Recently I finished listening to Jesse Bering’s book Why is the Penis Shaped Like That? And Other Reflections on Being Human. The book is a compilation of his essays posted at Scientific American so it ranges in subject all over the place, but his introduction states an interest that essentially ties all of them together– … Read more
…is my term for the collective group of idiots who contributed to Jen McCreight deciding that blogging is no longer worth the harassment she has faced on a daily basis. I wish they would form their own organization already. As soon as they hold a conference, the organizers of all other secular conferences could examine … Read more
Bad tidings: Podcaster Patrick Beja is shelving two shows, The Phileas Club (current events from international perspectives) and The Movielicious (discussion of recent movies, also from international perspectives). Both of these shows have been part of The Frogpants Network for quite some time, and have included hosts who also do other shows on that network. Good … Read more
Just a follow-up thought on my last post– you know, even if everyone’s personality matched their appearance exactly, and all beautiful people were good and wise while all ugly people were stupid and nasty, that wouldn’t justify being anti-feminist. Being good, wise, and beautiful all at the same time doesn’t make a person any more … Read more
So you may remember a couple of weeks ago when I wrote about a particularly ridiculous blog post which claimed that the popularity of the GIF of Australian hurdler Michelle Jenneke doing a little warm-up dance before competing was due to the fact that men– in general, men– do not love feminists. How did the … Read more
I went to see Hope Springs this afternoon with my mother, who has been married to my father 44 years. Kay and Arnold, Meryl Streep’s and Tommy Lee Jones’ characters respectively, have only been married for 31 years, a fact which Arnold slings around throughout the film in order to justify his opinion that nothing’s … Read more
I listened today to the inaugural episode of the podcast for one of my favorite blogs, Dr. Nerdlove. The podcast is called Paging Dr. Nerdlove, hosted by Harris O’Malley, and the first episode is about how to avoid coming off as creepy when meeting new people– specifically, how nerdy males can avoid creeping out females they … Read more
You do not get to operate a hate group without being called a hate group. Sorry. Yes, when your group says that homosexuals are “destructive to society” and should be “exported from the U.S.,” it’s a hate group. When it says that we should return to having criminal sanctions for homosexuals, it’s a hate group. … Read more
From an article in Slate this morning, What It’s Like For a Girl Gamer, I learned that there will be at least two panels on harassment in gaming at the upcoming PAX convention in Seattle– Ending Harassment in Gaming and Harassment and Bullying in Online Games: Technical Solutions v1.0 (Elisa Melendez, author of the Slate piece, is on … Read more
If you only read one thing about it– or, more likely, if you’ve read plenty about it and are either borderline overwhelmed or so overwhelmed that you can hardly see “whelmed” from where you stand– read Natalie Reed’s post from a couple of days ago, “All In.” It’s long, but definitely worth reading in its … Read more