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.

...because while I have very little interest in owning a purebred cat, I like looking at them sometimes. And purebred Maine Coons are eldritch motherfuckers, which is always fun to look at.

This is how I stumbled across this Metatron Eyes cattery, which holy shit looks like one of the nicest, most ethically put together catteries I've ever seen. Damn. If I wanted a purebred cat, this is the sort of place I'd want to buy it from and support. I mean, in practice I have a strong preference for mildly special-needs cats with extremely strong personalities, and it's just straight up easier to find that sort of thing by going through rescue, and we have such a massive feral problem worldwide that sourcing random-bred cats isn't hard. But it's nice to know that if people are going to be breeding cats, there are people out there working to do it with as much attention to quality of life in their animals as possible.

(As I was writing this, Arthur Dent stomped up, crawled into my lap, and immediately started purring himself to sleep. Aw.)

I was having an interesting Twitter conversation about the weird cultural projections that different regions of the US put on dogs this morning, including a guess that a dog from rural Georgia might have some blackmouth cur in her (quite possible!) and some regional discussion of what people expect out of dog manners, so this is quite a nice bookend for my day. I've been thinking about how dog culture in the US might change as dogs in need of homes become less and less common (as they already are in many areas), especially as spay/neuter culture penetrates the US South, and how racism and classism inform rescue culture and the way different breeds and types of dogs are often promoted. (Especially with respect to pit bulls. It is impossible to understand the cultural trajectory of pit bulls in the US without understanding the racial associations and aspects of the dogs, and it's uncomfortably interesting watching the ways that different groups try to promote the breed for adoption by, well, presenting them as middle class white person dogs too.

People get pretty weird about it.

Disclaimer because it's a loaded topic: my opinions on pit bulls are: ( behind the cut )

I am currently taking a long break from MeFi after I, uh, got hit pretty hard in the exclusion trauma side of things in a thread about wlw. Again. So it's nice to have DW to come back to and natter in, and the hell with everything else for a bit.

This post has been adapted from a Metafilter discussion about emotional labor, in which the question of why straight women still put up with men in the absence of equitable emotional, mental, and physical labor divisions came up. Someone brought up the possibility of reviving political lesbianism as a potential solution, and I had some thoughts.

So political lesbianism is a really different thing from "I am opting out of men," largely because it by definition involves redefining sexual orientation from "this is a descriptive rundown of my wants and desires" to "this is a political definition of the things that I think I ought to want." It muddies the game both for women who are actually sexually/romantically interested in other women and for women who want to set up families and households with other women irrespective of their actual sexual desires, and it has one hell of a problematic history when you look into the nitty gritty details.

(Political asexuality also very briefly popped up in at least one place in 1977, and I'm kind of glad now that it never caught on: my descriptive lists of the things I actually want enable me to find other people who actually want me and what I represent in a way that lists of what people think they ought to want don't.)

I'm all for people choosing to organize their families and households around the most emotionally fulfilling relationships for them, and I mean, I don't at a gut level understand the difference between friendship and romance once the limerence wears off. I certainly can't criticize anyone for choosing to set up their households and their chosen adult families around other types of relationships. But political lesbianism is not a good way to achieve that.

Let me try to dig into what I'm trying to say a little more clearly.

Orientation is a way of describing what we want when we reach out for connection with another person, either sexually or in terms of the initial butterflies wanting of feelings like crushes. It's a way of describing what we want when we say we're hungry for a type of contact.

But humans hunger for a lot of things, and sometimes not everything we want is available to us, or at least not available from any one person. So sometimes we reach out to get our needs met in different ways--our emotional needs and connections met by romantic partners, or friends, or sexual partners, or family and kin, or or or or. And what other people are willing to invest in us, that matters too. If we find that what we want is never available when we reach out, if it's being barred to us not by an external boundary but because it doesn't seem to be present to the touch, we as humans can and do think about different ways to structure our lives to get our emotional and physical and sexual needs for intimacy and contact met. We have an amazing variety of ways that different cultures and different individual people have devised to fill that hunger for connection. (Sometimes we tie sex to those things, and sometimes we don't, and that goes for pretty much every combination of genders you can imagine across cultures.)

When we talk about setting up relationships to feed one another with that desire for human connection, though, it's also important to note that individual dyadic relationships can be fragile and that stress can fray them. Those dyadic relationships need tending and work to flourish. So human cultures tend to grow up around providing structure to those privileged relationships in order to allow them to be structured and maintained. The problem is that most cultures have historically provided that kind of support along kin lines, and that Western society has shifted away from that along the (quite correct) notion that if your kin is kind of shitty, you're totally fucked by that system if you can't find another source of support. Except that a lot of the societal prioritization of supportive relationships has then shifted instead to romantic (assumed sexual, assumed monogamous) relationships instead. Which tends to center the need for support around a single dyadic romantic relationship instead of spreading it around more diffuse connections, and if it breaks... or your romantic relationship isn't equally distributing affection and support and connective maintenance....

well, you're shit out of luck.

I think the way to go about changing this isn't to change what we mean by orientation, because I don't think that losing the clarity of describing exactly what you want is a way forward. (At least, unless you pick up a mixed-attraction model, but that's something that doesn't seem to be very popular outside of ace and bi/pan communities, where desire-for-connection and desire-for-sex are less likely to align.) I think that what you want instead is to support people who reorganize how they prioritize and invest sexual and emotional connection.

And I think that is happening to some extent, but I think the conversation usually ends at "step back and disinvest from what is not working" and doesn't always include "step forward in this direction and find people who want something similar to you so you can find at least one compatible person," especially for straight people. I think that needs to be a bigger part of our conversations about emotional labor, and I think the need for a term to describe "the effort we put into maintaining our connections to one another" has yanked the term "emotional labor" to attach itself to because of that cultural shift towards choosing our connections to one another and looking for connection and yield in response to emotional investment.

I have no idea how to popularize those concepts for older straight women, though, so.... uh, mazel tov if you can?

 I just got out of a really interesting conversation about queerness and community and access to easy entry points of community, and one of the things one of the participants in that conversation said struck me. They said that when they're lonely and looking to make specifically queer friends, they feel like the only way they have to do that is to use Tindr to find people to potentially date, and then maybe see if friendship comes out of that. Or maybe otherwise to go out and be attractive and potentially available, and maybe make friends that way. 

I'm sort of personally horrified by the notion, in part because it's so inaccessible to me and in part because that's some heavy pressure to be available and attractive in exchange for affection and intimacy. And I'm newly really grateful for the people in my life and the set of circumstances that has let them be here for me, both personally and in the aggregate. 

This isn't intended to be a judgement on anyone who feels that way or anyone who that idea would work for or anything. It's just a system that would not work for me, and one I'm glad not to currently find myself in. 

So this post popped up again in my feeds and I got extremely excited, except that I actually sat down to read the comments and got depressed by the, ah, discourse in them.

Which is a shame, because the distinction between the types of stories I would classify as slashfic versus queerfic are not necessarily about what kind of story is necessarily sufficiently good and didactic or even sufficiently representational. It's not a distinction about whether the story is important or whether it's worthy of existing or whether it's even necessarily realistic. So instead of commenting on a two-month-old post full of really irritating infighting (which seems to be the case for the OP, too!), I want to maybe start a new discussion.

Let me reiterate for my space: this ain't a question about whether slashfic is worthy, or what kind of story is only created by appropriating straight women, or whether this distinction should exist. It's a question about whether this genre distinction applies to the stories within the broader genre of fanfiction.

( To me, it's a question of focus. )

[Posted originally to Pillowfort.]