Weekly Open Thread with Six Ducklings

34 thoughts on Weekly Open Thread with Six Ducklings

1. I recently read two excellent books which one would think were about vastly different topics, but to me they were both about the city I grew up in.

   Yossarian Slept Here: When Joseph Heller Was Dad, the Apthorp Was Home, and Life Was a Catch-22
   by Erica Heller was a biography of the author of my favorite book, who as it happens turns out to be an absolute shit at times. Nonetheless, the book was fantastic, and an amazing portrait of what it’s like to discover your heroes have feet of clay.

   and

   Gay New York by George Chauncey
   If you only read one book about fin-de-siecle New York’s proud gay communities that thrived long before the Stonewall riots, it should be this one. So many interesting little tidbits in there, such as where the term ‘gay’ for homosexual came from (I won’t spoil it.) It also explores the idea of heterosexuality as a purely 20th century construct.

   If my poor reviewing skills haven’t put you off (and even if they have,) read these two great books!

2. I had my blood drawn on Friday. It’s for the blood work that will help the doctor determine the appropriate dosage amounts of estradiol and spironolactone (an antiandrogen medication) for me. I’m really happy to have finally started the process of transitioning. I’ll be working on my voice as well once I begin taking hormones.

   [CN: alcohol]

   And yesterday I went to Dyke March in San Francisco. It was so terrible that I am no longer interested in going to any future gay pride events. I went with several other lesbians (all of whom were trans).
   I was so excited that I even put on an all-black butch lesbian outfit (with a distinctly goth aesthetic) for the day.

   Everything turned out to be horrible, however. We were harassed and misgendered on the BART, there was nothing distinctly lesbian whatsoever about the actual event, a straight marriage took place in the middle of the event, one of my friends lost their phone and we all felt lost and disheartened by the severe lack of trans women. The night ended in us leaving early and proceeding to drink very heavily. I hadn’t drank in nearly 2 years and yet everything was so horrible that I felt the urge to drink glass after glass of red wine.

   1. The straight marriage is completely bizarre to me. Why would anyone schedule their straight wedding during this kind of event?

      1. Hetero entitlement – that’s the reason.

      2. “…a straight marriage took place in the middle of the event…”

         That is really ****ing stupid. This is why in my city, gay bars began banning bachelorette parties from their grounds a couple years ago.

3. [Moderator Note: Massive many times seen before cut and paste Wall-Of-Text deleted and tedious troll commentor plonked]

4. Not related to any of the standard topics here on Feminste, but of great interest to me and perhaps passing interest to anyone thinking of writing for a living.

   The robot writers have officially arrived.

   AP will announce Monday that it plans to use automation technology from a company called Automated Insights to produce stories about earnings reports. The software means that “instead of providing 300 stories manually, we can provide up to 4,400 automatically for companies throughout the United States each quarter,” AP Managing Editor Lou Ferrara writes in a Q&A.

   We’re a long, long way from being able to automate Jill, but there’s no way a development like this doesn’t mean big changes are coming to journalism. Well, more big changes, I suppose. It’s been quite the transitioning field for a while.

   1. Well, the robot writers still need source material to base their writing on. I don’t see why an article about an earnings report is any more informative than just a table of numbers, or why someone would pay for that service, but I’m not a journamalist.

   2. Algorithmically parsing tables into articles isn’t that impressive. What we really need is someone to fill Jill’s role of making Feministe the “blog of record” again, so people don’t have to visit multiple sites to know what’s happening in depth in feminism.

      1. Yeah, that would be swell.

      2. Well, if you ever need someone to cover the reproductive justice angle… that’s pretty much what I do for work already!

         1. Hey, jump on in. The water’s fine.

5. Bernard Gallager at The Conversation writes Rolf Harris guilty: but what has Operation Yewtree really taught us about sexual abuse?, given that abuse by celebrities is only an extreme example of how predators groom their communities to believe them rather than their victims.

6. AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGGGGG

   WHAT THE FUCK, SCOTUS! HOBBY LOBBY!!! JESUS WEPT.

   1. It’s such a weird decision. Especially if you look at how they narrowed the ruling.

      “We want to make clear that this only applies to abortion, not to other things like religious objection to Taxation or something, Abortion is a super special-special religious objection, unlike all those other false ones”

      So, it seems the modus operandi is “As long as we can screw over women, we’ll trample on anything, including the Establishment Clause.”

      1. And imaginary abortion in particular, given Hobby Lobby’s creative interpretation of the science.

         1. Aahhh, yes, “abortificants.” I have to say that redefining words seems to work exceedingly well.

            If only gun enthusiasts would help out here, they’re doing a great job with jargon words.

            They’re always ready to redefine things in more technical and limited terms to their advantage.

            “There’s no such things as assault weapons, that’s just “scary black paint” on a normal weapon. And speaking about that, there’s no such thing as an automatic weapon, because the weapon part is the reciever by definition. The rest is just cosmetic extra’s that you can’t stop people from obtaining.” In short, due to the way we redefine things they are completely beyond the scope of any regulation.

            If we apply that to this, then maybe IUD’s can be classified as a “pre-conceptional barrier” or something.

         2. They call IUDs baby murder death sticks.

         3. “Baby murder death stick” does sound pretty catchy. I’d order one for my card-carrying feminist friend, who wishes to sprinkle it with “baby pesticide”.

         4. Baby Murder Death Stick would make a great band name.

         5. I especially enjoyed the Baby Murder Death Stick cover of “Lick My Love Pump”.
            I remember at one time trying to bring into a discussion with the forced-birth crowd (I believe this was over at Dawn Eden’s when Dawn Patrol still had comments) the idea that any of a number of useful and beneficial and good drugs could with much better justification than IUDs, if one be a devotee of the fertilized egg, be banned for the potentially-pregnant; I pointed out that an anti-implantation effect for birth control pills had been posited, but there was now no evidence for it. Honestly, I now think that if a wrong label, originally belonging to a bottle of let us say thalidomide, had accidentally once been shipped with a packet of birth control pills, the forced-birth crowd would now be insisting that the BCPs caused limb loss in babies. That is the level of reasoned discourse I have come to expect from that crowd.

7. My promotion goes into effect tonight, which is awesome. It also means that I’m in a new managerial role, and a former colleague at my old level who reports to me (it’s a dude who gets along swell with all the other dudes and I’m trying SO HARD not to read into it) is making my work life hard as fuck (as in, he straight up lied to me about his work flow, I caught him, and then he sent me a wall of text about how I “must be fucking kidding” to which I blithely responded, “I need you to rethink whether these texts were a good idea”). And I work in banking, so I don’t have free time to make friends, which means the second the social aspect of my job goes to hell, my life feels so much worse overall. So yay. Congratulations. How the fuck do adults make friends when they live at work?

   1. Congratulations and sorry to hear that? Well, there’s always blogs. Are you in I-banking? I guess you don’t get to keep banker’s hours?

8. I just want to run a few things down just in case anybody was under the impression that US women were not second-class citizens:

   1) Abortion clinic buffer zones? Struck down.

   2) Contraception coverage? Optional for employers.

   3) Cannibal cop’s conviction? Overturned by a federal judge.

   Be careful out there, people. They really don’t give two shits about us.

   1. 2) Contraception coverage? Optional for employers.

      God, that was such a fucking atrocity of a ruling, legally, morally, pragmatically… utterly irredeemably fucking awful.

      3) Cannibal cop’s conviction? Overturned by a federal judge.

      At the risk of sounding like an instigator, I don’t get this. Can you connect the dots on how this ruling is gendered for me?

      Honestly reviewing the decision, it seems pretty reasonable of the judge to surmise that the dude had some pretty sick misogynistic sexual fantasies, but wasn’t literally planning to open a restaurant where you could eat women. It’s hard to convict people for a crime they haven’t actually committed yet for good reason.

      I’m pretty much glad there’s a high evidentiary standard before spending life in prison.

      1. The dude had run the names of the women he wanted to kidnap, torture, cook alive, and eat through a cop database. He had followed them. He had purchased items he had discussed using to kidnap, torture, cook alive, and eat these specific women. He had taken steps to make his fantasies realities.

         Personally, I’d be happier knowing that somebody who was stalking me with the intention of kidnapping, torturing, and cooking me alive could be imprisoned before he succeeded, rather than being let go with a slap on the wrist.

      2. By the way, I’m glad you feel that that this guy isn’t a threat to you. I read about his arrest while administering an exam in NYC, in the same borough as his mom’s house, where he’s now staying. I read in detail about how he planned to kidnap and torture women not long after two of his former colleagues on the NYPD had been acquitted of raping the inebriated woman a worried taxi driver had called on them to protect, despite the bruise on the cervix of the survivor (the defense posited that she had bruised her cervix while showering, presumably during the daily internal cleansing with a bottle brush all us vagina-havers have to do) because, in the words of one juror, “if she hadn’t been so drunk, this wouldn’t have happened.”

         These are the men who got caught. This is my local police force. One of these men lives in the borough where I work. The rape took place in the neighborhood in which I grew up. These are the people I’m supposed to go to for “help.” Fuck, these are the dudes who used to hit on me in bars when I was younger. So I’m not taking this as lightly as you seem to be.

         1. By the way, I’m glad you feel that that this guy isn’t a threat to you. I read about his arrest while administering an exam in NYC, in the same borough as his mom’s house, where he’s now staying.

            That’s totally fair. I live in France, so I have a much more attenuated emotional reaction to this specific story (though not the issues of stalking/sexual assault/dudely violence in general, as a survivor of stalking myself).

            These are the men who got caught. This is my local police force. One of these men lives in the borough where I work. The rape took place in the neighborhood in which I grew up. These are the people I’m supposed to go to for “help.” Fuck, these are the dudes who used to hit on me in bars when I was younger. So I’m not taking this as lightly as you seem to be.

            That’s a fucking abominable story.

            The dude had run the names of the women he wanted to kidnap, torture, cook alive, and eat through a cop database. He had followed them. He had purchased items he had discussed using to kidnap, torture, cook alive, and eat these specific women. He had taken steps to make his fantasies realities.

            He served a year in jail for the first part. However he did not ever purchase the materials he wrote stories about using, and the dates on which he suggested he’d commit crimes passed without comment. Even the prosecution admitted he did nothing to turn his plans into reality. So if you’re going to accuse me of taking this lightly, at least get your fucking facts straight.

            And seriously, that’s a bullshit meaningless personal jab with no evidence to back it up. I take this shit super seriously. That doesn’t mean I have to agree with your assessment of what actions should or shouldn’t lead to incarceration.

         2. I disagree. It’s a personal jab, yes, but it’s not bullshit at all, in my opinion. It’s entirely warranted given your crack about opening up a restaurant.

            And I disagree that a year in jail is sufficient with reference to stalking his targets. I’m sure he’s learned a valuable lesson. Next time, he won’t get caught.

         3. I disagree. It’s a personal jab, yes, but it’s not bullshit at all, in my opinion. It’s entirely warranted given your crack about opening up a restaurant.

            It’s not a crack. In the web posts that led to his arrest he said he was going to open up a restaurant where you could buy and eat people after he kidnapped them.

            So given that, plus your untrue statement re: buying supplies, it really does seem to me that you don’t know anything about the case but are nevertheless prepared to make very strong statements about it.

            And I disagree that a year in jail is sufficient with reference to stalking his targets. I’m sure he’s learned a valuable lesson. Next time, he won’t get caught.

            I pretty much agree here (and never said I didn’t).

         4. By the way, I realize in my first two posts here I started two separate arguments with you. I find disagreement a useful way to learn/clarify my beliefs but I also have been told/am working on the fact that it’s not appropriate in all forums and for all people, especially those just looking for community/support. So if I just need to back off and take it elsewhere, tell me.

9. So sick of 4th of July shit.

   1. It’s hard to celebrate when the Supreme Court just declared women are second-class citizens who don’t deserve equal access to medical care, no?

10. Good news: finally received my prescriptions!

    Bad news: had to go through a highly triggering medical exam that involved the doctor literally exposing my bare breasts. (I have PTSD due to abuse trauma.) I’m also poor as fuck and for the time being living on donations. Life sucks aside from HRT.

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