Every single piece of popular media out there has some variation of “no fats no fems no Asians” as an unspoken default policy. If you’re not white and skinny and cis and male and perisex and straight…

just existing as a fem presenting person sucks so bad 😭 irl or online, my physical body or my fursona, it literally doesnt matter. i want to be more than just a piece of meat to people

Gacha games are famous for their raunchy character designs and objectification. But can you fight fire with fire? Can you teach gamers to respect women, by wrapping a positive message in lewd imagery? Goddess of Victory: Nikke is a game that attempts to find out. We’ll see just how Nikke teaches gamers to respect women, while also taking a look at the limits of Nikke as a teaching tool, in this relatively short video about the objectification of women in the gacha game space.

[…] it’s okay to enjoy your media, even if that media can have problematic aspects to it. This is the world in which we live, and we can either participate it or be alienated from it.

fanservice sucks bc it’s never you that’s being serviced it’s always some other really annoying fan

This month we learned that the linguist Robin Lakoff had died at the age of 82. If you’ve heard of Lakoff you will probably know her as the author of Language and Woman’s Place (LWP), an early and very influential contribution to the field of language and gender studies.

A survey of 8th and 10th graders shows a sharp drop in the percent of boys who believe that women should have the same opportunities as men

The sentiment behind this project is good, but parts of it seem insane:

Avoid using idioms and jargons. These can exclude people who don’t have particular specialized knowledge, and many idioms don’t translate from country to country. Additionally, these sometimes have origins in negative stereotypes.

Jargon is a crucial part of technical communication. Yes, jargon can cause friction when a person is getting inducted into a field, but our goal should not be to remove all friction from our work. And no idioms whatsoever? That’s just nonsense. But perhaps I’m just over-reacting to “my words being taken away.”

In my view, the effectiveness of what most people understand to be “linguistic engineering”—banning words, redefining them by fiat, trying to force people to use new words invented by engineers—is seriously overrated. If it were held to the same standard as actual engineering (does this work? Can we rely on it to keep working?), it would fail almost every time. Which is not to say we shouldn’t criticize it (though I’d prefer it if we didn’t only criticize the other side’s version while giving our own side a free pass); but I think we should probably focus less on the idea that “they” are messing with our minds, and more on the other, more prosaic tools which are used to crush dissent and enforce compliance.

I think there is much to be done regarding making linguistic engineering a legitimate field.

Last week the bromance between Donald Trump and Elon Musk ended in a spectacular war of words on social media. As the world watched, the US president and his “First Buddy” traded accusations, threats and insults. But while some people just reached for the popcorn, others apparently saw a golden opportunity to expound their pet…

because: Montell, Amanda. Wordslut. Nero, 2019.

Prohibition failed, but it succeeded in empowering women to speak up about issues like domestic violence.

Prohibition is strongly linked to the rise of women in American politics. A fascinating brief history of the 18th Amendment.

The discourse around Harry Styles, former One Direction member and one of the stars of “Don’t Worry Darling”, has taken an interesting turn. Perhaps it’s time someone… said something. Watch to find out whether Billie Eilish, Charlie Puth, Nick Jonas, and Shawn Mendes need to be… CANCELLED!?? In light of the recent heartbreaking tweet from Kit Connor, it’s seems like something should be said. Along the way, we’ll make friends with Judith Butler and weird gay sociologists and philosophers. Don’t you just love Twitter?

This video is such a great deconstruction of queerbaiting, from both the perspective of cinema and celebrity. It does well to ask both if common conceptions of queerbaiting are internally consistent and actually useful for working towards liberation.

I have many guy friends. Why don’t we hang out more?

Beautiful essay. Makes me very scared for my own future.

Trying to pick a pathway through forty years of the ugliest conflict in feminism.

Being trans is not a controversial idea but a lived reality. A new zine released today collects 22 first-personal accounts of what it is actually like to be trans or have trans kids as a philosopher.

Very much pulled at my heartstrings. So much to learn and do.

Great intro to choice feminism and where it and common critiques fail.