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I don't feel like this is a point I've ever had to be explicit about before but I think it's worth being explicit about: I think antifeminism is a really stupid ideology. I think feminism is a massively important political project, like one of the top 2 or 3 that have ever existed. It's so blindingly obvious that the core of the feminist project is justified and desirable.

Like any big-tent ideology/movement, sometimes it shits the bed. Radfems, 2014 Buzzfeed bullshit, whatever. I think the whole second wave was pretty deeply infused with bioessentialist nonsense. But if you're looking at feminism as a whole and writing it off for these reasons I think you're... well, either ulteriorly motivated or just kind of intellectually unvirtuous. "Intellectually unvirtuous" is a broader notion I have that I won't elaborate fully in this post, but it's like. Well unfortunately the average person is not intellectually virtuous at all.

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if leftists are talking about "misandry" on twitter it probably has something to do with the large fringe of online feminists who have loudly & openly identified as misandrists for about a decade. or maybe they're all secret incel double misogynists i guess, sure why not lol

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I agree that avoiding mansplaining — which requires finding out if your conversation partner already knows the thing you're explaining — is going to be harder for autistic people. But I don't think that the "I hate men" comments I hear are motivated by mansplaining specifically. If that's true in your experience, then yeah I can totally understand how that would be an excuse to hate autistic people.

Hating men is a loser move anyway but so many man haters are also basically just using it as a smokescreen to get away with hating autistic people

#autism #gender #mansplaining

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Like, is there already a mathblr community? Should there be?

I have access to Communities; does anyone have ideas? I don't really understand what they are.

#mathblr

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I have access to Communities; does anyone have ideas? I don't really understand what they are.

#hellsite my beloved #communities

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OK, this is about what I was expecting but still helpful, thank you!

how many people feel like they are 'settling' in their choice of spouse? I want to get married* some day and it seems like I should try to find an ideal partner, but what happens if nobody measures up to the standard in my head**?

* I don't actually care about the institution of marriage; I want to care deeply about someone and have them care deeply for me, and I want us to be physically affectionate with each other, and I want us to build a life together. Romance and marriage seem to be the best vehicles for this in the society in which I live.

** based on real experiences

#personal

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Hmm, there are probably people out there like this. But the "I hate men" remarks I've heard in my IRL social circles seem to make most sense as a sort of social signal that one is either (a) frustrated with sexism or (b) upset by some (often gendered) bad thing a man did.

Neither of these really seem to be about autistic people? (a) could be, if social awkwardness is misinterpreted as sexism, but I find (b) to be more common, and things like sexual assault don't seem particularly autistic to me. I do think that certain norms that mid-2010s online-ish liberal feminists wanted to implement can disproportionately impact autistic people, but that's different from "I hate men"-style rhetoric.

@feotakahari, how did the autistic woman describe her "bad man"? Most "I hate men"-rhetoric that I hear is either very general or prompted by a specific action, rather than describing a particular type of person, so maybe that's the disconnect here.

Hating men is a loser move anyway but so many man haters are also basically just using it as a smokescreen to get away with hating autistic people

#gender #autism

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It seems like it's at least decently likely that Trump wins. Biden's even less popular than Trump, but some people think this is partly caused by left-wingers who will vote for him anyway (they disapprove because he's not left-wing enough, but will still vote for him because he's more left-wing than Trump). I'm personally skeptical of this; probably some of those people will just not vote at all.

Do we think trump is gonna win? I really don't want trump to win.

#politics #america the beautiful

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Yeah, this makes sense. Both are suggesting it's OK to commit violence against some group of people that basically everyone agrees is bad, but whose definition is ambiguous and can be manipulated for rhetorical gain. The big complaints I hear* about "punch a nazi" rhetoric are that:

it normalizes political violence, and

the definition of who is a "nazi" is unclear, and can include a wide array of political opponents who don't actually agree with nazi or neo-nazi ideology (e.g. random right-wingers, people who are racist or nationalist but not nazis, or at worst just people who criticize you like the Twitter noodle cookbook lady).

Similar, but not identical, arguments can be made about "pedos get the woodchipper" rhetoric:

it either supports the death penalty (if it's shorthand for "the state should kill child molesters") or normalizes vigilante justice/lynch mobs (if it's shorthand for "you, personally, should kill child molesters"), and

the definition of who is a "pedo" is unclear, and can include a wide array of political and cultural opponents who haven't sexually abused children (e.g. teachers with the wrong political opinions, people who support medical gender transition for children, people who support more sex-ed courses in schools, or at worst just LGBTQ people).

There's also the question of whether those who are sexually attracted to children but haven't acted on it count as "pedos," although the question of whether to do violence against these people is not nearly as harmful to political discourse as the other groups I mentioned.

*I don't necessarily agree.

"pedos get the woodchipper" is just "punch a nazi" for the right

prove me wrong

#politics #rhetoric #discourse

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I don't think it really "means" anything, but I think it's kind of interesting that a lot of human societies have been quite squeamish about sex—in particular viewing it as a worldly pleasure which is gross, sinful, or unvirtuous to engage in—while generally not feeling squeamish about eating in the same way.

I think this is interesting because, conceptually, sex is actually pretty tame. It is (or at least should be) pleasurable for both parties, it's connected with both romantic love and the creation of new life (things which people generally valorize), etc. Obviously I understand the practical reasons why cultures might frown on unrestrained expression of sexuality in a world without birth control, but on a purely conceptual level sex seems pretty wholesome all around.

On the other hand, eating is rather disturbing as an idea, isn't it? Eating necessarily involves killing—even eating plants. As heterotrophs we literally cannot eat anything without ending life in order to do it. And of course most people now and throughout history have eaten meat, which means that eating involves slaughter. It's a gruesome thing; the pleasure we take from food is intimately and inherently tied to death. Eating is an act of destruction which is necessary to nourish the physical body. Surely this should be regarded, by the sorts of people inclined to the idea, as the greatest symbol of the fallen nature of the material world as compared to the spiritual. Surely it is hunger and not lust that should be the archetype of sinful material desire.

While ascetics of various backgrounds do seem to have mentioned gluttony (it is after all one of the seven deadly sins), my impression is that usually lust is a much greater concern for them. Why? Because lust is more tempting, a greater threat? I don't think so. I think it's because food is more tempting. Because you can go a lifetime without sex if you actually decide to, but a few days without food and your brain will basically shut down your capacity for higher reasoning and make you eat. Even when desire for food is railed against, it is generally merely excessive desire (gluttony), and not, as with lust, desire-at-all (hunger). I think only the most hardcore Buddhist monks take umbrage with hunger. Because lust is small potatoes; hunger has us all in its thrall. No matter how pacifistic we think ourselves to be, hunger drives us to kill and kill and kill. Isn't there a little more inherent horror in that than in, uh, people having sex?

At least the Jains seem to have taken the inherent-horror-in-eating stuff seriously.

#this is really good!! #art #writing

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I'm an apostrophe fan*, but this is an interesting argument.

*possibly just because I was meticulously taught all the rules for how to use them when I was growing up! I hardly ever miss the apostrophe when writing in Swedish, which lacks it.

#english #language

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You can also use the three-dot menu to mute all notifications from the post, which is what I usually do in the rare event that one of my posts gets >100 notes. I think the zillion-note complaint is a relic of before either of these features existed? maybe people don't know, or else they're just trying to bait people into interacting...

zero respect when people get all "oh nooooo i sure hope this post doesn't get a zillion noootes teehee, stop reblogging I can't have this be what people remember me for 🥺🤭" all coy and shit when the option to disable reblogs is right there. strangle that post in its crib to prove you're not a poser.

#I think this is generally available and not just an XKit thing? #hellsite my beloved

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#just saw something about how men are genetically predisposed to enjoy it when other men are mean to them #and there's lots of garden-variety Internet misogyny too

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My parents had pretty strong feelings about my hair when I was a young kid, and for no real benefit in adulthood. I have curly hair, which my mom doesn't and my dad sort of has—but he kept his hair quite short when I was a kid, so didn't provide much input. (I suspect I inherited curly hair from my mom's sister.) That meant that growing up, my parents had no idea how to take care of my hair, and tried for instance to brush it dry when it would get tangled, which was really painful and mostly made things worse.

As a kid, I also wasn't able to style or cut my hair how I wanted, but I'm not sure how much of that was because my parents would've stopped me versus me not being able to articulate my aesthetic preferences.

Ok, so here’s a thing. I talk a lot about autonomy and freedom for children, and a lot of times that comes up in really radical ways, dropping out of school, running away from home, *big life choices*.

But that’s not the only place where we curtail kids’ freedoms. Like, say a little girl’s getting a haircut and she wants to get half her head shaved so she looks like Natalie Dormer in The Hunger Games, like, first the barber’s going to look to the parent for permission (which is already fucked up) and then the parent’s almost certainly going to say no and tell the barber to trim a few inches off or whatever it is they think their hair should look like and…

What I’m getting at is that so many of the things we think we need to protect our kids from are *fucking harmless*. Shaving their heads, going to the supermarket in a spiderman costume, eating ketchup for dinner, these things are not going to seriously harm anyone. In so far as they are mistakes, they are mistakes that kids should be able to just make and gracefully recover from.

And I think the mindset here – that children need to present *normally* because otherwise what will people think of them, and what will people think of their parents – is *precisely* the same mindset that leads to abusive shit like “quiet hands” and ABA. That it doesn’t matter what they want, what’s good for their well-being, what matters is that they *look and act* “normally”.

Like it seems like there’s something akin to a curb-cut effect here? Where this mindset hurts developmentally disabled children more, a lot more, but maybe the most efficient thing to do is just to tear it out by the root, to criticize it wherever we see it? 

Like it’d be nice if we could just say, if they’re not hurting anyone, kids should be allowed to look and act the way they want to, they should be able to cut their own hair or flap or crossdress or refuse eye-contact or have cereal for dinner or not want to be touched and it should be the parent’s *responsibility* to fiercely defend their child’s right to do those things and set those boundaries against anyone who wants to give them shit for it, not to victim-blame and say no you can’t do those things because people will give me shit about it if you do.

#personal #hair #parenting

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If we object to the idea that “men are better,” it’s not that helpful to declare instead that “women are better.” It pits men and women against each other and sets up a prescriptive framework rather than a descriptive one.

(x + y: A Mathematician's Manifesto for Rethinking Gender by Eugenia Cheng)

#gender #eugenia cheng

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#svenska #video #laugh rule #Youtube

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Arghh, why are email addresses with hyphens in them such a problem??

#the internet