Re girls only

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ciS5GikZ5Jo

i didn't mention anything about what women want from men. and i started the thread. just sayin!

Perhaps you are suggesting that women only want them for their bodies?

― illegal crew member (C.K. Dexter Holland), Tuesday, December 27, 2011 7:56 PM (5 minutes ago) Bookmark Permalink

i refuse to opine on What Women Want as though we're a breed and not a bunch of different people but some of the time some women want men's bodies. are you for real?

You are just determined to keep proving everything I say, aren't you?

I'm not going to bother saying anything any more. You keep just making the points for me.

i don't even understand what's happening anymore

Sorry horseshoe that x-posted to CK.

oh no, you were not the source of my confusion!

This guy is just in a reality tunnel so far from mine it's impossible. And I should really be asleep.

yeah me too but vertigo is on late tonight and i'm considering staying up for it.

Don't back down gabbneb! Its your manly tenacity that makes you irresistible to all women of the world.

Irresistible!

xxp

that's what jimmy stewart said

fuck's sake u lose yr topicality to some weak gbebneb zings

i refuse to opine on What Women Want as though we're a breed and not a bunch of different people but some of the time some women want men's bodies. are you for real?

I think it's obvious my question was rhetorical. Is it really such a stretch to posit that a dude's relationship potential is a factor in his hotness?

Its your manly tenacity that makes you irresistible to all women of the world.

I think it's obvious what I'd be doing if that were what I were going for.

I was gonna finish watching If... tonight but I think my head's just in too weird a place now for schoolboy violence.

What channel is Vertigo on???

Hi-Fy

rté 1

2 channels at once is a giddying prospect

If only I were on that side of the Atlantic.

2.15 am fuck that i'm throwing fifa on

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UOEIQKczRPY

yeah babel is p boring and might send me to bed a lot sooner

babel? u playin as stuttgart or holland?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QHaA1beOwrY&ob=av3e

i only started watching it because gael garcia bernal is in it and i find him v nonthreatening.

he is interesting but not annoying imo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UPGiLsdWZdo&feature=related

what are you doing

what is julie lagger at now, is this an avant-garde protest against refereeing calls

i only started watching it because gael garcia bernal is in it and i find him v nonthreatening.

― judith, Tuesday, December 27, 2011 8:16 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Permalink

haha also you have excellent taste

i just like well-dressed gennlemen debating feminism tbh

Clár faisnéise ceoil ina mbeidh Neil Young- TG4 fyi

gael garcia bernal is threateningly sexy

i just like well-dressed gennlemen debating feminism tbh

― i am mad cool cos i don't like coldpay (Julie Lagger),

fuck sake but christopher nolan is really struggling for plot at this stage

nolan's never met a lady so he doesn't count

gael garcia bernal is actually julia roberts side-project

no ladies in the "no ladies" thread

can't help but feel if anybody from Sailor is still alive they cd bring a decent copyright case against Franz Ferdinand

i have posted twice to the girls-only thread. i don't regret the first one (a link) at all, but the second post (today) was unnecessary shit-stirring directed at a male (though in reference to an earlier discussion on that thread).

at any rate, i like to think i am respectful of everyone, though i suppose it is just like a guy to barge in, no matter how respectfully. so, sorry about that.

and while i do think it's fair for gabbneb to be able to respond when shit is being talked about him, no matter the thread/board, i may have kind of started it on that thread. sorry about that too.

Ha, the only time I ~really~ wanted to post on the girls thread was when Amanda posted about vocal fry.

― jaymc, Tuesday, December 27, 2011 5:25 PM (4 hours ago) Bookmark
haha!

Friend on fb (a grade school teacher) shared this recently.
http://togetherforjacksoncountykids.tumblr.com/post/14314184651/one-teachers-approach-to-preventing-gender-bullying-in

enjoyable anecdotage

No breast checks until post-menopause, though. Would sort of appreciate an exam because when I do a self-check I always feel like I have no idea what I'm looking for.

I took a women's health class in college in which we practiced breast exams on a fake breast that contained lumps. They were pretty clearly lumpy.

I don't get embarrassed very easily, but after the other two guys dropped, I was the only man in the class, so the breast exam day was kind of awkward, and the day we were each issued a clear acrylic speculum was pretty terrible.

Do you still have that?

I'm wearing it right now.

(no. i did not move it here from north carolina!)

x-posts while I've written this, sorry...

I didn't get to read that "gender bullying" blog when it was originally posted on the Girl Thread coz I was having Cornish broadband issues. I'm having pretty mixed feelings about it, and struggling to articulate why.

On the most immediate level, obviously it's great that this teacher is doing their best to combat gender bullying, and try to challenge the relentless gender stereotyping. I think the lessons that Tempel is teaching are v v important, and were taught in an accessible way.

But on another level, I think that I really kind of recoil from labels like "gender variance" in the first place. Because it gives that kind of relentless pinkification/commodification of childhood gender a kind of legitimacy which I really don't think it deserves. It's also the horrifying realisation that if I were a child today, I'd be labeled as "gender variant" instead of just being left to get on with mud and frogs. But is that the fault of the label itself, or the commodified bifurcation of childhood which really didn't exert the same kind of pressure when I was that age? Like, I definitely feel like it was more OK to just be a "tomboy" in the 70s when all kids wore dungarees in unisex colours? (Though, that said, young kids certainly found other things to bully me about in grade school - being an English person with a stupid accent in an American school being number one, what, are you going to call that "Accent Variance" now?)

But I often feel like a cranky old person when confronted with the exploding plethora of labels. Like, labels might be good if they give people a name for something they thought was abnormal or "I'm the only one" before - but at the same time, labels are, always, kind of limiting.

I think what this teacher did, for this child, and this class, was great. It's fantastic to teach kids to resist this kind of commodification of gender pressure, and early. But at the same time, it doesn't really get at the root issues. Like, *why* is gender bifurcation being pushed so much harder and so much earlier? Oh, that's right. Because you can sell twice as many toys if you manufacture one pink one and one blue one, instead of like it was back in the 70s, when my brother and I got one unisex toybox we had to share. What is driving this construction of gender - and gender (as opposed to sex) *is* a construct, it varies so much from culture to culture (which, to me, makes a mockery of the idea of "gender variance" - ALL gender varies) - but I know, just because gender is a Construct, that doesn't mean that Constructs don't have power. Like, *money* is a total Construct, but it's one of the most powerful things on earth (hell, even *power* is a total construct.)

For a supposed "feelgood" article, it's raising a lot more questions for me than it answers.

But I am a curmudgeon.

variating from what.

^^ That was a very clear explanation, FT, full of fine-grained distinctions which most people lack proper terminology to distinguish among. I am a bit unclear on one minor distinction, though. Would it be correct to say that the difference between 'mansplaining' and 'explaining' is that the first is an unsought and the second a requested explanation -- or does the difference lie elsewhere?

I don't think it's the difference between unsought/requested, it's the privilege gradient and assumption of automatic authority on the part of the 'Splainer that's problematic. It's that assumption in the mind of the Splainer, that the man always knows what they are talking about, and the woman doesn't, even and *especially* if what they talking about is something that the woman actually knows a heck of a lot more about, such as, for example, the fundamental differences of women's experiences from what men typically expect.

And funnily enough, while you were typing that question, I wrote out this big whole long post about what I mean by "privilege" which I shall now submit.

"Male Privilege" and indeed "Privilege" in this sense itself, is another term that could probably do with some explanation and clarification - I know of a fantastic resource on it, but unfortunately it's at work and (fortunately) I am not right now.

Because it's often incorrectly interpreted as being about an individual thing, and so people who are the beneficiary of Privilege will complain "but *I* don't get that! I have had individual experiences where that didn't apply!" when it's something that's structurally applied to a whole class or type or people (and against another whole class or category.) This is what raises a prejudice to an actual -ism like Sexism or Racism - the structural aspect.

And the thing is, people who have been the beneficiary of Privilege for their entire lives often interpret the *removal* of that Privilege as being "OMG reverse prejudice!" (which is another reason that I don't like using terms like "reverse sexism" and prefer misandry)

Privilege operates like... you want to go to a gig, but the venue has a policy that anyone wearing a suit automatically goes to the front of the queue and gets let in first, no matter how many other people are queuing. If you're not wearing a suit, you're out of luck, you have to go to the back of the really long-ass annoying queue and wait for so long that by the time you get in, all of the good seats are taken and you end up standing way at the back behind a column. You've got so used the idea that ppl in suits go straight to the front that you no longer even see the queue, you just think of it as deserved, because hey, it's always been this way, and if those other people really wanted to get in first, they should just bootstrap themselves into suits.

Now imagine that one time, you turn up and you're not wearing a suit. And the bouncer says "nope, go to the back of the queue." And you kick up a stink going "don't you know who I am!?!" And you scream and howl and complain because you don't get to go in first, and what's more, people in actual ~blue jeans~ are being let into the club ahead of you. So you insist "Hey! I am being discriminated against!"

When what has happened is that no, you are not being discriminated against, you're just being made to get in the queue with everyone else, and experience the same treatment that most people who are not in your category *always* experience, as a matter of course.

Now imagine that "the suit" is something you can't actually take off or put on - such as your gender, or your race, or your sexuality, or your class, etc. etc. And "the cool club" is actually "decent jobs, university, media representation, seats on yr government, even dumb shit like 'being Excelsiored on ILX' etc. etc." And that bouncer is the whole package of engrained Racism, Sexism, structural privilege, etc.

I'm sure that most progressive type people already kinda grok this, so again, apologies if I'm SPLAINING stuff you all already know, but I'm just realising now how much I chuck these words around without ever clarifying what I mean by them.

But that assumption - that one automatically gets to go to the front of the "expert" and "taken seriously" queue because one is male, even when talking about the very *different* experiences of females - is what gives SPLAINING its teeth and raises it from just annoying to actually A Problem.

i love the word "mansplaining"; it's hilarious and i hear it in my head a lot since i encountered it and i always know exactly what it means. men are encouraged to be authorities and a lot of men get their egos groomed thusly and many times the most non-threatening way to perform this is in front of a kind-hearted pretty woman; if she complies (feigned or not), automatic ego stroke. when it isn't insidious it's merely pathetic, like a dog chasing a frisbee. i think a lot of women play with this to their advantage, which whatever, some men never learn.

me and my partner have a good friend and over time i've come to see just how much i do this! she's very funny and sort of forgiving about it in the end, but i try not to do it anymore because it's condescending and gross but it's also dishonest and disrespectful to myself as well. i'd rather be always learning -- by myself and with others -- than declaring myself an authority on something.

xpost

one rule of thumb for me personally is that if i'm explaining/explicating/talking about something with somebody, it has to be of benefit to me first before it can be of benefit to the person i'm having the conversation with. i'm explaining myself, i'm not explaining something to somebody. it allows me to focus on the topic at hand and the other person talking about it and helps keep my ego out of the picture.

haha i didn't explain that very well