Quickies
Quickies: The Sassiness of Justice Sotomayor, Women in Science, and Clueless White Dudes
- Jennifer Lawrence Calls Photo Hacking a “Sex Crime” – It would be nice if the headline was more like, “Everyone Else Calls a Blatant Sex Crime a “Photo Leak.”
- Anita Sarkeesian explains the most “radical” way to support women online – “The founder of Feminist Frequency uses her own harassment to dissect the way women are harassed online” (Video link.)
- Nickelodeon Nostalgia Superfan Reveals Himself to Be Clueless White Guy – From the interview: “You might not like this or care, but it’s very hard to be a man in the publishing world. No one talks about that. My agent: woman. My editor: woman. My publicist: woman. The most successful genre is young adult novels — 85% of which are written by women. That discussion doesn’t really come up when it’s the other way around. It is 2014 now. It’s not 1995. Political correctness needs to change.” It’s soooo hard to be a white dude, you guys!!
- How Justice Sotomayor Is ‘Busting’ The Supreme Court’s Steady Rhythms – “The salsa scene is of a piece with Sotomayor’s sometimes confrontational style, according to the author. Sotomayor ‘can get in their faces’ during oral arguments, she can ‘cut off’ fellow justices, and when the court convenes in its private conferences to discuss cases, she doesn’t ‘soft-pedal anything,’ Biskupic says.” I like her style.
- Etsy’s Trying to Fix Tech’s Women Problem. Why Aren’t You? – “It seems unfair to make women parse the reasons why these things keep happening. Male technologists aren’t being asked about the gender gap unless they’ve just been called out for sending an insensitive tweet, or Valleywag has unearthed a series of their fratty emails from college. I know women in tech are, on some level, as sick of this conversation as the rest of us. But even let’s set the controversies aside for a moment, step back and ask the basic question: ‘My God, how did we get here?’ “
- New study confirms that respiratory patients benefit from using the Lung Flute – “Manufactured by Buffalo, New York-based Medical Acoustics, the Lung Flute requires users to simply blow into it. Doing so causes an integrated reed to vibrate, producing low-frequency sound waves which travel down into the patients’ lungs. There, the waves break up the mucus, allowing it to subsequently be cleared when the user forcefully exhales.” Science!
- These Women Should Win a Nobel Prize in Physics – “It’s been more than 50 years. There are plenty of excellent candidates.”
I’m going to interpret the disabling of comments on the Sarkeesian video as proof that she is skin-bleached lizard person responsible for using chemtrails to convince people sexism is real. That’s far more plausible than this nonsense about rape and death threats.
I really do admire her resiliency. Her delivery, in spite of all the crap she’s had to put up with, is improving every time I see her speak.
Why would anyone listen to someone writes a book and calls it an Oral History.
It’s almost like he doesn’t know how to word.
Jennifer Lawrence’s message is undermined by Vanity Fair’s insistence that she be shown half naked in a pool.
Not her call i realize, it just bugged me.
About YA novels, Christopher Paolini is male, no? And he basically just rewrote Star Wars in Middle Earth.
Ugh seriously. I actually liked his first novel, even though I could clearly see how much he borrowed from other fantasy. But that movie…I really wanted to like it despite the bad reviews. Nowadays, when an interesting-looking movie comes out, but it gets bad reviews, I remind myself not to get “Eragon’d” again.
mrmisconception, In what way does consenting to have photos taken of her undermine the message that sex crimes and theft of personal property are not OK?
She can choose to show as much skin as she likes to whomever she likes. This isn’t a problem with her being in photos showing skin. This is about a sex crime. What part of consent is hard for you to parse?
I’m not surprised someone called me out on this, I’ve been thinking about it as I’ve gone about my business today and realized that I had fallen into slut-shaming. Shame on me, I was absolutely wrong and was coming here with a mea culpa half expecting someone to beat me to it.
I am getting much better at policing my own thoughts and banishing this sort of thing, this was a definite misstep on my part and you are absolutely right.
I’m sorry to everyone.
Knee-jerk reactions happen to me too, and at least you were able to realize what was wrong with your reaction.
One thing that struck me about her interview was when she mentioned how some of her friends and loved ones had looked at her photos. What exactly was their train of thought? I love her for speaking out, even though she was definitely not obligated to.
I think that photo is fierce, anyway. I think your description of her being “half naked” doesn’t really describe the photograph at all. There is cleavage, but that’s it, and it’s her face that’s the center of the photo. She’s staring right at the camera/audience. And the hair style is fierce. The whole photo is pretty fierce, actually. It’s sexy, yes, but it’s also very strong. Which describes her pretty well, don’t you think?
Oh absolutely, I liked the photo and now that I’ve thought better of it I believe I was not only wrong but had it backward. The fact that she gave consent to this photo (which you are right is not that racy) actually underlines just what was wrong about the theft/sexual assault, that is the issue is not nudity or sex at all but rather lack of consent plain and simple.
Thanks and good for you.
It’s a process that never ends. I try and fail and try again. It’s all we can do.
That’s like saying that having consensual sex undermines the message that rape is wrong.
…which is something misogynists actually say so…not surprised to see it applied to other sex crimes.
You are absolutely right. The difference is consent.
The one thing that made me wince with Jennifer Lawrence’s comments was the statement, “I can’t believe we live in that kind of world.”
Wouldn’t it be nice to live in a world where when we delete a photo that we own, our service provider didn’t secretly keep a copy of that photo in the cloud (“backup”), and hide behind a “user agreement” to justify this.
Wouldn’t it be nice to live in a world where if someone hacks that cloud, steals your photos, and then shares them without your consent was universally decried as a criminal rather than the suggestion that “She was asking for it by taking the photos in the first place? What did she expect? ”
It would be nice, but that isn’t the world we live in. It hasn’t been for some time, privacy isn’t dying, it’s dead.
Yeah, but we don’t just have to accept that that’s how things are. That this is the world we live in isn’t an unavoidable fact, it’s a consequence of a whole series of choices that we, collectively, have made. And we could choose to make different choices. When you take the time to step back and really look at it, it does seem kind of shocking how quickly and readily we’ve chosen to give up our privacy. That’s how I would read the statement, “I can’t believe we live in that kind of world,” anyway; I don’t know if that’s what Jennifer Lawrence meant by it.
[quote]Wouldn’t it be nice to live in a world where when we delete a photo that we own, our service provider didn’t secretly keep a copy of that photo in the cloud (“backup”), and hide behind a “user agreement” to justify this.[/quote]
In fairness to the service provider, they like get hundreds of calls a day featuring the same ‘uhh.. I deleted something by accident and need you to restore it’ demand. Archiving, at least for a period of time, is good service. That their security was breached was a separate problem.
This is the second book he’s published. Trigger warning, from the description I think he’s written what is probably the best book ever written on the subject of nice guys and the experience of trying to reconcile wanting to have sex with a woman while also wanting to be nice to them based on the incredibly shitty script that many guys are working off of.