Omorka's Lair

Content warning: several of these are NSFW and they all have sexism in them. There's also some homophobia in the next-to-last one.

Professional porn actress Stoya has two posts on harassment at conventions and street harassment at her Twitter. Money quote (so to speak) from the first one: "Let me remind you that in a room of pornography fans, who have actually seen me with a dick in my mouth and who can buy a replica of my vagina in a can or box, I am treated with far more respect than I am walking down the street."

Branded tells us that fat acceptance, especially for women, is a plot on the part of the 1% to sell more fast food. MovieBob tells you why else not to see it at the Escapist.

Santiago Ortiz put together a scatterplot of male editors vs. female editors of Wkipedia, for a selection of pages on various topics. Note that the scales are not the same - the x-axis (male) is by 10s, and the y-axis (female) is by ones. The gray line on the left is the parity line. Apparently, Weird Al's viewpoint character is not only "White & Nerdy," but also most likely male.

Only partially about gender issues, mostly making fun of Rick Santorum, but if you haven't read Jim Wright's "Also, Nazis!" column at Stonekettle Station yet, you should.

And Io9 has an article about the state of harassment & sexism at various geek gatherings (ReaderCon, TAM, and DefCon are the three focal points). I haven't read the comments; could someone braver than I tell me how many of them are variations on "Why is this here and not on Jezebel?"

This was pretty damn powerful. Has some cussing, so probably NSFW:

( Guante's 10 Responses To the Phrase 'Man Up' Behind The Cut )

If you'd rather just read it, there's a link to the text here, but I really do recommend that you watch it, as it loses some impact without the intonation.

One of the skills tested by the various state-level high school English Language Arts exams - previously, in Texas, the TAKS tests; now, the STAAR tests and end-of-course exams - is the ability to identify the main character of a written story or excerpt. I don't think it's too strong to say that if you can't do that, then you probably shouldn't be graduated from high school.

So why has the historical reading of Genesis 38 focused on Onan, of all people? He's in all of three verses of the darn thing! The story has two main characters, and he's not even one of them! The two main characters are Judah and Tamar.

Is it mean of me to suggest that the reason Onan gets so much attention is because one of those main characters is (a) a woman who (b) uses sex to get her way, and (c) not only doesn't get punished for it, she becomes an ancestress of King David, and thus (in Christian myth) of Jesus Christ?

( Some high-school level literary analysis Behind The Cut )

MovieBob hits it out of the park twice in a row.

So, some dominionist dope gave his wedding guests a letter explaining why the wedding ceremony might look a little strange. Namely, he feels that a "biblical marriage" not only does not include any vows, but in fact is an "unbreakable arangement between [her husband] and her father." Her consent doesn't enter into it, and in fact seems to be regarded as undesirable

Someone by the handle of "Not John Norman" nails it in one of the comments:

I think this is the first case I’ve seen where search-and-replace to change the references to be about John Norman’s Gor would cause it to make more sense.

Yes, I realize I'm about a week late on this, but it didn't cross my feed until someone retwitted a piece on this today.

Someone please tell me this jerkass at 38:00 is pulling an Andy Kaufman? Please? (The comment about the 5th Amendment at 42:05 - the hosts didn't know how to get control back from this guy, did they? Also, might be triggery; read the text below the video before playing.)

The Spouse's DJing event went off last night without too much in the way of issues. I enjoyed myself quite a bit, and it seemed like everyone except for a tiny handful of people did. We didn't break even - didn't even come close - which sucks a bit (y'all need to drink more, apparently; also, certain people *ahemBugcatchcough* need to not bogart the bartender when they're only buying one drink), but I think I'm much more concerned about that than the Spouse is. The upstairs and downstairs bartenders both seemed to dig the mix, as well; one of them stayed after his shift to talk about the equipment and ended up suggesting that they might be able to talk the owner into charging less, which would be cool if they come through on that.

Next time I need to make sure that (1) flyers happen at least a month in advance of the gig, and (2) I blank-invite my entire Facebook friendslist - that's 11 years of former students, most of whom are now old enough to drink.

Anyway, for those who missed it, here's the setlist for the evening. And, echoing the Spouse - thanks to the Phonogram author and artist, Kieron Gillen and Jamie McKelvie, for the inspiration. I think we're gonna keep doing this.

Get your classism/ableism/heteronormativity out of my feminism: Experience and "choice feminism".

Can we all just agree that the ways in which we respond to and resist the kyriarchy are myriad, and claiming that someone else's resistance is "wrong" when it isn't hurting you is denying them the reality of their lived experience? Yes, some choices are harmful, but the One Right True And Only Way is the kyriarchy's, not ours.

Interesting article about evolutionary psychology from Newsweek. Of course, anyone who ever read Sarah Blaffer Hrdy's Mother Nature knew the gist of this already. (Or sufficient amounts of Gould, but there the general academic food fight that tended to surround him might obscure things a bit.)

I particulary liked this quote:

But the evidence points toward something gender-neutral. Men and women have both evolved the ability to distinguish between behavior that portends abandonment and behavior that does not, and to get upset only at the former. Which behavior is which depends on the society.

For presumably obvious reasons.

So I haven't had much to say about Caster Semenya, mostly because organized athletics bores me silly and I figured it would end up just being a garden-variety steroids case, since her body doesn't look that different from the Chinese women swimmers who got busted for doping a while back.

Nope. Not only has it turned out otherwise, but the various sports organizations involved have behaved incredibly badly from beginning to end, including repeatedly confusing gender with biological sex and then apparently leaking the results to the press before informing the athlete herself.

So an intersex person weighed in on the controversy over at ThisIsDiversity.com. I particularly liked this bit:

What Caster's situation illustrates, from an intersex perspective, is that we exist. Dyadic sex is a myth--sex is a spectrum. Hormones, chromosomes, genitals, gonads--they are all arranged in many complex ways, and imposing a binary onto them is arbitrary. It's as arbitrary as saying all fruit is either sweet or sour. Sure, ripe cherries are sweet and ripe limes are sour, but most fruit gets its savor from both tastes, and some fruits balance at the tangy sweet-and-sour midpoint. You can measure all the fructose and ascorbic acid you want, scientifically. You can create a rule that divides all fruit into sweet and sour categories using precise measurements of sugars and acids. But that will not eliminate the fact that the experience of tasting fruit is complex, and that this complexity is what makes eating fruit delicious.

Hey, look, the food metaphor again.

( I gripe and make this All About Me again Behind The Cut )