Grit and Glittr
Currently catching up on Season 2 of Battlestar, Season 2 of Teen Wolf, and Book 2 of Avatar. I liveblog Supernatural, Doctor Who, and Elementary, under read-more and tagged for spoilers.
My fandoms: Angel, Avatar: The Last Airbender, Battlestar Galactica, Being Human (US), Bones, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Cardcaptor Sakura, Castle, Coupling, CSI (Las Vegas), Cowboy Bebop, Dexter, Doctor Who, Dollhouse, Dragonriders of Pern, Dresden Files, Elementary, Escaflowne, The Finder, Firefly/Serenity, Game of Thrones, Good Omens, Grimm, Harry Potter, Hawaii Five-0, House, Inception, Legend of the Seeker, Lord of the Rings/The Hobbit, Marvel movieverse, Merlin, Monk, My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic, Neil Gaiman, Neon Genesis Evangelion, the Old Kingdom, Once Upon a Time, Psych, Quantum Leap, Scrubs, Sherlock, Smash, Stargate SG-1/Atlantis/Universe (RIP), Studio Ghibli, Suits, Supernatural, Teen Wolf, Torchwood, Touch, Warehouse 13
Still need to see: Alphas, Community, Eureka, Fullmetal Alchemist, Justified, Legend of Korra, Lost Girl, Veronica Mars
Dale Spender, an Australian feminist who has been a strong advocate of female rights in this area, noted that teachers who tried to restore the balance by deliberately ‘favouring’ the girls were astounded to find that despite their efforts they continued to devote more time to the boys in their classrooms. Another study reported that a male science teacher who managed to create an atmosphere in which girls and boys contributed more equally to discussion felt that he was devoting 90 per cent of his attention to the girls. And so did his male pupils. They complained vociferously that the girls were getting too much talking time.
In other public contexts, too, such as seminars and debates, when women and men are deliberately given an equal amount of the highly valued talking time, there is often a perception that they are getting more than their fair share. Dale Spender explains this as follows:
The talkativeness of women has been gauged in comparison not with men but with silence. Women have not been judged on the grounds of whether they talk more than men, but of whether they talk more than silent women.
In other words, if women talk at all, this may be perceived as ‘too much’ by men who expect them to provide a silent, decorative background in many social contexts. This may sound outrageous, but think about how you react when precocious children dominate the talk at an adult party. As women begin to make inroads into formerly ‘male’ domains such as business and professional contexts, we should not be surprised to find that their contributions are not always perceived positively or even accurately.
[x] (via neighborly)
As a teacher, I give girls what I hope is a lot of attention. I don’t know if I give girls their fair share, but I aspire to, especially after noticing that boys are willing to use their greater share of teachers’ attention to get girls who they feel aren’t being quiet and docile enough punished. I have therefore acquired a reputation for “caring more about the girls.” This has had two marked results: Some straight boys have gotten more hostile toward me, and most girls have gotten more confident around me. This makes me think I’m doing something right.
Longer thoughts on how this phenomenon relates to sexual harassment in classrooms, if you’re interested: The girls figured out I won’t report them if they hit boys who are sexually harassing them, I’ll only report the boys. This led to an increase in how often girls got the last word and boys got smacked in my classes, and, also, to a DECREASE IN HOW OFTEN GIRLS GOT SEXUALLY HARASSED. The sexual harassers seem to have been depending on the sort of “equal blame” and “retaliation is never warranted” and “don’t hurt others’ feelings” perspectives so many schools try to instill in kids; the sexual harassers were usually the ones bringing me into the situation by saying, “Miss, she hit me! You should write her up!” Once they figured out I was only ever going to respond, “If you don’t treat girls like that, they won’t hit you,” the girls got more confident and the sexual harassers largely shut the fuck up.
In schools, fighting against sexual harassment is often punished exactly the same as, or more severely than, sexual harassment — a lot of discipline codes make no distinction between violence and violence in self-defence, and violence is ALWAYS the highest level of disciplinary infraction, whereas verbal sexual harassment rarely is. Sexual harassers, at least in the schools I’ve been in, rely heavily on GETTING GIRLS IN TROUBLE WITH HIGHER AUTHORITIES as a strategy of harassment — creating an external punishment that penalises girls for and therefore discourages girls from fighting back. Sexual harassers are willing to use their greater share of floorspace to ask to get girls who won’t date them punished. By and large, teachers do punish those girls when they swear or hit. Schools condition girls to ignore sexual harassment by punishing them when they speak up or fight back instead.
Once the sexual harassers in my classes understood that girls wouldn’t be punished for rejecting them, they backed off around me. And there started to be a flip in what conversations I get called into — girls are telling me when boys are being nasty (too loud and dominant), instead of boys telling me when girls are being uncooperative (louder and more dominant than boys think they should be).
(via torrentofbabies)
reblogging again for the wonderful commentary.
(via partysoft)
It’s like this…
You’re fourteen and you’re reading Larry Niven’s “The Protector” because it’s your father’s favorite book and you like your father and you think he has good taste and the creature on the cover of the book looks interesting and you want to know what it’s about. And in it the female character does something better than the male character - because she’s been doing it her whole life and he’s only just learned - and he gets mad that she’s better at it than him. And you don’t understand why he would be mad about that, because, logically, she’d be better at it than him. She’s done it more. And he’s got a picture of a woman painted on the inside of his spacesuit, like a pinup girl, and it bothers you.
But you’re fourteen and you don’t know how to put this into words.
And then you’re fifteen and you’re reading “Orphans of the Sky” because it’s by a famous sci-fi author and it’s about a lost generation ship and how cool is that?!? but the women on the ship aren’t given a name until they’re married and you spend more time wondering what people call those women up until their marriage than you do focusing on the rest of the story. Even though this tidbit of information has nothing to do with the plot line of the story and is only brought up once in passing.
But it’s a random thing to get worked up about in an otherwise all right book.
Then you’re sixteen and you read “Dune” because your brother gave it to you for Christmas and it’s one of those books you have to read to earn your geek card. You spend an entire afternoon arguing over who is the main character - Paul or Jessica. And the more you contend Jessica, the more he says Paul, and you can’t make him see how the real hero is her. And you love Chani cause she’s tough and good with a knife, but at the end of the day, her killing Paul’s challengers is just a way to degrade them because those weenies lost to a girl.
Then you’re seventeen and you don’t want to read “Stranger in a Strange Land” after the first seventy pages because something about it just leaves a bad taste in your mouth. All of this talk of water-brothers. You can’t even pin it down.
And then you’re eighteen and you’ve given up on classic sci-fi, but that doesn’t stop your brother or your father from trying to get you to read more.
Even when you bring them the books and bring them the passages and show them how the authors didn’t treat women like people.
Your brother says, “Well, that was because of the time it was written in.”
You get all worked up because these men couldn’t imagine a world in which women were equal, in which women were empowered and intelligent and literate and capable.
You tell him - this, this is science fiction. This is all about imagining the world that could be and they couldn’t stand back long enough and dare to imagine how, not only technology would grow in time, but society would grow.
But he blows you off because he can’t understand how it feels to be fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen and desperately wanting to like the books your father likes, because your father has good taste, and being unable to, because most of those books tell you that you’re not a full person in ways that are too subtle to put into words. It’s all cognitive dissonance: a little like a song played a bit out of tempo - enough that you recognize it’s off, but not enough to pin down what exactly is wrong.
And then one day you’re twenty-two and studying sociology and some kind teacher finally gives you the words to explain all those little feelings that built and penned around inside of you for years.
It’s like the world clicking into place.
And that’s something your brother never had to struggle with.
IMPORTANT READING
(via emotionalexhib)
There’s that [disparity] in everything in the world. I think it’s really unfair, every actor, any actress has had her tits out. Every single actress I know. Blokes it’s like, let’s see some cock. Do you know what I mean? Let’s make it more even.
Natalia Tena, who plays Osha, on her nude scene in Game of Thrones and the gender disparity in nude scenes on the series and in other shows.
In the interview, Tena says she asked the producers if she could wear a merkin or grow out her own hair. (She had to ask for permission to grow out her own pubic hair and was actually told no?)
(via moniquill)
lexicalbutsecretlynoalcohollager:
true
Girls always bitch about this, sure, but it’s not like it’s any better for guys. You think I wanna be some ultra macho beefcake?
There’s a reason I always pick female character models in video games.
(via mysticsparrow)
That got very Inception-y. RANTS INSIDE OF RANTS INSIDE OF RANTS INSIDE OF… anyway.
I see a lot of “rants” about YA floating around the Internet and in my real-life bookish existence. I notice some very similar threads that run through these rants to the point that I can pretty…
YES THIS.
I’m sorry, I can’t hear you over all this perfection.
ACCURATE SIMILE
(via yellowfeathersfall)
Oh god, I’m such an attention-seeking little skank, praying on the desires and dreams and fantasies of the better read, more knowledgeable, REAL Nerds of the world. I’m much too pretty to know anything! Look at me, I’m even blond! I probably don’t even know who Superman is.
Jesus.
don’t worry baby, I’ll teach you about Superman
(via literarysins)
I write slash because I don’t like any of the females in the fandom I write for.
Does this read like “women get in the way of my almighty ship” to anyone but me?
Nah, it reads as worse. I can’t even grasp the amount of misogyny in this.
Yeah, I figured it was probably at least that bad. I just….whaaaa.
It’s also fucked-up on the queer side too, I’d say. It’s like, “I want to write for this fandom, but all the women suck, so I guess I gotta settle for the man-love.”
So many who are upset about Gaga’s burqa write of context, yet miss the most important context of all - that of gender inequality in Muslim countries. The burqa is the ultimate symbol of female suppression and…
I’m not usually privy to such conversations as I have little to no knowledge of things like this (and have no right to say, as these aren’t my customs) but DAMMNNNNNN this was an amazing read. I actually like the idea of wearing a burqa. It’s funny because I tend to have more respect for women who keep their bodies covered (not saying that you’re less than if you don’t) just because it’s quite a distraction. It seems like a lot of the times women wear revealing clothing and then cry that people aren’t treating them well and are oogling them or what have you.
That was intense.
How other people respond to the amount of clothing a woman wears is exactly none of her responsibility. Women’s clothing choices are scrutinized and criticized for a zillion reasons and there is no magical level of dress or undress (or for that matter, amount of makeup) that will not be examined and denigrated. It is an unwinnable game.
Eight year old girl schools Dwell magazine
This kid is my hero.
The Chloe/Arwen 2056 Campaign as already extended a cabinet position offer to Olivia. She’ll fit right in.
Very impressive. However, I have trouble believing articles like this because I’m afraid that with all of the women liberation going on that her mother may have sent this. *shrugs* What do I know?
Er…what?
Even if a parent helped her write the email or supervised her computer use or edited her original letter or took dictation while she explained her reaction or encouraged her to write in when she voiced her complaints—I know kids these days are far more Internet capable than I was at that age but in a similar situation my parents might have done any of those things merely to mediate my computer use—I’m not sure what “all the women liberation going on” has to do with that.
I’d be very surprised if an eight-year-old boy’s letter to a magazine were questioned in the same way.
Casual sexism, sizeism, and lookism is being called a fat cow while dressed in loose-fitting unisex-style clothes and flat shoes one morning on the way to work, then getting catcalled with sexual comments about the size of your ass and verbally abused for not sharing your phone number the next while wearing a more traditionally feminine and form-fitting outfit with three-inch heels- by the same man.
Yikes.
With the exception of Ellen and Jo Harvelle, the women on Supernatural seem to come in only two varieties. There’s the innocent, nervous, waifly ones who are in over their heads; and the saucy, slutty, seductive, usually evil ones.
Which is fairly typical across media and genres, of course, but it’s like the Supernatural ones all do it the same way. Seeing the same brand of stylized lascivious malevolence over and over again is exhausting. It’s obvious it’s supposed to be sinisterly sexy and it’s just boring. Maybe I’m just bad at popular attraction.
His words exactly:
I feel that the following are too common among the interests of girls -Dr. Who (Bonus points for additional obsession with David Tenant) (Bonus points for a Dr. Who tattoo idea) -Dexter -Sherlock Holmes-Harry Potter (Bonus…
This means all men Star Trek fans get immediate demerits for not being unique enough, right?
(via deducecanoe)
1. Does the image show only part(s) of a sexualized person’s body?
BMW2. Does the image present a sexualized person as a stand-in for an object?
Four Loko3. Does the image show sexualized persons as interchangeable?
Mercedes Benz
4. Does the image affirm the idea of violating the bodily integrity of a sexualized person who can’t consent?
Duncan Quinn
5. Does the image suggest that sexual availability is the defining characteristic of the person?
American Apparel
6. Does the image show a sexualized person as a commodity that can be bought and sold?
Red Tape Shoes
Not sure if I’ve reblogged this before but it’s worth it if I have because so many people get this wrong.
(via casual-isms)
- guys: uh why do girls care so much about being skinny? it's so annoying
- guys: ew fat chicks
- guys: why do girls care so much about shopping and romance and nail polish lol so annoying
- guys: ew crazy butch lesbian manly feminazis why can't they act more feminine lol
- guys: why do girls wear makeup they look so much better without it
- guys: oh i'm so sorry are you sick? tired? dying?
- guys: haha girls suck at math/science/sports
- guys: a girl who does math/science/sports? well? get back in the kitchen that shits not gonna get you a husband
- guys: why are girls so sensitive when we look at their boobs or something c'mon with that top you're asking for it
- guys: oh my god a gay guy just hit on me how fucking disgusting what a creeper doesn't he have any boundaries?
- EVERY GODDAMN DAY.