"The presumption here is that the position of power is what causes the men to be the sort of men who would beat women, which I do not see evidence for."
No, it's not. The issue is not (just) the power-holder's intentions, it's their limited ability to understand what it's like to BE the other person. Because it's not just about obvious abuses - like beating wives, it's also about all the little things - like not taking into account how biology translates into experience when writing, oh say, building codes dealing with the number of stalls required in restrooms.
This would, after all, be the point of "no taxation without representation." Not just that it's not fair! to tax someone who doesn't have a say in the system, and that the ability to do so encourages abuse. It's also that it's just makes for better laws to include everyone because you don't know what it's like to be everyone, you just know what it's like to be you. Even aside from the problem of selfishness or worse - which is what you are talking about - you also have the more basic problem that lack of power discourages communication - even when the power imbalance is simply there and not actively being abused.
A large number of men who beat there wives - now and in the past - think that they are doing it for their wives own good. The wives tend to think this as well. And needless to say the parents who abuse their children usually think they are doing it for their own good. Nicer people won't help any of that nearly as much as better understanding and more respect would - and balance of power encourages communication, sharing of knowledge, and mutual respect.
I work for a library system within a county that is looking at budget cuts across the board next fiscal year (shocking, I know), and this is all so true.
Our most recent mailer from our "employee's association" was a survey of what we would be most willing to give up, what we would be least willing to give up, how that might change depending on the consequences, and how strongly we felt about our opinions.
(And this is reminding me that I still need to fill it out and send it in. I hope it's not too late.)
And it's important that they ask these questions and that we be able to bargain - not just so we don't get screwed over, but so that the Board of Supervisors (the people we contract with) can get input that comes from somewhere other than the papers and people influential enough to know the Supervisors personally. It also makes the process more transparent to the public, who - in this case, are the ones paying our salary.
Well, certainly her comments, while ostensibly about women, most definitely are about men. What she's clearly saying is that any men who vote Democratic are not real men, just wannabe women.
Isn't that rather like pretending the civil war was about states rights?
I mean, sure, replace the gendered insults with "dirty" and you can reasonably say that the focus is on the person you are calling dirty rather than the dirt itself, but the dynamic is a little different when you are insulting someone by saying that they are like someone else. In such instances, I'd say it's pretty fair to say that at minimum, the remarks are about both the person being insulted and the person being used as an insult.
At best her comment is an ignorant example of heteronormativity. At worst, she is trying to conquer and divide by making a statement that is supposedly about one group, but is really an underhanded insult to another.
I say it's both.
Thus, he shot his mouth off with inadequate knowledge of what was actually going on.
If he hadn't linked to an article that gave him more knowledge than he demonstrated having, I might agree with you about him just "shoot[ing] his mouth off with inadequate knowledge of what was actually going on."
At that point he crossed into willfull blindness - which, in my book is something else entirely. It's one thing to not realize that something is sexist, racist, etc. - or even disagree with that assessment - it's another to have it pointed out and ignore the fact that it was pointed out. At that point I consider the person themselves to be sexist, racist, etc. rather than just ignorant.
FungiFromYuggoth's interpretation of Markos' words is perfectly valid. The sentence FungiFromYuggoth quoted comes directly after Markos quoted the article about the death threats against Sierra, so there's no logical reason to think that he's not including her as one of the people who haven't really recieved death threats.
Normally, one would think that the easily researched fact that they do exist would meant that Markos was not trying to include Sierra in this sweeping accusation. And yet if this is so - 1) why only bring her up? and 2) why the juxtoposition? Again, this is stuff that might be chalked up to nothing more than laziness or bad writing if there wasn't so much evidence of deliberate ignorance.
If one assumes that Markos is trying to make sense, then he's not trying to say that Sierra was lying. If one assumes that Markos doesn't care too much about making sense, then it appeears as though he's trying to have it both ways and say first that Sierra - and everyone else is lying - and that these non-existent death threats aren't a real problem.
FungiFromYuggoth,
There are too many problems with Markos' post to count. I was limiting it to that point because I didn't want to take over the entire thread and because to me, it makes all the others even worse by showing that his mischaracterization of the problem was almost certainly deliberate. One could argue that Markos didn't simply bother to research what Sierra blogged about, but that argument carries less weight in light of the fact that Markos ignored a lot of what he did uncover through his limited research.
That makes sense - we retail booksellers work the same way.
It's beyond useful - it's in fact essential - to have those log lasting bestsellers, whether they be The Da Vinci Code, Harry Potter, or The Purpose Driven Life.
But it still takes all those extra little bits to keep from going in the red, so it's not like you can ignore the good - and sometimes good - selling books either.
"i'm' with Mickle at least in wanting my heroines more real. I tried to read romance to write it and it just nauseated me."
Well, I meant that the characters only looked slightly more realistic. Romance readers didn't come up with the acronym TSTL (Too Stupid To Live) for nothing.
you can go out of your way to describe some breasts as long as you're careful to insist that they're not great big ones, which would be tawdry.
Which - as a large breasted woman - bugs me as much as the styrofoam tits do. Way to go from defining women by their bodies to...defining women by their bodies.
It seems to come up in space opera a lot.
Which partly accounts for my (temporary) dumping of sci-fi/fantasy in favor of romance mid-adolescence. I figured that, if reading "grown-up" books meant reading about sexual fantasies, I might as well read some that were more in line with my own.
Although it was a few too many books by David Eddings and Piers Anthony - not anything as cerebral as Asimov - that caused this epiphany. If I recall correctly, Eddings had a particularly annoying way of making all the whores large breasted and all the heroines adorably petite.
If you really want to read descriptions of a variety of breasts sizes, just thumb through the romance section. Romance novel heroines come in all kinds of shapes and sizes - just like the readers they are meant to be stand-ins for. Of course, the heroines are still pretty, not too fat, and with clear skin. Most importantly, sagging breasts are never mentioned, no matter the size. It is still fantasy, after all.
"Fiction, for the purposes of the public library, consists of those books the librarians think people are looking for when they ask us: 'Where's the fiction section?'"
Heh - that's funny. I work at one of those big box bookstores and the question we get asked all the time is "Where are your non-fiction books?" We generally just look around the store meaningfully, point to the fiction section and say "That corner over there is fiction. Everything else is non-fiction. Were you looking for anything in particular?"
The thing that bugs me about Frey isn't that I think it should be shelved elsewhere,* or that he made stuff up and said it was true, or even that a lot of people read his made-up non-fiction, it's that the people that had read it tended on and on about how it was so amazing because it really happened. Kinda like all the parents swooning over the fact that Paolini started writing Eragon when he was fifteen, a fact that didn't really surprise me once I read it.
*It's only a bookcase away from astrology in my store, so I'm not under any illusion that being in biography makes it fact
| Year | Number of comments posted |
|---|---|
| 2009 | 3 |
| 2007 | 2 |
| 2006 | 4 |
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