Gene Demby on what Wyatt Cenac’s story about Jon Stewart is really about, to him:
The Stewart-Cenac exchange illustrates what those of us who are often The Only One In The Room tend to know: It sucks. But it turns out that being The Only One isn’t simply burdensome and annoying on an individual level. There’s evidence that when people feel like they’re The Only One in a group, even a group that professes to care about diversity in its ranks, it actually gets in the way of everything said diversity was supposed to achieve in the first place.
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This is so frustrating and fascinating (I don’t love Jon Ronson, but I do like this piece):
Then, at the wardrobe fitting, they handed him his turban.
“I said, ‘Whoa, whoa! No! Afghans in America don’t wear turbans. Plus, this guy’s a terrorist. He’s not going to draw attention to himself. You tell the producers I want to bring authenticity to this character.’ The wardrobe supervisor replied, ‘All right, all right, I’ll talk to them.’”
The message came back from Chuck Norris’s people that the turban was mandatory.
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The reader who emailed me this said “an alternative to taking to the sea.”
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my eyes got wider and wider reading this (I totally get why she does this, and everything, it’s just part of the morass that is our world):
Stotland may be the only admissions consultant in the country who actively seeks out clients who have been disciplined for sexual misconduct, according to prominent lawyers and advocates for accused students. In the midst of a national movement that has put pressure on universities to adjudicate sexual misconduct cases more quickly and crack down harder on perpetrators, it’s a lucrative business to be spearheading. Accused students pay her hundreds of dollars an hour to help them brainstorm and edit their transfer application essays, advise them on how much to disclose from their tarnished disciplinary records, and find a school where they might stand a chance of getting in that’s also a good fit.
esp:
“God forbid, if one of my clients committed rape, who needs a liberal arts education more than that person?”
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Brokeback Mountain, ten years on:
Ossana: The first day we filmed that scene where Michelle’s character is on the toboggan and falls off the sled, and Ennis is with her—they’re laughing; well on the third take, Michelle fell off the sled, and at the bottom of the hill she was crying. She’d twisted her knee, and we had to call someone to take her to the hospital. Heath was not about to let her go alone, and as he was getting into the vehicle with her he was smoothing her hair back. I remember him looking at her, and she looking up at him with these wide eyes. She was almost startled by the attention he was giving her, but you could see it every day from thereon. For him it was truly love at first sight. He was so taken with her.
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This article is great because you literally don’t have to read anything after the first comma. pic.twitter.com/haNL8GcRI3
— Chris Farnell (@thebrainofchris) July 29, 2015
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Deleted comment of the day:
Tags: feminism, link roundup, the internet
I actually took to the sea the other night – benefits of living by the ocean, I suppose – but as you can see, I am back. Highly recommended, A++, would take to the sea again.
Is taking to one’s bed an adequate substitute, if it’s a water bed with some kind of wave maker?
Roller derby Toasties! Philly area Toasties! Hu-man Toasties! Philly’s legendary Nina Knockout and her family suffered a brutal attack over the weekend. The perpetrator is in jail, and she and her injured child are getting hospital care and lots of support. I am posting this to signal boost the love4danecia.com site, which has updates on Philly fundraising events, as well as a gofundme link.
I only knew her from skating, but I always liked and admired Nina. Nobody deserves this. I’ve been over-hugging my own child all week, because fuck.
Going to have to read the piece on Brokeback in tiny sips.
It’s Film Festival season here in the wilds of Northern Michigan, and instead of volunteering this year, MrChouffe and I are actually (gasp) going to movies! Last night we saw Do I Sound Gay?, which is a lot about language acquisition, misogyny, speech therapy, and human attraction, and is fantastic. Definitely discussion of uptalk and vocal fry. Highly, highly recommend.
I backed Do I Sound Gay? on Kickstarter (she says, like a millenial/lizard person), and I’m so happy it’s getting such good reviews! I can’t wait to see it.
THANK YOU!!! It was beautifully done. I didn’t realize there’d been a Kickstarter for it but I’m glad to hear it, and very glad that people (you) stepped up to help it get made.
*gasp* Are you at the Traverse City Film Festival? I am driving up there tomorrow!
Yep! Prepare for the worst traffic TC ever really gets. 🙂
Sent from my iPhone
The most heart-breaking thing about that Brokeback piece is that Michelle Williams clearly declined to participate, probably because the memories would be too painful to dredge up – and who can blame her, really.
Not I.
I’m going to give my kids a hyphenated last name: Overcome-Patriarchy.
Just kidding they’re getting the hyphenated last name of their lesbian moms. *Kanye shrug*
But won’t they be distracted by the dying bleats of the patriarchy?
…
.
.
(no, they will brush that dirt right off their shoulders)
Dying bleats of the patriarchy will be the white noise in the background of their lives, the way most of us hear a vague electrical hum. Or, in my case right now, about three billion cicadas.
Dying Bleats of the Patriarchy just jumped to #1 for my next all-woman pub quiz team name.
But then people won’t be able to tell who’s baby it is *really*. Cause that’s a really important thing to know donchyano.
My fiancé is taking my last name, and our kids will have my last name, and when people hear this, they by and large tend to lose their shit. It is fully my intention to collect these responses for a future article.
I look forward to that article!
My husband and I are giving one kid his last name, and the other kid my last name. I am interested to see what the reactions will be, if any.
My aunt and uncle did that — I think the biggest reaction was people at school and activities who didn’t believe the kids were related when they said they were.
Yeah, I have cousins in the same boat. Not that big of a deal.
My husband and I are both from big families, and think having the same last name as your siblings is overrated.
The boy and I are not having kids, which is good, because that would have been an issue. He has a rare last name (7 people in the country have it, and they’re all related to him) but it’s also cumbersome, hard to pronounce and hard to spell. I have a common-but-not-too-common simple last name, plus a fondness for disrupting silly patriarchal tradition. In other words: it’s good that we won’t have to have the discussion.
That’s pretty much exactly our name situation too. Of course, when fiancé told his mother, her reaction was to ask if he was ashamed of his (German) heritage, which… what? He responded by asking her if she was ashamed of her French heritage, since she changed her name upon marriage, which more or less shut that down.
I got some really passive aggressive little faces but no real commentary, because I think people fear me. Which they should! (My partner didn’t take my last name but our kids will have my last name.)
Part of me really wants to have a daughter someday who will inherit my whole name. Bird_Internet Jr. Maybe a granddaughter named Bird_Internet III. Who says that that’s only for male offspring?
In a way, the Gilmore Girls did that. Rory was officially called Lorelai Gilmore, just like her mom (though, looking it up on wikipedia, they apparently have different middle names)
Frankly, Bird Internet is such a beautiful and majestic name, it’d be a shame not to pass it on.
I used to have patients who had done that, one patient was Mom’s Name and her daughter was Mom’s Name, Jr. I was very confused when I first met the whole family.
Like Phoebe Junior.
I feel so torn about this right now.
My husband’s sister’s kids have (t)he(i)r family’s last name, so we have some precedent in terms of kids can take their mom’s name. I know that the only people who would make a big to do if our kid has my name are, however, my husband’s parents. The thing is, I’m not even sure it is ‘the feminism’ that makes me want my kids to have my name, but mostly just to spite them because they seem to take every chance to subtly remind me that I am indeed not a *true* family member. Terrible reasoning, I know. But damn those people make me crazy.
Ah who cares what your reasoning is! The end result will be more kids who with their mother’s last name, which is awesome. Plus, you can spend their childhoods instructing them to say some great feminist shit whenever anyone asks them about their names, and then when they’re all grown up and you’re tipsy at a family gathering you can say “I actually did it to piss off your grandparents, they were just huge assholes to me,” and they’ll absolutely love it.
Yesss! Great point. My husband has already said he’s on board to do what I want to do, so, I mean. I guess all we need is the baby part now.
I love this. I am getting married soon, and the few times anyone has actually asked me if I intend to change my name, I have burst out laughing and said no, but he is welcome to take mine if he feels like it. Like, friend, you have MET me before, why would you not know the answer to this question already?
We genuinely are not sure what to do about future kids’ names, though, as our names would sound unreasonably long and tongue-twistery if hyphenated.
Best story from my recent wedding: while setting up decorations with my mom (known feminist supportive of whatever I get up to), she turns to me and says “Oh just think. This is the last day you’ll be Alluvial_Fan…” I say, what.
“You’ll be Alluvial_Hislastname.”
Reader, I was speechless. I didn’t make an announcement about keeping my name, cause if you know me, you know I’m keeping my name. Never occurred to me my MOTHER would have missed this. But the relentless laughing really helped with wedding stress, esp. when my sisters heard the story.
My parter and I plan on keeping our own names, and for kid(s) doing first half of my last name + last half of his last name. I like my initials and he likes his slavic ending. Works for us all!
I listened to the Wyatt Cenac episode of WTF yesterday and it made me like him about 1000% more than I already did. And I can definitely relate to the feelings of sadness that come with realizing some person you’ve always looked up to & inadvertently lionized turns out to be just a regular human being who is just as capable of being a dick on occasion.
“It may sound like the bleating of a dying patriarchy, but that’s just because it IS the bleating of a dying patriarchy.”
I deeply hope the “bleating” line is the work of a snarky copy editor, and the guy dumb enough to write that article wasn’t ALSO clever enough to write that line.
Yeah, it definitely is. Tom Fordy is the guy who wrote the article, not the subject of an article written by someone else, so that is 100% one sly wink.
I wish my local metaphysical bookstore had a CD of said bleating, that I might use it to lull myself to sleep at night. I mean, I like the rushing creek noises I have now, but the change-up would be good I think.
You just need Jon Voight reading Red Pill Subreddit comments to you.
omg this is perfect.
Hey Toasts! Do you love being angry? Are you having a hard time mustering up enough righteous feminist anger for today? Well, then – do I have an article for you: The Legends (formerly Lingerie) Football League, and how these powerful women are unpaid and disrespected by their commissioner: http://grantland.com/features/legends-football-le…
(Sorry, I’m a comments luddite and I don’t know how to make that a neat little linking phrase)
Best of luck!
Mission accomplished. I am now angry.
Jesus.
I knew the lingerie football thing was a thing, but I assumed those women were paid by the wheelbarrow. That is fucked up.
I could NOT believe it. To say “No one is here to watch you play football” to these women who love the game and are basically forced to risk injury for the Male Gaze AND be unpaid is suuuuper fucked up.
I read this a few days ago! that commissioner is soooooooooooo skeevy, jesus christ.
also, obviously I like that they really spent so much time profiling the women, who are ridiculously great and clearly SO dedicated to the sport, despite everything.
but weirdly, the other part that stuck with me was that dude fan who was so clearly enjoying himself BUT ALSO didn’t want to give his last name because he just started a new job?? Like, I guess he recognized his own dirtbaggery, but grosssssss.
I know a woman who has played LFL and WFA (aka “clothed women’s football) and who prefers LFL, because LFL is where the fans and support are.
I’m basically reduced to incoherent rage gargling when I think about the fact that it’s 2015 and female athletes have to be basically naked to get fans and support. And this article is making me so much madder!
Can we talk about the gritty dystopian Little Women where the girls investigate a conspiracy on the mean streets of Philadelphia here? Because I think I need to talk about it.
I hate myself already because I know I’m going to watch it to see if it’ll replace Reign as my new “wtf even is this mess” show.
Yes, I feel the same way. No part of me wants it, but I’m just so utterly curious!
It kind of sounds like he just made the Little Women connection for the publicity not because it bears any relation to the book beyond the names of the protagonists…
Having said that, I definitely would watch that show and if Susan Sarandon and Winona Ryder make cameos/star in it I can die happy.
I choose to think of it as a completely original show that includes a strong allusion to Alcott in the form of character names. Unless they’re going to do something about the unique challenges of adopting trancendentalism in a literal dystopia? Yeah, I’m sure that’s it.
I like the idea that it’s like a Louisa May Alcott themed conspiracy/dystopia; like the way season 1 of True Detective used Robert Chambers and the King in Yellow as an allegory for nihilism and dehumanization?
I just.
Why?
I’m not even a big Little Women fan! And I like fanfic and AUs and reimaginings and all of that. I watch Sleepy Hollow!
But I do not understand the point of this.
It doesn’t even sound like a good AU!
You wanna make a story about sisters in dystopian Philadelphia? Go for it! Dystopias are hot right now! Name the girls after the March sisters! Those are all classic names, and it would be 100% believable that they were either named after the book on purpose (by their mom, who was a big fan) or that it’s just a coincidence. You wanna make Jo a writer and Amy a brat? Go for it! Acknowledge in the press materials that you were inspired by the book. But don’t try to pretend that this has anything to do with the source material.
(Also, Alcott wrote tons of other stuff that is ripe for action-y adaptations! Pick one of those!)
Yes! I would watch a show about four sisters solving conspiracies together, deffo. I suppose that is all that it will turn out to be, but then I just find it irritating that they are claiming to draw upon Little Women as apparently you can’t just have four sisters in a show, you have to have them be from something else too.
I…what.
(would probably watch it though)
Being set in my hometown, of course I’m going to watch at least one episode, just so I can do the “Wait, that’s PITTSBURGH/TORONTO/VANCOUVER!” commentary when they have outdoor scenes.
i don’t know why, but the phrase “dystopian philadelphia” makes me giggle every time in comes up
but yes, i’m distressed and baffled and curious and also pretending it doesn’t exist?
Why do kids have to have their father’s name?
Once in high school, I was sent to the principal for saying in a class discussion about suffrage that women in our culture have no names. Even if we ‘kept’ our birth names those were still our fathers’ names. We are the nameless ones. We don’t even have names of our own. My argument being we wouldn’t be complete citizens until we had names of our own that we kept forever. No “married name” any more. This of course provoked an extended episode of class mansplaining and I was threatened with suspension for being logical, I guess. Not sufficiently meek. The principal called my mother. My mother said, “what’s your name?” The Principal stated his name. My mother says, “Is it your mother’s name?”
I wasn’t suspended. But I was told to be “more diplomatic”.
This one bugs me so much. “It’s not really my name, it’s my father’s name, so I will change names when I get married.” Change names if you want to, but remember you are actually changing to your father-in-law’s name, by that argument.
It is MY NAME. (Not shouting, just passionate.)
I lived with it for a whole bunch of years, it BELONGS TO ME. Regardless of parental penis predecessors.
If I marry, I will not change to my partner’s last name– in addition to making me unhappy for feminist reasons, the result would be common enough that I would forever be getting other people’s mail and phone calls. But I am not close to my father. I would change my last name to the one my mother had prior to marrying, but she’s the awesome outcast from a nightmarish family.
I would prefer to be [Current first name] [Current middle name] [Favorite grandma’s first name]. But that would confuse people who already know me.
GO BABY LITTLEHUNTINGCREEK
I’ve never really understood that argument, though, because boys also (tend to) get their father’s names, which are in turn their father’s names and so on. Why are their birth names “theirs”, but ours are not?
YES THIS. I kept my name upon marriage, which is MINE because it was given to ME when I was born. Yes, it is patrilineal and it’s stupid that that’s the default. But it’s still MY NAME.
Keeping-your-own-name fist bump! Thought honestly, my mom kept her own name too, so I kind of grew up with that as the default.
YEEESSSSS. I really, really like my name. It’s unique-but-not, if you’ve seen My Big Fat Greek Wedding that will make sense, it flows beautifully, I’ve worked really really damn hard for it to be the name of ME. I love MrChouffe and his name fits him perfectly, but it would not fit me nor the person I’ve grown into. We’ve talked about name-changing and his basic position is, do it if you want to, but I wouldn’t change mine so I certainly don’t expect you to do it. Which makes sense! And is lovely!
My name is mine. I own it and I’m not changing it.
I’m pretty attached to my (father’s) name, partly because it contains some extraneous letters and I’ve invested so much time into teaching people to spell it correctly, and partly because –according to family legend– it would’ve died out centuries ago if not for the woman in a generation of only daughters who took a husband only under the condition that he took her name instead of the other way around. I can get behind that.
That’s a great family legend to have!
THE POOPJOKES NAME SHALL LIVE FOR A THOUSAND THOUSAND YEARS
It’s pronounced “pup-JO-kays”. Spelled with a double o.
I kept my name because it is mine, too. Also, my husband and his ex chose their own last name, which he still uses. And I’m certainly not switching over to that.
My dad is a jackass. My last name is a bit unwieldy, difficult for people to spell, too long for two syllables (11 letters!), autocorrect changes it even though it is in the dictionary. When I was in my teens and early twenties I was so ready to change it when I got married, but then I didn’t get married, and I kept that name. I’ve now come to a point where it’s my name, not his. I’ve had it longer than he did before I was born.
When my parents divorced my mom kept it, because his family is her family now and they’re great. It’s my name, and my Grandpa Max’s name, and his father’s name, and my uncle Steve’s name. I share it with people that aren’t my dad, and now I love it. If I ever get married, I don’t know if I’ll change it. Depends on how awesome his name is and the people that share it, I guess.
Yep. If you feel like the name fits you, why change it, regardless of the reason?
I should have read your comment before saying the same thing. But yes.
Both my grandmothers told me that they wish they could have kept their own names when they got married because it’s how they still viewed themselves.
My one grandmother found it onerous to change her name again when she was remarried in her 70s — but she didn’t want to keep her first husband’s last name in her new marriage.
I only recently learned that it was illegal in (most of?) the U.S. for a woman to keep her name after marriage until the 1970s. That is crazy!
I get so, so angry at the “well, it’s some dude’s name anyway, you don’t have your own name” argument, and defeated. It’s like, what would I have to do for a name to be mine, and would you be asking my purely hypothetical brother the same questions?
When we got married, I told the manfellow (who didn’t really see the point of getting married but was happy to do it so I could be on his sweet, sweet health insurance, God bless America) that I had no intention of using his name. He got this baffled look on his face and said, “Oh, wow, it had never even occurred to me that you’d change your name. I mean, if you’d wanted to, it’s your choice, but I don’t see why you would.” And I was like, “Um, because literally every other woman in my family has, including my sister?”
Same kind of baffled look he gets when I explain how hard it is for me to say directly what I want or disagree with people. His pure egalitarianism is really touching, but he wasn’t socialized as a girl and he has no idea how hard it is to be bracing all the time to defend your choices, your desires. And this is one of the big ones, where no matter what you choose, someone will invariably pop up to say you are Not Feminist Enough or Too Feminist or Betraying Tradition or this or that or the other.
Same! Our first names are given to us by our parents too, – most of us did not pick them. But most people don’t change them either, because when you’ve been called something your whole life it becomes yours anyway. That’s how I feel about my surname: no matter where it came from, I own it. It does not ‘belong’ to my father. It belongs to me, and his name belongs to him.
I’ve never had more of a sense that my surname is MINE and matters than when I finally got it changed back after a divorce. I’d thought, “I want to take my husband’s name to show that we’re family now!” And then I had to live with his name during the year and a half wait for a divorce. Never again.
My birth name isn’t mine because my grandfather repeatedly cheated on my grandmother, including but not limited to when she was going through treatment for cancer. Fuck him and fuck “carrying on” his name. I chose to take my husband’s name when I married to distance myself from that part of my life.
This, among other things, is why I rather like Icelandic naming conventions – one could have a family name of John’s-son/daughter or Jane’s-son/daughter.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Icelandic_name
I would love to be Bessie Mae Mimisdottir. (But then, my mom was pretty fantastic.)
Those names aren’t family names! They’re completely individual. You’d be Mimisdottir or more commonly Fathersdottir (traditionally, everyone was Fathersdaughter or Fathersson, because patriarchy), and your brothers would be Mimisson. Your kids would be Bessiesdottir and Bessiesson, and their kids would be named after them, and so on. No family name. The first name is the “real name”, the patronymicon is the less important name. In Iceland, they list people based on the first name, so you’d be listed under B in the phone book.
Exactly. Also my mom’s last name was my maternal grandfather’s name. It’s always some man’s name at some point, and also some woman’s name, and it doesn’t make it any more or less yours.
Yeah, tell me my name isn’t really my name, and I will come at you.
Seriously. I have a hyphenated last name–my mom’s and my dad’s (or my maternal grandfather’s and my dad’s, apparently. PBBBBT). The only people on earth, as far as I can tell, who have had this exact name are me and my sisters. My parents didn’t hyphenate themselves; it’s not their name. Whose is it if not mine? If I have a daughter and I give it to her, is it hers, or is it still the property of some dead men she’s never met who once bore parts of it?
Of course no one’s going to tell a boy that his last name doesn’t belong to him, though, so if I have a boy, will it automatically become his name without ever being mine? How the fuck does that work?
REALLY. My siblings and I have the same last name, from the same set of parents. So why would my brother’s last name be “his name” but my sister’s last name (THE SAME NAME) “just her father’s name”??
It’s not like men go on quests to find their True Name, they just get them from their parents, same as us. We all inherited the same name from the same man! My sister has had it longer than my brother, even, because she’s older than him! What IS her real last name, if it’s not “Familyname”? Maybe she should go on a name quest, then, or whatever it is men do?
If anything, the name is mine. I’m the oldest. I had it first. My brother’s name is clearly the most diluted, since he only got what was left of it after two older siblings.
I think we should make Name Quests a thing. It should involve laser tag.
Ugh ugh high school “let’s have a class discussion but don’t, like, get INTO it.” Go you & your mom.
Someone on this very website said, in a conversation on this topic, “How long does a woman have to have something before it belongs to her?” and that has really stuck with me. My name has been MY NAME my whole life. The fact that it comes from my father doesn’t feel very relevant to me. It’s mine.
OMG your school. “A minor child is thinking critically! Quick, alert a legal guardian!”
“Diplomatic” MY BUTT.
It pisses me off we’re teaching our teens this way.
“Is it your mother’s name?”
OMG I love your mom so much. High five, mama littlehuntingcreek.
You have no right, no right whatsoever, to tell me the name I’ve borne all my life and with which I identify isn’t mine because my father had it first.
And really, if you had your mother’s name, would it be any more “yours” than if you had your father’s name? Unless they invented a new one just for you, you’re going to inherit SOMEBODY’S name.
This is an AWESOME argument to make in a high school debate. Really, if a woman’s name is “her father’s”, and if marriage to a man means she loses “her father’s name” and gets absorbed into her husband’s name, this is the only logical conclusion.
I’ve always found this convention so, so creepy. I discovered as a kid that my mother had had a different name before and that it automatically disappeared upon marriage to be replaced by my father’s (she got married only a few years before they changed the law to allow a choice), and I think that’s when I became a misandrist.
They take your name. They steal YOUR NAME.
this comment really makes me see how much the innocuous phrase “took his name” sounds like something out of a dark fairy tale with an evil sorceror.
Yes, so glad you’re commenting on “taking” a name. That’s why Mr. Rose and I choose our wording carefully. We say, “No, we don’t *share* a name. We each use our own.”
Yes, exactly! They literally erase your name and replace it with the name of another person. You (your government paper self) stop being you, you’re absorbed into him. Do not tell me that that isn’t sorcery, I know dark magic when I see it. Uughhrgh.
I also get the creeps whenever I hear about an adoption where the adoptive parents give their kid a new first name. Nooooo. If the kid came to you with a name, that is their name. You can’t undo someone’s name, it’ll always be theirs even if you refuse to call them by it. It doesn’t have to be their only name, you can add more, but you can’t pretend that the name they arrive with isn’t real! Take them into your family by adding your last name, give them a bunch of new first and middle names, but DON’T DENY THEIR NAME. If they don’t want their birth name, they can choose to give it up. That’s completely different.
Names should never be removed, only added or cast off.
All of our kids have both our last names, no hyphen, but we switched the order, so the boys are HisName MyName, and the girl is MyName HisName. It drives people batshit, but it feels right to me. I suppose people would understand better with a hyphen, but I hate how it looks, and since my husband is Venezuelan, having the mother’s surname as well (hyphenless) is traditional.
Because having two last names is kind of a pain, the boys, now teens, have functionally dropped their second last name. We expected that; my husband only uses one last name in his day to day life. My daughter has said she may drop hers in future, but she plans to keep my name. It’s hard to come up with an egalitarian system of surnaming, but that makes me happy. I have both my last name and my husband’s and I currently use both for just about everything, but I figure I’ll likely use only mine when I’m teaching.
Yes! The fact that every child keeps both parents’ surnames is one of my favorite things about Latin American culture.
Both you and your mom are awesome! Oh, to have been a fly on the wall for that particular phone conversation.
I doubt I’ll marry, but if I do, I’m keeping my name. I have found this to be mostly the case for my female friends who marry in their 30s or later — by that point, many have built up respectable reputations in their fields under their own names. They don’t want to cause confusion or limit their opportunities by changing their surnames, which makes perfect sense to me; apparently some professions are more prone to that issue than others. But my favorite is my baby sister, who is in medical school and kept her name because “our family deserves a doctor!” She’s awesome. (She’s pregnant with their first, who will get her husband’s surname, because she doesn’t care about that either way.)
When you’re done rejoicing over the bleats of dying patriarchy (when are we going to start the rituals, btw?), NPR’s list of 100 reader suggested romances is out and it’s great. Definitely not complete (as no list ever could be) but excellent overall.
I had all kinds of happy sighs of ‘loved that book/series’ reading that list, which made me all the more eager to get ahold of the things on the list I hadn’t read.
Me too! So many favorites, so much happy sighing.
Booo, no Tipping the Velvet in the LGBTQ section. EVERYONE READ TIPPING THE VELVET IT IS GREAT. And if you’ve watched the movie and decided the book is bad, you are wrong. The movie is campy and stupid (but I love it anyway, cause I like campy and stupid, plus, hi, hot ladies in tuxes) but the book is delightful and sublime and has made several of my straight friends say they wished they were gay while reading it, cause it made the sex sound so good. So there.
Good list otherwise, though 🙂
I LOVE that book. All of Sarah Waters, really.
Somehow I had no idea that was a book! I watched the miniseries years ago and loved it. I’ll have to check it out.
This is a great list! And while the comment section is probably mostly dreadful (I skimmed) there is nothing more hilarious than someone trying to school Victoria Dahl (VICTORIA FREAKIN’ DAHL) on romance novel covers.
Second names. Uggh. I have a very complicated family, I’m the youngest child of both of my parents, but they both had previous children (Big brother on my mums side, like 6 kids on my dads side), they also weren’t together by the time I was born. So my mother gave me her second name (also technically I have my brothers father’s second name due to divorces still being illegal in Ireland when I was born).
Once my sister (fathers side) tried to convince me it was illegal for me not to have my fathers name (and it was obviously not her own opinion). For various (legal) reasons my mother didn’t put my father on my birth certificate, when he found this out, he marched into the national registry office and made them edit the records to include him, and then since he had a version of a birth certificate where I had his name, proceeded to confuse the shit out of 6 year old me by insisting I had his name, but then joked that he wasn’t my father. He’s a bit sadistic tbh.
Names are really important for a lot of reasons, but especially if you’re not a married and stable couple, children having the mothers name can mean the difference between escaping an abusive father and being stuck with him, at least in Ireland, in order to get the child a passport, and thus leave the country, you need both parents, as named on the birth certificate, present. My mother learned this the hard way with my brothers father (her husband), and didn’t make the same mistake again with me (although did make the same mistake of getting with a crazy person, but at least planned for it better?)
So yeah, man insisting kids have his name? Big red flag for me. But then again I have trust issues.
Toasties, I just came back from my first ever smear test and am now rewarding myself with a cookie. Go me!
In other news, this comic about flowers and recovery and growing older is one of my favourite things I’ve seen this week.
Go you! I hope it was okay and that the cookie is an adequate reward. (I suppose there’s also the sense of self-satisfaction for doing something unpleasant.) I had my first one a few months ago, and while it wasn’t the best thing ever, it was much better than I expected (I could barely feel the speculum, woo).
I rewarded myself after a blood draw today with a big sugary Starbucks drink, I approve 🙂
Um… so I THOUGHT our society had decided that RAPISTS need… JAIL???
No, no. Liberal arts. You must have misunderstood. I mean, the justice system isn’t sending them to jail, so maybe they are all sitting there saying “‘Rape, you say? What am I supposed to do? I’m not an admissions counselor!”
I’m sorry, it’s pronounced Yale.
BURN
I wish I could upvote this one hundred times.
“This time, no one was going to challenge his version of the facts.”
OH, FINALLY.
“God forbid, if one of my clients committed rape, who needs a liberal arts education more than that person?”
Does this strike anyone else as rather classist? The implication seems to be that rape is a vice of the uneducated poor. (Note: I am coming at this from a U.S. perspective, where a college education is increasingly becoming a class marker.)
I was trying to put my finger on why that line made me uncomfortable, and I think that is it. It’s not the idea of rehabilitation that I’m opposed to, it’s the idea that people commit rape because they are uneducated and if they just had a little more book learning, gosh darnit, they would never dream of such a thing.
Thank you. I also felt uncomfortable at reading that, and couldn’t articulate why.
Well for me, its just, when did we decide criminals need liberal arts education to stop violent crimes?
Oh, right– when the perpetrators are largely white college educated men whose families can afford a college admissions rape counselor…???
#ItsStillCrimeEvenIfYoureWHITE
a million upvotes for this!
It’s not rapists don’t need an education (everyone does, and that’s the point of trying to extend college to more prisoners), it’s that other people need to be kept safe from them a lot more.
yeesh leave the cabin hermit alone, “we feared for someone’s safety so we busted down the door and started rifling through their things taking pictures for our Home and Gardens special on the charming rustic lives of the simple folk, BTW we’re trashing the place cause they’re intruding on an unsullied natural preserve that’s due to be bulldozed in a month”
Yeah that’s sad man. I mean I get that its not his property etc. and stuff but like, “Guys, guys, this person just built the most rad fort and the seven year old in me respects that forever isn’t there some way that this can be preserved? Like, laws of the land be damned this is cool!”
When I was kid we lived near a set of big dumpsters and were forever making forts out of old furniture and junk and this person is a fort boss. (Why were we allowed to do that? I don’t know. We had attentive and invested parents who apparently gave us tetanus shots and then set us free?)
In high school my friends and I used to enjoy dumpster-diving in the dumpster of a floral shop. Assembling bouquets of trash flowers… good times.
my god, yes. “I am going to break the law and cut their padlock because ‘somebody might be hurt inside’, but they can’t break the law like me, so I am also going to take their stuff (and catalog it!) and destroy the cabin” so the forest can be logged.
poor anonymous person.
like I feel like this sort of thing might be a good case in point of why you might want to retreat to a deep forest hobbit hole and live like you’re in the bronze age for a while but https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ABbc-O_3_Ac
If you fear for someone’s safety, always enter their residence with gun drawn.
Yeah, the “this is a nature refuge… that’s due for harvesting!” part really threw me.
Me too, but I figured it was one of those intentional prunings that they have to do, like deliberately set-and-monitored forest fires that occasionally happen in order to keep the forests free from … I don’t know actually… fungus? dangerous overgrowth?
From building up so much potential fuel (leaf litter, dropped branches, etc.) that natural wildfires become dangerously uncontrollable, mainly.
“Community forest” appears to be like “national forest” as in vs. “national park” – in other words, open for exploitation for those parts of the public that are mining or timber companies or Cliven Bundy, just not for any old peon who just wants to get away from the california busybodies and be in nature nondestructively.
Local here: they are craaaazy conscientious about managing that forest, and you can’t even really tell it’s been harvested afterward. The occasional fire is good for redwood trees, actually, but since this forest is all up in the town I assume they want to minimize their fire chances.
I have a hyphenated last name given to me by my parents (each kept their own, and us kids got both), and when I was a kid almost every other conversation in which I gave my full name went like this:
“My name’s RudyRed X-Y.”
“Is your last name X or Y?”
“…Yes.”
Yes! Also, answering the first several roll calls of every year (and every subsequent one performed by a substitute) with “X-Y!” instead of “here,” since everyone thought it was okay to just… stop reading my name halfway through?
I tried hyphening my name way back when. I went to an audition, they called my name, they said, “Which one is it?”. I said both. Across the entire theater, the director yelled, “just pick one already!”.
So, I picked mine.
I haven’t encountered people who were confused about my last name for many years (although databases are still thrown for a loop sometimes). I’m not sure if it’s because hyphenated names are more common nowadays, so people understand how they work now, or if it’s because they assume I’m married now that I’m an adult. Like, having a little kid with a hyphenated name is confusing because only married people have those, and obviously a kid can’t be married? I don’t know.
Are we too exhausted by police violence to talk about the Cincinnati case where the police officer was just charged for murder?
I am all kinds of shocked and broken up about seeing somebody basically executed by being shot in the head at a traffic stop. It is horrifying for the family involved. This one is also changing my sense of safety and how I view police and traffic stops and the works, even though of course yes it was exceptional and no I’m not an African-American man. But the idea that this police officer thought it was in any way acceptable to just raise his gun and unload a bullet in a person’s head!… I really can’t get over it.
Yes I am *exhausted* but yes you are very very right
Cold comfort that he’s been indicted and even the police chief has come out and said, “What he did was wrong. He should be held accountable.” Is it a sign that #BlackLivesMatter has been making a dent? One can only hope.
But then MFer goes and pleads “not guilty”? YOU SHOT A GUY IN THE HEAD. How can he claim he’s not guilty?
Yeah, I am pretty exhausted by it. :/ Honestly, it was watching Sandra Bland’s arrest video that did me in for all of this, and I had a talk with my husband (who is Black, and a dark complexioned large man to boot) about all of this and the possibility of him (or any of our family members) ever being killed during a routine traffic stop.
The conversation went something like this:
T: I will always come home, because I’m willing to suffer some minor indignities in order to continue living.
Me: What if that isn’t enough?
T: Then I can’t do anything about that.
Considering I’ve seen a drunken white guy at a bar put his hands up as we were walking out while saying “whoa whoa, I don’t want a fight!” just because my husband was.. walking out and had a neutral face (?) makes me really worried when I see all these things about how cops can shoot unarmed people even if they just think they’re under threat.
ETA: all this to say–if “we” have learned anything, it’s that body cams are definitely not enough to deter fucking police brutality.
Oh man, your husband’s response to that question is seriously heartbreaking.
It probably helps that 1) he has been into the Stoics for the past few years and 2) he’s been aware of this issue for all of his life (-_-); , whereas my relatively sheltered non-Black POC self never grew up fearing the police and so I’m grappling with this in a shorter period of time. (There are other SE Asian communities that have a very tense relationship with the police, but I didn’t have that perspective growing up in central MD.)
Your “what if that isn’t enough” made me cry.
I definitely was knee deep in emotions after watching the first few minutes of Sandra Bland’s conversation with Encinia. Honestly, I would’ve been teary saying it if it wasn’t for the fact that I was so angry too.
That Buzzfeed article is infuriating on so many levels. Like, if this lady truly believes rapists deserve college educations then she would charge on a sliding scale and not just help the overprivileged turd burglars who can afford her exorbitant fees plus full college tuition. Like how do you think these dudes ended up in situations like this in the first place? Could it be because they were raised to expect that they can do whatever they want and get whatever they want at all times with no consequences? Helping them get back into college isn’t going to teach them to be better people, it’s just going to remind them that money can solve any problem.
Also I am 100% not surprised that that smug shitbag still uses her Harvard email address even though she is not a student there anymore, nor is she an employee. What a self-satisfied hypocrite.
Harvard really pushes their super special alumni email addresses, presumably bc they realize that a certain brand of smug Harvard alums love the prestige. I think it just forwards to your regular email account, though. They’re not devoting server space to that.
I am not commenting on the rest of the article as I am not reading it, for my own blood pressure.
Like, I genuinely believe that anyone who desires an education should be able to get it, there’s a reason we (ideally) have educational programs in prisons, etc. But the right to an education is not the same as the right to be continually ensconced in a snooty private school bubble where nobody gets to judge you for your past mistakes.
YES! That one kid who thought his life was over because he might end up having to go to community college made me want to scream. Get an education if you want one, please, that’s great, but you do not deserve to live on a college campus.
Yeah, there’s a distinction between getting an education and getting the “college experience” of socializing, living away from parental supervision, etc. The latter is what got you in trouble; lucky for you, there’s an educational path that doesn’t have to include those elements.
EXACTLY. Fine, you shouldn’t be barred from getting an education from the rest of your life. But maybe you should lose the college experience with parties, drinking, and hooking up with drunk girls who don’t want to be there. THAT is not anyone’s right.
EXACTLY. Thank you.
I think that’s what really got me about the whole article. You’re taking money from rich people and enabling them to continue going about their lives without really having to face the consequences of their actions even a LITTLE TINY BIT. What is so horrible about having to go to community college, anyway?
I went to a big state school that had an automatic transfer program from all the state community colleges – certain GPA, you get into the 4 year university. Pretty much every transfer I talked to about their community college classes vs 4 year campus classes said that they had a better experience at the community college. More individualized attention from professors, smaller class sizes, students who actually give a shit. Community college is a wonderful thing, and anyone who RAPED someone could maybe learn a lot from being in an educational settings with students from a very wide range of backgrounds and life experience.
I spent a year at a community college and I saw some of the best-quality teaching of my college experience there. And yeah, it’s a lot harder to be a little shit who doesn’t try in class when the person who’s setting the curve on the test is like “I need to take the final early so that I can pick up my three kids from school and then work several consecutive night shifts.”
Yes- this. There are very few people in a Community College class who are just there for the “experience.” It was also the first and nearly only time I haven’t been the most driven student in my classes and everyone else also did the reading and homework.
My dad said his CC professors were almost always way better than his 4 year school profs, not in the least because you get more individual attention in the smaller classes at a CC.
YES. I had a better experience at the school I transferred into than the community colleges I attended, but my community college experiences spanned a range, and I had some seriously excellent teachers who taught me to love subjects I’d never imagined loving. And I believe it’s two of those teachers’ letters of recommendation that got me where I ended up. I liked talking to my fellow community college students, but I was never placed in a situation where I was around them on non-class time unless I explicitly chose to be there, and it wasn’t really a social scene.
I want people to get as much education as they want, even shitty people, but if you rape somebody, I think it’s fucking FINE if you lose the privilege of living among other people without much supervision. At this point, too, there are a number of reputable online options. I don’t think, by and large, online education is as good as attending classes in person, but I also think when you rape somebody, well, maybe you’re going to have to pick a less than ideal option.
It’s been my experience that rich people often don’t properly value a college education, because for them, it’s just an accepted next step rather than something life changing. Like, the life changing part is the unsupervised partying and boundary pushing. The education is the part you have to get through. When I think of who most needs a liberal arts education, I think first of the people who can’t get there because of various monetary and educational and medical roadblocks. I don’t think rich rapists should be KEPT from a college education, but they aren’t the people I’m going to weep for.
I think what’s horrible for them isn’t attending a community college (because let’s be real, these dudes probably aren’t getting the full value of their elite private universities anyway), but having a CC on their CV later. Going to, say, Duke opens doors with the people who care that you went to Duke rather than [local community college].
There are some really weird assumptions around college and college students. Not solely because of the students’ social class, definitely not because of their age, there’s something about college itself that make some people (honestly, college-educated people) believe that students neither have the ability nor the duty to act conscientiously, and also that students need and deserve extra protection.
There are so many young people who aren’t in college! Same age, but they’re expected to be adults. And I’m not only talking about the blue collar people either. If a 21 year old computer programmer or a 19 year old receptionist or a 24 year old self-taught graphic designer commits crimes, they get treated like they’ve committed crimes. A slap on the wrist might mean that they only pay damages or something, NOT that people hold speeches about how they really could benefit from a liberal arts education. 18-25 year old construction workers, home health aides, delivery drivers and waitresses will be laughed at and go straight to jail, do not pass Go, do not collect 200$.
16 year old high school dropouts? Tried as adults, prison forever (in the US). Also considered capable of being parents, bootstrapping out of poverty and getting over any trauma without therapy. If they fail or whine, just mock them for not trying hard enough, or decide that there’s something deeply wrong with them.
Story time! A person in my life has pretty bad ADHD and dropped out of high school. They worked and lived by themselves from the age of 18 or 19, but had a hard time staying afloat. But whenever they tried to get help, they were told that they should basically just give up. You see, they were often late, had problems with housing and employment (in the middle of a recession and a housing shortage), pretty disorganised, often ignorant about society’s many bureaucracies, couldn’t keep a sleep schedule, eat regular meals and keep up with housework (in short, they were an 18-22 year old young adult with untreated ADHD and no support system who were expected to basically be middle-aged). So, they were obviously completely unfit for society and should expect to never work actual jobs paying actual money again. Instead, they ought to go to a bunch of training programmes for the needy or something and survive on meager benefits way below subsistence levels, forever. Go back to high school? Doubtful, maybe later. College? Haha, no, never.
A year ago, they decided to ask for help. They had managed to get into a good college through sheer bootstrapping, despite being pretty much rejected by society and advised to never try (apparently, their life suddenly got easier when they were allowed to treat their ADHD with medication and lucked into stable housing), but the old problems were still there. They described exactly the same things as before – can’t keep a schedule, can’t keep up with housework, can’t sleep at night or get up in the morning, can’t be on time, etc. What did the doctor say? “Sounds like a typical college student!” They still haven’t been able to get real help, because everyone just thinks that this is what college students are like. Before college, they had been threatened with being INSTITUTIONALISED for these things, but now it’s suddenly normal! They manage to stay in school, though, because so far they’ve been met with understanding and second chances when they’ve explained their situation (which also didn’t happen before college – no second chances there). As a college student of 25 (with access to resources, student services, student housing, advice, computers), they’re expected to show only a FRACTION of the responsibility they were supposed to handle as a working-class 21 year old with no safety net. College magic!
Who needs a liberal arts education more than that person? A lot of people. Does she really want a list?
Is there an actual like legal requirement that the surname must be inherited somehow because that whole thing seems like such a wasted opportunity to raise Gilgamesh Skull Emperor Eternal or Medea Laserhawk-Anvilsplitter
Depends on the country, but in the US you absolutely could do this though the social pressure is pretty strong.
This a good opportunity to report that I once worked with a woman who seemed completely unremarkable to me until I learned her daughter’s name was Princess Amidala.
I overheard a wonderful conversation at the bar the other day: “Oh, yeah, you can legally change your name easily. Say you wanted your last name to be…Azerbaijan. And your first name to be….Logan. You go down to the Daley Center Monday morning, you’re Logan Azerbaijan.”
I just…man, what makes THAT the first name that pops into your head? I love it.
Logan Azerbaijan and his rival across the Caspian Sea, Jess Turkmenistan. #ideasfortwins
“Caspian Sea” would also be a great name, actually!
GLORIANA FURIOSA
*_*
But how will you set yourself apart from all the other Gloriana Furiosas? (I assume there will be many, because it is the perfect name.)
I had a long chat with my mother last night about names that essentially boiled down to; yes you can name your child anything, but it is your responsibility to give them a name that they can carry through life. I tend to think, don’t name the baby, name the adult that they are going to become.
This discussion was of course sparked by the names of some children in the family, one of which is a nickname only, the other is made up. They’re both lovely names for two cute little babies, but those kids are going to have to go to college and get careers with those names, and I feel for them already. One of them in particular is going to spend her entire life correcting people about her name (the mum just removed the O from a very popular name…).
So yeah go for it with the names, but just remember that little Jisanthapus Mcdoiley Darth Laser King is going to have to put that on a college application one day.
that name is a whole college ESSAY right there.
I don’t know, if I were an admissions officer, that is exactly the kind of application I’d want to look at.
I get you. But I grew up with an unusual name, and its also the name of a Simpsons character. You can imagine the fun I had in school. And not so much for college, but for jobs, like can you imagine if that kid wanted to be a Doctor or a lawyer?
‘Hi, I’m Dr Darth Laser King, I’ll be performing your child operation today!’ There’s a fine line between being unique, interesting and memorable, and being so ridiculous that no one can take you seriously.
At least if you’re going to give your kid a ‘unique’ name, give them a relatively normal middle name so that they have a choice if they want it (My middle name is Louise and I went by that for a few years because I hated my name and the reaction it always got)
Hell even David Bowie’s son changed his name from Zowie to Brian (or something like that)
Man, I guess that’s true, but it just seems to me that it means that people are boring.
It’s an unfortunate fact of the world. There are most definitely things in life that are worth going against the crowd for, no matter how hard it is. But sometimes it’s easier to go with it (grew up with the go against the crowd at all costs, maybe I’ve just made an extreme correction against that)
But yeah, naming kids is hard and a big deal, I think it all works out OK so long as you’re thinking about the child and the person that they’re going to become (and not say, about a fandom that YOU really love. There’s going to be more than a few Katniss’s our there hating their parents in a few years)
Sometimes, though, I’m not sure about that. I think by the time those kids are 20, there’s going to be so many Katnisses that people aren’t even going to think that it’s weird.
That happened here! I was surprised to learn that a completely normal name was invented by a poplar children’s author in the 70’s. The name sounds historical, plausible and also pretty cool. It just fits so well into the language that most people don’t know that the author didn’t just popularise an old name but straight up invented it.
Buuut “Katniss” doesn’t look very plausible to me. Needs to either look older or newer, I think. Catnis? Sure. Catneece? Yeah, okay. Katnise? Wouldn’t question it, looks old and English. But the K combined with the two S’s doesn’t look very English to me, but also not like the usual loanwords. I know it’s the real name for a plant, I just still don’t believe it :p
I was once operated on by Batwoman, and the anaesthetic made me giggle loopily about that for hours.
I’ve worked in the medical field for some time now, and it always gives me a little thrill when I meet doctors whose last names make them sound like superheroes, such as Doctor Justice and Doctor Stoneking.
A friend of mine is very excited about introducing herself as Dr. Payne after she completes her degree.
PERFECT
I knew a Mark Doom in college but the jerk wussed out into business school
What an asshole.
I know a Dr Mort, whose dad was an undertaker!
…Your first names are Selma and Louise?
Yep. And it took me and embarrassingly long time to get the joke. When I eventually asked my mother about it she said she’d just hoped I wouldn’t notice.
Hell even David Bowie’s son changed his name from Zowie to Brian (or something like that)
*appears in a puff of glitter* You must be talking about the director Duncan Jones, aka Duncan Zowie Haywood Jones, fka Zowie Bowie, fka Joey Bowie.
I feel like lately I’ve seen a lot of cutesy nicknames as first names, like kids named Lulu or Ellie or something. Which are both fine things to call someone, but why not give them the full name officially and call them by the nickname? That way they have a choice if they don’t want to be “cute” for life.
Throw a Rockefeller on the end and I’ll bet you it more than balances out
When we got married, we had the option to change both of our names to basically ANYTHING.
We both kept the names we’d had all our lives, but neither of us is particularly attached to our middle names. I really wish we’d run with the opportunity to take a shared badass middle name.
“God forbid, if one of my clients committed rape, who needs a liberal arts education more than that person?”
I don’t disagree with a word of that, but she might also ask herself another question: ‘god forbid’, if a woman is 18 to 22, living away from home for the first time in a country and a culture where women’s rights are not altogether secured and only recently and partially ensconced in law, in a physical environment conducive to isolation and assault, in an administrative and legal structure that will be hostile to her needs, should needs arise, who needs a campus free from likely rapists more than that person?
(tl; dr: the problem with higher education and with the world at large is not that we don’t spend enough time trying to give rapists what they need.)
But all sorts of producers—not just Jews—are behind insensitive movie portrayals of Muslims … There’s John Musker, director of 1992’s Aladdin, in which all the “good Arabs” have American accents and all the “bad Arabs” have pseudo-Middle Eastern accents.
holy shit how did I never ever realize this?? thaaaaaaaaat’s terrible :/ I haven’t seen Aladdin in many years but I definitely watched it semi-regularly until the end of college, and it just never stood out to me. What a way to be confronted with my own privilege.
Right? I used to LOVE that movie when I was a kid, and I still have so many fond memories associated with it, but godDAMN is it racist as hell. Ugh.
WOW, thank you for quoting that. That’s fascinating and awful. And I thought it was positive that they had the sultan casually drop “Praise Allah!”
This just isn’t true, though. Jafar, the main baddie, has some sort of ultra-smooth vaguely British accent, while Robin Williams’cheerful merchant character at the beginning of the film has a thick Mideast accent. As I recall, most of the one-line characters from the bazaar, good and bad, have Mideastern accents. So it may be more accurate to say that the “important Arabs” have Western accents while the “background Arabs” have Mideastern accents. Which is… not great, but is probably better than the strictly “good/bad” dichotomy.
Of course Jafar’s primary minion, Iago, has a Gilbert Gottfried accent, which transcends all national and ethnic boundaries. Then again, he’s a parrot, so he probably doesn’t count.
Another thing about Jafar (discussed in Do I Sound Gay, incidentally) is that the character, along with Bagheera and Scar, are all descendants of the vaguely-queer upper-crust threatening character that was first really shown in 1944’s Laura with Vincent Price’s character, and that’s mostly done through body language and vocal patterns.
Dang, now that you point it out, Jafar is Vincent Price, isn’t he? He’s just some voice actor doing a reasonably effective Vincent Price impression. I was trying to decipher just exactly what shade of accent Jafar has, whether it’s strictly British or some elite Mid-Atlantic variant, but couldn’t get past “vocal equivalent of an opera cloak.” Which… is Vincent Price.
You know, now that I think about it, it makes sense that the voice actor for Jafar would do a Vincent Price impression–I’ve heard that a lot of the creative team for The Princess and the Cobbler went on to become a part of Aladdin’s development, and guess who voiced Zig Zag, the evil advisor to the Sultan in that film? Vincent Price! Even if the voice actor hadn’t heard of P & C, the director could have encouraged him to do something similar. …Additional googling suggests that ZigZag and Jafar look not unlike Vincent Price as well, so…make of that what you will?
See also: Irons, Jeremy; Voice roles of.
I agree with this, but it has also been pointed out many times that the “good” characters are also drawn as typical Good-Looking White Disney People and the bad guys are drawn with much more varied/non-Western facial features.
Oh my god. I never noticed. O.O
There’s also the issue with the opening song, which originally had the lines where they cut of your nose/if they don’t like your face/it’s barbaric, but hey, it’s home!.
Also, Jafar’s dark and goateed, whereas Aladdin looks like Tom Cruise with a tan.
I know we talked about vocal fry all over the place the other day, but I forgot to mention: Chelsea Peretti’s vocal fry is a key part of her masterful comedic portrayal of Gina on Brooklyn Nine Nine (aka A Bunch Of Great Comedians Plus Andy Samberg).
I watched a bunch of Silicon Valley yesterday after seeing all the gifs in the link roundup and, holy moley, the attorney (young, hip attorney, forgot his name) has seeeeeerious vocal fry, which is also a key part of his portrayal of that character. It’s definitely there for the character because the actor didn’t have vocal fry when he portrayed Michael Ginsberg on Mad Men.
Can I make a (hopefully) small request? My internet at work blocks Twitter/FB/social media/personal email accounts, so any time a twitter link or photo is posted, I’m unable to see it. I would have to go onto my phone and take my phone off the company wi-fi in order to view the link.
Would it be possible to screenshot or direct-link Tweets? I’m in the finance industry, which is heavily regulated for what are probably obvious reasons, and I’m probably not the only one in a similar boat. I would be so so so so grateful, especially to be able to read things like links/discussions about last names, which is something I feel pretty passionate about.
Sorry! Embedding Tweets is really best for us, screenshotting is frowned on by Twitter users and direct-linking means you don’t get the visual on the site, which I like to have in roundups, so I think you will just have to look at the one or two a day of these at home.
That’s totally understandable! Thanks for replying so quickly 🙂
And here I assumed everyone used the embedding because it’s more fancy! Why don’t they want people to use screenshots?
Because then you can’t click and get the user who actually made the tweet, or RT it, so it’s making it harder for them to get credit for their work.
When my mom and her brother were young, my grandmother remarried to a man who happened to have the same name for his last name as my uncle has for his first name. As in, my uncle is “John Doe,” and my grandpa is “George John.” It was quite clear to all involved that the kids did not need his last name.
I am from the area where the tiny house was discovered in the woods and may I say, that is just… SO Arcata. Oh my heart.
A dying patriarchy says “bleat.”
A dying matriarchy says “moo.”
A dying monarchy says “neigh.”
A dying democracy says “cluck cluck.”
A dying anarchy says “quack.”
A dying oligarchy says “wee, wee, wee,” all the way home.
when dealing with the patriarchy, it’s best to grab the goat by the horns, I guess.
I will giggle to myself all day over this.
A+, would so buy a hacked version of the Farmer Says toy with these noises instead.
Man, I saw this and my brain immediately went to “That is not my daddy. That is Foul Ole Ron. Foul Ole Ron says ‘Buggrit, millenium hand and foot.'” Pratchett is in my braaaaaain.
And the cat says fiddle-aye-fee.
*wild applause*
Okay, here’s terrifying: Woman gets hysterectomy and discovers her teeth are missing.
And here’s rage-ifying: “You propose a museum celebrating the achievements of women and then it turns out to be a museum celebrating London’s most notorious murderer of women.”
“The man behind the [museum] is Mark Palmer-Edgecumbe, a former diversity chief at Google.”
The Troll Museum is going to be one of the cultural cornerstones of the 21st century mark my words
This is probably the place to say I HATE BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN SO MUCH I HATE IT I HATE IT I HATE IT I HATE IT IHATEITIHATEIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIT.
We watched it for my Queer Cinema class in university, and I thought then what I think now: that it’s a tragic melodrama written by and for straight people trying to shine a light on The Unbearable Queerness Of Being without ever allowing the gay/bi characters the room or agency to develop beyond caricatures of the closet. I get that it was significant when it came out, because mainstream Hollywood movies with gay leads are so rare, but I also think it typifies the Hollywood approach to gay people: everyone is white, traditional gender roles abound (oh, but they’re sad about it, so it’s okay!) and the gay men are objects of pity rather than personal identification. Filmmakers like Derek Jarman and Kenneth Anger were doing better than this in the 1970s, for goodness’ sake.
Huh, I’m queer and I enjoyed it, but I waited several years before watching and sold copies of the tiny paperback extracted from Close Range to lots of men with actual tears in their eyes because they were so grateful to feel seen by it. And I also approach movies like a dog being thrown a ball, so the deeper analysis is usually lost on me.
I totally get the frustration about a straight person writing a gay tragedy, and I would probably feel exactly the same way about this movie if I hadn’t met so many closeted men who really identified with it. Coming from the province where it was shot, I remember that the idea of two manly gay cowboys was incredibly subversive when it came out.
Agreed on the whiteness issue, though I find Brokeback Mountain a hell of a lot more forgivable than Queer as Folk, which didn’t even have a token man of colour in a much bigger cast.
A big part of the problem- a big part- is while movies by and for gay people have been getting made since the sixties, they don’t often get the big advertising push that Brokeback Mountain did. There was no Oscar campaign for The Incredibly True Adventures of Two Girls In Love or Pariah the way there was for Brokeback Mountain or Dallas Buyers Club. Hollywood releases “gay” movies, but the ones they push forward (as opposed to quietly sliding them out on DVD without any fanfare) are the ones that tell a perscribed story that they know won’t push straight audiences too far. Movies that don’t do that get ignored, and gay audiences have to dig to find them.
I actually read an interview awhile back with Annie Proloux, who scoffed at the people who write fanfic where Jack lives, or where Ennis finds a new boyfriend: “That’s not why I wrote it! I was trying to send a message!” Which, to me, exemplifies the whole problem with straight-led gay stories. I’m glad Proloux feels she has something important to say about gay liberation, but the people writing fanfic have different priorities. They want happy endings.
This is all true, but I think Brokeback’s mainstream-ness is what was so important about it: it was very uncommon for a movie intended for a mainstream audience to have a gay sex scene in it, for one thing. It broke down a lot of barriers. And for all that ten years doesn’t seem like that long ago, things have changed a lot since then. Most subversive texts/films don’t seem all that radical many years down the line; To Kill a Mockingbird isn’t, for example. Neither is Brokeback Mountain, viewed through that lens. But I don’t think that means we ought to throw them out entirely.
Now, the fact that gay characters only seem to make it to the screen if they’re tragic STILL is a big problem. I wouldn’t be as forgiving regarding something recent. But I remember the film industry before and after BM and I do think there is a difference.
And like PierrePoutine, I am from the province it was filmed in. It was a pretty big deal here, particularly since Alberta tends to be very conservative.
I wish to share here that when I first heard of it I thought it was “The Incredibly True Adventures of Turtles in Love” which I still kind of want to see.
Ugh, Annie Proulx, that was a jerk thing to say. No one is forcing you to read fanfic so just stay away from it. And why shouldn’t people take comfort in unrealistic happy endings?
I think Brokeback Mountain is 1000 times less sketchy than DBC. DBC was made 10 years after, at a time when plenty had been written on the perils of casting cis actors in trans roles, it still needed a straight hero, and the actors were far more obnoxious than Ledger and Gyllenhaal. I also find it quite heartening to learn that Ledger didn’t like hearing people mock the ‘quit you’ line.
So much of my perception of these films has to do with time and context. BM pushed a lot of boundaries in 2005 but I’d probably be less forgiving if it came out today. When I see the trailer for ‘Jenny’s Wedding’ I find it ridiculously conservative for 2015, while in 2001 Kissing Jessica Stein seemed very progressive to me even though she ends up with a dude.
I’m still stuck on the Buzzfeed article. This is the part I’m stuck on:
Stotland said she’s gotten pushback from people who can’t imagine advising students accused of sexual assault. “They’re like, ‘So then you’ll put them on another campus to rape again?’” she said. “I’m like, ‘As opposed to them dying?’”
I don’t understand this– why would they die? Are people dying of not going back to fancy colleges? Is this a national epidemic I am unaware of?
omg agreed, this makes literally no sense. are those the options? I think maybe the idea is that if they are a danger to society, that’s true on a college campus or off, but still, WHAT
“God forbid, if one of my clients committed rape, who needs a liberal arts education more than that person?”
THEIR VICTIMS MAYBE? WHICH IS NOW MORE LIKELY TO BE HARDER FOR THEM TO ACHIEVE BECAUSE FUCKING PTSD AND EVERYTHING ELSE CAN MAKE IT EXPONENTIALLY HARDER TO COMPLETE TERTIARY EDUCATION IN A FUCKING HOSTILE ENVIRONMENT WHICH GOES "poor baby rapists, they deserve to have not have their lives ruined by going to jail", ASSHOLE.
Don't mind me, I got ambushed by a rapist's graduation pictures today. I haven't even read the article, I can't.
The prison system violates human rights to an extent where I also tend to think rapists should be educated rather than going to jail. But educated means extensive sexual assault counseling, community service, etc. Instead, they’re being educated on how to tell the stories of when they raped someone so that it somehow wasn’t rape. They’re literally being handed a script of how to lie to themselves to avoid taking accountability for their crime.
Exclusion from the privilege of “the college experience” is absolutely an appropriate part of reparations for the crime of raping someone at that college. Exclusion from elite college environments is absolutely, 100% appropriate to that crime. A “liberal arts education” encourages and supports privilege in already privileged dudes and I fail to see how a BA in economics or whatever is what a rapist needs more than anyone.
Also, I’m skeptical of this whole “hey, rapists will be rapists, college campuses are no different than McDonald’s!” In my experience, at least a small liberal arts colleges, there’s an unearned sense of comfort between undergraduates. Maybe you don’t know this dude too well, but somebody’s friend’s roommate does, so he’s not going to rape you, right? Obviously that’s not how it turns out a lot of the time, but I’m just saying that a college campus environment is often one in which students will more readily make themselves more vulnerable to another student. Having horrifically violated that sense of community trust is one more reason why people who rape someone in college should not be supported into getting back into a similar community.