Quickies
Quickies: Girl Scouts, lazy writing, measles, and the history of headstones
- Girl Scouts return $100K when donor demands it “not be used” for trans girls – “Council CEO Megan Ferland told the newspaper her decision wasn’t hard after that, though she was “very sad” to see discrimination possibly deny her troop resources. She wrote a note back to the donor, who she was careful not to name, saying she would not be accepting their money.”
- Rape scenes aren’t just awful, they’re lazy writing – “From reinforcing falsehoods about sexual violence to the objectification of women, here’s why that rape storyline is probably a bad idea, and a pretty uncreative one too.”
- One more source of air travel stress: Catching the measles – “For the second time in two years, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has confirmed that someone caught the measles by walking past an infected person in an airport.”
- On gravestone decorations – Hark! A Vagrant has a cartoon on one of my favorite bits of history, how the decorations on headstones changed as religious sentiment changed in early America. The paper she links to is well worth a read and go wander around an old New England cemetery if you ever have the chance.
Like they say on TV tropes, rape is the new dead parents. Another thing about rape is, okay, you give a character a motive, but if she’s a girl, does she need a special girl motive like rape? (And of course, male characters get ‘my girlfriend/sister/daughter/whatever was raped’, which removes her entirely from the storyline.) Or sometimes a character is a child of rape.
It’s easy to get infected in today’s world. And people forget that all those infections really were deadly a century ago.
Dear Anonymous Gift* Giver,
$100.000 to compromise our principles? Please. We make twice that much in cookie sales before breakfast, bitch.
Sincerely,
World Association of Girl Guides and Girl Scouts
*The strings attached to your “gift” make it seem more like extortion than a gift, FWIW.