[ETA: Oh yeah, both links are to those horrid PDF things.]

Summary of the 2009 Hollywood Writers Report, going over demographics by sex, age, and (sort of) race. There's some weirdness (like lumping all races under "minority"* and putting that up against "women" and "white males," as though women are somehow all white or something) but it gives a pretty decent picture at who's writing for film and TV.

(SPOILER: It is mostly young white men. I know! How surprising! You could not tell this at all from what gets released!)

Here's the full report, for those of you that like lots of words. Or like details and shit.

* Weird both because, y'know, "ALL RACES ARE THE SAME" and because "minority" covers more than just race. BUT HEY, I think y'all can figure out from context what they are TRYING to say.

For the past few days I've been reading this Metafilter thread [trigger warning for sexual assault discussion], linked from somewhere or other.

It's loooong, but definitely worth reading, both for a great general discussion on what it's like to be a woman (in the US mainly), and for an example where, even with some serious Fail going on, things don't get completely derailed and stupid.

I encourage folks to read all (or at least most and skim past things that are repetitive or whatev), but a few posts that I think are especially noteworthy:

One woman's account of Growing up Female
Another one
And another account
"What you, as a guy, can do to help"

Again, I recommend reading the whole damn thing, or as much as you can, because a lot of different points (and Bingo Squares) come up, and are discussed and explained.

Danii makes a good post, everyone goes and reads it. [Except people who have potential trigger issues surrounding sexual violence toward women. They go here. Everyone else can go there after reading.]

Just... just look at that. Read some of those. Stare at reality for a moment and then go back to that Jezebel article and admit that it all fits together, that it all functions within the same system and the same broken ideas that permiate the "enlightened" world we live in. That what happened there is NOT SURPRISING. It's sad, it's sickening, but it's not surprising.

And sometimes when I read all this stuff, I get so angry, literally so angry I can hardly keep from shaking. My arms are tight, my fingers clench. If you aren't angry after reading all that, I... I don't even know what to say. But mainly, the response is always "Why Don't People Do Something?"

. . . .

And one day I kind of realized "...hey. I'm part of 'people'. And, well, I'm doing something."

Separating historical fact from film fiction

“We found that when information in the film was consistent with information in the text, watching the film clips increased correct recall by about 50 percent relative to reading the text alone,” explains Andrew Butler, a psychology doctoral student at Washington University in St. Louis.

“In contrast, when information in the film directly contradicted the text, people often falsely recalled the misinformation portrayed in the film, sometimes as much as 50 percent of the time.”

. . . .

“The misleading effect occurred even when people were reminded of the potentially inaccurate nature of popular films right before viewing the film,” Butler says.

“However, the effect was completely negated when a specific warning about the particular inaccuracy was provided before the film,” adds Butler. “These results have implications for the common educational practice of using popular films as an instructional aid.”

tl;dr anyone who says "Oh it's just a movie people will know better and it won't affect anything!" are full of it.

Here is a Thing on geekiness and then on geekiness and gender.

Sexual Assault Prevention Tips Guaranteed to Work!

1. Don’t put drugs in people’s drinks in order to control their behavior.

2. When you see someone walking by themselves, leave them alone!

3. If you pull over to help someone with car problems, remember not to assault them!

4. NEVER open an unlocked door or window uninvited.

5. If you are in an elevator and someone else gets in, DON’T ASSAULT THEM!

6. Remember, people go to laundry to do their laundry, do not attempt to molest someone who is alone in a laundry room.

7. USE THE BUDDY SYSTEM! If you are not able to stop yourself from assaulting people, ask a friend to stay with you while you are in public.

8. Always be honest with people! Don’t pretend to be a caring friend in order to gain the trust of someone you want to assault. Consider telling them you plan to assault them. If you don’t communicate your intentions, the other person may take that as a sign that you do not plan to rape them.

9. Don’t forget: you can’t have sex with someone unless they are awake!

10. Carry a whistle! If you are worried you might assault someone “on accident” you can hand it to the person you are with, so they can blow it if you do.

And, ALWAYS REMEMBER: if you didn’t ask permission and then respect the answer the first time, you are commiting a crime- no matter how “into it” others appear to be.

(via badgerbag)

the Mean People Upstairs

So I started wondering: If [The Angry Oppressed Person In My Head] bore no resemblance whatsoever to any actual oppressed person, angry or otherwise, with whom I was acquainted, but was instead indistinguishable from every abusive person I ever knew, why was my brain substituting “abusive asshole” for “oppressed person?”

Because that’s how my privilege mentally manifests itself. That is the surefire way for my privilege to feel safe and entitled to go right on blithely existing and stomping all over the actual human beings I was erasing in order to maintain it.

Why Anti-Feminism is Illogical, Unnecessary, Evil, and Incredibly Unsexy

The point of feminism is not to alienate men, but for women to focus on our own concerns and needs, to establish our own values. These may or may not coincide with the already established values of our dominant culture, just as our concerns and needs may or may not fold neatly into a relationship. The point is to work on making decisions based on choices that are really choices instead of following a script--in other words, it means learning to laugh at what we find funny instead of just following along with the laugh track

I'm not even touching the article it's in response to. That shit's fucked up. OK, I'm touching this one part:

Women don’t control these resources, because they don’t have to. What do women control? Men. As I mention in an earlier post, any reasonably attractive young woman exercises as much power over men as the male ruler of the world does over women.

I am not sure where this leaves ugly women. Possibly locked away in the attic so that nobody has to suffer the fate of having to see them. But they apparently are more powerful than men, except that they aren't, because, being ugly, they don't control men. Yeah.

(I am also not sure about men who are asexual or gay. Are they also controlled by women?)

When I was last at Comic-Con, I attended a lovely dinner with a few women but mostly men, and at one point the conversation turned to why we women had pretty much stopped reading superhero comics and were now more drawn to manga. The gentlemen at the table, all great guys and fans and not at all the type that would spew bile aimed at girls, nonetheless were completely puzzled as to why women would be so bothered by the way female superheroes are drawn (not the writing, but the pin-up style art that is prevalent). I had a tough time explaining it at the time, but the next morning I came up with the right switch that got them thinking: what if we took Batman, dressed him up in a thong, and sent him out to fight crime, all the while featuring many panels of him lounging around in his bedroom or talking on the phone in a tiny towel. When I mentioned this to a few of my (straight) male comics fan friends, their reaction was very much a look of horror and an exclamation of, “I don’t want to see that!” My response was “…And so you see my point.”

From here.

What weirds me out is how many people have a complete failure to grok that. o_O But then, I'm kind of uncomfortable with particularly skimpy-clothed, sexed-up ANYONE*, so maybe I'm just more sensitive to it.

*Outside of settings where they are supposed to be both, like porn and James Bond.

Blog Pam's House Blend bans people who use the cis- prefix in discussions of trans-related issues.

WTF

I don't even understand how using a term to define "those folks who ain't trans" in order to clearly talk about this stuff is somehow offensive. Also the tone argument can go suck some ammonia or something. I'm all about a civil discussion and all, but there's civility and there's demanding to be catered to, and Tone Argument is usually not the first one.

>:(

[Usual trigger warnings for the subject; I didn't cut the excerpt because it didn't seem likely to be particularly trigger-inducing, beyond the subject itself. I apologise in advance if this was wrong, and would be happy to cut it if need be.]

So there's been this discussion of rape going around. And this is one of the better posts that has points I don't think get brought up a lot, as well as part in particular that I feel gets to the crux of the matter:

Thus we see advice on how to avoid rape is primarily (almost entirely) weighted towards what women do, rather than what men do. Then, (the threat of) rape is used to regulate (primarily) women's sexual behaviour, as well as to punish those who step outside appropriate patterns of behaviour and/or do not fit into the standard model of what a woman should be like.

I say this not to play down how rape and sexual harassment take freedoms away from these women, but because I'd like for 'rape in the Congo', or 'the rural south' to NOT be a footnote to these experiences. I want us to be able to talk about how these are different, about how framing rape as 'nothing more or less than a conscious process of intimidation by which all men keep all women in a state of fear' is an inadequate exploration of how rape works, because it conceptualises rape as a tool of patriarchy without taking into account how patriarchal control operates in conjunction with colonialism/capitalism/racism/ablism/transphobia/homophobia to make people vulnerable to abuse. And not just because not all men are rapists, that is not the issue at hand.

There are links pointing to some of the other posts on the discussion, if you're (like me) getting in this late.

Am in the process of reading the
2nd Asian Women Blog Carnival, which has some great stuff (as these things tend to do).

Found this one to be interesting for a kind of different (from what I usually see) take on the talk about privilege:

The internet was probably the biggest eye-opener for me, and the best. You don't really think about what you are and where you grow up until you meet something completely antithetical to it, I guess, and that was what most of the internet was. I didn't hate homosexuality or anything when I first started writing - I didn't even know what it was, except that there were things on ff.net labelled "slash" - and one day I put a disclaimer on one of my fics saying that this is not slash - ick!, and the next thing I knew I was a 9 year old with a series of extremely angry and vulgar reviews in my inbox.

Within the context of recent discussions, I sit back and wonder, was that 9 year old me being... entitled? Acting... privileged? And I end up thinking, no, mostly it was ignorance - maybe it's all just linguistic theory, but the words "entitlement" and "privilege" when applied with a broad stroke ping my senses oddly.

Entitlement you don't know you've got shares space with ignorance. If there's failure going on, it's a failure to recognise - or maybe a failure to have lived, or been human enough. When people start using words like entitlement and privilege and failure around, there's an air of defensiveness/offensiveness, of abruptly born guilt and damage done intentionally, a martyrdom for someone's inability to be everyone and everything at the same time.

Not sure what to say about it just yet- it'll probably be percolating in my brain bits along with Miss Manners Rescues Civilization. (That being, in the same space as. My brain likes to percolate lots of things at once, but I don't think it's going to mix that post with, say, "What would be good stuff to sell at AWA?" or "No, seriously, I TOTALLY need to do a story about reincarnated lovers that DON'T feel like getting together again.")

1) I feel kind of... I guess sad + uncomfortable that my Amputee Girls pics are mostly faved by people making fetish collections. I mean... I guess one could make the argument that I've got kind of a drawing "fetish" for them (and other exterior things like scars), but... IDK, it's just... odd to me. (Fetish pics kind of weird me out in general because so few of them have a sense of exterior setting or personality.)

1a) Similarly, my "Kaiju Aya" for one of the AWA badges that one time continues to get faves from people with giant girl fetishes. Which for some reason bothers me less. Possibly because there is not really a marginalized group of giant girls.*

2) I keep mentally trying out costume designs for guys that might be the equivalent of cheesecakey girl designs, but it doesn't work. Part is probably because of the culturally indoctrinated "noooo, men cannot be SEXY in costumes like that, it would render them Not Men and/or Very Silly Looking!"** but I think part is just that I've developed a kind of internal division between "srs character design" and "sexytimes character design." Or maybe something else. The result is that I just can't properly do that kind of design. Not that I need to.

3) Karen Healey requested an illustration of Sei Shōnagon and Jane Austen as a crimefighting duo. I obliged. Apparently, it is considered a good illustration.

4) I cannot type today.

*Obese girls do not count unless they are also taller than a building.
**Oftentimes, the less clothing a guy is wearing, the sillier he looks. Especially when you start removing leg coverings. Why did you make guys' legs so funny-lookin', God?

How David Beats Goliath

The whole thing is a great read, but I wanted to highlight this passage in particular:

( ''The price that the outsider pays for being so heedless of custom is, of course, the disapproval of the insider.'' )

It's another of those sumups of how Privilege works, and the psychology behind the players and coaches protesting is pretty much the same one that happens when Privilege of any sort is challenged- "You've suddenly made things more difficult for me, where before they were very easy! This is unfair!"

Which, of course, is why I'm into trying to get my fellow Privileged types to see from a perspective other than the mainstream one, since, by the nature of Privilege, we don't really see how inherently unfair our setup is.

On an unrelated note, the article's illustration is really cute.

Feminist Cookies

For those people who feel they deserve special accolades for not actively being jerks.

This is one of the best things ever.

A thousand times this!

This points to the key confusion of the persecuted hegemons. They are unable to distinguish between challenges to their hegemony -- to their privilege -- and threats to their faith itself. This is a spiritually perilous confusion, particularly so for Christians who claim to follow a crucified outcast.

The word I'm stretching for here, Stanley Hauerwas would say, is "constantinianism" -- the inversion and perversion of Christianity that occurred when a religion of slaves and women and the poor became a religion of emperors and empires. Constantinian faith requires and assumes the establishment of an official, privileged religion. It comes to believe, in the language of the First Amendment, that its own free exercise depends on such an establishment -- that its free exercise is incompatible with the free exercise of any other religion (or of no religion at all).

A particularly timely link since I just posted this.

But yeah, if seeing shit you don't want to see messes up your faith and connection to God then your faith and connection to God is shitty and needs some serious work.

Childhood Masculinity

Post on the kind of abuse that US culture tends to promote in young boys. It's written from a transwoman's perspective, but from what I've heard from a lot of my guy friends (and what I've seen in general) it applies across the board. It's an important thing for everyone to think about, especially if you have any kind of contact with kids.

Because that shit ain't good, and it's up to adults to try and show another way.