yelling at the void
Here’s what I want to know. It’s an open question to everyone, to my ex-boyfriends, neuroscientists, radical feminists, politicians, people on Twitter, my friends, myself. What is it about porn stars that bothers you so much?…
We can go on like this, of course, because in America the racist traumas are widespread. How about the next time a black person is stopped and patted down without cause? How do you write about that humiliation in a way that’s different from what you wrote when Forest Whitaker received the same treatment last year, and a New York City police chief before him, and thousands of other innocent black and Latino men before them?…
Women who have experienced this can recognize that placating these men is a rational choice, **a form of self-defense to protect against setting off an aggressor**. But to male bystanders, it often looks like a warm welcome, and that helps to shift blame in the public eye from the harasser and onto his target, who’s failed to respond with the type of masculine bravado that men more easily recognize.…
The way people speak and write is based on a lot of factors. Geography, for one. The various communities you belong to are also a big influence. We’re all fluent in more than one english, for example the language of our peer group and the language of our parents’ generation.…
Then Couric moved on to what a lot of us were waiting for. She told Cox, the “last time you were here, I got a lot of flack because I asked about the physical process” of being trans. **She then admitted that the “flack” was appropriate**, and she now understands that it’s troubling for trans people to hear those kinds of questions, because too often it’s the focus of all conversations they have with cis people and that for many trans people, the physical aspect isn’t really that big a deal.…