Sanity Watchers

: Last week at my mum’s birthday party my aunts would scowl and say...

Wed, 06 Jul 2011 12:53:55 -0500

: Last week at my mum’s birthday party my aunts would scowl and say...:

Last week at my mum’s birthday party my aunts would scowl and say “Don’t you want to go and play instead of eating so much?” whenever my 5 year old cousin took a new piece of candy or ice cream. Whenever my 6 year old cousin (who had had just as much as my 5yo cousin) would eat more there were no…

Best Microaggression ever.

Mon, 27 Jun 2011 11:27:20 -0500

microaggressions:

Submission we liked ;)

I’m biracial and I have a vaguely Muslim-sounding name. People keep accusing me of being a terrorist and I had to hold a press conference about my birth certificate to prove I’m an American. First black president, USA. Made me feel annoyed.

see if you can spot the irony

Sun, 26 Jun 2011 23:54:44 -0500

cocoku:

holographic-unicorn:

mycultureisnotatrend:

man destroying other cultures sure is bad. but awesome headdress dude!!!

I just don’t even have anything to say anymore….

File under: easier said than done

Sun, 26 Jun 2011 23:42:29 -0500

In light of the comments on this Jez post about the humiliating experience a dying woman and her daughter had at the hands of the TSA, I thought I should post something I wrote when my mom was still alive, before hospice care started, when I was the one helping her with activities of daily life like toileting and bathing. I wrote this to try to describe to my friends why I was thoroughly exhausted even though my mom slept 2/3 of the day. I am trying to imagine doing all this in an airport bathroom after being groped by the TSA.

The thing about Parkinson’s, at least how I understand it, is that it makes everything so SLOW. Not only does my mom move very slowly when she moves, but it takes forever to get from the idea to move to the actual motion. Half the time, she’ll decide to move, and then by the time her body starts cooperating, she has forgotten what she was supposed to do. Just to get out of the bedroom involves sitting up, scooting to the edge of the bed, standing up, walking to the bathroom, walking *into* the bathroom, turning around to face away from the toilet, pulling pants down, sitting down, using the toilet, cleaning yourself, changing adult underwear (which itself involves taking off shoes and pants and then putting them on again), standing up, pulling pants up, walking out of the bathroom, walking to the bed, turning to sit down on the bed, sitting down, changing pants, changing shirts, combing hair, standing up again, walking to the door, walking down the hallway, and then sitting in the chair in the living room. What most of us can do in ten minutes before our brains have even switched on involves as much effort as anything my mom does in a day, and she can only keep one task in mind at a time, so that there’s no way, for instance, that she could remember to get a new pair of undies *before* going into the bathroom. So I have a hand in every aspect of every part of this. We both end up worn out, and all we’ve done is get out of bed.

"If no woman in your life has ever talked to you about how she lives her life with an undercurrent of..."

Fri, 03 Jun 2011 22:58:33 -0500

“If no woman in your life has ever talked to you about how she lives her life with an undercurrent of fear of men, consider the possibility that it may be because she sees you as one of those men she cannot really trust.”

- —Chris Clarke, How Not To Be An Asshole: A Guide For Men (2011 version)

Goddamn this post is still one of my all-time faves.

"A label is an abstraction/social construct, not a directive. Desire comes first, naming it comes..."

Wed, 01 Jun 2011 13:29:05 -0500

“A label is an abstraction/social construct, not a directive. Desire comes first, naming it comes later. “Bisexual” feels like a lie but so does “lesbian” and so does “pansexual” and so does everything except “queer” which feels true. Because I like girls and because I’m a fucking weirdo, “queer” feels right. Sometimes “gay” feels right too, maybe because I like girls and because I’m happy.”

- Riese at Autostraddle. This quote (and the article) made me really fucking happy.

"If someone gets too drunk and they pass out, and a gang of dudes decides that they’re going to..."

Fri, 27 May 2011 13:29:23 -0500

“

If someone gets too drunk and they pass out, and a gang of dudes decides that they’re going to use that person as a pinata to see who can land the biggest punch, would we say to the drunk person, “Well, you should have known that’s what dudes do.” I would hope not. I would hope you’d be so horrified that anyone would think that beating the shit out of someone for shits and giggles was a fucked up thing to do.

Well, that’s what rape is. It’s a violent assault that uses sex as a weapon instead of fisticuffs. But the general gist is the same. But we get all confused, because we as a culture don’t think of sex as something that men and women do together for fun, but as something men extract from women. If we were clearer on this, why rape isn’t sex wouldn’t be so damn hard to understand. And we wouldn’t tolerate rapists wandering amongst us, free to rape.

”

- Amanda Marcotte

betterbooktitles: Title and Redesign by Michael Molina who is...

Fri, 27 May 2011 10:13:35 -0500

betterbooktitles:

Title and Redesign by Michael Molina who is part of this sketch group.

Heidi Murkoff and Sharon Mazel: What to Expect When You’re Expecting

.jnf.: Oh hey speaking of ridiculous things to get mad about

Tue, 10 May 2011 16:16:45 -0500

.jnf.: Oh hey speaking of ridiculous things to get mad about:

jsmooth995:

Animal ethicists are calling for a new vocabulary about animals, shunning words such as “pets,” “wildlife,” and “vermin” as derogatory and even suggesting “animal” is a “term of abuse.”

Common language on fauna betrays an “anthropocentric bias” and impedes an understanding of our interaction…

I do think language matters, and I’m down with dropping “owner” in favor of “caretaker,” (or “housemate,” as Maru refers to his human counterpart).

But I think it’s a shame these ethicists are humansplaining on behalf of other animals, instead of respecting how they self-identify.

For example the Feline community has long been on record with their position that humans should be referred to as “Where Food Comes From,” and the proper and respectful terminology for cats is “The One You Give The Food To, And By The Way Where’s My Food”.

"On the operating table, I was prepped for the procedure by a female nurse and a male doctor. When..."

Wed, 04 May 2011 00:24:43 -0500

“

On the operating table, I was prepped for the procedure by a female nurse and a male doctor. When the nurse lifted the hospital gown above my abdomen, she exclaimed, “Look at that pretty flat stomach!”

I processed this statement for a moment. A medical professional had complimented me on my thinness, which was so extreme as to prevent me from having life-saving surgery, while prepping me for a procedure intended to help me gain weight.

To his credit, the doctor quickly snapped, “That’s the problem!” but her message couldn’t have been clearer.

We live in a culture that so values thinness, that values such extreme thinness, that I received a compliment about my body when I was on an operating table, when I was so ill and weighed so little that doctors feared I might not survive major surgery.

”

- Amber Leab, guest posting at Shakesville

The Intervention that Wasn't

Thu, 28 Apr 2011 03:09:00 -0500

Lately I have been completely hooked (har har) on the show Intervention. I’d seen it a couple times on cable at my parents’ house, but I found it too depressing. But then it showed up on Netflix Instant, and I have been watching it serially. If you’re not familiar with the show, it’s basically What Not to Wear for the soul—it involves a family staging an intervention with a drug-addicted, alcoholic, or mentally unstable family member, who (if they choose) will get 90 days of rehab paid by the show. The actual intervention doesn’t happen until the last 10 minutes of the episode, and it’s almost always completely nerve-wracking: will this week’s subject say yes to rehab? If they don’t, will their family members be able to stop enabling them from that day forward? Sometimes, the subjects straight up run away from the intervention; occasionally they end up in jail before rehab. It’s a surreal, heartrending mix of exploitation tv and serious documentary. And I’ve watched dozens of episodes in the last month.

It took me at least a dozen before I realized why the show haunts me: I tried to be part of a one-woman, long-distance, half-assed intervention myself. I didn’t think of it that way at the time, but that’s what it was. Around 2004, when I was living on the West Coast and my family was back East, my mother started acting very strange. She said things that didn’t make sense; she wrote letters addressed to the wrong people; she hung up the phone when my boyfriend answered, convinced she’d dialed a wrong number. For months I wondered what was happening; I would ask her if she was okay and she would insist nothing was wrong. I conspired with my stepfather to get her to go to the doctor, but she kept refusing, and from 3000 miles away, I couldn’t make her go. I wasn’t sure if I was exaggerating the weirdness out of paranoia—until one day in April, I got two birthday cards from my mom on the same day, one signed “Mom” and one signed with her first name. My birthday is in August. I called her to ask if she’d mixed up some envelopes, and she flatly denied that she’d sent cards to anyone, refusing to believe that I was holding them in my hands as we spoke. After I got off the phone, I cried for hours. I called and begged her to go to her doctor. I asked my stepdad if we could get her there without her consent. Neither of us knew what to do, and no one else knew how bad things were getting; she was still clever enough to hide her confusion from people who weren’t as intimately involved in her life.

If you know me from Shapely Prose, you probably know what I didn’t then: my mother was at the beginning of a rapidly progressing dementia. On Intervention, they say that the only way to make an addict choose recovery is to make them face their rock bottom; the only way to get my mom to admit her health was failing was for her to hit rock bottom, too—she collapsed at home and hit her head, which led to the ER, which led to neurologists, which led to a diagnosis of Parkinson’s disease. She died in 2009. Her autopsy showed that she also had Alzheimer’s. These diseases are currently incurable, but some people live for a long time before dementia completely takes over. I have no doubt that my mom’s insistence on maintaining the illusion of control hastened her decline; she didn’t start neurological treatment or occupational or speech therapy until she was very confused and scared. The weird blessing of dementia is that the more ill a demented person gets, the less their illness scares them: eventually my mom lost the desire to control her health, and thus lost the anxiety that came from not being able to. Part of the thrill of watching Intervention is seeing how different the subjects look after rehab—they’ve been reborn, and they know it. In our family’s situation, that was a fantasy, but it remains a stubborn one even after my mother’s death.

I’m not sure what I’m getting at, exactly, except that when I watch friends and family members on Intervention beg their loved ones to accept help, I think of how pitifully inept I was at convincing my mom to accept help. I don’t say this out of self-flagellation; I was a devoted daughter, and I was an important caregiver in the last years of her life. But she was so scared, and I was so scared, and neither of us knew what to do or how to stop what was happening. Even though my mom’s problem wasn’t addiction but a different disease, she desperately needed help beyond what our family could give her—and her disease made it impossible for her to seek it out. We really could have used Candy Finnigan, is what I’m saying. I think maybe I still could.

.jnf.: The Best Comments from a Fox News Story on Obama's Birth Certificate

Wed, 27 Apr 2011 11:40:38 -0500

.jnf.: The Best Comments from a Fox News Story on Obama's Birth Certificate:

Does everyone here understand the Fed Reserve has not had a press conference in 90 years and they are having one today!!!!!
This BC is being released today to distract from the real bad news we are about to get from the bankers. This is merely another “bait and switch” from this Admin. It has…

I think the technical term is "What What in the Butt"

Thu, 21 Apr 2011 19:44:36 -0500

annalsofonlinedating:

apologies in advance… yum yum up the bum!!! well when u free treacle??? xxx

________________________________________________

+15 for “yum yum in the bum.” WHY.

+4 for apologizing, and then doing something entirely inappropriate.

+6 for “treacle.” I am 86 years old, I guess, because I do not know what that is.

+3 for “xxx.” Yup.

TOTAL POINTS: 28.

"If you’re a dude who has never been groped against your will, and who is typically socialized as..."

Tue, 19 Apr 2011 09:16:12 -0500

“If you’re a dude who has never been groped against your will, and who is typically socialized as masculine, this has got to be the most astonishing and unresolvable experience ever. There is a reason why the loudest voices of protest have been male: men are not socially conditioned to accept that groping may happen, occasionally, in shared spaces, and that they should not raise the alarm but should simply “let it go”, that making a fuss would draw unwanted attention, that it isn’t “worth it”. Men have not spent their lives watching those who did speak up get condemned or blamed for their assault because they were “asking for it.””

- The lady is a tramp: On getting my bits touched by the TSA (via theoryofgravity)

I think this is a really important point; it doesn’t make the outrage at the TSA procedures any less genuine, but it does explain the intensity and the shock that was so apparent in the “don’t touch my junk” protests.

"Men will often admit other women are oppressed but not you."

Sun, 17 Apr 2011 17:03:33 -0500

“Men will often admit other women are oppressed but not you.”

- Sheila Rowbotham (via earlyfrost)

Eg-fucking-zactly. Just like we’re all outraged and horrified by the statistics of sexual abuse, but we tend to try and discredit individuals.

(via cocoku)

No false patriotic wreath

Sun, 17 Apr 2011 12:29:18 -0500

Rick Santorum made a funny! He thought his campaign slogan “Fighting to Make America America Again” would really stick it to all those Muslims, gays, feminists, and so on, who obviously want to dismantle the republic, stat. But apparently he slept through senior English, because he was totally surprised to find out about this extremely famous poem by extremely famous American poet Langston Hughes. Here, read it again, and thank Rick Santorum for giving Hughes a shout-out during National Poetry Month.

Let America Be America Again by Langston Hughes

Let America be America again.
Let it be the dream it used to be.
Let it be the pioneer on the plain
Seeking a home where he himself is free.

(America never was America to me.)

Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed--
Let it be that great strong land of love
Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme
That any man be crushed by one above.

(It never was America to me.)

O, let my land be a land where Liberty
Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath,
But opportunity is real, and life is free,
Equality is in the air we breathe.

(There's never been equality for me,
Nor freedom in this "homeland of the free.")

Say, who are you that mumbles in the dark? 
And who are you that draws your veil across the stars?

I am the poor white, fooled and pushed apart,
I am the Negro bearing slavery's scars.
I am the red man driven from the land,
I am the immigrant clutching the hope I seek--
And finding only the same old stupid plan
Of dog eat dog, of mighty crush the weak.

I am the young man, full of strength and hope,
Tangled in that ancient endless chain
Of profit, power, gain, of grab the land!
Of grab the gold! Of grab the ways of satisfying need!
Of work the men! Of take the pay!
Of owning everything for one's own greed!

I am the farmer, bondsman to the soil.
I am the worker sold to the machine.
I am the Negro, servant to you all.
I am the people, humble, hungry, mean--
Hungry yet today despite the dream.
Beaten yet today--O, Pioneers!
I am the man who never got ahead,
The poorest worker bartered through the years.

Yet I'm the one who dreamt our basic dream
In the Old World while still a serf of kings,
Who dreamt a dream so strong, so brave, so true,
That even yet its mighty daring sings
In every brick and stone, in every furrow turned
That's made America the land it has become.
O, I'm the man who sailed those early seas
In search of what I meant to be my home--
For I'm the one who left dark Ireland's shore,
And Poland's plain, and England's grassy lea,
And torn from Black Africa's strand I came
To build a "homeland of the free."

The free?

Who said the free?  Not me?
Surely not me?  The millions on relief today?
The millions shot down when we strike?
The millions who have nothing for our pay?
For all the dreams we've dreamed
And all the songs we've sung
And all the hopes we've held
And all the flags we've hung,
The millions who have nothing for our pay--
Except the dream that's almost dead today.

O, let America be America again--
The land that never has been yet--
And yet must be--the land where every man is free.
The land that's mine--the poor man's, Indian's, Negro's, ME--
Who made America,
Whose sweat and blood, whose faith and pain,
Whose hand at the foundry, whose plow in the rain,
Must bring back our mighty dream again.

Sure, call me any ugly name you choose--
The steel of freedom does not stain.
From those who live like leeches on the people's lives,
We must take back our land again,
America!

O, yes,
I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath--
America will be!

Out of the rack and ruin of our gangster death,
The rape and rot of graft, and stealth, and lies,
We, the people, must redeem
The land, the mines, the plants, the rivers.
The mountains and the endless plain--
All, all the stretch of these great green states--
And make America again!

"Here are some things that happens to a dude when he first starts to speak up about feminist..."

Fri, 15 Apr 2011 12:54:00 -0500

“

Here are some things that happens to a dude when he first starts to speak up about feminist issues:

He discovers that women in his life whom he would never have associated with the word “feminism” have strong opinions about the things that he’s talking about. Because while we have the luxury of perceiving these things as not being about us, and thus not relevant to our lives, every woman he knows has had to consider what she’d do if she got pregnant when she didn’t not plan to. Every woman he knows has been talked down to by a man who wasn’t as smart or capable as she was. Almost all of them have been treated poorly or made uncomfortable by some dude at some point who saw getting into her pants as a prize to be won. Even women who seemed like just one of the dudes begin to share experiences that he never would have imagined that they’d had, because doing so around him begins to feel safe.

”

- Why Feminism Is Also Dude-ism, by Dan Solomon, on the always awesome Hay Ladies

(NB: Cis women are not the only people who have to worry about pregnancy and harassment.)

OMFG

Fri, 15 Apr 2011 12:48:53 -0500

OMFG:

I can say nothing about this but “OMFG” on repeat until I die.

Small pleasures

Wed, 13 Apr 2011 23:50:28 -0500

Between Chicago winter, dissertation writing, chronic migraines, and Mr Machine’s frequent work travel, I’ve been feeling pretty blah lately. Not depressed, exactly, and no longer in the depths of grief that I was this time last year: just underwhelmed by the world. But today felt like a genuine spring day—warm sun, cool breeze, birds everywhere—and it made me think about the little things that have been improving my life lately. They’re all objects I purchased, which makes me feel uncharacteristically consumerist, but the truth is they bring me comfort or little doses of pleasure—an essential feeling when you’re staring down another grey day or scholarly article (or, most of the time, both). So I thought I’d share them with you, because why not.

Noise-canceling headphones. I don’t know how I survived apartment living before I had them. These can be pretty expensive, but I got this pair on sale and am quite happy with them so far. Also good for when the guy next to you in the coffeeshop is muttering under his breath.
Gel heel liners. Three months of wearing winter boots has made my regular callouses disappear, and these are a godsend now that I can wear cute shoes again.
Tinted lip balm. I have terribly mixed feelings about my lips. I love their shape: big and plushy and cute. But I have dry, sensitive skin, and that means my lips are chapped 75% of the time. I love how lipstick looks, but I really can’t wear it very often. I just got this one in Fresh Plum and I looooove it. It’s a similar color to Clinique’s Black Honey, which is the best thing ever, but a little more matte so (for me) it seems better for casual use.
Breatheright strips. I am actually just trying these for the first time this very moment, but already I feel like my brain’s getting way more than its usual share of oxygen. I’m hoping this might help with my migraines, as well, since they seem to be related to nasal congestion (though I don’t know which is the chicken and which is the egg).

So that’s my current retail therapy. What’s yours?

Tiger Beatdown: Life Among the One Percent

Wed, 13 Apr 2011 19:00:34 -0500

Tiger Beatdown: Life Among the One Percent:

meloukhia:

This is very asexuality 101 for most of you, but here’s the more advanced bit for your reading pleasure!

To take just one example of the need for asexual visibility and broader inclusion of asexual people in ongoing conversations within social justice and feminist communities, including asexuality in conversations about sexuality is critical. Asexuals are poorly understood by sexual people and we can become targets of abuse, especially in the case of asexuals who experience intersections with other identities like disability. Some people believe that asexual people need ‘correction’ so we can be ‘cured,’ and asexual people can experience tremendous pressure to have sex, sometimes leading to rape and sexual assault. We may have imperfect language to describe these experiences in no small part because the community talking about rape and sexual assault is focusing on sexual people and does not think about what these experiences might be like when you are asexual.

It is critical to not just pay lip service to asexuality, but to actively learn about it; by talking to asexual people, by exploring resources we design for ourselves, by including us in discussions to take advantage of the experience we can bring to the table. As Take Back the Night events unfold all over the world this month, as April is Sexual Assault Awareness Month, as I see reporting from the End Violence Against Women Conference in Chicago, asexuality weighs heavily on my mind. In order to be an elephant in the room, you must be visible.

A good post about asexuality by s.e. smith.