sciatrix

and we're back, dammit! The house has air conditioning that works again, I have no massive terrifying looming deadlines, and I'm going to use Wednesday to share links I have open in my tabs. Among other things.

From around DW

Via rachelmanija: Debunking food, fatness and fitness myths

I would like your best recs for in-depth articles, studies, or books on the most cutting-edge current knowledge about nutrition, body weight, and health.

greywash has been killing it: On mourning, transformative works, and audience manipulation (CW: suicide)

And look. If someone comes into my fandom and writes a story where the character I most relate to dies in a way I find tone-deaf, oppressive, and clueless, I'm sure as hell not going to take that death on board as part of my personal mythology. I'm probably going to get really, really mad; drink some whiskey; drag the author extensively in Discord; write like four Dreamwidth rants where I deconstruct all the bullshit arguments the author was making that I found tone-deaf, oppressive, and clueless; and then write my own goddamned fanfic giving their fanfic all the middle fingers I can muster in a deeply passive-aggressive, naming-no-names sort of way. [...]

But I'm not going to read that story and go into mourning for the death of my avatar character. Why the hell should I? What does that death count? It doesn't even have the (lbr, since I'm a fanfic writer in the first place, to me faaairly spurious) gloss of being "the original source." It's not the fucking original source! It's just some other jerkoff, howling into the void about characters that someone else made up!! They say "he dies"; I say, "hold my beer." Transformative works are transformative works, guys. If they can kill him off, I can bring him back. Why the hell should their version matter more?

via tzikeh: Avengers: Endgame

I’m not mad at the movie per se; I’m mad about the narrative construct employed by pretty much any movie/show/insert-form-of-storytelling-here that the death of one or more main characters (especially The Grand Sacrifice For All Humanity) is the only option in a high-stakes situation–anything else, and the payoff is just not enough, somehow. There is no closure without death? That’s a pretty terrible position for storytellers to take.

Over here, siderea brought me a fantastic little discussion from this NPR piece on taxon-specific bias in animal behavior. You can find the paper that Dr. Rosenthal mentions writing in the NPR piece available open-access here, if you want to read more.

One of the things his work really raises for me is the question of what this research is really for. What are we trying to know, and why?

For instance, if why we, like, as a species, are studying the behavior of other organisms because we want to know what the full range of possibilities are - possibly to contextualize and inform human behavior - then, yes, lack of coverage is a problem. The question of what all those under- or un-studied beetles are up to becomes important, and science should get on that.

Via staranise: Children and the prodigies we make of them

That, and the idea that white people see our children as gardens to cultivate more than people to raise, which—we do. When my 1yo nephew SHRIEKED all through dinner, and everyone at the dinner table winced, I joked, "Ah, future operatic tenor." When my brother's kids earn money and save up for a big LEGO train, we say, "Future entrepreneurs here." We're preparing kids for a competitive world where every early advantage can translate into tens of thousands of dollars lost, into opportunities missed, lives derailed.

It's that age-old question: At what point does adequately preparing a child for an abusive and cutthroat world in itself constitute abuse? At what point does failing to do so constitute neglect?

Generally interesting

An Evolutionary Psychology Quiz

How do we know evolutionary psychology is perfectly legitimate? Well, for starters, it has not one but two science terms in its name. And furthermore, it’s just common sense: Homo sapiens evolved in a vicious, winner-take-all state of nature, and therefore the deepest, realest elements of human psychology are hardwired, brutal, and individualistic. The false trappings of “civilization” came later, and overlaid our natural psychology with everything about us that’s gentle, feminine, decadent, shallow, cosmopolitan, unnatural, and legalistic. Anyone who attempts to call this “sexist,” “pure ideology,” “vaguely anti-Semitic,” or “extremely convenient” just doesn’t understand science.

Here’s a quiz to test your knowledge of evolutionary psychology. Please keep in mind that evolutionary psychology employs different standards of proof than the hard sciences. These standards are unfalsifiable, and therefore cannot be questioned.

Inside the Growing World of Queer Truckers

In an industry dominated by white men, queer people are finding a community on the road.

I wrote the book on user-friendly design. What I see today horrifies me.

The world is designed against the elderly, writes Don Norman, 83-year-old author of the industry bible Design of Everyday Things and a former Apple VP.

Excellent additional commentary via vassraptor here.

Less of a question, more of a comment... (comes with a list of The Worst Questions in ascending order of sin)

If you attend panels or presentations, ever, I need you to read this article because, best case scenario, I need you to help protect me from “less of a question, more of a comment” guy. Worst case scenario, you are “less of a question, more of a comment” guy. Let’s talk about panels in general, panels about diversity and identity topics in particular, and how you as an audience member can make choices and ask questions which improve that experience for both panelists and audience. I’ll also answer some questions we both did and didn’t get to at PAX East’s “Designing Asian Settings and Themes in Analog Games” panel.

What ‘Guardians’ Director James Gunn Learned From High-Profile Firing

My apparatus for being loved was my work, and being famous. I had never really experienced before that feeling of being loved so deeply. It has been a problem for me in relationships, in friendships; I can experience loving another person but I have a very difficult time experiencing being loved. In that moment, the apparatus which was my only hope for feeling love was torn away from me and I had absolutely nothing. I didn’t know what I was supposed to do.

And then came this outpouring of real love. [...] That amount of love that I felt from my friends, my family, and the people in the community was absolutely overwhelming. In order for me to have fully felt that love for the first time, the thing that needed to happen was the apparatus by which I was feeling falsely loved had to be completely taken away.

Scabby the Rat Is Under Attack—And Needs Our Help

The Trump era presents unions with a range of new threats to their survival, including the 2018 Janus Supreme Court decision revoking the right of public sector unions to collect dues from nonmembers. This erosion of union protections is being met with large-scale protests and grassroots organizing, from picketing school teachers to striking ride-share drivers. But as battles over union rights transpire at the local and federal levels, an unexpected figure has come into focus: a giant inflatable rodent.

In the late 20th century, Scabby the Rat was popularized in the industrial Midwest and grew into a symbol of union solidarity, showing up at protests around the country and the world. Standing as large as 25 feet tall with an aggressive facial expression, claws ready to fight and a stomach covered in inflamed scabs, Scabby is an effective tactic to force negotiation and draw media coverage while shaming those who violate strikes. The rat’s continued effectiveness is a testament to the importance of workplace organizing, particularly in an era of historically low union participation.

Is gender unique to humans?

This summer, in the introductory course I teach on the evolution and biology of human and animal behavior, I showed my students a website that demonstrates how to identify frog "genders." I explained that this was a misuse of the term "gender"; what the author meant was how to identify frog sexes. Gender, I told the students, goes far beyond mere sex differences in appearance or behavior. It refers to something complex and abstract that may well be unique to Homo sapiens. This idea is nothing new; scholars have been saying for decades that only humans have gender. But later that day I began to wonder: Is it really true that gender identity is totally absent among non-human species—even our closest evolutionary relatives, chimpanzees and bonobos?

Things I keep reading in small bites and then darting away from

Autistic burnout: The cost of masking and passing

Being an autistic seen as “high-functioning” means having your identity doubted and questioned. Exhausting efforts to pass and mask are given little credit. They are tossed aside with an “I do that too” and held against us in those moments of meltdown and burnout when we can longer pretend at neurotypicality. The rewards for passing are the familiar ableist tropes of invisible disability and the expectation to keep on passing, forever.

Access intimacy: the missing link

Access intimacy is that elusive, hard to describe feeling when someone else “gets” your access needs. The kind of eerie comfort that your disabled self feels with someone on a purely access level. Sometimes it can happen with complete strangers, disabled or not, or sometimes it can be built over years. It could also be the way your body relaxes and opens up with someone when all your access needs are being met. It is not dependent on someone having a political understanding of disability, ableism or access.

I was sitting down to compile a signal boost post for the week, which will probably be pretty big since I missed last week's. And I pulled out a link that I had a bit more to say about than I thought I did, so I figured it could have a post of its own.

staranise had some discussion a few days ago about the history of "butch" and "femme" as terms, and whether or not they're lesbian-only words. Spoiler: her conclusion, which I'm 100% down with, is 'no'. I often bring up an anecdote, actually, about a slightly awkward joke my (gay, male, about twenty years older than me) boss once made off-the-cuff to an audience of mostly straight colleagues, back when I was new to the lab: "If you use the word butch... you're probably not." I, who am pretty butch, was a little confused and startled before I realized that the joke actually makes sense if you're habitually assuming that the people who use 'butch' are mostly gay men (which is, I think, his context; he coughed and backtracked a little bit when I stared at him in confusion).

We actually had a lot of those little "huh wha?" moments the year I was new to the lab. I think I was still adjusting to bringing up queer culture where there were straight people, which at the time I would have never bothered to do and which he (I think deliberately) makes a point of doing sometimes. And I think he was probably still adjusting some to me being there with my own context, which was (and is) very different from my boss' while still being recognizable. In retrospect, I'm a little sorry about having come into the lab with the trauma I did from Tumblr exclusionists; I think he was very excited to have a queer mentee, and I don't think he had any context for why I would sidestep conversations and tuck away my own perspective in (not-outwardly-visible) fright when he would toss topics of conversation out at me.

It turns out that when you're largely accessing queer community through the scars of gatekeeping and trauma, and you have been really seriously immersing yourself in the attacks mounted by exclusionists--at the time I was coming off of two years of doing that very heavily--you start developing a fear reaction to people who are "unassailably" part of the community and who don't do a lot of obvious and visible stepping to make sure you know you're welcome. Which, since I didn't actually tell him that I ID as ace and that colors my experiences really deeply until... oh, the summer after I joined the lab, after he spent two weeks with me in the field (so around each other 24/7) trying to figure out what the hell I was and why I wasn't responding like either a straight person or a queer person to the conversational gambits he'd toss out, obviously he didn't know to do. (And just as obviously my experience was totally outside his context, which makes total sense, and just--augh.)

I'm more open about it right now, but it's been gone on six and a half years, and I'm still trying to work out how to talk about my own experiences both to other folks in my field--will they criticize me for openly holding an identity that is so often ridiculed?--and within my department. It's easier with folks about my age, but it's not like older people are all in total agreement with exclusionists, either. And it's hard unlearning the signifiers I initially learned on the internet.

I hate how the context of exclusionists drives certain community experiences to hide and fear connection to other groups, while at the same time being totally unseen by wide swathes of the groups exclusionists are ostensibly protecting. I hate that my fear drove me to hide because I had associated the presence of "real" LGBTQ+ people with potential judgement and threat, especially when I think at the time I was probably the only other openly queer person in our department. (I think I may be that now--we had another cis male gay grad student who had been in the same undergraduate lab as I was join, but he has since left to pursue a career in data science. And I don't think either of us know anyone else.)

Anyway. That little story was such a perfect encapsulation of two people whose queer contexts and communities are different meeting with a little bit of a bump, and such a perfect "yeah, no: suck it" story for those exclusionists trying to insist that "butch" and "femme" are terms only for cis lesbians.

One thing I fucking love about Holt is that the portrayal of an older, well-established gay man is absolutely pitch perfect, in the sense that–he is neither a one-dimensional Activist Who Cares About Nothing But His Community nor the other trap that middle-aged gay men tend to fall into on mainstream comedy, going “eh, fuck it, I got mine” and joking about fleeing the city for Pride and being faintly embarrassed by activism. Holt’s not a professional activist–he’s got his career and that’s his priority–but he also clearly cares about his community, and tbh as someone who has done the whole founding something because no one else cared enough to do it and then being challenged by someone who has better ideas for the organization… well, his response to the whole AAGLNYCPA thing is 100% on point. Fuck. I have so many feelings about him.

( tucked under a cut so as to not take up TOO much room )

I think that’s a huge strength of the show, and one that ought to be replicated more often: if you’re having a character stand in for one marginalized experience in your writing, make an effort to bring in a second character occupying a similar experience to play off of them with. Just one, and nothing you do with the character can escape the notion that you’re making a commentary on stereotypes or the dialogue between stereotyping and personhood and reality. But if you have two, you immediately can point to the places where their personalities respond to the expectations around them differently, and surprise: there’s a fully realized, human pair of characters that suddenly feel 100% more human and deeply realized than otherwise.