Spotted on Facebook: Left side: Photo of Caitlyn Jenner on the cover of Vanity Fair magazine. Caption: “Pretending to be awoman: Must accept and approve of”Right side: Photo of Rachel Dolezal. Caption: “Pretending tobe black: Unacceptable!! We disapprove” The people I see most often making the equivocation/slippery slope argument between […]
Read MoreWe have to make the comparisons…they will anyway
I was all set to write a post on TERFS, right before Caitlyn Jenner came out. I had several paragraphs written, comparing trans-exclusionary radical feminism to regular transphobia, explaining how regular transphobia tends to be rooted in religious belief and social conservatism, whereas TERFism comes more from a second wave […]
Read MoreLetter to an advice column, rewritten
Dear Robin, Our only child is getting married soon. My husband and I love his fiancé and are fully supportive of this arrangement– last year, my husband and I committed to paying for the wedding. Here’s the problem: Turns out that both my son and his fiancé have different beliefs […]
Read MoreThe latest indignity
Dignity is a sort of agreement between people. A decision to grant that a person, or body of people, deserve respect. That they possess agency, the capacity and the right to make their own decisions. To determine their own lives. America has agreed, implicitly, that poor people have no dignity. […]
Read MorePeople being stupid about Zarya
Sigh. Guys, Zarya is a character in a video game. Not a real person auditioning to be your girlfriend.
Read MoreZarya
Today at PAX East, Blizzard revealed two new playable characters for its upcoming FPS game Overwatch, announced last November at BlizzCon. You can see a video of the entire presentation here. The two heroes announced are a futuristic outlaw gunslinger called McCree, and a Russian “tank” soldier called Zarya. Game […]
Read MoreOversexualize? Overnope.
Last November during BlizzCon, I wrote a post critiquing the design of some of the female playable characters as compared to the male characters in the newly revealed but not yet released FPS game Overwatch. In it, I addressed the following comment made by Blizzard senior vice president Chris Metzen: […]
Read MoreNothing more spectacular about him
The BBC has a profile on Omar El-Hussein, the man who carried out Saturday’s killings in Copenhagen. He apparently was assisted by two other men, who have since been taken in police custody. They were charged with providing El-Hussein with weapons and helping him escape after the attacks. We know […]
Read MoreBrief summary and context of yesterday’s violence in Copenhagen
Yesterday a symposium to discuss blasphemy and the meaning of free speech was held at a cafe in Copenhagen called Krudttønden. In attendance at this meeting was Lars Vilks, a 68 year old Swedish man upon whose head the Islamic State placed a $100,000 bounty for his 2007 depictions of […]
Read MoreNaming of names
At work the other day, we got into a discussion about names. Weird family names, bizarre nicknames, the difference (if any) between your given name and the name you have now, and how that came to be. We talked about how it’s impossible to find a name for your child […]
Read More