Monday, June 22, 2015

Bullets

  • Google has been acting up for me lately, and I'm still unsure if it's something on my end or theirs, so this blog might be more sparsely tended to than usual.
  • I finished reading Alice Dreger's new book about activism and academia's search for truth and how the two often clash leaving some scientists efficiently blacklisted. I'm neither, so I don't have a dog in this fight, but as someone with a well-documented history of being fed up with the militant tactics of the activist left, I found it somewhat comforting (validating?) that this isn't anything new, but the emergence of social media as another tool in the advocacy tool belt adds an authoritarian wrinkle.
  • Camp NaNo starts next week. I'm continuing on in my trend of editing something old instead of writing something new. Actually I'm rewriting a story I wrote that was, well, too close to a big, famous story that was made into a movie recently, and it's not even one I liked very much, so I'm scrapping it entirely and starting over. 
  • The tomboy narrative. I've want to write a longer post about it for a while, but right now I'll leave it at this: something that's always bothered me about the way gender and gender roles are talked about, primarily in feminist/queer circles, is the lack of consideration class and culture is given. Tomboy was the default when I was growing up.  Even most moms wore flannels and jeans. I didn't even hear the phrase "girly girl" until I was well into my twenties. (I read a post once on a lesbian message board declaring straight women who co-opt a "butch identity" as appropriating a culture that isn't theirs and I wanted to say, "Honey, come to the Midwest and to my working-class neighborhood. You'll see plenty of 'butch' straight ladies." Gender expression is not sexual orientation but whatever.) Pink, ribbons, baby dolls, princesses -- those things didn't say "girl" to me as much as they said "rich girl." I wish more people would address this.