invention is part of what makes me despair. 🙁
Singular they is definitely on its way to becoming grammatically correct- it sounds completely normal to me and most of my friends. Probably still depends a lot on age/region though.
I mean, other languages already use plural and singular “you” to denote formality rather than number, so why the hell can’t we use “they” to fill a rather large hole in our grammar?
It’s horrible. A friend of mine recently started identifying as gender neutral and I was SO RELIEVED that she wanted to keep the female pronouns. If she wanted xie or something obviously I’d do it but they are just so bad. I’m 100% on board with “they” for a non-specific person but it gets a little confusing when you are talking about a concrete person that you know.
I used to feel this way, but honestly, with a lot of practice I barely have to think about it. Also I figure that the work I have to put into remembering someone’s pronouns is not really that much compared to the effort that person has to put into defending their sense of self and personhood in the face of a language and a culture that doesn’t make room for them.
Oh yeah, like I said, I’d definitely do it (she did switch names and while I had to make an effort to remember for a few weeks, it was nbd), and you’re right that it’s not a huge problem. I just wish there were better options for everyone.
I was recently introduced to yo as gender-neutral pronoun and I like it and use it. Somehow it’s fun and self-explanatory in a way that I haven’t felt with other ones. Maybe it’s just because it’s not derivative of something that already exists but is just it’s own thing.
This link roundup is perfect. Every article was amazing.
I agree!
Aaahhhh Doug Glanville everything you write is great (and you made me proud to be a Phillies fan).
Love the variety of the links in these posts – keep ’em coming!
yourself
with your brother, yourself on the raft.
ahhh, that poem is breathtaking. thank you.
I’d never heard of Action Park, but the Wikipedia article on it is cuh-razy:
“Former employee Tom Fergus says the bottom of the pool was eventually painted white to make it easier to spot any bodies on the bottom.”
WHAT.
Ha! This place is still open, just under a different name/ownership, and despite the supposed increased safety standards it is for sure still super dangerous – I say this from personal experience going there as a kid, and from my brother’s experience as a summer park employee. I had no idea it was so notorious it merited its own wikipedia article! Amazing.
My face ran the gamut of horrified emoticons reading that.
“Super Speedboats: These were set up in a small pond, known by staff to be heavily infested with snakes.”
I mean, this is all a description of a made-up amusement park in The Simpsons, and not a real place? Right? Right?
I’d never heard of it either, which is a shame, since I grew up in Rockland Co., NY, just over the border from Vernon, NJ. I was only 12 when we moved away, though, and my parents aren’t really pro-amusement parks at the best of times. Bro Jinx, however, was 19 when we left, so I emailed him the article this morning, asking if he’d heard of the place. His reply:
“I saw that on line this AM. Hell yeah every year in Highschool that place rocked.”
Then I asked him about the snake pond:
“Snakes oh hell no. I didn’t know that.”
Teenage Bro Jinx was a little bit of a dirtbag teen (but who wasn’t, in the ’80s?)
1. Not all doctors opposed the use of spirits before surgery. Some advised whiskey beforehand to dull the pain (and more likely, to dull the response time/reactions of patients being held down while sliced open).
2. For an article that talks about not looking down on people in the past who used things like bloodletting, I am not a fan of the author’s snarky condescension towards modern visitors today don’t know about history.
“In the shop, we rarely talk about the other equipment male doctors carried, for fear of upsetting visitors or creating controversy… Despite this avoidance, it periodically pops up, and forces me as the interpreter to rely on innuendo.”
And then she relies on innuendo to explain the ‘other equipment’ in the article. Is she talking about equipment to kill and/or dismember babies stuck somewhere in the vaginal canal, to save the mother?
Yes. If a baby was irretrievably stuck, a doctor could use hooks and sharpened pointed items to bring the baby out in pieces. This was absolute last-ditch efforts to save the mother, since it came with HORRIFYING RISKS like PUNCTURING THE MOTHER’S ORGANS, but if the baby had died in the birth canal, it might work.
I’d assume they don’t bring it up to ward off discussions about abortion.
Aaah ok. Yeah… definitely last ditch efforts then!!!
I can understand why it they might avoid the subject with visitors, but it seemed to me weird to vaguely refer to it in an article and not follow through.
I also thought for breaking pelvis bones? If the baby was still alive. I understand why the author didn’t want to explain it to the little girl, but…I still want an explanation!
The condescension bothered me a little too, Lots of people know nothing about medical history. It’s not a flaw – we all can’t know everything.
That shop in the picture is here in my little town. I have been in it!
Dude, I know, right? “My job is to educate people–UGH these people know NOTHING.”
I fucking love telling people weird shit about history and there’s no point in copping a gross snotty attitude about it because then NO ONE WILL LISTEN TO YOU and it’s a self-defeating proposition.
Also, happy Easter. I made Hot Cross Buns this morning and they were delicious! Is anyone else eating them right now?
Mmm fun! I read so much Victorian era fiction as a child that sentence evoked tangible nostalgia… for 19th century England (almost definitely The Little Princess).
Have you ever eaten them? You should make them. They are really easy to make – like actually easy, not fake easy. It just takes time waiting for the yeast to rise. And they are yum!
Hot cross buns make me homesick. Not in a miserable way, just in a “how does no-one here know these!” kind of a way. When I know that at home they would have been in the supermarkets for weeks, and everyone would be eating them and I wouldn’t have to explain what they were. Traditions are funny like that.
My grandma made such good hot cross(less, often) buns. Way more candied peel in them than you ever find in commercial ones, and not as greasy. They’re curiously absent around grocery stores/bakeries around here, though I didn’t go looking high and low for them. (Presumably someone in Montreal sells them.)
Aww, now I miss my grandma 🙁
One of the reasons the doctors who used forceps used them secretly , under a sheet – was they considered them a proprietary secret. Only some doctors had them and could use them – a family of forceps users.Hundreds of women died so they could protect their secret for about 100 plus years. Putting profits before people, in this case women-people. If you weren’t a misandrist before,just read about the history of men involving themselves in childbirth, pushing out the midwives, spreading infections by not washing their hands after handling cadavers, keeping forceps a secret…I could go on.
Putting profits before people I see the medical field/pharmaceutical research hasn’t changed
This medical article is SO COOL! Ahhhh!
Ughhhh can we talk about racist friends of friends? There’s a person in my wider social circle who I have to see maybe once a month or so, and almost every time she inevitably says some absurd racist bullshit. She’s ALSO one of those “I just tell it like it is” assholes (as mentioned in the therapist post yesterday) and acts like her offensive “jokes” based on racist stereotypes are somehow “just being honest.” I am in a much easier position than the letter writer (I’m white, and this person is just a friend of my best friend’s roommate, so I have much less to lose socially), but I still find myself at a total loss every time it happens. Usually by the time I’ve processed that yes, she DID really say that, the whole conversation has passed me by and then I just stew and feel guilty the rest of the night.
One of my friends called her out recently — Racist Asshole described a disagreement over a movie as being “lynched” for her opinion, and my friend very coldly said “I don’t think that’s the most appropriate choice of words” — and Racist Asshole said “I THINK IT’S THE PERFECT CHOICE OF WORDS” and then beamed smugly like she was the funniest person alive.
AGHHHHHHH
Ugh I had a friend like this, who insisted he had no problem with black people, as long as they didn’t act like “thugs,” and yeah, very much an “I call ’em like I see ’em” guy. I have slowly cut him out of my life and it feels so wonderful.
AHHH! That is horrible.
My friend’s husband is supposedly like this…and I say this despite never meeting him because SHE ADMITS HE’S RACIST!! Why do you marry someone like that?? I am terrified of meeting him (they live across the country and I rarely see her, much less both of them since he does shift work) because who wants to be around that??
Racists friends of friends are the pits! I struggle with this a lot with my partner and his friends/family. We’re both white, but we have a fairly significant age difference and wildly divergent life experiences. It doesn’t help that my academic background is in cultural studies and I am the kind of insufferable person who wants to “problematize” every fucking thing on the planet (ok, not everything, but I’m definitely the jerk who’s like, “But don’t you think it’s kind of fucked up that…” while everyone else is begging me to stop taking everything so seriously.)
…Except if you’re saying the kind of shit these dudes are saying, you’re trafficking in racism & I feel like it’s been so hard to communicate that concept. Like, what’s “really racist”? What is the list of “Official Racist Actions” that makes shitty jokes/comments into somehow socially acceptable lesser offenses, you know? My attempts to intervene have mostly resulted in people complaining about me being a bossy buzzkill, so I’ve tapered off but I’ve struggled with choosing to say nothing because I don’t want to be complicit in their racist garbage.
Honestly, in that situation I would probably say, “Well, you’re wrong” and then get up to go get a drink/go to the bathroom, but I am a belligerent asshole and you don’t have to do that if you don’t want to.
Toasties, one of my mom’s close friends is racist. This is someone who comes over to the house at least once a day. I can’t really cut her out the way the article suggests since our contact doesn’t usually occur in third-party places, and I’m not going to hideout in my own house. I plan to talk to mom about it and let her know that it really bothers me. I’m hoping she’ll agree to talk to her friend. This isn’t a plea for advice so much as wondering if anyone else has dealt with something similar and how’d it go?
The apothecary article was indeed quite delightful. thank you! I’ve just reached the part in ‘My life in Middlemarch’ where the author talks about George Eliots headaches, and how her writing could have been affected by the time travelled appearance of Aspirin. So when I read the excerpt above my only reaction was of course!
On the other hand aspirin (and paracetamol) are quite the wonder drugs, and I would take them anywhere.
Nicole, I love your total, uninhibited outrage every time the Oscar Pistorious case is brought up. You’re right, of course, and you’re totally unsubtle and non-apologetic about it and it’s awesome.
You know, I can live with the idea that Pistorius’s defense sounds more plausible to people in South Africa than it does to me. Different cultures, different contexts, different crime rates, whatever. But the idea that that article can say, “There are two stories about what happened the night Pistorius shot Steenkamp. Neither is particularly plausible…” I mean, it is just not true. There is nothing remotely implausible about the narrative, “A man’s controlling and abusive behavior toward his girlfriend eventually escalated to physical violence and murder,” and I feel like the people who are acting like that is totally implausible must be living in some kind of parallel universe.
How does aspirin come to mind before both antibiotics and birth control?! Boggling.
And a small pox vaccination. (That’s the one that really scares me.)
Yeah, that would probably be my pick
I thought about that but wasn’t sure when they’d figured out they could inoculate people against it. Wikipedia says broadly introduced in 1798, but that there was some understanding of how people who’d had cowpox were protected (to a degree) from smallpox in Turkey in the early 1700’s. But yeah, antibiotics or smallpox vaccine, or maybe birth control.
You know, that just got me thinking: If birth control were around earlier (and hooray if it had been), would there have been the huge push for hand washing and anesthesia and chainsaws and what not since so many fewer women would have been in agony/dying (now seemingly) needlessly in childbirth?
Good point! There probably would’ve been a push for handwashing and anesthesia (especially for anesthesia, since surgery was so incredibly painful), just maybe later/more gradually? Obstetrics was where handwashing was first realized to be so important, and given that childbirth is very common it’s easier to get the statistics to make the connection, but if they figured out anesthetic and then started doing surgeries, I’d imagine that handwashing wouldn’t be far behind.
<3 Semmelweiss.
I’m thinking that henceforth my solution to the racist friend of a friend will be to just start singing They Might Be Giants’ Your Racist Friend: “this is where the party ends, I can’t stand here listening to yooooouuuuuuuu and your racist friend….”
Growing up in that environment does make me think of gender in a really different way than most Americans, especially because the indigenous word for gay, bakla, already has femininity encoded in it so the shift was more or less transparent for my family. That said, I was policed in the early days for not being sufficiently feminine once I decided to be a woman, though my family has since adjusted. It's especially endearing to watch my grandmother correct people from my hometown when they try to use my birth name. It's the best feeling ever to see your primary role model growing up still live up to your admiration of her thirty years later.
My grandpa was an old crotchety racist southerner. When he moved in with my uncle's family for a while, he would watch sports and constantly complain about basketball players using racist terms. Finally my aunt (who is a southerner herself) said those words were not allowed in her house, that if he ever used them again, she would ship him back to Florida, where he'd be put in an old folks home. I think it actually worked (although he then used it to play the wounded party about how his daughter-in-law was trying to kick him out, etc). Obviously not the same situation, but I think either you or your mother need to make it clear your house is a racism-free zone and it won't be tolerated any longer. You can be gentle about it, but still be firm.
I just finished a book about our fraught history with vaccines, and apparently when Cotton Mather tried to introduce smallpox inoculations in the US, his house was actually firebombed. There was an accompanying note that said "COTTON MATHER, You Dog, Dam you. I'l inoculate you with this, with a Pox to you." (spelling is original) So yea, people had some strong opinions.
ACTION PARK. I used to go there all the time growing up, although I always knew it as Mountain Creek Water Park. Apparently it’s going back to the old name as of this summer though?
Anyway, it’s great, although I always came home with mild whiplash and multiple bruises. It took me literally about eight years to work up the nerve to go on this one slide though: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uOn99MH8ZFs
Can one of our resident gal scientists fact check this one? It seems off to me, but I don’t have the background to articulate exactly why:
“Unfortunately, the removal of tumors triggers this—tumors secrete hormones that prevent the proliferation of cancer cells in other areas of the body. Removing tumors unleashes dormant cancer cells that have been distributed throughout the body.”
Nicole, I missed this until now. Thanks for posting the poem!
Nicole, I missed this until now. Thanks for posting the poem!