I have been sitting here for a week trying to figure out how best to explain the American clusterfuck to people overseas. It's not easy. There's a lot of context. It's the kind of thing that doesn't make any sense unless you're in it at the time. The hard fact is, people here are dying. Not of anything so easily romanticized as bombs on barricades, but of things that no citizen of any industrialized nation has any business dying of in 2016: Diabetes, anaphylactic allergies, asthma attacks, endocarditis pursuant to chronic dental abscess, stress-induced suicides, malnutrition . There is a huge economic underclass here who used to work making things , like in factories. They were, to some extent, indispensable; you have to have actual humans with actual hands to put together cars and televisions and shoes, and you always need a certain number of hands to fill your orders. But everything is now made overseas, where it's cheaper, and the "working class" ...
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A couple of my friends were discussing Election Day worries last night. Specifically, about the prospect of "poll watchers" hanging around and being douchey. Firstly, yearrrghghgh I do not have enough drugs to deal with this , but secondly, it made me think about demographics. Dorchester is, as I may have mentioned, heavily not-white. Historically, this has been a very working-class neighborhood -- around the turn of the 20th century, there were a mix of family homes and rooming houses for Irish immigrant workers where we are now -- and this seems to have held true even as the definition of "working class" has precessed from "daily toil in the factory" to "daily toil in a boring pointless office job". I see an international panoply of clothing all the time in my various neighborhood wanderings. One night on my walk home from the T, I passed a guy in a dashiki, a lady in hijaab, and a Buddhist monk in traditional beads and kesa using his bank ca...
I was asked a while ago to read through a book by Catherine Hakim, called Erotic Capital: The Power In The Boardroom And The Bedroom . The library finally coughed it up, so I did. tl;dr: Hakim's thesis is interesting and absolutely deserves an entire book of analysis. She didn't bother to write one. The book is bullshit and you will just throw it at the wall. The review inquiry came to me from one of my readers, on the grounds that I've worked in an industry where attractiveness, specifically conformist femininity, is an asset. So you are all absolutely clear where I am coming from, this is me (NSFW, if your work is hostile to cleavage):
I gave up and spent most of yesterday curled up in bed. I hurt a lot less physically; for some reason, a metric fuckton of dextromethorphan to the brain seems to reboot a lot of things, often including angry nerves. I've no idea why. It's not even an analgesic; I use it for pain control when I've run out of other options because it's a dissociative, and if you're not in radio contact with your body parts, it's really hard for them to bother you. [It's an NMDA receptor antagonist, if you're curious. A friend of mine who's taken recreational doses of DXM and has had nitrous oxide for dental surgery says they feel more or less the same. This also inadvertently creeped out the dentist. She'd done the first quite a few times before the second, and was sufficiently used to handling herself in that state that she was able to chatter and ask questions whenever he took his hands out of her mouth. Most people do not ask for their loose teeth back, and th...
Ah, here come the think-pieces about Orlando. I keep writing and re-writing this and deleting a rant about them, uncertain whether I'm "allowed" to have feelings on the topic. The fact that I even have to ask myself, "Am I allowed to have an opinion?" rather than, "Is my opinion informed and at least kind of reasonable?" is one of the biggest problems I have with the practice of identity politics, so fuck it. Here it is. Some lady -- I think it's a lady; everyone is using feminine pronouns -- apparently wrote a thing declaring that cis het white people are not allowed to comment on anything that happened in Orlando. How dare you offer condolences now when you are so silent the rest of the time, usw. I expect in a week or two someone else will write one decrying a lack of supportive commentary from the mainstream, oblivious to the flaw in their logic. If no one is allowed to comment unless they've been commenting all along, but they're n...
One of the things I always liked about David Bowie was that he was the first major pop star to come out in print, and he still managed to stonewall and tap-dance his way out of identity politics for forty-five fucking years . For those who were not around at the time -- I wasn't -- and are less obsessive than I am about tracking down old industry rags, the article that started the whole uproar ran in January 1972, in a magazine called Melody Maker . Originally a wholesome look at the socially-acceptable pop music of the day, in the late '60s it took a turn for the grown-up. Relatively speaking, anyway. It was fanwank, but slightly older fanwank than you'd expect from Tiger Beat . (Or whatever they publish that in now. Last time I knew was back in high school; my sister subscribed to a couple of them.) It didn't aspire to serious reporting like Rolling Stone , or to being culture critics like NME today; it was just aimed away from teenyboppers and more at readers in...
Maybe I'm just having an incredibly cranky-making week, but I am starting to get ticked at the slew of articles with headlines that talk about 'the problem with Stephen Colbert'. I keep reading them, and inevitably it turns out that the problem the author is having is actually with CBS -- they are pissed that the network didn't hire a woman. Getting women into positions of prominence in comedy may well be a problem, but it has nothing to do with Colbert per se . They would have that problem with literally anyone in the role who did not fit their favorite list of criteria. This is what I'm talking about with 'the perfect is the enemy of the good'. They think CBS's choice of host is unacceptable because he's not a she, even though Colbert arguably ticks most if not all of the other boxes they care about. I'm not kidding here. I'm not defending the guy just because, 'hey, dude makes me laugh, he can do no wrong'. I decided I liked him ...
I don't usually bother getting annoyed at the phrasing of things in news articles. Entertainment news is especially addlepated and mired in sexist dreck. I mainly register my protest by not applying my eyeballs to it, which denies them some tiny portion of the attention and ad revenue they need to live. People have noticed that I am trying to distract myself by watching smart humans fuck around in front of a camera, however, and keep sending me links to things about Jon Stewart's final episode of The Daily Show . All of the US articles I've seen, and almost all of the Commonwealth ones, describe his reaction to Colbert's final thanks as "emotional". This is technically accurate, but suspiciously tactful from an industry based on publishing paparazzi photos of reality stars who are coked out of their minds, and police blotter items they dug up by seeing whose name Google can link to both "DUI" and "SAG". Seriously. Dude's crying. Pre...
The last time we met, the doctor told me she thought "we" needed to get me some "new coping methods". This is usually the part where I figure out how to change doctors, or just quit making appointments, because this is usually where they start giving me sales pitches on the wonders of CBT and stop reading things I hand them. I try not to be overly paranoid, but I got just about thirty years of "stop whining, you don't need medication, you just need to stop having the wrong feelings" and that makes a mark. I'm willing to give this one the benefit of the doubt, because she is an Energetic Young Thing who doesn't know me all that well yet, and also because she's not the therapist person. Frankly, I can ignore just about anything she says as long as she doesn't start pestering me to take something that won't end well, or threaten to stop letting me have something unless I toe the party line. The therapist person has made no such noise...
Man, internet, why you gotta be like this? The people responsible for Rebecca Black and "Friday" are inexplicably still in business. They did it again to someone named Jenna Rose, except worse. I refuse to link to the real video, on the grounds that hits would just encourage them, but here's someone's critique of the song " OMG ", which is... pretty omg, honestly. If you don't want to watch it, the gist is that someone has taken a 12-year-old girl and tried to get her to vamp for the camera. She's not very good at it -- which is, in its own way, reassuring -- but the fact that someone actually thought this was a good idea alone strikes me as pretty squicky. The person doing the critique also got sick of the song, which has about seven words total, and replaced the track with some death metal after they ran out of synonyms for EWWWW. First things first: Divorced from context, there is nothing actually wrong with this song. It's stupid, but t...
Yesterday I found a blog called " Does Every Woman Have An Eating Disorder? " This... disturbs me. Greatly. I know I've written before about how I can't relate to a lot of girl-pop (and even young feminist!) literature, because basically all of it is predicated on the assumption that every woman hates her body. They mean well, but that's about all you can say for them. A lot of the pop stuff gives diet and exercise advice, which is generally stupid and not helpful, but at least not intentionally malicious; most of the feminist stuff preaches size/body acceptance, which is better but often has problems remaining all-inclusive rather than slipping into 'real women have curves' (so boyishly-built women and transladies who haven't had surgery or horomones aren't 'real'?) territory. It all presumes that the default state for woman is thinking that her corpus is a hideous blob, courtesy the evil bloodthirsty media, and that everyone is struggl...
Discussions of physical attractiveness are often fraught. Often, it trolls itself rapidly down into a shouting match between people who see themselves as the "haves" and the people who see themselves as the "have-nots". It doesn't always break down according to who the average observer would consider attractive. "Anecdote" is not the singular of "data", but it's been my experience that overwhelmingly, the people who would disagree with a disinterested third-party over which group they were in are the ones who are generally considered attractive but don't believe so. Eventually, someone will get frustrated with all the talk of what should be and shout, "Yeah, but all other things being equal, wouldn't you rather be pretty?" It's the Godwin's Law of the topic. What do you call that, anyway? Wolf's Law? There are two ways you can take that question. One of them is a near-instant way to trip everyone's t...
Jenny Trout just tweeted a link to this article , which is a short rant about how dudes telling dudettes "I like natural beauty, don't wear any makeup!" is just as annoying as "How about putting on some makeup, you'd look nice!" Which in fact it is. I've gotten both from time to time. I don't wear any makeup, most days. I would love to tell you it's because caking on foundation every day is bad for your pores blah blah compulsive cosmetic alteration is a sign of body dysmorphia blah blah blah EVIL PATRIARCHY blah blah yakkity-schmakkity, but the actual reason is that I'm a devoutly lazy fucker. Every minute I spend spackling my face is one more minute I'm not lying in my warm, comfortable bed, fantasizing about being a combination best-selling author and internationally-famous rock star and listening to three rodents who have never been truly hungry for a single second in their tiny little rat lives try to tell me that they are WASTING ...
The rare female creeper!
When creepiness is discussed here in the mud wrestling grudge match that is the internet, sooner or later someone always whines that it's always men accused of being scary creeps, and that's sexist. Although, culturally, the behaviors that are characteristic of creepiness are associated mostly with men and social notions of masculinity, it's entirely possible for women to get into the act, and occasionally one does. One of the recent episodes of Never Mind The Buzzcocks featured as a panelist an Italian woman inexplicably named Nancy. I don't have any idea who she is or why exactly she's there, but I gather that her two main claims to fame are dancing on some competition show and sleeping around. Not that both of these aren't perfectly good hobbies -- it just happens that I don't follow the kind of TV programs that feature either of them, and so am not familiar with her work. She wound up on Fielding's side of the stage, along with some kid who is ev...
Captain Awkward recently linked again to the infamous discussion on creepiness that basically the entire internet read back in August. Her answer is awesome and anyone who hasn't seen it ought to; the discussion section below, however, is somewhat uneven. The good Captain evidently had to send a lot of comments to the spam pile, because they were from idiots or rageaholics or mansplainers who couldn't spell to save their lives, and a lot of what did get through is fogged with a great deal of pop-psych and social justice vocabulary. It's well-meaning, but there are parts that could have used a lot less technical philosophy and a lot more swearing in majuscules, in my own humble opinion. One of the things that wasn't covered terribly well, probably because it would have been taken as encouragement by the crowds in the spam pile, was how and why a lot of women are reduced to just saying, "because," when the creepy fuckers try to manipulate their victims by aski...