Within hours of my parents arriving in Seattle, my parents witnessed a pimp making a deal with a john by shouting a phone number and instructions out of his car while stuck in traffic on Broadway on Capitol Hill.
Me: …I swear that’s the first time I’ve seen that happen.
What else will they see on their adventure out of the Midwest? No one knows! Hopefully not any homeless people’s genitalia!
I feel like I should fight this, saying there’s only room for one internet meme to come out of Purdue…but it involves cute guys being stupid, so I can’t resist:
My thought of “And then they fell and snapped their necks” flitted away once I laughed at the guy hanging off the Amelia Earhart statue outside of the dorm I lived in for a year.
These videos crack me up. Not every dialect oddity applies to me since I grew up closer to Chicago, but it is pretty stereotypical for the rest of Indiana:
…I do this all the time. I always have to edit “anyways” down to “anyway” when I’m blogging. Mumble “prolly” instead of “probably.” And I learned from this video that it’s Meijer, not Meijer’s. Dammit.
Pop is the correct way, not soda. … and I have to try really, really hard not to pronounce “milk” as “melk.” I’ve given up pronouncing eggs correctly – they will forever be aygs for me.
Damn youuuuu Indiana!
A lot of people, male and female, are often afraid of calling out instances of sexism. They don’t want to be perceived as oversensitive or troublemakers, or they’re afraid of angry backlash.
I say “they,” because I obviously don’t have a problem with blowing up the whole internet in order to call out sexism.
But is this an accurate representation of how men respond to accusations of sexism? One study says otherwise:
In a recent study, conducted by Robyn Mallett and Dana Wagner at Loyola University Chicago, male participants were teamed with a female partner (who was actually a confederate in the experiment). Their assignment was to read a set of moral or ethical dilemmas and discuss together how to deal with each situation, including one in which a nurse discovers that a hospital patient has been given tainted blood.
During their discussion, the female confederate confronted her male partner either for sexism (i.e., having assumed the nurse in the story was female, which every male participant did) or in a gender-neutral way (i.e., disagreeing with the male’s suggested solution to the dilemma).
As expected, men had much stronger reactions to being told that their remark was sexist than they did to mere disagreement. But the reactions weren’t what you might expect. The men accused of sexism smiled and laughed more, appeared more surprised, gestured more often and with greater energy, and were more likely to try to justify or apologize for their remark. But they did not react with more hostility or anger – in fact, they reported liking the female partner in both conditions equally well, and were generally pleasant across the board.
At first, that sounds great. Yay, men who were called out for the sexism smiled more and didn’t respond with hostility! Time to go politely tell MRAs how they’re wrong!
But I have a couple of concerns about the study. For one, their sexist remark…isn’t that sexist. Assuming a nurse is female is based on pure probability rather than assumptions about gender roles. The vast, vast majority of nurses are female, therefore a nurse in a story is much more likely to be female. It’s not like 50% of nurses are actually male, but it’s still perceived as women’s work.
This may seem like nitpicking, but I have a feeling men would react differently depending on what type of sexism is being addressed. It’s easy for a man to go “Whoops, yes, I suppose some nurses are male.” But it’s hard for a man to go “Whoops, yes, I suppose I do have (insert any type of male privilege I’ve never thought about and vehemently disagree with here).”
I’d also like to see results from how the men felt long after the exercise concluded. Were they just acting nicer when they were in immediate social interaction with the woman? Was in genuine? Did they turn around and start telling their buddies about how she’s a stupid oversensitive bitch, or did they really change their minds about sexism?
And finally, I’d love to see this repeated in the setting of blog comments or a forum. What happens when you put the internet between two people, and you have the drug of anonymity in your system? I know it’s anecdotal evidence, but I don’t exactly see people skipping together through e-fields of daisies after an accusation of sexism.
More science! We need more science!
A friend of mine who’s in med school is looking for some good, credible resources on non-religious arguments for being pro-choice. Obviously the logical move was to ask a feminist atheist blogger, but I’ve failed him since I 1) Live in Blog Land, where good, credible resources are elusive creatures, and 2) Have a horrible memory and suck at recalling good things I have read.
But I know non-religious, humanist arguments for being pro-choice are out there. I could spend a couple hours writing a huge post myself on my own humanist arguments for being pro-choice. Oooooorrrrr I can be lazy since I know I have an intelligent well-read readership who likes to help me out (especially when I suck up to them by saying how intelligent and well-read they are). So what do you recommend? What are some good articles or books that address this subject? And I suppose blog posts are fine if they’re from a more reputable individual.
And if you just want to throw in your own godless 2 cents on the abortion issue, consider this an open thread. I’ll be hiding in the corner behind some bullet proof glass.
A must watch for all of those straights who have been brainwashed into their heterosexual lifestyle:
Spoiler Alert: This post talks about last night’s episode of True Blood. Read at your own risk if you haven’t watched it yet.
For those of you who don’t know, I’m a bit of a True Blood fanatic. It’s a guilty pleasure. I love the campiness, the puns, the one liners, the cliff hangers, and all of gratuitous sex and beautiful people (Mmmm Eric, Alcide, and Jessica). All of this entertainment is enough to outweigh the sometimes frustratingly bad plot, Sookie’s dues ex machina lightning fingers, and, well, Sookie herself.
But sometimes I overanalyze things, because that’s what I do. Like when, in the last season, the hospital claimed Sookie didn’t have a blood type. …You can’t not have a blood type! Blood type is determined by antigens on the surface of red blood cells. If you lacked all antigens, you’d just be type O and negative for every other type, like Rh factor. Extremely rare, but not “no blood type.” Hell, even if Sookie didn’t have any red blood cells, she’d still come up negative on all of the tests.
The thing that stuck out for me during last night’s episode was something that I think of more and more when I watch the show. Andy Bellefleur, the town’s sheriff, was walking through the woods alone at night. He had been dumped there by his cousin and told to walk home alone because he was sobering up from V – vampire blood – which is a powerful drug in the series. In a poof of light, a beautiful fairy pops in front of him and seduces him in return for him pledging to protect her. And they do it right there in the woods. …Which thankfully we don’t see, because it’s Andy.
Me: Come on, would you have sex with some random hot person who just popped up in front of you in the woods?!
Male Friend #1: …
Male Friend #2: …Probably
Me: This is so goddamn stereotypical.
That wasn’t really my issue, though. When Andy finally gets home, his cousin’s wife Arlene asks what took him so long. He recounts the story of how a beautiful woman appeared out of a ball of light and they had sex. Arlene thinks he must be hallucinating because he’s coming down from V.
This is the same Arlene who just saw a spirit exorcised from her possessed friend who stole her baby. The same Arlene who was possessed by a maenad into having crazy orgies. The same Arlene who went to a witch to abort her potentially evil baby. The same Arlene who knowingly serves vampires synthetic blood in the bar she works at. The same Arlene who knows her coworker Sookie can read minds.
How can you live in a universe where it’s common knowledge that vampires, werewolves, werepanthers, shape shifters, ghosts, telepaths, and witches exist, but a beautiful woman appearing out of a ball of light is obviously a hallucination? If someone recounted that story to me in that universe, my reaction would be “Holy shit! You obviously just banged some new supernatural being we personally don’t have any knowledge about, since we keep discovering new supernatural beings all the time! Let’s do some investigation on what it could possibly be!”
Because really, skepticism is based on the scientific method, rationality, and logic. If we lived in a universe where we know magic is real and that numerous types of supernatural beings roam the world…well, it wouldn’t be “super”natural anymore. It would be natural, and we’d need to figure out where we went wrong with the laws of physics. I’d love to research the biology behind vampires never dying by feeding on other’s blood!
But if we lived in such a universe, where would we draw the line? Was Arlene right to still be skeptical about the fairy, even though we, the viewers, know what it is? If we lived in a universe where physics and biology didn’t work as we expected, how would we establish between “real” supernatural things and “fake” ones? For example, many characters on the show are very skeptical about religion or God – but what makes angels and deities unbelievable when you have vampires and shifters running around?
…I guess you have physical evidence of the vampires and shifters.
Anyway, what do you think? Is Arlene being a good skeptic, or is she being a little dimwitted? If you lived in a supernatural universe, how would you react to a situation that described a new supernatural creature or event that you personally aren’t familiar with?
Other than I obviously went shopping at Ikea.
Moving has taken over my life this week. I have a dozen or so bruises from hauling around boxes and assembling Ikea furniture that claims to take two people. And we’re having an apartment warming party tonight, so I’ve been preparing for that too. And by tonight, I mean it technically started 5 minutes ago, which means everyone will show up in an hour and a half. Which is why I picked an early time. I do not understand this fashionably late business.
After tonight, I only have a tiny cabinet to assemble, and then I have a three day weekend. So you will get real blog posts very soon! Until then, consider this an open thread. What have you been up to? Heck, what has the internet been up to? I haven’t checked blogs all week – for all I know atheists could have finally taken over the world and the memo is buried deep in my unchecked inbox.
Probably the best compliment I got was that two random people asked me where I bought my hat…but I painted it! Without tape or drawing circles! Freehand! I’m just that awesome.