The nature of fandom seems to have morphed in the past decade. In the old days of sci-fi conventions and Bobby Sherman fan clubs, fandom was a subculture reserved for the very young or the very obsessed—or, in the case of the Grateful Dead, the very stoned. As fantasy and comic-book franchises have taken over the entertainment industry, nerd culture has become mainstream. Now that couch potatoes have social media, they have risen up and become active, opinionated participants. As a result, movie studios and TV showrunners have to cater to subsets of diehard devotees, who expect to have a say in how their favorite properties are handled.
We live in a society where female ways of being are still commonly viewed as second-best, where too much feminine energy can be an obstacle to being taken seriously, where women are expected to conform to stereotypically male communication patterns and expectations in order to have a career and real power. Too often it’s a choice between embracing who you really are and getting what you want in life.
An entire section of the rules was devoted to censoring depictions of homosexuality. “Intimate activities (holding hands, touching, kissing) between homosexual lovers” were censored, as were “reports of homosexual groups, including news, characters, music, tv show, pictures”. Similarly blocked was content about “protecting rights of homosexuals (parade, slogan, etc.)” and “promotion of homosexuality”.
The U.S. and UK governments are expected to sign a treaty in October that will force social media platforms based in either of the countries to “disclose encrypted messages from suspected terrorists, paedophiles and other serious criminals” to police in the other, according to the Times of London.
Comment tu peux transmettre le contenu de messages chiffrés que tu n'es pas sensé pouvoir déchiffrer ? 🤔
Oops.
C'est toujours triste de voir un rêve s'évaporer à tout jamais comme ça.
It’s a survival mechanism, especially as someone with depression and anxiety, to try to ignore and normalize the dehumanizing experiences I have to move through in order to live. If I were to allow myself to be bothered by quotidian microaggressions and invalidations and othering, I’d maybe never leave the house.
Some writers map their sentences metrically, marking the stressed and unstressed syllables with scansion marks as if notating a musical score. Some even work out the stresses before they fill in the words. The rest of us just have a foggy sense that a sentence needs an extra beat. But we still know that a sentence is not just what it says but how it says it.
The notion that novelists should be solitary creators has long been deeply ingrained. More than twenty years ago, a group of Italian men set out to debunk that idea.
La nomination de Tristan Nitot servira d'abord à redorer le blason de Qwant dans la presse et les médias, mais également à éliminer de la direction de l'entreprise la seule personne susceptible d'essayer de pouvoir tenir tête à Léandri.
« Nitot est tout sauf un administratif ou un opérationnel : c'est un speaker, hors sol et totalement sous la coupe de Léandri. Son rôle : danser devant les journalistes, nu s'il le faut. »
Here, Dugan and Fabbre share portraits and words from 12 of the 88 people they connected with along the way.
There are plenty of well-documented reasons to distrust Instagram — the platform where one is never not branding, never not making Facebook money, never not giving Facebook one’s data — but most unnerving are the ways in which it has led me to distrust myself. After countless adventures through the black hole, my propensity to share, perform, and entertain has melded with a desire far more cynical: to be liked, quantifiably, for an idealized version of myself, at a rate not possible even ten years ago.
The key to understanding why a self-proclaimed radical feminist group would side with conservatives arguing for the right to force cisgender women into skirts at work is to understand who TERFs are and what they’ve been up to for the past 50 years.
Je crois que les réseaux sociaux nous ont niquées. On doit pas être cablées pour s'exprimer constamment devant des milliers de personnes qui s'expriment elles aussi constamment par milliers devant nous. C'est trop de pression pour notre cervelle.
Dating. Am I good at it? What qualifies as good at it? For me, dating was always about the effort. I put effort into my dates under the (gargantuanly misguided) notion that effort nets result. I do my hair and makeup, pull a lewk, and put on my optimism and positivity panties before walking out the door. I ask thoughtful questions and come prepared with morsels of information gleaned from their profiles so as to ensure my dates never feels void of conversation topic or connection. I put my best effort forward, because I believe — sorry, believed — dating is an activity worth the effort.
Direct communication is the best because when you clearly voice the truth about what you’re thinking and how you’re feeling, you maximize the likelihood of being understood.
21 ans que je vois des sales merdeux instrumentaliser le suicide de gars comme mon père pour éviter de parler des violences faites aux femmes par les hommes. Je dis de gars comme mon père parce qu’il cochait comme la majorité des hommes qui se suicident toutes les cases ; moyen utilisé, raisons, incapacité de parler etc. Ces gens s’en contrefoutent en général puisque le moindre mec qui oserait exprimer son mal être sur les réseaux sociaux est moqué, vilipendé, voire poussé au suicide. Qu’on ne vienne donc pas me prétendre que le suicide des mecs les intéressent c’est un mensonge, une sale petite instrumentalisation. Les mecs sont tellement mal à l'aise avec la fragilité masculine que c'est le seul argument qu'ils sont en bouche d'ailleurs lorsqu'il s'agit de contrer la propagande masculiniste et fasciste de certains. "Halala qu'est ce qu'il est fragile" braillent-ils face à un masculiniste comme si le problème était là.
les interdictions de la GPA n’arrêtent pas le commerce des bébés mais l’alimentent en réalité de manière à rendre les travailleuses gestationnelles beaucoup plus vulnérables qu’auparavant. Comme pour le travail du sexe, la question d’être pour ou contre la GPA n’est donc pas pertinente. Il s’agit plutôt de savoir pourquoi il est considéré comme normal d’être davantage opposé à la GPA qu’à d’autres formes de travails risqués et quels sont les effets de cette posture de charité sur les personnes qui exercent actuellement ce travail ?
Though well aware that this male-conceived genre served as a vehicle to tell horror stories of female independence, I was nonetheless entranced by these women who seemed so unburdened by emotion; it was the sort of disposition to which I could never relate, and never will.
The uncompromising outrage of activists and survivors has no doubt drawn important attention to sexual misconduct and egregious criminal behavior. Outrage brings awareness to long-buried issues in desperate need of justice. Outrage has resulted in the #MeToo movement, the formation of Time’s Up and the galvanization on display at the annual Women’s March. Outrage is a righteous and necessary vanguard in a free society.
Outrage is different from sex panic, however. The former exposes; the latter silences. Panic rejects nuance, debate and disagreement in favor of party lines and swift action. Panic has resulted in the rise of cancel culture and the dismissal of due process. By the time we can consider whether we’re in a full-blown cultural panic, rational thinking has already been cast aside. It becomes risky to ask for facts and data. In a sex panic, it becomes imprudent to question the extent to which sex-based discrimination exists. It becomes dangerous to suggest that all sexual violations, and all experiences of sexual violence, are not equivalent. As a consequence, we learn to shut up and sit down lest we face public condemnation and risk being attacked on the internet.
And in 2013, when the oldest Millennials were in their early 30s, Tinder became available to smartphone users everywhere. Suddenly dates too (or sex, or phone sex) could be set up without so much as a single spoken word between two people who had never met. In the years since, app dating has reached such a level of ubiquity that a couples therapist in New York told me last year that he no longer even bothers asking couples below a certain age threshold how they met. (It’s almost always the apps, he said.)
She was hurt by this, and seemed unable to understand why I was unwilling to continue a quasi-romantic relationship with someone for whom my feelings, my intimacy, my body, was the equivalent of a day at a theme park, a fun and whimsical distraction from the everyday. I didn’t feel scorned or heartbroken; I felt used and objectified. Beth saw no harm in using me to make herself feel good because, in her mind, my feelings and sexuality were somehow less legitimate than her own—which is, of course, the very essence of heteronormativity and homophobia.
Bryan was of little help. He grew frustrated that they couldn’t “bang” like they used to, and accused her of faking her infections to avoid having sex with him.
Dans son livre Histoire de la violence, Edouard Louis, alors qu’il évoque la mort d’une petite fille dont la mère est en partie tenue pour responsable, évoque la circulation de la haine et de la violence. Il écrit que «la haine pour la mère, la haine s’était déplacée sur d’autres personnes, à croire que c’est un sentiment qui ne peut par nature jamais disparaître mais seulement passer d’un corps à l’autre, se transférer d’un groupe à l’autre, d’une communauté à l’autre, (...) la haine n’a pas besoin d’individus particuliers pour exister mais uniquement de foyers pour se réincarner».
Even Darling, who believes that the way we treat robots mirrors our ideas about empathy and kindness, agrees the ethics aren’t always clear. “Even though it’s clearly wrong to punch a person, you get into ethical questions very quickly where it’s not always so clear what the answer is,” she says. “Is it OK to punch a person who’s trying to punch you? Is it OK to punch a Nazi?”
I get confused by the lack of quasi-assault, and interpret it as a lack of interest. I’m starting to realize I experience desirability via a violation of my boundaries, and it’s a weird, murky place to navigate.
Feminist pedagogy alone is inadequate to the barriers facing women, people of color, and queer people in institutions of higher education. Instead, we should look toward changing the institutions that structure our teaching. Just as we teach students to contextualize the texts and people we study, we must understand our classrooms as products of the broader university environment.
Here are the rules: You bring wine, or you bring food, or you do the dishes. Though, if you can’t bring anything that week because you’re low on time or energy or money, there’s still a seat for you.
Dans les années 1980, alors qu’elle luttait contre le cancer, Audre Lorde a affirmé que de prendre soin d’elle-même était « un acte de guerre politique ». Depuis, le self-care est devenu un mot à la mode dans les milieux activistes. La rhétorique du self-care est passée de spécifique à universelle, de provocative à obligatoire. Lorsqu’on parle de self-care aujourd’hui, parle-t-on de la même chose que Lorde ?
The community that I have spent my entire adult life working and living in sometimes feels even more dangerous and volatile than the mainstream, cis and heteronormative world that I spent my teen years trying to escape. After all, I can at least blame the cruelty of straight, cis society on homophobia and transphobia. But why are queers so mean to queers?