I have a crackpot theory that the kitty-brain-melt effect has something to do with the toxoplasma parasite, and subtle "love me" mind control effects. But it is, as I say, a crackpot theory. One thing's for certain: the more time you spend with cats, the more you do it. I've seen people go from "huh? it's a cat" to "oozjhums woozjhums." I'm way past gone.
Xopher: "vain idols": brilliant.
Devil is a verb, too. People should devil more often. Well-done with the deviltry.
Martyn Taylor:
I don't know the exact details of his experience except that he was held for a few hours and questioned in connection with fears of Irish terrorism. I can tell you that this individual has (or had, at the last time I saw him) fairly bright red hair; pale skin with some freckles; and the sort of strong bone structure that seems to jibe with his descent.
Not being one who studies familial traits, and being aware that ethnic profiling is never as realistic as it sounds to those who employ it, I'm not exactly an authority here. I'm just saying he has the kind of face that Americans, at least, often stereotype for Irish. I believe his name is also Irish. For all I know (not having been there) he may have been going around with marks of his ancestry (pins etc) on his person, as he did now and again in the short time I knew him. But this is random speculation and not terribly relevant.
I was simply supplying anecdotal fodder for the notion that profiling occurs, whether condoned or not, in many situations; the conditions of profiling will vary by location, and by the various biases of the individuals in charge. These biases, being frequently unconscious, will take a person in America with brownish skin and a large nose, and declare this person "suspicious" out of a suspicion of Middle-Easterners, regardless of where this person's self and ancestors were actually born and what they've been doing in recent years. Which is bothersome twice; once because they're committing the error of imagining everyone from a region the same, and again because they're stupid enough to get their victim wrong.
I don't imagine America is the sole host of this problem, and provided the example of my acquaintance's experience because I wanted to see dialogue perhaps about a tale that hadn't been heard here a thousand times.
Said dialogue has been occurring, and I am glad. Being someone who knows rather less about the broader issues herein than I might, I find it enlightening.
Aw. Hell. I never met him, but whenever I ran across something brilliant and beautiful in a thread here, it was him one time out of two. That's a lot of brilliant and beautiful.
I don't believe things just go nowhere. So I believe there's a very, very bright mind somewhere in the world, where it wasn't before. The crying shame is nobody knows where that is.
It has the same well-crafted brain-eating sensibility as intentional badfic by a good writer.
I'm sorry to have mooned you all with that dangling "But". I moved some thoughts around, and somehow didn't catch the loose end in the preview.
But, for purposes of mutual understanding, I'd just like to say that if I came upon an online discussion thread in a forum I cared about wherein someone said "Anyone who doesn't want to have kids [or does want to, for that matter!] is a decadent, sniveling, nasty little piece of work," I'd damn well put in my side -- and probably a lot less politely than Greg London's put in his.
Search and replace in the phrase for anything, really, that's of some value but not broadly, and is annoying to people to whom it is not of value. It's really a very colorful, charged and personalizing phrase. It regards the individual and not the Hummer.
On the primary argument, I have only this to say: There are definitely places where any giant monster of a vehicle is useful. There are also places where it is useless-to-dangerous. If I were to own such a vehicle, I would plan ahead and make certain that I had another way (other car, bicycle, bus, etc) to accomplish tasks for which the vehicle was not suited -- such as getting around in a major city, should I choose to enter one.
Again, originally "man" was neutral gender--it still is in German I think--but the psychological landscape changed with what evolved into English and again, ditched the meme that the generic adult emancipated human could be either male or female, replacing it with a privileged position in society and thought that the default was male, and female was socially and psychologically an afterthought and inferior(...)
Paula, thank you for the etymology post. Yes, I've seen that information before, and that was what gave me the impetus to start playing around with phrases containing the M-word, using them neutrally. Hey, it's one syllable shorter than person!
Humanity (humanity?) is gradually re-assimilating the parts of "man" that mean "person" but got stuck in "male".
On the vehicular note, I've never been comfortable driving anything that didn't hug the ground, simply because when I'm driving, my tactile sense keeps me aware of my relative position. I learned to navigate traffic on a bicycle. I need to feel the ground and hear the traffic. I'd say that's nearly as important to me as seeing -- at least, I've always been lousy at racecar arcade games. Haven't tried the more recent VR-style ones, but I suspect that if the seat told me where the ground was, I'd do better. I also have a sense of self, and of car-self, that is maneuverable and gymnastic. Driving a station wagon, while not out of my range, makes me feel rather like I'm wearing a spacesuit.
The way I see it, rather than the definition of "woman" being upgraded, the long-held definition of "man" (as "full adult human being") is gradually being expanded to include women.
By this the male privilege zone has shrunk vastly -- to the point that a male who wants to reinforce the idea that they are a man (definition: holder of privilege, above woman) as opposed to a man (definition: human, with male-gendered connotations: the you-the-man definition) must indulge ridiculous cliches, and narrow their field of gender expression further.
I think this is actually a good thing to see happening: it means, I'd guess, that gender as power-zoning is on its way to disappearing entirely, which will leave us with gender as an expression of various things, less the power baggage. But it's awkward while the language transitions.
Gender vocabulary is awkward: there are no words for "man" right now that don't have any privilege connotations. There are few words for privilege that don't have any male connotations. Vocabulary is being reshaped and defined, and in the meantime, it's difficult for men to find various things, such as clothing which is not boring and a social role which is gendered without being tied into gender privilege structures.
It's similarly difficult for women to expand into the "privilege area" without taking on masculine re-labeling.
And I'm not sure exactly where I fit into this, except that, at present, I'm pronoun-neutral in a (public/internet) context and that's awkward. People stick to the one that seems to denote my physiology, and I've been hearing it for long enough that I'm used to it, but all the same, it doesn't suit. Trouble is, I'm not sure if the other one does. At least, not sure enough to take hormones, at present.
When half the time you are buying one gender's clothing and half the time you are buying the other's, you get to see how clothing stores are battlegrounds...
Multiple, overlapping causes as rhandir puts it is my viewpoint on how gender happens in the first place too -- the most easily identifiable cause being chromosomes, followed by hormones, which I imagine is why the literature places a great deal of emphasis on these factors. Nurture is a lot less measurable. You can't do a simple test to tell how much "boy training" or "girl training" someone's carrying around in their blood, and you can't figure out the chemical composition of "boy training" or "girl training" either. But it's definitely present, even if they don't make test strips for it.
It's enough to give anyone a science headache.
Regarding rhandir's stuff:
A female-to-male transsexual, after a couple years of testosterone, is physically indistinguishable from any other man as long as he keeps his clothes on. I wish to provide a gentle reminder that it is not polite to refer to such a person as a "woman". Half my friends are in this category, and believe me, they have low voices, beards, male pattern baldness, etc. It's really hard to suss out unless, like me, you spend so much time with transgendered folk that you can follow subtle signs -- and even then it's not terribly easy.
In other news, I do believe some of the hormone information in the article is (a) true for some people but not all; or (b) erroneous. (Like the corpus callosum thing; that's from disputed studies.) Not surprising, and no blame in it, as in every case where there is a broad range of personal experience and it often falls into dispute, people will try very hard to back up their own -- like with psychiatric drugs, in general and specific.
There's so much more I'd like to say -- this is one of my pet topics and I could expand for ages, but I'm in Maine, Jim Kelly is doing a reading, and I have to scamper off to it. Tally-ho!
Thena in Maine, I rarely run across a simple, anecdotal blog comment that makes my soul feel as if a raw cut, irritated daily, has just been healed with some good tingly curative compound. Okay, so it happens here more often than on most blogs I visit, but still. Thank you.
(I also happen to be in Maine, this week. So, hello. Usually I am in Oregon.)
Careful with ibuprofen, too. I think I may have sustained some mild kidney damage taking it for repetitive stress injuries. My skin itched and I passed water too quickly; I went to the doctor and got tested inconclusively; I went off the ibuprofen and my skin stopped itching after a few weeks, and I stopped needing to go to the bathroom all the time.
In our state, they have just made sudafed prescription-only. This is hellishly annoying.
More Northwest love: Portland also has the ceiling adboards with poetry on their buses. What's more, it's actually good, interesting poetry. I've seen snippets from John Ashberry and Ted Kooser, among others.
Re: Susan, Deanna:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paraphilia#List_of_paraphilias
Some choice examples:
Harpaxophilia: sexual arousal from being the victim of a robbery or burglary
Sitophilia: sexual arousal from food
Andromimetophilia: love of women dressed as men
Agalmatophilia: sexual attraction to statues or mannequins or immobility
And thus we lose depictive art. Anyone been practicing medieval Islamic styles?
Oh: I'll add that in my state, Oregon (and quite a few others, such as New York; I only know the specifics locally) women are allowed to go topless in public, for a very simple reason: gender equality.
This doesn't come up very often. I don't think I've seen a publically topless woman yet. I imagine this is because the mores are rather more restrictive than the laws, and any female who takes advantage of her equal legal status is likely to find herself subject to LOTS of attention and bewilderment, so it's not a very casual thing.
LJ did not make boobs sexual, nor did culture, society, or any of those things. They are sexual for purely physical reasons. ,
says idonotlikepeas. I have to quibble.
Maybe my sampling is small, but of the women who've told me where their erogenous zones are (or whose erogenous zones I've found out, empirically) not everyone favors "breasts" and a similar number favor "ears".
An argument could be made that breasts are sexual in an evolutionary context for men inclined to reproduce. This argument could also be made for wide hips and faces without boils on them.
Let me know when you ban pictures of these.
Greg London says:
Well, that's unfortunate for you, really, but it isn't a required outcome.
I didn't say the outcome was always bad. As with Wikipedia, mob-style decision-making actually does work in some areas, less well in others. You seemed to be referring to "mob" as a type of system, and I grabbed that idea and ran with it.
Anyhow, I want to give a big yay! to AW being reinstated, and I mean to send a smidge of money. When I have a smidge to send.
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