http://uncannymagazine.com/article/masculinity-is-an-anxiety-disorder-breaking-down-the-nerd-box/

I read this stuff and feel like a cow listening to someone complain that beef is so bad for your cholesterol.

Like, in a way, we're on the same side. We both have the same goal, to get people to eat less beef.

And yet, and yet I have to react with I DON'T FUCKING CARE, YOU MURDEROUS SHITWEASEL. Maybe there's a way in which it would be more effective to respond with "That's true! Eating me is awfully bad for you! As it happens, I have this lovely tofu recipe..."

But at the point at which I can respond to a conversation about how unhealthy it is to kill me with genuine concern about the effects on my killer's health... he might as well kill me. He's already stolen my life, whether or not I'm still breathing. I've lost it.

But luckily, y'all stopped reading like 2 paragraphs ago.

brainwane premiered a new vid at Wiscon 2015!

It's called "Pipeline".

Because the tech industry's got a blank space, baby. And it'll write your name.

As you probably know, the 50 Shades of Grey movie came out recently.

Delightful: the explosion of men impotently railing "This isn't sexy! Why would anyone think this was sexy! It's awful! It's terrible! Stop finding it sexy!"


(drawn by floccinaucinihilipilificationa; thanks, kate_nepveu!)

Incidentally, have you noticed? Sometimes things that are just not that well written become hugely popular among men, or majority men. Star Wars, for example. Then there is an enormous collective effort to figure out what's appealing about it: explosions, special effects, the Hero's Journey, etc. And sometimes things that are just not that well written become hugely popular among women. Then there is an enormous collective effort to explain what's wrong with women for liking it.

Irritating as all fuck: all the earnest BDSMers finger-wagging about how dangerous it is that this story has fallen into the hands of women who Know Not The Truth About BDSM.

Y'all. It is a fantasy. Fan. Ta. Sy. I've got a copy of The Topping Book and Dossie Easton cheerfully writes about helping a guy figure out how to play out his fantasy of literally skinning his lover. You've read Doc and Fluff - you know, groundbreaking BDSM classic? About healthy safe and sane relationships, is it? Fuck's sake, stop freaking out because women are doing some homosocial bonding over fantasizing about a hot toppy billionaire.

(The famous tampon scene? The "ewww, why would anyone want to read that?" scene? Yes. In a world where girls don't want to let guys go down on them because they think they're "gross", let us wonder what on earth women might find appealing about a book with a scene in which a man is so comfortable with and completely not grossed out at all by a woman's normal bodily functions that it doesn't kill the mood for him to take out her tampon. It may remain forever a mystery.)

I now live and work in such a way that I have little to no professional contact with men; I can go entire days without having to consider what a man — any man — thinks of my work.

See, that's what kills me about this The Toast/The Butter thing. Mallory Ortberg wrote that but it's not true. Nick Pavich is the guy running the money behind the site. She's hasn't escaped working for The Man.

That's why Roxane Gay has to post these humiliating tweets about how she's doing what she can.

Oh Mallory, you told us you were the Queen of Misandry but you were sitting on a throne of lies. ;___;

ETA: thanks kate_nepveu for pointing out that Ms. Ortberg is not working for Mr. Pavich: they are co-founders, with equal ownership in the company.

Still. When you're a business owner but you can't alter your contracts without a man's buy-in, it is not true that you've substantially escaped having to care about a man thinks of your work.

A female name online means taking 25x as much abuse as a man + real names policy + forced identity integration + Google ubiquity that forces me to have a G+ account to comment on Youtube, comment on apps, or SEE MY WORK CALENDAR = Google to women: "Get off the internet!"

but whyyyyyy are there no female Mark Zuckerbergs I FUCKING WONDER. "God knows what you would do to get 13 year old girls interested in computers", indeed.

lovepeaceohana asks:

Predictable, possibly, but - what has been the most surprising thing about parenthood?

For me, personally, the absolute most surprising thing was the way I shifted my gender presentation identity way, way the hell over to femme.

I used to do most of my clothes shopping in the men's section. Before the Junebug was born, I hadn't carried a purse for maybe 17, 18 years. I had no interest in wearing makeup outside of Halloween; I had one tube of lipstick, grudgingly bought basically at random, which I would maybe wear on Valentine's Day, I'm not really sure why. Superstition, maybe. And now I wear dresses, and read beauty blogs for fun.

That's part of it; there's also the way that I've become way more invested in the house being tidy, which has coincided disastrously with having babies, which means that I started getting more upset that the place is a mess at the same time as I produced two tiny, yet incredibly powerful, MEGAMESS-O-TRONs.

My Republican friend, of course, suggests that having kids has brought out the innate gendered-ness of me & Mr. E's characters. I think this is bullshit. I think what it is, is a couple of things. First, I have a longer maternity leave: that means that I am home right now while Mr. E is not. It is way easier to not give a shit that the place is a mess if you spend an hour a day there, versus if you spend all your waking hours there. But also, we were not raised by wolves in the forest: I think that we will never know what is innate, but having kids has stripped away some of our veneer of civility. Leaving our deep programming. And having kids is way easier if things are clean and put away. You don't have to pick the old garlic pieces out of the crawling baby's mouth if there's no old garlic pieces on the floor for him to find. When one of us is chasing the naked toddler, we are equally likely to angrily say "Is he entirely out of clean pants?" But in me that translates to a mental note to fold the fucking laundry so we can find the clean pants when we need them, and to go by the local baby consignment store sometime and buy more pants. Because we've both been trained that that's my job.

The difference is that, with kids, the stakes are higher. I long ago made the decision that some lady of the house jobs are not my job. I will not do thank you cards for Mr. E's side of the family/friends. It is not my job just because I am the girl. This mostly means that they don't get done, and Mr. E's side of the family probably thinks that I'm an asshole, because I doubt they would blame him, because he's a guy and it's not his job. And y'know what? I can live with that. I would rather have that than taking on yet another job.

However. If I don't buy the Junebug pants as he grows out of them, he doesn't get new pants. And I can't live with that. So I take that on.

About the makeup and clothes and so on: that, I suspect, is to do with how unattractive I started to feel after having the Junebug. And pretty is a skill: I don't have the time/freedom to exercise much, (although I will more as Rocket gets older and more on a schedule and strong enough to go in a jogging stroller) but I can go by the Walgreens and buy some red lip balm. And I know they say pretty isn't the rent you pay to exist in the world as female. I do think that's true….as long as you're not existing in the traditional, i.e. dependent, female role. If you're paying for yourself, be as ugly as you want, I say. But now that my kids are living in a neighborhood, going to a daycare, that I could never, ever, ever afford except for Mr. E's money, I guess I feel like I had better up my appearance game. Because we know what happens to kids' standard of living when their parents get divorced, you know?

(I know that Mr. E loves his kids deeply and would never let them go wanting, no matter what happened with us. I am also pretty sure that everyone who ever had kids with someone they were in love with at the time thought that exact same thing.)

I should make it clear that I didn't really make a clear-eyed analysis and decide to care about lipstick because it might affect my kids' financial future. I just found myself becoming interested. This is an attempt to figure out what might be going on in my head. The results, however, are a matter of record.

Posted without comment:

By the time Diana Vreeland joined Harper's Bazaar in 1937 as a junior editor, handbags had become an integral and important part of the fashion business, as she would quickly learn. Shortly after she arrived at the august glossy, Vreeland had what she described in her memoir, D.V., as a "brainwave!"

"We're going to eliminate all handbags," she told a colleague.

"You're going to what?" he responded.

"Eliminate all handbags," she repeated. "Now look. What have I got here? I've got cigarettes, I've got my lipstick, I've got my comb, I've got my powder, I've got my rouge, I've got my money. But what do I want with a bloody old handbag that one leaves in taxis and so on? It should all go into pockets. Real pockets, like a man has, for goodness sake."

Then Vreeland explained how she wanted to devote an entire issue of the venerable fashion magazine to "showing what you can do with pockets and how the silhouette is improved and so on."

Her colleague ran from her office - "the way you run for the police!" she recalled - straight to Harper's Bazaar editor Carmel Snow.

"Diana's going crazy!" he cried. "Get hold of her."

Snow went to see Vreeland.

"Listen, Diana," Snow told Vreeland, "I think you've lost your mind. Do you realize that our income from handbag advertising is God knows how many millions a year?!"

- Deluxe: How Luxury Lost its Luster, by Dana Thomas

"Thanks. It has pockets!" - every girl ever responding to a compliment on a skirt/dress that has pockets

- Tumblr/Twitter, attribution unknown

Hey! What have y'all been up to?

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siblings

Last night I got to hear the story of Mr. E's friend's older son meeting his newborn brother for the very first time. They had a homebirth, so toddler boy got whisked away early in the morning and came back to find a very tired mama nursing a very small baby. Well, mama was happy to see him of course, and he got to climb up on her lap, and since he was still nursing at that point too, he started nursing on the other side. Latched on. Looked over at his newborn baby brother.

Reached out and just straight-armed him right off the boob.

Oh, this bodes well. (The Junebug isn't nursing anymore, though. Maybe that will make things easier? No idea.)

---

toilet training

Toilet training is…a thing. We're still going. I have been tempted to give up many times. It is definitely a two-steps-forward-one-step-back kind of process. Things will be going so well that I'll think it's time to try taking the underwear out on a trip. (What we're doing is, he wears underwear at home when he's awake, and then he wears diapers for outside the house, naps, and bedtime.) And then he'll have a day with five accidents. :(

Things that have helped:

We haven't tried M&Ms yet, although I have been considering it. Instead, we have presented flushing as an exciting treat that you only get to do if you actually use the potty. It involves cheering, waving bye-bye, and talking about how the poop is going off on its poop adventure through the sewer system to the ocean.

We got underwear with dogs on it, which he enjoys wearing and requests; and also, we talk about how the doggies HATE being dirty or wet, and every time we pull down his trousers and his underwear is dry, the doggies bark for joy, which the Junebug really likes.

What has been a HUGE help is the Aqueduck faucet extender. It was getting really hard for me to lift him up so that he could wash his hands, and he hated it, so it was trauma every time, which is something we were trying not to associate with using the potty. We put this on the faucet and now he can reach the water from the stepstool without any help - it's changed everything.

This week I am hopeful because for the first time he has requested to wear underwear to daycare. We told him that when he can use the potty at daycare every day, then he can wear underwear to daycare. If he starts WANTING to wear underwear, the battle will be more than half won.

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the dangers of generalizing from your own experience

I'm at the stage in this pregnancy when I see outfits on mannequins in shop windows as I go by, and they go in at the waist, or have belts, and I get all angry, like "who the fuck are they thinking could wear that?" And then I remember, oh yeah - anyone who's not currently six months pregnant or more, which is actually most people, self. (Clothes in shop windows that would never fit me no matter what are a different issue, but I'm not talking about those. Just, totally normal outfits that don't accommodate a whole different person bulging out of your guts.)

---

accidentally washing your own brain

Mr. E went out of town for three days to his sister's wedding. It was the longest I've ever had to solo parent, because I have been so very lucky. And it is not that long. Three days.

Now, Mr. E is not one of those like 50s detached dads who don't know how anything in the household is run. The way we do things is that he does most of the dealing with the Junebug in the mornings and gets him off to daycare, and I pick him up and do more of the evening stuff. Friday was, I think, the very first time in the Junebug's life that I was the one who packed his lunch in the morning. (And then I forgot it, but that's another story.)

And yet. In just three days of solo parenting. When Monday came around and Mr. E was back and organizing the Junebug's breakfast just like always, I caught myself having the thought, maybe I should stick around in the kitchen instead of going to take my shower, just in case they need help.

Three. Freaking. Days.

I had this conversation with my friend J one time. There are many reasons why women still take on so much more of the childcare burden. J has her own business - but she works from home, while her husband works full time out of the home, and if you've ever worked from home you know how it is almost impossible - for you and others - to think of your time as unavailable in the same way. There are societal pressures as to outcomes (clean house, kid behavior) that bear on women that are much lighter or nonexistent on men. There's lots of things. But one of those things is that as women we are socialized that guys cannot be trusted to take care of their kids and will not do it as well as we will. J openly said, yes the working from home, etc., but another one of the reasons she does most of the child raising is that she wants things done the way she wants them done and she is willing to take on more work in order to make more of those decisions.

Me, I want a more equal division of the work, and I get it - but the tradeoff is, I have to accept more things being done Mr. E's way. And Lord knows you've heard some of the arguments about that. And in three days my brain decided to sneak in some programming about how maybe I should take some of that work off of Mr. E. You know. Just in case he needed some help.

GET OUT OF MY HEAD, PATRIARCHY!

Three teenagers, on the bus, clearly friends, two boys and a girl, late teens, maybe 17 or 18, animated conversation. Eventually the conversation turns to a friend of theirs whose girlfriend has just had a baby.

Girl expresses the opinion that this is not such a good idea, having a baby at their age. Both boys disagree. Both boys say they'd be up for having a kid, if they met the right girl to have one with.

One boy mentions he'd want to have a girl baby, though.

Girl is very surprised. Says that's the first time she's ever heard anyone say they'd rather have a girl.

Boy says, "Naw man, you got a boy, you gotta be kissing that n___a n' shit. That's hella gay!"

Boys and girl agree that is hella gay, and further conclude that moms should take care of little boy babies and dads should be the ones to take care of little girl babies.

I die a little inside.

Mr. E, when I relate this conversation, finds the bright side that at least all three kids take it for granted that when you have a baby, you have to be an involved affectionate dad and be kissing that n___a n' shit.

I have got to start wearing headphones more often.

On the bus home after work tonight: me. A little boy sitting next to me. His brother sitting next to him. His sister, a little chubby with glasses, third on the bus, too late to get a seat, standing in front of them, swinging a little on the pole she was holding on to. Sister maybe 7 or 8, one brother older, one younger. Kids talking.

Sister mentions that she's good at soccer.

Older brother says "No you're not. You suck."

Sister tries to meet him halfway. "I'm sort of good. Maybe I sort of suck."

Older brother: "No, you suck."

Sister: "You know [other kid]? I got a goal off him today. I made a goal."

Older brother pauses. "He probably let you."

Older brother: "Boys like to let girls win. They just pretend like you won."

Me, leaning in: "No they don't. Boys hate it when it looks like girls beat them."

Older brother: "Oh yeah….that's true."

Me: [trying not to look too smug]

Kids: silent for a few minutes, while I pull out my phone and ostentatiously perform Not Listening To Your Conversation Anymore, Please Go About Your Business.

Sister: smiling a little.

------


Mr. E says I used sexism against sexism. Like judo or something? Or just another ultimately self-defeating master's tool?