Picture this: a world in which you must declare your preferred gender pronoun, or PGP, in every single sentence you utter. If you are someone who cares about the notion of gender, this may sound rather wonderful. No one would ever get confused. You’d always know how to address your fellow persons, and they would know how to address you.
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On Hebrew and Living in Gendered Language
Gender
Mar 17, 2015
Link Roundup!
The Internet
Mar 17, 2015
the jinx The jinx THE JINX the JINX
the jinx
jinxy
THE JINX
television > police ANY DAY
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Tony Abbott is an idiot, let’s talk about exactly how he’s an idiot (Australia, I feel for you, we Canadians have an idiot right now too):
The suggestion that Indigenous people living on their traditional lands is a “lifestyle choice” has not gone down well among people who think the proclaimed prime minister for Indigenous affairs should know more about Aboriginal culture.
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Link Roundup!
The Internet
Mar 16, 2015
“From Jamaica to Minnesota to myself“:
In creative writing, I teach that characters arise out of our need for them. By now, the person I created in New York was the only one I wanted to be. Over the next two years, I came and left often, pushing the limits of a student visa. I’d make friends but never get close enough to have them ask me anything too deep, playing at being aloof when I was really just shy, and I’d walk past gay bars, turn and walk past again, but never go in. Back home I fell back into church, knowing I didn’t belong there anymore. Once I forgot to code-switch in time and dashed to the bathroom in J.F.K., minutes before my flight to Kingston, to change out of my skinny jeans and hoop earrings. Eight years after reaching the end of myself, I was on borrowed time. Whether it was in a plane or a coffin, I knew I had to get out of Jamaica.
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“My Flu” is better than anything a man has ever written:
Anyway, as far as I’m concerned The Fall is a show about Gillian Anderson—as Inspector Stella Gibson—murmuring endlessly. Something bad happens and she’s like “Mmmmmm.” Something worse happens and she’s like “Mmmmm,” at a lower octave. Once in a while she’ll murmur, “Mmmm, it of-ten occurrrrs to me that men are horrrribullll,” and that’s why everyone loves it.
You know what I’d like to see? I’d like to see a show about Stella Gibson’s dry cleaner. In the first scene Stella Gibson’s dry cleaner says to his wife “I got a new customer today, she has ten million silk shirts and they’re always perfect.” The show ends with him retiring early and moving to the Canary Islands.
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Link Roundup!
The Internet
Mar 12, 2015
Sarah Marshall linked to this on Facebook and now I’m really into it:
Martha’s Vineyard Sign Language (MVSL) was a village sign language once widely used on the island of Martha’s Vineyard off the coast of Massachusetts, U.S., from the early 18th century to 1952. It was used by both deaf and hearingpeople in the community; consequently, deafness did not become a barrier to participation in public life. Martha’s Vineyard Sign Language played a role in the development of American Sign Language.
The language was able to thrive on Martha’s Vineyard because of the unusually high percentage of deaf islanders and because deafness was a recessive hereditary trait, which meant that almost anyone might have both deaf and hearing siblings. In 1854,when the island’s deaf population peaked, the United States national average was one deaf person in 5728, while on Martha’s Vineyard it was one in 155. In the town of Chilmark, which had the highest concentration of deaf people on the island, the average was 1 in 25; in a section of Chilmark called Squibnocket, as much as a quarter of the population of 60 was deaf.
Hearing people sometimes signed even when there were no deaf people present: children signed behind a schoolteacher’s back; adults signed to one another during church sermons; and farmers signed to their children across a wide field, where the spoken word would not carry.
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Related to the Chipewyan naming issue we talked about on Tuesday, how Facebook (in league with trolls) messes with Native names:
Iron Eyes says that in late summer 2014 Facebook disabled his personal account and asked him for ID to restore it. That account suspension meant that Iron Eyes—who also co-founded Last Real Indians—also lost access as an administrator to the site’s Facebook page.
“I turned in my Standing Rock Nation ID twice, but Facebook kept my account disabled anyway,” Iron Eyes says. His tribal identification allows him to vote in North Dakota, but Facebook required a state ID.
Iron Eyes, who was highly visible during the protests in Leith, suspects that PLE targeted him, but he hasn’t been able to prove it. Ultimately he holds Facebook responsible for what he calls discrimination. “So many of us Lakota people have these two-word last names that were sometimes handed down [in] ceremonious and meaningful ways. Facebook has belittled and singled us out because of it,” says Iron Eyes, who adds that the social network didn’t offer him an explanation about why his account was flagged in the first place.
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It’s 2050 And Feminism Has Finally Won
Feminism
Mar 11, 2015
It’s 2050 and feminism has finally won. Women make up more than 80% of serial killers and serial killer-related entertainment shows. Everyone agrees that Harper Lee wrote In Cold Blood under Truman Capote’s name as a favor before beating Ernest Hemingway in Greco-Roman-style wrestling. Sex is just when two or more women take the mathematics portion of the SAT together and kick a businessman’s teeth in. It’s 2050 and Bob Dylan was never even born.
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Milking the Bull: On Heroines
Beauty
Mar 11, 2015
Anna Cabe’s previous work for The Toast can be found here.
“Foolish talk,” growled the king. “Did you just say that your father gave birth to a child? It’s the most impossible thing I’ve ever heard!”
“Your Majesty,” Marcela replied, maintaining her calm, “If you as you now admit it is impossible for a man to give birth to a child, it must equally be ridiculous to milk a bull.”
Realizing then it was Marcela herself at the river, the king could not help but marvel at her intelligence. — from “The Legend of Marcela, the Intelligent Maiden”
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Marcela, the Intelligent Maiden, in capital letters. Unlike the saccharine Cinderella (so-called for passively sleeping in ashes), the insipid Snow White (named for her complexion; also knocked out cold), the drowsy Sleeping Beauty (dubbed for, well, taking a long nap), here was a fair maiden who outwitted a king and thus gained her prince. Here was a pretty face without a yawning gap behind it.
Best of all, she had my brown eyes and skin, my black hair. She was someone that I didn’t know I hungered for, surrounded as I was by softly blonde Disney princesses, until I was well into elementary school and discovered Filipino folklore for the first time.
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Link Roundup!
The Internet
Mar 10, 2015
The New Yorker has two fantastic things right now (probably others, but these are the two I could not detach myself from): Gerry Adams’ cloaked IRA leadership (I also recommend Ed Moloney’s book, which I read while IN Northern Ireland and made for a really intense experience) and also Break-In at Y-12, on how that lil group of pacifists basically walked into a secure nuclear facility.
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This is the best reason to become a New Media Personality, and also the article is great and it is here:
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Link Roundup!
The Internet
Mar 09, 2015
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The shots stopped as quickly as they had started. The man disappeared between some buildings. Chest heaving, hands shaking, I tried to calm my crying daughter, while my husband, friends and I all looked at one another in breathless disbelief. I turned to check on Hunter, a high school intern from Oregon who was staying with my family for a few weeks, but she was on the phone.
“Someone was just shooting on the beach,” she said, between gulps of air, to the person on the line.
Unable to imagine whom she would be calling at that moment, I asked her, somewhat indignantly, if she couldn’t have waited until we got to safety before calling her mom.
“No,” she said. “I am talking to the police.”
My friends and I locked eyes in stunned silence. Between the four adults, we hold six degrees. Three of us are journalists. And not one of us had thought to call the police. We had not even considered it.
We also are all black. And without realizing it, in that moment, each of us had made a set of calculations, an instantaneous weighing of the pros and cons.
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