Chaos Theory

The problem is that you are allowed to choose at all

Yeah, you know the usual "you can't win no matter what you do if you have a vagina' situation? This is the problem:

"The above scenarios, where there is no right choice, is just the surface of the situation.  What’s reallyat all. being globally disapproved of here is that women have a choice

It’s so simple when you finally realize that. Of course all choices are disapproved of, because it’s HAVING A CHOICE that’s the problem. If women, for instance, in all those situations, had to do what their husbands or if unmarried, their fathers, told them to do about each particular situation, society in general would cease censuring them regardless of what the choice was. For evidence, look at cultures where women are married off by their fathers–there is never any censure directed at them, nor is there censure directed at their fathers generally speaking. Oh yes, early marriage is so sad! but aside from the woman-as-victim, there are no other actors ever presented as being at fault.  I have yet to read an article that actually blames any individual father or husband for the marriage. Look at cultures where abortion and birth control are illegal. Nobody ever blames the women for how many or how few children they have, or whether or not they are working outside the home or not–because they have no choice. Or cultures where abortion and sterilization are required by law after a certain number of children are borne. And again, I have yet to read the article that ever holds any husbands or fathers culpable either–no actual individuals are ever to blame for whatever situation is in effect. As long as the women involved had no choice.

So I have the intellectual satisfaction of solving the mechanics of a puzzle that has troubled me for some time. Unfortunately, I have yet to figure out the why of it.  Why, in a country purportedly founded upon the rights of the individual to choose any number of things–why we have created a situation where doing so is overwhelmingly disapproved of, a situation where the only fix in terms of general societal approval would be to remove entirely that right..? Why is the individual’s pursuit of life, liberty and happiness constrained so much more heavily by loudly exhorted mores only when the individual is a fertile woman of childbearing years..?"   

This makes me SHUDDER

The story of a girl who got sexually harassed up the wazoo in ELEMENTARY SCHOOL. Of course, nobody would do shit about it. And it gets worse.

"And about a month before school let out for the summer, Robert asked me to be his girlfriend.
I was extremely surprised. When I shared the story with my best friend Danielle, she didn’t seem surprised at all, just pragmatic. “Well, are you?” she asked.
I was even more surprised that she’d think there was any chance I’d say yes. “But why?” I asked, honestly bewildered. I thought Robert was a nice boy but we didn’t talk outside of multiplication tables; what would I do with him? Frankly, what would I do with any boyfriend? What were they supposed to be for?
“You should tell him yes,” she said.  “He’d protect you.”
Protect me?
And that’s when I first began to understand what being female really meant.
I still remember her voice, saying it: ”He’d protect you.” I remember it because I finally understood.

 

Some boys want to do things to you that you don’t want.
You can’t make them stop because they’re bigger than you.
Adults don’t make them stop because they don’t care.
Only other boys can make them stop.
But other boys won’t do it unless you let them be your boyfriend.

As I hadn’t really contemplated saying yes before, I hadn’t actually spent any time wondering what being my boyfriend would have in it for Robert. So the next day, I asked him. It became quickly clear that he wanted the same things as Drew wanted, albeit coached much less crudely and nastily. And the final piece of the puzzle fell into place.

You have to do those things with your boyfriend instead.

It seemed like a zero-sum move to me, so I told Robert no.
--------------

So I steeled myself and waited for Drew to be alone on the playground—he didn’t bother me at recess anymore much, and why would he? He had a lot more fun with me after school—and approached him. And offered to be his girlfriend.

If, I said, he kept the rest of his friends off me, and didn’t chase me anymore or push me down or hurt me at all, I would agree to walk with him in school, and hold his hand, and sneak kisses at recess, and he could walk me home and touch me a little and I would announce publicly that he was my boyfriend.

It did indeed work. He got pretty hard-core on his boys—they were all scared of him anyway so it didn’t take too much for them to forget they ever had anything to do with me. He made it clear to everyone else that they’d better not so much as look cross-eyed at me. He became positively affectionate. And amazingly respectful of the boundaries I set. My willingness had bought what all my resistance could not."

Oh good god. GOOD GOD.

The joys of the Internets when female

"I haven't had time to read LJ recently, so I was up way too late last night catching up.  And this is what I got:
* An Onion AV Club writer venting her frustration that, whenever the AV Club interviews a reasonably attractive and successful woman, the comments section fills up with posts from men saying they'd fuck her, bragging that she's not good enough for them to fuck, and saying that they don't know her work, but they can just tell she's a stuck-up, stupid bitch who wouldn't be worth fucking. I checked the Onion AV Club and found this an accurate assessment. (Apparently, if your bio mentions that you wrote a humorous essay about getting locked out of your New York apartment, but you also have a vagina, it means you must be a rich, stupid, shallow Park Avenue bitch, because what other kind of woman lives in an apartment in New York?)
* Two professors arguing that it's okay for a man to rape a woman if he really, really wants sex, because it's exactly the same as a starving man stealing a loaf of bread.
* An autobio comic by a brilliant young cartoonist in which a male acquaintance tells her that all women would be happier if they quit their jobs and devoted themselves to raising children, complete with the typical guffawing about how he'd LOVE to be a stay-at-home mom because it'd be just like loafing around the house playing Guitar Hero all day. If you've ever wondered why brilliant young female cartoonists often have such short careers, rest assured that it has nothing to do with the number of times they're told by helpful people to stop drawing and concentrate on babies.
* A friend commenting that a strange man on the BART spotted her reading a difficult-looking book and told her that no one would want to marry a woman who reads books like that."

These stories make me ANGRY.

"It’s the story of Agata Mroz, a volleyball champion (therefore thin, tall, and of course blonde and
beautiful---wouldn’t be a tragic story of How You Should Be if the heroine wasn’t blonde and beautiful) who got cancer, but got married and made her husband a baby anyway, dying in the process at the age of 26.
In other words, the ideal woman is young and beautiful, and has the good sense to check out of life before her beauty fades, but of course taking the time to make a man a baby before she goes.  Women, like houseguests and fish, don’t last too long without stinking, and really we should all get the hint.

Like Hugo says, it’s a dig at women who would dare have an abortion to save their own physical lives, much less those who would swallow a pill or get an early term D&C to save the lives we’ve chosen for ourselves.  But more than that, it’s a dig at the very right of women to live our lives as if we were human beings that have purposes other than being young, beautiful, and fertile."

I have to point out this response from someone who's been there:

"I unfortunately have some personal experience with this:  while she was pregnant with me, my mother found out that her breast cancer had recurred and she was advised to have an abortion so they could treat the cancer.  She refused, I was born, and she died when I was seven.
Am I happy to be here?  Well, duh.  But that doesn’t make up for the fact that she’s not here, and that left an enormous hole in my life and in my older brother’s life.  I appreciate that she made the decision to have me even though she knew it might shorten her own life, but I still miss her every day.
And for K-Lo to sanctimoniously come in and tell me how great it is that my mother is fucking dead makes me want to punch her in the face."

Here we go again.

First we had strategic use of beer. Now there's strategic use of tea.

Strategic use of beer

Awesome.

"I bet the jewels practically leapt into her hands from the force of her sheer awesomeness."

We know she's not supposed to be a role model, but...

Name discussions obsess EVERYBODY

I'm reading yet another marital name change discussion. I wasn't even going to link to this one because I link to them ALL, but then I got annoyed at this comment:

"My mother and father were married in 1976, and my mother never changed her name.
Last Christmas they received an Xmas card from relatives (on Mom’s side of the family), addressed to “Dr. and Mrs. Hisname.”
Oh, did I mention my mother and father are both Ph.D.s?  They actually have the same degree and graduated the same year.
Over 30 years of marriage and there are still people who cannot accept that she didn’t change her name. Even people who were physically present at the wedding, and who know damn well what her name really is."

ARRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHHH.

Skank-bot

I really don't like the tone this article takes when it comes to talking about Cameron (warning: spoilerish for Sarah Connor):

"Girl Power: After talking briefly with Summer Glau and being reminded about what a lady she is, I asked Terminator boss and creator Josh Friedman if Cameron had any sense of human femininity. "I think sometimes she does when it suits her," he replied. "Last year she learned how to paint her nails, and she's learned how to wear miniskirts and exploit her legs for attention."

Ew.

Another solution to the never-ending marital name game

"Then we found out that some Danish people have used an interesting way of combining last names - with von between them. Although I found this information on the internet - I should have bookmarked it because as I write this I cannot find the reference again. Essentially, the word von means “of” or “from.” German naming traditions used von to mean of X Estate, denoting nobility. The nobility system of naming has passed, the remnants are the people who today still bear those names. In the Danish usage of von to combine names, it is like saying your last name is X of Y or X from Y. So how about Haro von Mogel?

That was it. We found our new names: Karl and Ariela Haro von Mogel."

That is not at all a bad idea, Karl!