Friendly Reminder That Bisexual, Pansexual, Asexual, And Aromantic People Do Not Experience “straight

would you be willing to explain the medieval vs. rennaisance stuff you were mentioning in "the middle ages got murdered" or point me to the tags you use for talking about such things? ty.

SURE. :D 

So here’s the thing: what we call “the Renaissance” was a very self-consciously constructed concept invented by a guy called Francesco Petracco (aka Petrarch) because he was totally defensive about the place of Italy in the era he was alive in (aka “a totally disreputable mess of constant warfare, weird alliances, sadistic fuckhead rulers, and so on, with bits of it being passed between mainland European empires and/or the pope and/or both willy nilly, with everyone else kind of ignoring it”) because this was an ignoble and horrible fate for The Heirs of Rome. 

He endeavoured to Subtly (ie not at all subtly) get himself crowned as a poet of outstanding virtue via laurel wreath (aka what we’d now call “the poet laureate”, although the position wasn’t formalized at that time although the symbolism was well known) in a big Ceremony and announced that Learning and Art and Wisdom would restore the world (aka Rome, aka the Empire rightly controlled by Rome) to a good and moral place of goodness, unlike all this horrible shit that had been happening lately. 

He impressed a GREAT many people with this, and more or less from then on the official story of history is that with Petrarch in the mid-14th century (aka the mid-1300s) there was a Renaissance that saved us from the Dark and/or Middle Ages, where we got back alllll the True Wisdom of Antiquity and became civilized thoughtful people instead of superstitious peasants. 

The problem with this is, of course, that it is a giant pile of flaming bullshit. 

Keep reading

So the "don't call trans women dude" discourse is back on my dash, and I just read something that might explain why it's such a frustrating argument for everyone involved.

TLDR: There's gender-cultural differences that explain why people are arguing about this- and a reason it hurts trans women more than you might think if you were raised on the other side of the cultural divide.

I'll admit, I used to be very much on team "I won't call you 'dude' if it feels like misgendering, but also I don't really grok why it feels like I'm misgendering you, especially if I'm not addressing you directly." But then I read an academic paper that really unpicked how people used the word 'dude' (it's Kiesling (2004) if you're curious) and I realized that the way I was taught to use the word was different from the way most trans women were taught.

... So the thing about the word 'dude' that's really interesting is that it's used differently a) by people of different genders and b) across gender lines. This study is, obviously, 20 years old, but a lot of the conclusions hold up. The gist is, there's ~5 different ways that people use the word "dude":

marking discourse structure- AKA separating thoughts. You can use the word 'dude' to signal that you're changing the subject or going on a different train of thought.

exclamation. You can use the word "dude" the way you'd use another interjection like "oh my god" or "god damn".

confrontational stance mitigation. When you're getting in an argument with someone, you can address them as 'dude' to de-escalate. If you're both the same gender, it's homosocial bonding. If you're different genders, it's an attempt to weaken the gender-related power dynamic.

marking affiliation and connection. Kiesling calls this 'cool solidarity'- the idea is, "I'm a dude, you're a dude. We're just guys being dudes." This is often a greeting or a form of address (aka directly calling someone dude).

signaling agreement. "Dude, you are soooo right", kind of deal.

Now, here's the important part.

When [cis] men use the word 'dude', they are overwhelmingly using it as a form of address to mark affiliation and connection- "hey, we're all bros here, dude"- to mitigate a confrontational stance, or to signal agreement.

When [cis] women use the word 'dude', they're often commiserating about something bad (and marking affiliation/connection), mitigating a confrontational stance, or giving someone a direct order. (Anecdotally, I'd guess cis women also use it as an exclamation - this is how I most often use it.)

Cis men use the word 'dude' to say 'we're all guys here'. It is a direct form of male bonding. If a cis man uses the word 'dude' in your presence, he is generally calling you one of the guys.

Cis women use the word 'dude' to say 'we're on the same level as you; we're peers'- especially to de-escalate an argument with a cis man. Between women, it's an expression of ~cool solidarity~; when a woman's addressing a man, it's a way to say 'I'm as good as you, knock it off'.

So you've got this cultural difference, depending on how you were raised and where you spent time in your formative years. If you were assigned female at birth, you're probably used to thinking of the word 'dude' as something that isn't a direct form of address- and, if you're addressing it to someone you see as a girl, you're probably thinking of it as 'cool solidarity'! You're not trying to tell the person you're talking to that they're a man- you're trying to convey that they're a cool person that you relate to as a peer.

Meanwhile, if you were assigned male at birth and spent your teens surrounded by cis guys, you're used to thinking of 'dude' as an expression of "we're all guys here", and specifically as homosocial male bonding. Someone using the word 'dude' extensively in your presence, even if they're not calling you 'dude' directly, feels like they're trying to put you in the Man Box, regardless of how they mean it.*

So what you get is this horrible, neverending argument, where everyone's lightly triggered and no one's happy.

The takeaway here: Obviously, don't call people things they don't want to be called, regardless of gender! But no one in this argument is coming to it in bad faith.

If you were raised as a cis woman and you're using the word the way a cis woman is, it is a gender-neutral term for you (with some subconscious gendered connotations you might not have realized). But if you were raised as a cis man and you're using the word the way a cis man uses it, the word dude is inherently gendered.

Don't pick this fight; it's as pointless as a French person and an American person arguing whether cheek kisses are an acceptable greeting. To one person, they might be. To another person, they aren't. Accept that your worldview is different, move on, and again, don't call people things they don't want to be called.

*(There is, of course, also the secret third thing, where someone who is trying to misgender a trans woman uses the word 'dude' to a trans woman the way they'd use it to a man. This absolutely happens. But I think the other dynamic is the reason we keep having this argument.)

CoVID-19 Trauma Resources

HEY GUYS

Know how I talk about trauma and how it works (and how to mediate it and avoid it) and so on a lot?

The Neurosequential Network is putting together webinars and talks and resources about that here.

Thus far there’s a recording of the live meeting they did yesterday, a link to an episode on The Trauma Therapist Podcast on the issue, and to Peace of Mind Foundation’s facebook discussion, but much more is planned.

That said even these are amazing resources as they are. This can be particularly useful if there are children in your life, but it’s honestly useful period.

(This is the network behind the symposium I was stupidly excited about going to; sadly it’s been postponed until next year, but the network started putting this stuff together immediately.)

Really been mulling this over a lot lately.

(Bluesky's nuclear block function means the original post isn't visible here, but the context is yet another leftist doing the "Dems bad, don't us for refusing to support Dems, etc., etc." song and dance)

You know, the second to last post is true for a lot of these Very Online leftists, I think. They actually do know the parties aren't the same, deep down, but they can't possibly risk being seen as Cringe and a bootlicker by saying so, leaving them to hope everyone else acts like an adult and does the work for them

spaci1701 replied to your post “Just in case you’re ever embarrassed about doing something silly or…”

So nice that he’s willing to offer his professional opinion of your husband’s teeth for free. Did he have some good news for you? Does it involve pliers?

So I had a CT scan, and lots of other stuff done, and they “couldn’t find anything immediately wrong” on film, which he very quickly assured me, didn’t mean there wasn’t a problem.

He thinks the pain coming from one particular tooth (the one making me want to rip my face off) is a filling I might be allergic to which is causing the tooth to self destruct, so before he takes the whole tooth out he wants to see if he can fix the filling and pack it with something I wont be allergic to and just try to save me from any more surgery. So that’s what I will be doing next week to try and get me out of pain. (We need to wait for some testing to come back before he feels happy putting things into my jaw)

He’s also willing to extract my root canal teeth because in his own words “there’s no way they should hurt like that”, but first he wants to send me to an orthodontist, to evaluate my bite because my jaw muscles are a mess, and it’s because my teeth have been ground so far down by the previous dentist none of them touch, so I’m performing gymnastics just to be able to chew and eat. And braces would help with that.

We also discovered that I also have a cluster of excess of nerve bundles, all on the lower left side of my jaw, which is why I can get drilled on the right side of my face and not flinch, but the left side never goes numb. Which is why no matter what they are doing, they are not able to get me numb for procedures.

Which is why the root canals on the left side of my face all feel like they are failing, despite appearing fine on film and upon re-opening. It’s my face recovering from the trauma of being fully “live” while having the roots stripped out. When I described my root canal experiences he sat with his eyes closed gripping his head in his hands. He also doesn’t think with my inflammation issues I am a candidate for root canal or implants, he thinks my body will reject them based purely on the fact that my root canal teeth just won’t heal, like my jaw is trying to push them out.

He also thinks one of those nerve bundles might have got hit by a needle when they were trying to get me numb—based on some residual bruising I have inside my mouth. So now my nerves are all freaking out and healing from being quite literally stabbed multiple times, which explains why NONE of my pain killers are working either.

He was very much “why are you not screaming from pain right now” and I was very “I am too tired to scream, just help me, please help me”. He promised me he’d find a way or find someone else who could.

I cried.

Several times.

Because someone believes me.

And they think they might know what to do. Also they made me a cup of tea when I started crying and held my hand.

They seem like good people who care. So I’m hopeful.

I’m still in a LOT of pain, but I’m really hopeful.

no idea if this is true, but it feels true

every time i see trad gender roles people being weird about fibercraft i wanna tell them

-medieval and early modern knitting guilds were full of men learning and perfecting fancy knitting techniques to impress rich clients

-in cold, wet climates like the scottish highlands knitting was done by the whole family, in fact it was the perfect activity to do while a man was out on a fishing boat or in the pasture with his sheep and cattle

-men who were away from women for a long time had to know how to knit and sew at least well enough to mend their own clothes. soldiers knitted. sailors knitted. cowboys and frontiersmen knitted. vikings probably knitted (actually they would have been doing a kind of proto knitting called nalbinding, but that's beside the point). all those guys the far right love to treat as ultra masculine heroes were sitting around their barracks and campfires at night darning their socks and knitting themselves little hats