By the way, I’m going to be in Sarasota Florida over the next week or so, so if you’re in town and want to have lunch drop me a line.
- An Unbelievable Story of Rape – ProPublica A woman reported being raped to the police, and later confessed that she had made it up. But she hadn’t. A horrifying long read.
- Study: Your Brain Is a Mosaic of Male and Female.
- On Setting The “Universal Sex Difference” Bar Way Too Low | Skepchick
- Growing Up Arab American in DC After 9/11 — Medium
- Tennessee Woman Charged With Attempted Murder After Failed Self-Induced Abortion
- Son, Men Don’t Get Raped. An Esquire article from last year about male victims of rape in the military. It’s not a great scan, you can visit this post to see a few pull-quotes if you don’t want to read the whole thing.
- Feminist Frequency: “Yes, it’s fake. Who cares? This is legitimately what she would have said anyway, so she might of well of said it.” Remember, it’s about ethics. Also, CW for misogynistic comments and death wishes.
- Whites earn more than blacks — even on eBay – The Washington Post
- Fun facts. (Humor).
- Promoting Marriage Has Failed and Is Unnecessary to Cut Poverty | Demos I used to be provisionally in favor of marriage-promotion, on the grounds that marriage seems to be something that a lot of people really really want, and it seems to be a net positive in most married people’s lives. But it’s become increasingly clear that marriage promotion policies simply don’t work.
- 80 Books No Woman Should Read | Literary Hub “…of course I believe everyone should read anything they want. I just think some books are instructions on why women are dirt or hardly exist at all except as accessories or are inherently evil and empty.”
- Men Explain Lolita to Me | Literary Hub “But “to read Lolita and ‘identify’ with one of the characters is to entirely misunderstand Nabokov” said one of my volunteer instructors. I thought that was funny, so I posted it on Facebook, and another nice liberal man came along and explained to me this book was actually an allegory as though I hadn’t thought of that yet.”
- Are Republicans For Freedom or White Identity Politics? Interesting article about how (in the author’s view) Trump represents a change in the GOP to a European-style White Identity Party. CW: The author is a conservative who makes unfair assumptions about liberals. The discussion of immigration – in which it’s a terrible injustice to voters that neither party supports deportation policies that even right-wing immigration experts agree are not possible to implement – is impressively incoherent.
- When a school assigned homework on Islam, it drew so many threats the district shut down – Vox Of course I don’t excuse the threats, but some parents objecting angrily was inevitable given the assignment: “The worksheet asked students to try to copy the Shahada — the statement that “there is no god but Allah, and Mohammed is the messenger of Allah,” the pillar of Muslim faith — in order to understand the complexity of Arabic calligraphy.”
- In Texas, a 12 year old Sikh boy was arrested for “terrorism” over a solar charger / Boing Boing He was also suspended from school for three days. Deja vu.
- More Big Pharma outrage after 2,000% overnight price hike on an infant seizure medication. Deja vu squared.
- Shut up about the y-axis. It shouldn’t always start at zero. – Vox
- 1918: Court Refuses To Fine Women In Man’s Attire. News you can use.
I feel as though that fat joke was a weird twitch by the writer. I wish it hadn’t been there, but it also hasn’t been a ongoing trend in the show. I don’t consider a lack of fat people to be the same sort of problem. (This is about my emotional reaction to the show– I’m not saying other people should share it.)
That fat joke was also out of character for Jessica– not just that she isn’t generally hostile to fat people, she doesn’t have the bandwidth for judging what she sees that doesn’t have any practical importance for her, and a good thing, too.
What does infuriate me is the ending of the movie Spy. I’m rot13-ing because this is a spoiler– I’m not sure whether the movie has been around for long enough that people don’t care.
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@desipis:
No more than the fact that nothing is perfect makes it meaningless to point out flaws. Simply saying that something is problematic is, indeed, useless, but it is also very rarely done IME. Usually the person leveling the complaint cites a specific way in which they believe a work is problematic, and then others can agree with the complaint, disagree with it, or ignore it as is their wont.
There are a lot of things wrong with this statement, including:
– It wasn’t “cutting”, it was standard-issue fatphobia (admittedly this one’s subjective).
– Even if people are bad at figuring out calories, that doesn’t mean that a woman eating a burger while exercising is representative of fat people or their habits. This is a choice the show made about how to portray this woman.
– Yes, people are bad at estimating calorie content. However, as the paper itself says:
In other words, fat people were BETTER at figuring out the calorie content than thin people, so the idea that fat people are fat because we just don’t know how many calories are in our food is contradicted by the results here. It’s thin people who are worse at understanding how many calories they’re consuming, insofar as its results are representative of all people and of all meals.
I should add that that may not be the full story–there’s also a (stronger) correlation with the number of calories in a meal, so if fat people in general ate more calorie-rich meals in this study (this information was not given as far as I can tell), then fat people would end up underestimating their calories more, even though for a fixed meal we are better at estimating total calories. However, it’s still certainly not true that “all people are bad at estimating calories” is a reasonable dominant explanation for “some people are fat and some people are not”.
I should also have added to my list that “fat people don’t understand how many calories they are consuming” is not the most obvious interpretation of the Jessica Jones joke to me, but rather something like “fat people stuff their faces all the time”.
I got a whopping 54% on the face-blindness test. I was completely guessing for the last section, where the faces were obscured by static.
Yes, exactly. Just saying “this is problematic” is a tautology, but saying “This is fat-hating in this specific way, and it would’ve been trivially easy for a show that tries to be honest about women’s experiences to just not do that” is very different.
That seems very binary to me. There’s no point in mentioning a negative about anything unless you find it completely and utterly without merit *and* want to make a value judgment about people who do like it?
Does that only apply to negatives that you consider to be “identity politics”? That is, if instead of saying the fat-hate really put them off Jessica Jones, someone mentioned that they found the pacing weird and awkward, or that Simpson’s characterization seemed to veer off suddenly for no apparent reason, would you say “So what?” and ask why they even bothered to make the comment if they still found the show worth watching?
If “everything is problematic“, then what purpose does it serve to state “this thing is problematic“? Given the premise “everything is problematic“, the statement “this thing is problematic” seems to mean nothing other than “this thing is a thing” (i.e. it’s simply stating a tautology).
In support of/addition to what others have said–Do people generally, when they notice something scientifically inaccurate in a show, just say “this show is scientifically inaccurate” and fail to point out what, specifically, is scientifically inaccurate? And use it as shorthand for “This show is completely bad and the people who watch it are bad for watching it”? My experience is that “scientifically inaccurate” and “problematic stereotyping” are treated similarly by the people who care about those things.
Sometimes there are good reasons to be scientifically inaccurate, but often it’s just laziness (e.g. unwillingness to do research, easier to recycle a plot device instead of use a new one) and not bothering to question one’s own assumptions on the part of the writers. Not so different from stereotyping…
Also agree with Harlequin @104 about interpretation of what the joke was trying to say.
Adding another minor point to what everyone else has already said:
When you change “Everything is problematic in one way or another” to “everything is problematic …“, it is really unsurprising that you then don’t understand what was said and can’t figure out why anyone would say that or care about it. The decision to elide “in one way or another” is telling.
Good 2016, one and all! You all rock, and I’ve read so many interesting comments here in 2015.
Even you trolls whose comments I don’t let through! I can’t say your comments are interesting – but best wishes to you anyway.