Men and women are misogynistic for different reasons: men to marginalize women, and women to ingratiate themselves with the men trying to marginalize them. Neither one is justifiable, but one is oppressive and the other is a (bad) strategy to deal with that oppression. One thus sees that if the men who are misogynists weren’t, the women who are misogynists wouldn’t have any reason to be. Ergo, exhorting women to stop being misogynists so that men will stop gets it precisely backwards.
Sarcastathon 5000: Yesterday barrister Barbara Hewson, wrote a piece regarding Operation...
Yesterday barrister Barbara Hewson, wrote a piece regarding Operation Yewtree, which began with the statement ‘I do not support the persecution of old men’. She described Yewtree as an ‘inquisition’ and it’s victims as ‘zealots’, and this is simply in the first two paragraphs.
While the…
Junot Diaz on Men Who Write About Women
- The Atlantic: It sounds like you're saying that literary "talent" doesn't inoculate a writer—especially a male writer—from making gross, false misjudgments about gender. You'd think being a great writer would give you empathy and the ability to understand people who are unlike you—whether we're talking about gender or another category. But that doesn't seem to be the case.
- Junot Diaz: I think that unless you are actively, consciously working against the gravitational pull of the culture, you will predictably, thematically, create these sort of fucked-up representations. Without fail. The only way not to do them is to admit to yourself [that] you're fucked up, admit to yourself that you're not good at this shit, and to be conscious in the way that you create these characters. It's so funny what people call inspiration. I have so many young writers who're like, "Well I was inspired. This was my story." And I'm like, "OK. Sir, your inspiration for your stories is like every other male's inspiration for their stories: that the female is only in there to provide sexual service." There comes a time when this mythical inspiration is exposed for doing exactly what it's truthfully doing: to underscore and reinforce cultural structures, or I'd say, cultural asymmetry.
I chose to be a writer in girlhood because books rescued me. They were the places where I could bring the broken bits and pieces of myself and put them together again, the places where I could dream about alternative realities, possible futures. They let me know firsthand that if the mind was to be the site of resistance, only the imagination could make it so. To imagine, then, was a way to begin the process of transforming reality. All that we cannot imagine will never come into being.
— bell hooks, “Narratives of Struggle” (via ellesugars)
I used to think it would be great if we could all be colorblind. That’s naïve, especially for a white person, because a white person can afford to be colorblind. They don’t have to think about race every day. An African American does.
— David Howard
In its favour, if Google Glass didn’t exist, all these Silicon Valley guys would be having affairs or buying unsuitable motorbikes
— (via whitemenwearinggoogleglass)
When austerity feels like a heart attack
“It remains to be seen how the Eurozone crisis will affect the long term health of citizens in the PIGS, who’ve typically been held up as doyennes of health, with their much vaunted heart-healthy Mediterranean cuisine. But if the Argentinian financial crisis and resulting heart attack rates, and now the spike in cardiac arrests in Kalamata are anything to go by, using the European south as a guinea pig for austerity is fatal, as well as economically illiterate.”
I wrote about how austerity has caused heart attacks to spike in Greece, and maternal health to plummet - it’s over on OpenDemocracy, or the New Statesman, whichever you prefer.
“I’ll tell you what really annoyed us miners,” said Pete Mansell, sipping a pint of John Smith’s on Monday. “She said we were the enemy within. We weren’t. We were just looking after our lives, our families, our kids and our properties, everything that we ever had. We were fighting for that big style.”
Rachel’s Tunisian tiles blog
While interviewing in Tunis, I kept getting distracted by the amazing floor tiles… here’s some of them
economistadentata: Bankers have no armies.
“My lord,’ he says. “You have said what you have to say. Now listen to me. You are a man whose money is almost spent. I am a man who knows how you have spent it. You are a man who has borrowed all over Europe. I am a man who knows all your creditors. One word from me, and your debts will be…
