from the comments
Kelsey Parker quoting an article from Foreign Policy:
As it turns out, Western advisors and researchers, and Western money, were among the forces that contributed to a serious reduction in the number of women and girls in the developing world. And today feminist and reproductive-rights groups are still reeling from that legacy.
The story begins in the mid-20th century, when several factors converged to make Western demographers worried about global population growth. Thanks to advances in public health, people were living longer than ever before. Projections released by the U.N. Population Division in 1951 suggested what the sum of all those extra years of life could be: Rapid population growth was on the horizon, particularly in the developing world. As pundits forecast a global “population explosion,” anxiety mounted in policy circles, and the population control movement that coalesced brought together everyone from environmentalists to McCarthyites. Viewed through a 1960s Beltway lens, mounting numbers of people meant higher rates of poverty, which in turn made countries more vulnerable to communism.
Read more here.
It’s a Girl!
It’s a Girl! is a documentary about the systematic killing and suppression of girls in South Asia and around the world.
In India, China and many other parts of the world today, girls are killed, aborted and abandoned simply because they are girls. The United Nations estimates as many as 200 million girls are missing in the world today because of this so-called “gendercide”.
Girls who survive infancy are often subject to neglect, and many grow up to face extreme violence and even death at the hands of their own husbands or other family members.
The war against girls is rooted in centuries-old tradition and sustained by deeply ingrained cultural dynamics which, in combination with government policies, accelerate the elimination of girls.
Speechless.
(via kottke)
image out of context
headline of the day
2 women share 1st kiss at US Navy ship’s return
Google Image Search: Carlo Mollino Polaroids
from the comments
And I should point out that the Lego Technic sets that I had as a kid are still actively developed, you just wouldn’t know it walking down the lego aisle at your local toy store.
And that brings up an even bigger point, which is that the internet has freed the long tail to go live in cheap ecommerce space, rather than cutthroat toy store shelves. If there’s a particular brick you need, there are official and unofficial places to get it. Whole communities of people online trade designs for their new transmission gearbox.
I’d argue that there’s never been a better time to get your kid interested in legos, male or female.
tweet of the day
“Today I think I’ll make some music for white people to do cunnilingus to.” —Miles Davis, 1959
— Scott Simpson (@scottsimpson) December 14, 2011
Keeping with a theme…
Enough with the “he just can’t seem to leave the seat down”. Why *can’t* there be a gender neutral position for that porcelain receptacle? Leaving it “lid down” means both men and women must take pains to be courteous. Discuss(t).
quote out of context
Activists say the name “unwanted,” which is widely given to girls across India, gives them the feeling they are worthless and a burden.
tweet of the day
Update: Point. Counterpoint.
Strut
Après lunch at the sub-urban lesbian bar. My dear friend Miss Mindy struts her stuff.
it’s complicated
From an article on literary, and other, deal-breakers in relationships, we get this insight into the complex male psyche:
Straight guys are often asked if they are “ass men” or “boob guys,” if they like skinny or curvy, if they prefer a big rack or a small rack, bush or no bush. And though it’s fun to claim allegiance to one camp or the other, I think the true answer is that we like attractive women who will sleep with us.
(via @tcarmody)
quote out of context
After collecting and weighing his own shavings every 24 hours, the author, who was living on a remote island, claimed his beard grew faster the day before he planned to visit the mainland, where his potential for making whoopee increased. “Even the presence of particular female company in the absence of intercourse, after a period of separation, usually caused an obvious increase in beard growth,” he wrote.
(thanks, Tim)
It was almost as if there was a secret world of pronouns that existed outside our awareness
COOK: What are some of the more unusual “texts” you have applied this technique to?
PENNEBAKER: Some of the more unusual texts have been my own. There is something almost creepy about analyzing your own emails, letters of recommendation, web pages, and natural conversations.
COOK: And what have you found?
PENNEBAKER: One of the most interesting results was part of a study my students and I conducted dealing with status in email correspondence. Basically, we discovered that in any interaction, the person with the higher status uses I-words less (yes, less) than people who are low in status. The effects were quite robust and, naturally, I wanted to test this on myself. I always assumed that I was a warm, egalitarian kind of guy who treated people pretty much the same.
I was the same as everyone else. When undergraduates wrote me, their emails were littered with I, me, and my. My response, although quite friendly, was remarkably detached — hardly an I-word graced the page. And then I analyzed my emails to the dean of my college. My emails looked like an I-word salad; his emails back to me were practically I-word free.
One of half a dozen subjects discussed in an interview with James Pennebaker, chair of the department of psychology at the University of Texas at Austin, on his work with the hidden world of pronouns.
(thanks, Andrew)
Quote out of context
Bert, who is fascinated by pigeons and gets easily upset
– Pete
”You got to have your very own broom!”
Betty Wright, just a few years back, performing her 1972 hit, The Clean-Up Woman.
Remembering Scott, 6
From Mark:
Remember those “basic skills” tests we took as TX school children (they were probably administered everywhere) where you’d bubble in the answers? Scott told me that he read the first question, then bubbled in the rest of the test booklet in a design that resembled an eyelet dress fabric that he liked.
from the comments
The “gentlemen” in the cubicles near me have been talking about how they could beat each other in various sports for the last couple of weeks.
Recently they’ve been talking about running a 40 – throwing around times like 4.8 and 4.6. They’ve decided to have a race next week. One of them has declined because, “do you know how long it takes me to warm up?”
They’re moving to a different part of the building at the end of the day today, so I won’t get the hear about the results of their race.
Las Reinas Chulas: “Que Suave Patria”
Please don’t turn aside take a look even if no hablas español (not even dumbass texan spanish).
¡Las Reinas Chulas reglan!
Dozens of plastic foam heads rain onto the stage. Four drug traffickers in fringed jackets and sparkly pink cowboy hats bat them into the audience with toy AK-47s. All the while, the cast croons, “Let them slit our throats, let them pack us up . . . let them not ask any questions, let them not investigate.”
This is cabaret, Mexico style. Las Reinas Chulas, or the Beautiful Queens, parody drug violence in a show the women first produced in 2005 and that still fills nightclubs around Mexico, including a performance in the tourist town of Taxco this weekend.
a clip from the documentary
from the comments
Hey, I’ve never been an honorary man. I have a guy card — big difference. It was revoked for a time, so I keep it up my ass now. With my grandfather’s watch.
Even Ancient Men Seemed to Like Their Man Caves
I didn’t know whether to go with a headline of the day or a quote out of context with this one, so you get both. Which means, I guess, you get neither.
“This is strong and beautiful science,” Laitman said. “It at least is giving us a glimpse that some of the behaviors we see today have roots going into the past. It may well be in our lineage that [males] liked their man caves.”
Then Sharp added more, something sinister. He told of the dragging sounds he heard on the night that Benjamin Fink moved out of the house, and he told of the strange holes that were being dug in the back yard. And he told of the awful stench that came from one of the rooms upstairs.
Like most cities, Sacramento had a homeless problem. Many of the street residents were suffering from mental illness, or they were alcoholics and drug addicts. Judy Moise was a street councillor working for an organization called Volunteers of America. Her job was to make certain that the homeless of Sacramento had help, and received the benefits and services that they were entitled to and needed. One of the people she helped was 51-year-old Alvaro Montoya, whom everyone called Bert. He was a mentally disabled schizophrenic who spent much of the time having loud arguments in Spanish with the voices that were in his head. Bert was a gentle man, almost childlike, and no danger to anyone. Living on the streets was not good for him. He sometimes slept at a nearby detox centre, but Moise felt he should have somewhere better. Luckily, there was such a place, a boarding house at 1426 F Street. It was popular with social workers as they knew that no-one would be turned away. Some of the people who lived there had many problems, such as James Gallop, a 62-year-year-old man who was suffering from a brain tumour. There was also 64-year-old Dorothy Miller, a long term alcoholic. There were Betty Palmer and Leona Carpenter, both 78 years old. They were unable to fend for themselves. No matter what your problems, no matter what your mental state, your infirmities, or your addictions, all were welcome at 1426 F Street. The boarding house was run by a white-haired landlady in her seventies, who was known for her charitable work, donating money and clothing to the needy, and employing paroled prisoners from the local halfway house to do repairs and other work that was needed. She also knew how to work the system and was very good at getting more money in benefits for her boarders. Her name was Dorothea Puente.
Also, Dorothea Puente was a serial killer.
(via the browser)
I’d buy that app.
Fuck it I’ve heard enough, I’m going to make some killer android app that listens to every word you hear and uses Google’s voice recognition shit and some semantic networks and logistic regression crap and fucking starts chirping at you whenever it detects someone is hitting on you, make it look like an incoming call from captain obvious or something. It make take a while to accumulate enough training data to detect every subtle hint but it should pick this one up pretty easily. #
One of the 5,661 comments on From Male Redditors: What are some hints females gave you, but you didn’t get them until after you had your chance?
Read more
The Beating of Chrissy Polis
My stomach is staging a revolt. I’m in a foul mood and reading about the beating of Chrissy Polis, a trans-gender woman who was beaten in the dining area of a McDonald’s Restaurant in Maryland, certainly didn’t improve it. The thing that pisses me off about that is the fact that I just happened to hear about this while reading about something else. It wasn’t in the news at all.
Like Bint Alshamsa, I hate what happened to Chrissy Polis, too. And I just learned of it from a TG friend seeking to talk with me about how an awful lot of men who profess to be into TG women want them to be both virgins and hos.
As India once said, más or menos, “Not to go all Women’s Studies 101 on y’all.”
But.
