War in a Dress

Plot twist: Romney applies for unemployment tomorrow

If you refer to women as “females” you’re already showing that you ain’t shit

femalestruggle:

crankyskirt:

(example)

Like, get it together. At least try to obscure the fact that your argument will be a horseshit sandwich with bumboclaat dressing by changing up the vocab a little.

Oh, really? Female is a bad word now, too? How about female women? is that preferable and unoffensive after all, being female is totally gross and offensive.

Is talking about my period also being exclusionary? 

I hate to ask this, not because I’m afraid of being rude but because I’m pretty sure I already know the answer, but are you Black and in the States? Because I was referring to a specific way the word is used in the vernacular form by some Black men (and other men of color) in the US speaking about Black women (and other women of color) in the US. So unless that’s the context you’re coming from, I think you’re getting up in arms about commentary that wasn’t discussing a group in which you claim membership.

TL;DR maybe this isn’t the convo for you, and doesn’t concern you, your period, or your insular construction of language. Please leave.

Tumblr is fucking funny. (Or, you can take that “you betcha” bullshit and blow it out your ass.)

My insomniac behind wakes up at 3:30, logs into Tumblr (because, of course, that’s just what you do when you first wake up), and finds out that from one little post, people have concluded that I’m a Palinesque anti-intellectual.

Holy shit, that’s amazing. Seriously, those of you who took that from my post, thank you. Thank you so much for proving my point. Because if people who have less formal education than you, but more of a sense of how privilege works in the world, were able to understand my goddamn post without footnotes, and y’all couldn’t figure out from my Tumblr that “anti-intellectual” and “Sarah Palin” are a couple of the least accurate epithets you could use for me (and trust, there are plenty out there for queer dark-skinned black feminine people - you don’t even have to be all that creative to come up with a string of them), you are probably exactly the kind of “life of the mind”-having shithead I was talking about in the first place.

That you managed to miss the point even with the original post’s tags attached (including “cross-class fluency” and “codeswitch or go home”) stuns me - the irony of your reading comprehension fail is making me giggle (as is this mug of cheap wine I’m drinking).

But since that’s what I’m being called, I’ll concede. I am a fucking anti-intellectual. Because if being an intellectual means engaging in buzzword-heavy circle jerks with other doctoral candidates, coupled with a striking inability to communicate with the majority of muhfuckas walking the earth, then all that cherished book learning has diminished the intellectual’s capacity to be a human being. Or did folks forget that the language of the academy is, in a lot of cases, used specifically to shut out those who can’t afford formalized higher education? Even a cursory glance at US history, or of the history of other colonized nations, reveals that there have been brilliant informally-educated people with valuable contributions to make since nationhood became a trend, whose contributions were diminished in their time because they were too dark or too female, and higher education at the time was a wealthy white men’s game.

I realize that for those of you who’ve already decided I’m a neocon book-burner in disguise, the above rant isn’t going to change your opinion. Plus I’m not at all willing to wave around degrees to prove my worth and qualification for this discussion (I’ve had people pull that shit in meatspace with me… fuck that noise). Just in case you need a straight cis white dude with Ivy League wallpaper to translate what the fuck I’m saying (and fuck you for that, by the way), I’ll refer you to this essay from American Scholar by William Deresiewicz, “The Disadvantages of an Elite Education.” An excerpt:

It didn’t dawn on me that there might be a few holes in my education until I was about 35. I’d just bought a house, the pipes needed fixing, and the plumber was standing in my kitchen. There he was, a short, beefy guy with a goatee and a Red Sox cap and a thick Boston accent, and I suddenly learned that I didn’t have the slightest idea what to say to someone like him. So alien was his experience to me, so unguessable his values, so mysterious his very language, that I couldn’t succeed in engaging him in a few minutes of small talk before he got down to work. Fourteen years of higher education and a handful of Ivy League degrees, and there I was, stiff and stupid, struck dumb by my own dumbness. “Ivy retardation,” a friend of mine calls this. I could carry on conversations with people from other countries, in other languages, but I couldn’t talk to the man who was standing in my own house.

It’s not surprising that it took me so long to discover the extent of my miseducation, because the last thing an elite education will teach you is its own inadequacy. As two dozen years at Yale and Columbia have shown me, elite colleges relentlessly encourage their students to flatter themselves for being there, and for what being there can do for them. The advantages of an elite education are indeed undeniable. You learn to think, at least in certain ways, and you make the contacts needed to launch yourself into a life rich in all of society’s most cherished rewards. To consider that while some opportunities are being created, others are being cancelled and that while some abilities are being developed, others are being crippled is, within this context, not only outrageous, but inconceivable.

Point of all my TL;DR - book smart ain’t shit if you can’t talk to people. You want people to respect book learning? Talk to them like you respect their minds, even if they weren’t shaped in a classroom. Otherwise, go sit your ass down somewhere.

Sometimes, you have to just laugh. Or sigh. Or say “WTF?!” to yourself.

It’s orientation season, which means we’re busy here at my school, helping out the newbies.

I just had an interaction with an, er, interesting-looking young person. Tall (well over six feet), very blond, blue-eyed kid with a pronounced Boston accent… wearing a red/green/gold/black Rasta tam and a T-shirt with Bob Marley smoking a joint.

If there ever was a sign that it’s the end of the goddamn day, that dude was it.

Oh, Jane: my sort-of-but-not-really review of xoJane.com

I didn’t really read Sassy much (though I did check out a couple of issues, for most of its run I was younger than the target demographic) but I did read Jane. I liked some of the feature stories, and it seemed less self-consciously feminine (not by a lot, but still) and more savvy than its alternatives like Marie Claire and Glamour. Jane Pratt the editor, however, came across as irritatingly self-centered - regular bouts of name-dropping, brags about super-chic excursions to hip resorts and film festivals, what have you. I skipped the editor’s letters and read the rest, until the editorial quality (in my opinion, that is) went downhill and Jane just got boring to me.

So when I heard that there was a new project coming out by Jane Pratt, I wasn’t exactly jumping for joy. My first thought was, “Here is something that I am going to hate. I’ll try to maintain an open mind - no, for real! I promise! - but when all’s said and done, I’ll probably hate this.”

I’ll start with the positive: Pratt made her name into a brand that people follow, for better or for worse. Sassy readers happily followed her to Jane because they dug the promise of the product, and I imagine that, despite the years-long absence of Jane from the magazine market, people will respond to this website (webzine? is that even a phrase that people use anymore) similarly. Not a fan of the player, but I can’t hate the game.

And now the rest. Selected article titles from the ‘Tech’ section (heavy use of the finger quotes of irony around ‘Tech’): “I Can’t Date You Unless You Have A Smartphone.” “My iPod Nano Is Just Too Small.” “Ask Natalie: Why Do People Keep Stealing My Dang Laptop Chargers?” It’s not like I was expecting Slashdot or even Gizmodo, but this shit is insulting. It’s not that far north on the slippery slope from some craptastic “pink is for girls” filler article about pretty decals for one’s laptop or Android apps that’ll get you The Guy.

By this point I figured I was just being picky (which is very like me). Whatever. So I click around, see some more innocuous-looking articles (nothing out of the realm of other Internet mags like The Awl, Thought Catalog, The Hairpin, etc.), and then come across this title:

I Spent Two Weeks In A Mental Institution, But Left With Better Hair
A nervous breakdown is no excuse not to condition.

Fucking wow. I sat there for a second thinking I was being pranked, because there was no way that this article could be as insensitive as the title indicated. And then I read the article - nope, contents exactly as advertised.

I think the first commenter on the article had a pretty damn good response:

Yes, I have been institutionalized, and it wasn’t in a highbrow Manhattan sanitarium. It was some 30 years ago in Denver and I (like everyone else there) was for the most part treated very poorly and condescendingly. I realize that people have different experiences in life, but I don’t see being institutionalized as anything close to “cute.” Believe me, the condition of my hair was nowhere close to a concern when I was in this craphole.

So that’s it, I guess. I’m over Jane Pratt. (To be fair, I was over her publications before and now I’m reminded of why.) To me, this replicates my relationship with the website Jezebel - after a while the stuff I was reading was full of so much fail that I questioned how much I valued my time after reading it. Gross.

And now off to read some Gizmodo. (Yes, it’s Gawker Media like Jezebel. I’m terrible.)