I do not play games. I haven’t for decades. I used to play Trivial Pursuitâ„¢ and I still enjoy a game of chess, but both these games are high on the mental acuity charts and low on the following the rules charts. Sorry, but it’s true—to play Trivial Pursuitâ„¢, inane as some of the questions are occasionally, you actually have to know something about, you know, The World and its contents. That’s why people who read widely and pay attention to things outside themselves do well at it. Chess requires strategizing way outside the possibilities prescribed by the relatively simple set of rules and works the gray cells and synapses much more thoroughly than the repeatable pattern-following of many games.…
Category: sex
Why Is This So Difficult To Get?
This is going to be a bit of a ramble, so bear with me.
We keep seeing more incidents of sexual harassment emerging into the light of day within the science fiction community. There are people who have been behaving poorly for a long time and finally they’re being called on it. Why this is such a difficult concept for some people to grasp eludes me. The excuse-making is both ancient and pathetic. This is science fiction, these are supposed to be people who are ahead of the curve when it comes to social grasp, we like to pretend we live in the future.…
Colloquial For “Why, I Didn’t Mean Nothin’ By It!”
I confess when everyone started talking about Paula Deen this past week, I had a moment or two of complete cultural disconnect.
Who?
Oh, she writes cookbooks and does a show on Food Network. Hm. So what?
I’m still not altogether sure what she did, what trial she spoke at where she rather obliviously let it be known that she thinks using the N-word is just fine. I’m not really interested enough in her—or any other cooking personality—to give much of a damn. I don’t read cookbooks (I have several, I couldn’t tell you who wrote them) and I don’t watch Food Network (we don’t have cable or dish), so this is a part of the popular zeitgeist of which I am rather oblivious.…
On The Extraction of Feet From Mouths
I’ve been thinking deeply about the recent eruption of controversy in SFWA over sexism. Seems just about anywhere we look in the last several years there are examples of men behaving stupidly toward and about women. While this is nothing new, where it has been cropping up seems surprising.
There have been several incidents, both online and out in the world, within the skeptical community. The boys came out to try to tell the girls to get their own clubhouse and stop invading what for some reason these males had regarded as somehow the province of people with testicles. Prominent women—skeptics, humanists, atheists, scientists—have been treated to high school-level chauvinism by males intent on…
On what?…
Scouts’ Honor
My relationship with the Boy Scouts of America was not the most pleasant. I was an oddity, to be sure. I think I was at one time the only—only—second class scout to be a patrol leader.
Second class. For those who may not have been through the quasi-military organization, the way it was structured in my youth was you entered as a Tenderfoot. There were requirements for advancement. Skills had to be learned, benchmarks achieved, and then, having passed through them, you matriculated to Second Class. You were something of a scout, then. It was assumed by your fellows that you knew a thing or three, wouldn’t get lost in the woods, knew how to police a campsite, etc etc. …
Games, Women, Growing Up, Remembrance
I want to talk a little bit about women.
I like to count myself as a feminist. Unapologetically. I would like to believe that I’ve been one more or less forever, and maybe on some level that’s true (and if so I credit early exposure to science fiction, which I’ll talk about later**), but really what I could point to as early feminism was more a matter of an idealized attitude about fair play, not any kind of studied assessment concerning women’s rights and so forth. My progress toward self-conscious feminism took a while.
First, a video:
Okay, it is that negative reaction she experienced which (a) I don’t “get” in any visceral way and (b) I find continually, almost universally shrugged off as “harmless” by people who otherwise would never dream of behaving that way.…
War On Women
My previous post, over-the-top as it was in some ways (yet heartfelt and, I think, not misdirected) spurred a few remarks about the so-called War On Women. There are people who claim this is a myth, a straw man argument, a distraction, that there is no war on women, only the mouthings of a few extremists with no real authority and, really, nothing has or will change.
I can agree to an extent that maybe War On Women is perhaps an overstatement, because—and it’s a fine distinction—I don’t really believe most of the politicians engaged in it care one way or the other. …
At The Risk Of…
Another GOP candidate has stirred the hornet’s nest of women’s rights and abortion by making one of the most blatantly absurd statements— no, that’s inaccurate, mainly because there is no way to gauge “most absurd” in this context. So many of them have come out and said shit everyone knew they were thinking but till recently had managed to either not say or have couched in more sophisticated and euphemistic language.
Richard Mourdock said that any pregnancy resulting from rape is “God’s intent.”
How to delicately respond to this…?
Oh, fuckit. This is bullshit.
The basic assumption of Biblical literalism these asshats have been using is a compendium of tribal law no one would approve across the board anymore because we don’t believe that shit anymore!…
It Was Fifty Years Ago, Mr. Bond
“Do you expect me to talk?”
“No, Mr. Bond, I expect you to die!”
The exchange between Bond and Goldfinger may sum up the attitude of many who are tired, offended, or otherwise ambivalent or disinterested in the absurdly long career of the improbable James Bond, 007. Even those of us who have been more or less unable to let go our adolescent attachment to the character have doubtless wondered why he hasn’t just died.
He should have, certainly after the criminal treatment he endured toward the middle and end of the Roger Moore years. All due respect to Mr.…
Where It Comes Down For Me
I grew up in a sexist culture.
No, really. I was born in 1954. I grew up in the stew of sexism and was made very aware of it because it was being challenged throughout my childhood, adolescence, and early adulthood. I came of age during the heyday of Male Privilege, when the default assumption was that men were the smart ones, the strong ones, the ones who shouldered all responsibility, and women basically came along for the ride because, well, we needed them for babies and cooking and occasional interludes of sex and, well, because they looked good. Strong, independent women were weird, unnatural, and intended to be conquered by a stronger man who, paradoxically, didn’t actually need them but decided, for some reason, to protect them because while they were getting along fine without him, that simply couldn’t last because women couldn’t sustain themselves and it was great that one was independent for as long as she was, but it was really a man’s duty to take care of her, so…
It sounds absurd when you break it down like that, but really, that’s what it was.…