Sarah Roark

I thought this might be good for an awwwwwwww from nagaina_ryuuoh:

http://sports.yahoo.com/olympics/blog/fourth_place_medal/post/Skating-star-Johnny-Weir-married-on-New-Year-82?urn=oly-wp992

Happy New Year all!

(with thanks to Jess Hartley for the link)

http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/10/mf_hardwickexcerpt/

Just wow.

Condoms With Teeth Fight Rape

I'm not sure I should encourage the spark of schadenfreude this inspires in me. Or, well, maybe I should. :-)

At the very least, word of their being handed out has to be a great deterrent...

I don't know. Sometimes I'm a little shocked at all the shock.

I'm talking about the Penn State mess, of course. All these social and psychological mechanisms were well understood, I thought, and yet people keep asking the same questions over and over.

How could team and university officials protect a child molester (okay, alleged molester, though FWIW, it sounded to me like Sandusky basically outed himself as a very-unclear-on-appropriate-behavior pedophile in the Costas interview) -- and how can students and alumni defend and make excuses for Paterno's inaction? Well, that's easy. I got that one. See, I think people are envisioning this abstract Platonic scenario where one is weighing one simple thing against another simple thing: the needs of a child against the well-being of The Molester, whose only human or social attribute is that he molests. Trouble is, it's never like that in real life. It would be one thing if the offender was always some loser-loner who didn't matter to anyone, but more often than not it's just the opposite. Quite often, he's someone who contributes good things to the community, who's embedded, whom the community depends on and is invested in. They sometimes deliberately position themselves that way, in fact -- whether it's because it gets them easier access to their preferred victims, or they're engaged in some effed-up bargaining with Heaven that goes "If I do all this good stuff over HERE, maybe that'll make up for this one tiny bad thing I do over HERE," or whatever the hell the reason is.

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It really is kind of heartbreaking to see sex-positive and radical feminists go after each other. Especially the sometimes innocent, sometimes quite willful mutual misinterpretation.

And the sad part is, I get it. On both sides. I see why there would be bitterness in either direction. I get why people go off half-cocked on partial information.

Radfems get tired of being portrayed as being by definition man-haters, sex-haters, and so on. They certainly get enough of that crap from mainstream media, the dude commentariat and the men's rights crowds. It's even worse to get it from fellow feminists. And while there are lots of sex-pos feminists who don't accuse radfems of those things, and whose critiques of radical feminism are quite nuanced, there others who blithely sling mud or whose well-intentioned criticisms edge too much onto those old stereotypes. (It's also been pointed out that the very label 'sex-positive' has an unfortunate and to some insulting implication that anyone who doesn't subscribe to that school of thought must, by exclusion, be 'sex-negative.')

Meanwhile, I've also personally seen how in some radfem (and even in some more liberal-feminist/general-2nd-wave) spaces, certain women -- unapologetic sex workers for example, women who practice or support BDSM, women whose gender expression or sex lives happen to tread too close to conventional femininity, and trans women -- are sometimes made to feel unwelcome, essentially told they don't get to call themselves feminists. This isn't by any means a universal occurrence, and there are radical feminists who actively speak out against this kind of shunning/shaming/silencing; but it comes up often enough to create anxiety and hurt and to make it very understandable that a new school of feminism would be created to build a safer space.

So yeah, I get it. It just depresses me. I mean, it's one thing to have honest disagreements about theory and politics, but must the sides continually mischaracterize each other?

Man, it is depressing to watch the sex-positive and radical feminists going after each other, and the willful misunderstanding on both sides. (Over on Feministe.)

On the Google News front page, the headline was:

"Zachary Quinto Announces He's a 'Gay Man'"

...Why the scare quotes, dudes?

Okay. Of the probably zillion reasons not to elect Chris Christie, for me his weight is not even SORT of near the top of the list.

I care if a presidential candidate has something that makes them liable to drop dead at short notice, sure. But it's unwise to make health assumptions about anyone based on their appearance. I'll wait for actual medical data, thanks.

Yes, Solvang. Opposing the expansion of a Native American reservation is exactly like the Arab-spring revolutionaries' sacrifices of blood and freedom. That's not even sort of an insulting comparison.

I've heard this kind of squawking from the folks out that way before (mostly from people who seem to just hate reservation casinos because well, because), and it really does annoy me.

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-chumash-20110925,0,6836260.story

::head-shaky::

Okay, I guess I should have realized that for some people, Chaz Bono dancing on Dancing with the Stars would be a Thing. You know, vulnerable children could see him, um, dancing! And talking!

Good lord, people.

I have to agree with other commenters -- this does just make it even more apparent why we NEED him to do a stint on the show. Especially for the vulnerable children who might not see acceptance of transgender people anywhere else in their lives.

I guess where DWTS fell from God's True Path really was in allowing fat ladies to dance, you know, after that it's obviously just a free-for-all...