“Across California and the nation, educators say the Supreme Court decision legalizing same-sex marriage stands to improve, over time, the way gay and lesbian people are talked about at schools, both in the hallways and in the curriculum.
“I think we’ve crossed a threshold toward acceptance and welcome,” said Todd Savage, president of the National Association of School Psychologists.
“The ruling is going to make it that much easier for adults in schools to feel OK in talking about LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer) topics and families,” said Johanna Eager, director of the Welcoming Schools project of the Human Rights Campaign Foundation, which provides diversity training to school staff, including those in Oakland and Berkeley. “It gives a legitimacy to having these conversations.”
As the Senate convened on Monday to vote on a bill seeking to defund Planned Parenthood, Sen. Elizabeth Warren took the floor to issue a fierce defense of the health organization.
“Do you have any idea what year it is?” Warren asked. “Did you fall down, hit your head, and think you woke up in the 1950’s or the 1890’s? Should we call for a doctor? Because I simply cannot believe that in the year 2015, the United States Senate would be spending its time trying to defund women’s health care centers. You know, on second thought, maybe I shouldn’t be that surprised. The Republicans have had a plan for years to strip away women’s rights to make choices over our own bodies. Just look at the recent facts.”
The Massachusetts senator continued her impassioned speech and listed examples of Republican-lead efforts to gut health care services to women over the years, including the recent budget proposal that includes a measure to remove federal funding for family planning providers.
The most recent call to gut federal spending on Planned Parenthood was sparked by several videos secretly recorded by a sting mission that appeared to capture top officials from the organization discussing the sale of fetal tissues. Following the public release of the videos, Planned Parenthood was hit by two cyber-attacks—one aimed at its website and another claiming to have hacked into the organization’s databases and employee information.
The group, which now receives $528 million in federal funding (or 41 percent of its annual budget), also provides contraception to almost 40 percent of women who rely on public programs for family planning.
The videos have already moved Congress to launch two probes into the organization’s activities. Eight Republican governors—including several who are running for president—have opened parallel investigations. Many Republican senators—including several who are running for president—have vowed to strip Planned Parenthood of its hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funding.
While its opponents tried to brand Planned Parenthood as an abortion mill, the group has stressed that abortions make up only 3 percent of its services, and STI screenings, Pap tests, and pregnancy prevention comprise the vast majority of its activities.
1. Man dates woman who makes a game about depression
2. Man and woman break up after a few months. She cheats on him maybe
3. Manbaby gets on irc and orchestrates super fucking elaborate ass ridiculous fucking scheme to get back at her in which he alleges that she slept with men in order to receive positive reviews for games in spite of the fact that the guy she allegedly slept with never even reviewed her game
4. Pathetic ass manbaby goes further and further with it, orchestrating a “#notyourshield” scheme for people posing as female gamers (and eventually some real female gamers that fall for the hoax) to use. Like the fucking planning that went into this shit is ridiculous. Read the fucking irc logs. Dude is fucking pathetic
5. At some point Adam Baldwin disappoints countless Browncoats by reminding the world that he believes everything Fox News says and he starts tweeting about the shit until it blows up and others start to tweet about it
6. Assholes and anti-feminists run with it, acting like it’s about ethics in game journalism EVEN THOUGH they have no problem with sites that sell positive reviews for money and seem to agree across the board that game journalism sites shouldn’t do anything to piss off their advertisers (so basically these dudes don’t give a fuck about ethics in game journalism they just give a fuck about the fact that a woman may choose to fuck someone that isn’t them)
7. Backlash against #gamergate comes up, and yet SOMEHOW women are the only ones getting threats of violence for speaking up. A former Minnesota Vikings player curses out gamer gaters viscously and is left completely alone, but Felicia Day says she’s wary since gamer gate happened and they doxx the shit out of her and send her threats of violence hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm
8. The pathetic manbaby that started all of this says he doesn’t regret doing it in spite of the violent threats women have received and the ones who have had to leave their homes and cancel a speech at a college because some shit threatened a mass shooting just because she was talking.
9. After all of this, after the hoax is exposed and women are the exclusive targets of the worst threats of violence, we’re supposed to believe it’s about ethics in journalism and not blatant fucking misogyny yeah okay
I saw “Trainwreck” last night. The 7:00 p.m. showing at the 68th Street AMC was full. Maybe people had come just to get out of the apartment and yet avoid the beastly heat, but they enjoyed the movie. Sometimes the laughter lasted long enough to cover up the next joke.
The “Trainwreck” story is standard rom-com: Amy Schumer plays a young woman who rejects the idea of commitment and love. Circumstances put her together with a man she seems to have nothing in common with. You can guess the rest.
But this is Amy Schumer’s movie, so there’s an important twist – the conventional sex roles are reversed. It’s the man who is sweet and naive and who wants a real relationship; the woman has a lot of sex with a lot of different guys, drinks a lot, smokes weed, and resists love until at the end, she decides to become the woman he wants her to be.
Here is the R-rated version of the trailer:
What interested me was not the movie itself, but the reaction in some conservative quarters. For Armond White at the National Review, the movie triggered something like what Jonathan Haidt calls “disgust” – a reaction to the violation of strong taboos that surround things like food, sex, blood and other bodily matters, and death. These taboos are often arbitrary, not rational. Pork is an “abomination,” for example, because… well, because it is, and because pigs are “unclean.”
“Trainwreck” has no pork, but it does have what some find unclean.
Schumer’s tampon jokes and gay jokes, female versions of locker-room humor, literally drag pop culture to the toilet. A girl-talk scene set in adjoining restroom stalls — one revealing dropped panties, the other panty-less (obviously Amy) — is just Apatow using women to show off his indecency.
As a comedian and now as a filmmaker, Schumer talks about women-things: body functions and body parts. These jokes seem to elicit two different kinds of laughter. Back when researchers studying small group interaction were trying to code and categorize behavior, laughter posed a problem (see this earlier post). It could be coded as “Shows Tension,” but it might also be “Shows Tension Release.”
With Amy Schumer jokes, the male laughter is mostly a nervous, full of tension about a taboo subject. But the female laughter seems much less inhibited – tension release, maybe even a relief, as if to say, “Someone is finally talking publicly and frankly about things we could only whisper about,” since most of the time they have had to pretend to share the male taboo.
Indecency indeed. But something is indecent only to members of groups that deem it indecent. Some groups are not at all disgusted by pork. And for some audiences, tampon jokes and toilet-stall conversations about Johnny Depp movies are not indecent; they’re just funny. What audiences might those be? Women.
Take the tampon joke that the National Reviewer finds indecent. It would seem obvious that used tampons look different depending on where you are in your period – less bloody on the final day, more so a few days earlier. But at the mere mention of this fact in “Trainwreck,” hilarity ensues, especially among women in the audience.
The thing about taboos – ideas about what is indecent or disgusting – is that entire social structures get built around them. To violate the taboo is to threaten the entire edifice. Powerful taboos on women-things often go with male domination. So for the National Review, the “Trainwreck”reversal of rom-com gender roles makes the movie dangerous and subversive.
Here are some excerpts from the review just to give the flavor of this Purity-and-Danger-like conflating of taboo, female sexuality, and social/political threat to the established order (emphasis mine):
Schumer turns female sexual prerogative into shamelessness
the degradation of sex — and women
uses sex to promote feminist permissiveness.
She enjoys a sexual license
Amy brazenly practices the same sexual habits as men
Lacking . . . old-fashioned sense of shame,
It’s merely brazen, like Lena Dunham’s HBO series, Girls (also about a promiscuous female writer
Schumer’s film can be seen to distort human relations into smut.
This is not just disrespectful, it confirms Schumer’s project of cultural takeover,
she aims to acquire cultural power
Schumer disguises a noxious cultural agenda as personal fiat. She’s a comedy demagogue who okays modern misbehavior yet blatantly revels in PC notions about feminism, abortion, and other hot-button topics
Wow.
I should add that not all conservative publications felt so threatened. Joe Morganstern at the Wall Street Journal gave the movie a warm review. Breitbart saw the movie’s essential conservatism (“The anti-slut message is a healthy one”) and praised Schumer as a comic actor. Still, the National Review piece seems emblematic of something broader in the cultural conservative camp: a taboo-like reaction to female sexuality.
Producers, sellers, and consumers waste tons of food. John Oliver discusses the shocking amount of food we don’t eat. Connect with Last Week Tonight online.....
This is just the most recent of countless similar messages I have received because of my Wonder Woman costumes. I am so tired of white, white passing, and anti-Black people from any and all ethnic backgrounds and nationalities looking at me in my costume and telling me ‘You don’t deserve to wear that. Wonder Woman isn’t for Black people.’
It’s nothing to do with ‘accuracy’, it’s racism and I’m sick of it. In before ‘Oh but they just didn’t know about Nubia!!’ Please. You can try to use ignorance as an excuse but you have to ask yourself, even if these people don’t know there IS a Black Wonder Woman, what makes them feel like they have the right to tell Black people what they can and cannot do? What gives them this supposed authority over our imaginations and our desire to create? This mentality is the reason why so many potential cosplayers of color are afraid to even wear a costume.
I can and have sent these people panels, pages and issues of official DC comics full of images of Black Wonder Women (yes, there are more than one!) and it doesn’t matter to them. My skin is still too dark, my nose too broad, my hair too nappy, in their words, not mine. I have been told to my face that I disgrace the Wonder Woman costume with my Blackness. Many other people of color have gone through similar experiences. I know of only one way for us to combat this.
Create, design, display and wear whatever we damn well please. Let our differences enhance our art. Let every single privileged individual who thinks to question our rights to self expression choke on their words. Feel free to be yourself in whatever way you see fit. Do not let other people’s opinions of your race or ethnicity dictate your choices. Don’t let the way they see you have anything to do with who you are.
So I was rereading Harry Potter, when I came across this and thought- what if instead of Cedric Diggory, Cassius Warrington had been chosen to compete in the Triwizard Tournament?
Imagine Dumbledore calling out the name of the Hogwarts champion and it isn’t a Gryffindor, or a Ravenclaw, or even a Hufflepuff, but it’s a Slytherin. A student from a House most people hate.
Imagine Cassius Warrington getting up, and three out of four Houses are booing at him and shouting things like “NO!” or, “We can’t have a Slytherin champion!” or demanding a retry. But he’s a Slytherin- he’s been dealing with this shit since he got sorted, so he keeps his head high and joins the other champions.
Imagine Harry trying to catch Warrington alone because he doesn’t really want to associate with Slytherins (plus Malfoy has this tendency of being around the guy ALL THE TIME since he got chosen), but at the same time he’s also fair enough not to want him to walk into the first task unprepared.
Imagine Warrington walking over to Harry a few months later, and Ron and Hermione both jump into a protective stance, wands out, but instead of attacking Harry he just tells him to stick the egg underwater. (Because Slytherins don’t forget those who helped them out).
Imagine Warrington and Harry helping each other out in the labyrinth.
Imagine Harry being devastated when Peter kills Warrington- because Voldemort doesn’t care what house they’re form, a spare is a spare.
Imagine the uproar that causes among the Slytherins, because some of their parents really are Death Eaters and they know what really happened.
Imagine Slytherins fighting in the Battle of Hogwarts and shouting “This is for Cassius!”
Imagine Harry returning with Warrington’s body, and the crowd realizes what’s happened, but Warrington’s parents don’t show up. There’s no one to mourn him, to cradle him in their arms and cry for their son. The Slytherins know why. His parents were Death Eaters, too.
Imagine Slytherins reaching out, asking for help from classmates from other houses. They’re terrified, truly terrified because the being their parents claimed would never hurt them because they’re pureblood, they realize that he does not care.
Imagine Slytherins in the 5th book sneaking off to join Dumbledore’s Army, to learn more about who Voldemort is without their parents acting as a filter.
Imagine the shock when they’re told what he’s really done.
Imagine that a few talented Slytherins went with Harry and the others into the Ministry of Magic. The others are a bit wary but they prove themselves as friends.
Imagine them being confronted by Lucius Malfoy in the the Hall of Prophecy, and when the Death Eaters descend, they know that any one of them could be their parents.
Imagine the shocked gasp of a Death Eater as they realize their own child, a pureblood, is standing defiantly with Harry Potter. They choke back a cry. They can’t let their child know that they were about to duel to the death.
Imagine a DA Slytherin facing off against their own Death Eater parent. That they make the decision to let their child defeat them, because in that moment, they realize that they love their child more than they fear Voldemort. They go down, mask unveiled, and the Slytherin kid has to be dragged from the fight before he gets killed.
Imagine Book 6 Slytherins getting more friendly and cooperative with the other houses. Two years of Voldemort terrorizing the muggle and Wizarding world, two years where their parents just up and leave some days, cringing from the pain in their arm, two years after the death of the first Slytherin pureblood, Cassius Warrington, killed by Voldemort’s right-hand man, and they’re slowly hitting the breaking point.
Imagine Slytherin kids keeping tabs on their parents, sending the information to Harry, who shares it with the Order of the Phoenix, and hoping that their parents won’t be killed.
Imagine Book 7 Slytherins low-key rebelling against the new oppressive Hogwarts staff.
Imagine the final siege on Hogwarts, where Slytherins stand proudly by their fellow houses, knowing full-well they could be fighting their own parents. Some Slytherins know their parents were in the fighting. They hope to find them first and sneak them away. Their fellow students understand. Professor McGonagall allows 7th Year Slytherin, Pansy Parkinson, to duel a death eater in her stead; her father is under that veil. She knows it.
Imagine the aftermath of the battle; every house suffered loses. Slytherin students crying over the deaths of friends they made in every house.
Imagine
a Cassius Warrington statue made in his honor, the first Slytherin to fight and die nobly with Harry Potter, the boy who lived, in the face of ultimate evil. He was a true Slytherin, and it’s in his name that Slytherin children and their families have cut all ties with the Death Eaters, denounced Voldemort, and are finally living in peace.
Imagine a story in which Harry wasn’t in love with his fellow champion’s girlfriend, but after her boyfriend’s death just hugs her so long, so hard, and says “he wanted to win for you. You should know–you should know he won, he did it for you” and gives her the best hug and shoulder he knows how to be because her parents aren’t there either and she must know why.
Imagine Harry staring over her head at everyone else until Hermione steps up–it doesn’t take long, but it takes long enough that when she does all eyes are on her as a source of motion–and says “we’re never going to forget this. They’re not going to get away with it” and the girlfriend just latches onto Hermione and everyone is in wands-out stance convinced she’s about to attack the shit out of Hermione, and then the girlfriend stares into her eyes and says “do you promise me” and Hermione just gives her this super-firm nod and says “I promise” and the girlfriend just collapses on her, sobbing.
Imagine Dumbledore trying to give some flowery speech about inter-wizard solidarity while glossing over why, because Slytherins have always been a touchy subject, and Ron gets to his feet and says “Professor, I need to say something important” and Dumbledore is so surprised he just cedes the floor, and Ron–after that awkward moment when he realizes everyone is staring at him–says he didn’t know Warrington particularly, but he knows how Warrington and Harry played. That each was always cheering on the other. Both wanted to win, but neither was willing to undercut the other by underhanded means. He finishes up saying “I think–I think it’s important everyone should know he died being what a champion should be. Because he could have abandoned Harry and instead he stood up with him to play the game the honest way, and he died for it. And–and Slytherin House should be proud, and we should all be proud, because Warrington was a good bloke.” He sits back down all flustered because he didn’t actually stand up meaning to make a speech. And then Pansy Parkinson stands up before Dumbledore can take back control of the room and says “I want to tell Weasley thank you.” And all of Slytherin House raises a glass–to Warrington, to Weasley, to Potter–and the other houses follow suit. Many years later, Wizarding scholars will say that was the moment Voldemort truly lost.
Imagine later that summer. Harry gets several owls on his birthday, all unsigned. The birds are plump and pretentious and well-cared-for. He will never know which Slytherins sent him their treasures: parchments with hexes developed by the Death Eaters; a strange locket that will only open if he whispers a special spell but that always shows him the picture he most needs to see; a page torn from a potions book that, brewed properly, will allow him extra time to summon a Patronus by giving him a few crucial seconds not just of happiness but of bliss. It doesn’t matter. Harry knows these gifts not as birthday gifts but for what they really are, and he treasures the locket and copies out the potion to send to Hermione and Mrs. Weasley, and when first summoned by the Order of the Phoenix he marches straight up to Dumbledore with the hexes and says “I can’t tell you where I got these, Professor. But they’re in use by the Death Eaters and I think you should have them.” Months later, Sirius will recognize the spell Bellatrix shoots at him, and will dive out of the way just in the nick of time.
The final battle. Everyone is there. Sirius somehow ends up herding a group of Slytherins. They all stare at him and he at them, across a centuries-old divide Voldemort has only succeeded in deepening. Then he remembers the hexes. Harry’s locket, now tucked under Sirius’ shirt because Harry’s friends are with him in this battle but most of Sirius’ are dead. The moment that happiness potion saved Remus’ life, his very soul. Snape’s final words to Harry, finally seen not as mockery but real true advice. What Harry said Voldemort said–his first words in his new form. They are kids, and they are sharing the same kind of hurt he once wouldn’t admit to, watching his mother burn his name off the family tree. “When we go in there, it’s going to be hell,” he tells the Slytherins. “Some of you are probably going to die. I might go down too, and if I do I want your best curser in the front. But I want you all to remember one thing. There are no spares.” Later retellings of the battle never fail to mention the moment a group of angry, screaming teens burst into the Great Hall, wearing their green and silver as the badge of honor it should be, shouting NO SPARES, NO SPARES at the tops of their voices in between hexes and curses and the occasional physical punch. When Hermione is present, she always interrupts the storyteller to be sure everyone knows about the moment Blaise Zabini shoved her to the floor, dropped on top of her, fired off three curses in rapid succession and said “stay alive, Granger, we need you” before jumping back to his feet and vanishing into the melee–how, for all anyone knows, those may have been his last words, and she will not let his sacrifice go unnoted.
The aftermath. Malfoy holds out a hand to Sirius, badly injured on the floor. Sirius asks how Malfoy is willing to trust him. Malfoy nods at his chest. “You’ve got my godfather’s locket,” he says, and when Sirius and Harry finally speak after the battle Harry gives his full agreement to the very first thing out of Sirius’ mouth. They give the locket to Malfoy. Sirius grits his teeth and closes his eyes and opens them and says “He probably saved my life, giving Harry that.” He doesn’t say thank you. Malfoy hears it anyway.
The school reopens under a single banner: the four Houses united. The House rivalry is reduced to just that–a competition in fun–with those deep divides slowly healing to scars, and eventually away to nothing at all.
Far and away the greatest menace to the writer—any writer, beginning or
otherwise—is the reader. The reader is, after all, a kind of silent
partner in this whole business of writing, and a work of fiction is
surely incomplete if it is never read. The reader is, in fact, the
writer’s only unrelenting, genuine enemy. He has everything on his side;
all he has to do, after all, is shut his eyes, and any work of fiction
becomes meaningless. Moreover, a reader has an advantage over a
beginning writer in not being a beginning reader; before he takes up a
story to read it, he can be presumed to have read everything from
Shakespeare to Jack Kerouac. No matter whether he reads a story in
manuscript as a great personal favor, or opens a magazine, or—kindest of
all—goes into a bookstore and pays good money for a book, he is still
an enemy to be defeated with any kind of dirty fighting that comes to
the writer’s mind.
“It says something about both Republicans and Democrats when one candidate is overtly racist and basks in the adulation of conservatives, while another candidate boldly attacks “the billionaire class,” yet is seen as unelectable by certain liberals.”
In Completely Out of Touch news, the Koch Brothers hosted a retreat for Republican Presidential candidates this weekend where, in addition to making the candidates dance for donations to their campaigns, they hosted an All-Male Panel about activism where they compared their efforts toward Republican leadership to struggles for civil rights. Because clearly, nothing says oppressed quite like older, wealthy white men who support misogynist, transphobic, and homophobic policies.
But hey, at least there was one black participant in the panel:
Look at the American revolution, the anti-slavery movement, the women’s suffrage movement, the civil rights movement. All of these struck a moral chord with the American people. They all sought to overcome an injustice. And we, too, are seeking to right injustices that are holding our country back.
Which ones, I wonder? Apparently, a big focus of the weekend was on how devoted the Koch brothers are to helping the poor. Well, they’d better be, considering that the policies their candidates support, not to mention the corporations from which they get their donations, work to keep them poor. Because corporations are people, too, didn’t cha know. Thanks, Citizens United! I guess they just really want to keep poor people around…so they can help them?
Oh, and apparently the lone female Republican Presidential candidate, Carly Fiorina, formerly a Hewlett-Packard CEO, is the only Republican woman they know, because they couldn’t find any other knowledgeable women to have sit on the panel alongside their one black participant. Whatever happened to Mitt Romney’s binders of women? QUICK! SOMEONE CONSULT THE BINDERS!
The panel also focused on “the plight of the disenfranchised.” Fiorina had this to say about the Koch Brothers’ fundraising network and why she attended the retreat:
These are people who care deeply about our nation. The foundation that the Koch brothers have built has invested in the power of ideas. They’ve invested in the power of ground games. They’ve invested in the power of lifting people up.
That’s kinda hard to believe, considering that the Republicans they support were responsible for gutting the Voting Rights Act, which is the thing that Martin Luther King Jr. fought so hard for to ensure that states allowed people to vote regardless of race, by removing Section 5, which required that states have to run all their new voting laws by the federal government first, to ensure that they’re up to snuff. Chief Justice John Roberts said that “our country has changed” – meaning that we’re all past racism and so we don’t need all these blanket protections anymore. Well, clearly he was wrong, because pretty much the second the Voting Rights Act was changed, eight states instituted new voting laws that disenfranchised a bunch of people – namely, people of color who would likely vote Democrat. So, lifting people up involves taking away their voice in the political process?
What’s more, while there’s a female Republican candidate in Fiorina, and a Latino candidate in Marco Rubio, the current Republican front-runner is apparently Donald freaking Trump, which goes to show how ready Republican voters are to fight for change and the disenfranchised. I guess having a reality show and owning hotels has its privileges?
And that’s really what this is all about. Privilege. Specifically white privilege, male privilege, and good ol’ fashioned class privilege. The Koch Brothers may be working really hard to fix their public image and make themselves over into teddy bears who really care about people. But the fact of the matter is, they put their enormous funds behind candidates who take people’s rights away and actively work to keep poor people in their place.
The American people know hypocrisy when they see it. I hope.
I’m still fuming about being catcalled at the gas station yesterday.
Well, I’m actually over that. What I’m still fuming about is the number of male “friends” who swooped in afterwards to pull a NOT ALL MEN, tell me I should have made polite conversation, and lecture me on not carrying myself with enough confidence.
I wish men would use that energy to tell assholes to cut it the fuck out. Quit silencing women’s grievances. Quit prioritizing your need to be liked over my safety. It shows an overwhelming amount of insecurity.
I sincerely, truly want to collect all the words written about Trump in this election, then build a time machine to take me back to the '80s so I can run around to everyone on the street, shove the printouts into their faces and scream "Do you SEE what you're doing to me? Do you SEE?"
“Trump is in many ways the logical end result of seven years - really two-plus decades - of Republican cultivation of anger and grievance as a method of conducting politics.This is what brought us the 2010 and 2014 election triumphs on the one hand, but also government shut-downs, debt crises based on nothing, and more.”
These tickets have sold out early every year so far, and the student tickets (available to students from any university) usually sell out very quickly. So, if you want to guarantee a spot, and see people like Rosemary Mosco, Abby Howard, and Max Tegmark, please book soon!
I've started tracking this by what books I feel like reading.
iOS: Period tracking is nothing new. Most women track their cycle in some way, whether it’s with a basic app, a calendar, or just noting the days mentally. But beyond tracking your period or ovulation, this app offers a more inclusive look into a woman’s sexual, menstrual, and reproductive health.
Super Opinionated.
