Nobody Nose What Happened That Night, I’m Being Sirius

Belittling of male rape victims is the result of several factors, but feminism isn’t one of them. The primary reason people think men can’t get raped is that they stereotype men as more capable and stronger. Which is the sort of stereotyping feminism is actively trying to combat.

In fact, feminists are some of the most vocal advocates saying that men can be raped (see example here: http://everydayfeminism.com/2014/12/male-rape-epidemic/ ; I can provide more examples if you want).

Some of the most common proponents of the idea that men can’t be raped are MRAs (which is a misleading name if I’ve ever heard one). If you really want to point fingers, point them at the group that actually is dispensing this sort of lie.

Obviously, people can feel free to choose whatever label they want for their beliefs, but if they believe in equality of the sexes, then they are feminists. If they don’t, then they aren’t. It’s that simple.

Basically why I’m not a feminist

Only if you ignore (not a comprehensive list):

- The five genders in Sulawesi culture

-Hijras, in India, who have been recognized for thousands of years

-Two-spirit people in Native American culture

-Some (though not all) of the people who identify as warias

-Hawaiian mahus

Non-binary genders: not actually a new concept.

Alien Invasion?

Here’s a different take on the alien invasion trope: 

The world is going to shit: overpopulation, deforestation, pollution, global warming, everything. The only question is if we’ll kill ourselves off before we kill the planet out from under us. Then one day ships appear in the skies all over the world- not just America and countries with trendy landmarks, but EVERYWHERE. Efforts are made to stop the “attackers” but humanity is still rounded up and carted off to some strange alien facility. 

Food (of a sort) and shelter are provided, but no answers are forthcoming because humanity’s captors don’t bother talking to us. Maybe select individuals are taken off for testing, but they all come back in more or less the same condition they were found, except maybe with immuno-boosters or a few troubling terminal diseases cleared up. There’s massive speculation about what’s going on and probably religions are formed based on various beliefs about what the aliens are doing with us, but no one knows for sure. 

This goes on for years (or longer) and then one day everyone is rounded up again and taken back to Earth. Everything is exactly how we left it (except maybe dustier and overgrown) except now there’s no pollution, the ice caps have been repaired, global temps stabilized, ozone holes patched, everything. There are more forests, more crops, and maybe a few critical species (like bees) have been given a population boost. There probably isn’t a lot of thought to where people get dumped so a lot of folks end up in the wrong countries and whatnot, but eventually we sort ourselves back out and either make our way back home or settle down where we are. In a world that’s a little better than the one we left.

And that’s how humanity finds out they’re just an alien terrarium and the owners have stopped by to clean the tank.

Here, have some recommendations of Advanced Gay literature!

1. Fires of the Faithful/ Turning the Storm by Naomi Kritzer. This duet is mostly a fantasy novel; the protagonist is also lesbian. There are some religious themes, but the protagonist could probably best be described as agnostic-ish. You can find the first one on Amazon here: https://www.amazon.com/Fires-Faithful-Naomi-Kritzer/dp/0553585177

2. Proxy by Alex London. I’m not sure if it quite qualifies as Advanced Gay literature, as homophobia still exists in that universe and negatively affects one of the two protagonists, who is gay. I’m granting it a spot on the list mostly because the main problems are not the result of homophobia. It’s on Amazon here: https://www.amazon.com/Proxy-Alex-London/dp/014751133X

3. The Just City by Jo Walton. This book is about a group of people trying to set up Plato’s Republic. If you don’t like philosophy, you’ll probably find it boring, but if you do, especially Plato’s works, you might like it. Several characters are mentioned to be in relationships with people of the same gender. Although sexual attraction to anyone is discouraged, this isn’t applied any more harshly to the same-gender-attracted characters. I will warn you that there are a few rape scenes, so if that bothers you you should probably stay away. It’s on Amazon at https://www.amazon.com/Just-City-Thessaly-Jo-Walton/dp/0765332663

Those are just the first few to come to mind; if you want more recommendations message me.

tfw you pick up a Gay Novel TM at the library but upon reading it discover its all about being gay and how hard tm it is but you already graduated this level of beginners gay and youre mad bc you cant find Advanced Gay literature

A week or so ago, I was feeling nostalgic for my old Pokémon games, so I pulled out my old copy of Pokémon White, reset the game, and played through the main storyline.

Things I've noticed (spoilers for BW and BW2 follow):

Child!me was really bad at Pokémon. I basically just kept whichever Pokémon happened to be the highest level ones I had in my team, and if that meant randomly putting in a wild 'mon with a terrible moveset, so be it. I basically didn't consider type advantages at all. I'm pretty sure I wiped to Elesa like five times or so before I swapped in a ground type and manage to beat her, and the lesson I took from that was "wow, the Pokémon I added was only one level higher than the one I swapped it out for, amazing how much difference that makes!"

The "good guys'" arguments in the game are ... really bad. Like, I agree that they're correct about the empirical fact "is catching/training/battling Pokémon abusive," but there are a number of conversations that essentially go:

Team Plasma: have you considered that you're making Pokémon suffer, and that's bad? "Good" guy: I think it's important to consider different perspectives and let people make up their own mind on whether Pokémon suffering is bad! not everything is black and white!

Subtext I absolutely did not notice when I initially played through: Alder is really bad at his job! The Elite Four more or less tells you that he's abandoning his actual job duties to wander around Unova being sad that one of his Pokémon died several years ago. When N beats him, he randomly gets really upset about it and starts insulting him. No wonder by the sequels he's been replaced.

One thing I'd remembered as not being explicit until the second game was that outside of N, there are plenty of Team Plasma members who actually genuinely want to help Pokémon and were not abusive. I was remembering wrong -- this is pretty explicit in BW too.

I could probably hit up ye olde googleheim for this but I wonder how they chose the order for LGBTQIA like … what type of alphabet

George Takei educating the ignorant

@evolution-is-just-a-theorem

I don’t think (f) is necessarily about minds, especially given your interpretation of g. “Sherlock Holmes has a name that starts with S” seems to me to be the equivalent of “Justice has a name that starts with J.” Even though Justice is not a physical thing that exists in the world any more than Sherlock Holmes is, the second statement can still be evaluated as true or false, in the sense that the first letter of the string “Justice” can be determined.

(It is possible that you are using a more narrow definition of the word “name” than I am, which could affect this analysis.)

Bullet of the day: conversations about fictional objects are non-sensical*. One cannot reasonably ask whether or not Sherlock and Watson did the frick-frack.

@lambdaphagy , because you had good comments the last time I talked about a similar topic.

* They can be made sensical without changing the conversation *too* much, but in my experience people don’t even realize they’re doing something strange.