Steeleye Span’s “All Around My Hat” is a criminally underappreciated bop.
What if I started recommending Art and Lies and Stone Gods to everyone who is annoying about discworld?
“The second city is political. Politics of slums, apartments, mansions. The correct balance must be maintained. On no account should there be too many mansions or too few slums. Apartments hold the balance; the rich are terrified of being reduced to one, the poor dream of owning their own. The political city thrives on fear. Fear of never owning an apartment. Fear of owning merely an apartment.
Homelessness is illegal. In my city no-one is homeless although there are an increasing number of criminals who live on the street. It was smart to turn an abandoned class into a criminal class, sometimes people feel sorry for down and outs, they never feel sorry for criminals, it has been a great stabiliser.”
–Jeanette Winterson, Art and Lies
Since I’ve seen this happen with other things in tumblr. Bugs are essential to the ecosystem. Protecting them, as a private citizen, mostly means not using pesticide on you plants, including your vegetable garden and fruit trees, and as much as possible buying from low or no spray farms, planting pollinator friendly plants, not mowing often and not raking much, and leaving nests that you find outside that aren’t an active hazard alone. Consider leaving your porch lights off unless using them so they don’t kill themselves on the light or get inside.
It does not mean that “liking bugs” makes you a good person and having any kind of negative reaction makes you a bad person. It does not mean deciding all bugs in your house are just “funky little guys.” It does not mean that killing the ones in ylur house is bad, nor does it mean killing the ones that land on you is bad. If you’re feeling compassionate and want to put the bug outside, great! But bugs inside are often bad and can cause allergies and disease, and be indicative of bigger issues. We have a biological repulsion to certain types of insects because it used to help tell us if a food was ok to eat. It’s not a moral issue to think something is gross. It’s also not a moral failing to be allergic to bees and need to get rid of nests around your home.
It may be a moral issue if you mow your grass to within an inch of its life constantly in spring and make sure your property is perfectly leaf free in fall and winter though.
I do wish that “oppositional sexism” was a more commonly known term. It was coined as part of transmisogyny theory, and is defined as the belief that men and women, are distinct, non-overlapping categories that do not share any traits. If gender was a venn diagram, people who believe in oppositional sexism think that “men” and “women” are separate circles that never touch.
The reason I think that it’s a useful term is that it helps a lot with articulating exactly why a lot of transphobic people will call a cis man a girl for wearing nail polish, then turn around and call a trans woman a man. Both of those are enforcement of man and woman as non-overlapping social categories. It’s also a huge part of homophobia, with many homophobes considering gay people to no longer really belong to their gender because they aren’t performing it to their satisfaction.
It’s a large part of the reason behind arguments that men and women can’t understand each other or be friends, and/or that either men or women are monoliths. If men and women have nothing in common at all, it would be difficult for them to understand each other, and if all men are alike or all women are alike, then it makes sense to treat them all the same. Enforcing this rift is particularly miserable for women and men in close relationships with each other, but is often continued on the basis that “If I’m not a real man/woman, they won’t love me anymore.”
One common “progressive” form of oppositional sexism is an idea often put as the “divine feminine”, that women are special in a way that men will never understand. It’s meant to uplift women, but does so in ways that reinforce the idea that men and women are fundamentally different in ways that can never be reconciled or transcended. There’s a reason this rhetoric is hugely popular among both tradwifes and radical feminists. It argues that there is something about women that men will never have or know, which is appealing when you are trying to define womanhood in a way that means no man is or ever has been a part of it.
You’ll notice that nonbinary people are sharply excluded from the definition. This doesn’t mean it doesn’t apply to them, it means that oppositional sexism doesn’t believe nonbinary people of any kind exist. It’s especially rough on multigender people who are both men and women, because the whole idea of it is that men and women are two circles that don’t overlap. The idea of them overlapping in one person is fundamentally rejected.
I think it’s a very useful term for talking about a lot of the problems that a lot of queer people face when it comes to trying to carve out a place for ourselves in a society that views any deviation from rigid, binary categories as a failure to perform them correctly.
If I can add, oppositional sexism is a cornerstone of evangelicalism and honestly a whole bunch of other forms of Christianity. The idea women and men exist for different tasks is deeply religious but specifically in the US and I assume for the majority of tradwives evangelical/conservative christian dogma. So even when ppl who proport to be somewhere feminist start up divine feminine shit they’re regurgitating the same talking points the religious right started doing.
Yep. I believe they refer to it as “Complimentarianism”.
Sunday, August 6, 2023
I think the only thing weirder than seeing (US) southernisms sneaking into European users speech is watching it happen with anglicized Yiddishisms.
message to cis allies: buying your trans friend lunch will do much more good for the trans community than debating transphobes who will not change their minds publicaly on social media and making all your trans followers see how much people hate them over and over again
if you base your trans allyship more on fighting with idiots than supporting and loving the trans community you may want to rethink things a little. bc i tend to get sick of when my cis friends want to talk more about how many people hate me than anything else about my transness.
It’s weird that ime, by and large, disabled people get that whatever the new inoffensive language of yesterday was is the derogatory language of today, and sometimes that language is SO derogatory that it’s gotta go, and sometimes you have to insist on a word’s neutrality despite others using it as a pejorative, and sometimes you use what is understood to be offensive on purpose to make a point, but that doesn’t make that offensive word suddenly neutral, and it’s a matter of tone and degree, not something to make neat if then rules for. But ime by and large millennial and younger lgbtq people don’t get this at all.
