Let's begin with something important:
It's vital and essential for feminist men to talk about their feelings and setbacks and especially how much toxic masculinity has hurt them and feminism has helped. Because the people who most need to understand that feminism isn't their opponent aren't going to listen to women or women's opinions on the matter, they're going to listen to men. So it's on men to both demonstrate and explain to other men that feminism is the way to getting many of the things that anti-feminists say they want, like companionship, relationships, and that all-important sex.
France will provide free condoms for those between the ages of 18-25, building on a scheme to provide free hormonal contraception, and all on the idea of curbing unwanted pregnancies in young people by making cost not a barrier to safer sex practices. It would be nice to have that happen in the United States, but we'd have to actually become the secular government the Constitution says we're supposed to have.
Additionally,
an article in the Lancet describes a study of young people in the Netherlands where 98% of those who came to a clinic for gender dysphoria and were started on puberty blockers went on to having gender-affirming hormone treatments. Which, I suppose, is good if what you're trying to fight is misinformation that suggests people who go on puberty blockers are going to regret it. It's also possible to have that conclusion twisted into the idea that puberty blockers are the gateway drug to gender-affirming hormones (and that both are being "pushed" on young people, never mind the studies that show how much children and teens already have had genderfeels by the time they go on puberty blockers.) There's also the potential weakness that this study was about people who already had gender dysphoria, rather than looking more generally about all the people who receive puberty blockers and then go on to be happy in their gender, whether cis or trans. (Because puberty blockers are also prescribed for cis kids who are experiencing an early puberty, despite what you have heard about them. But a lot of people against puberty blockers don't like the logical conclusion that their opposition means that they are in favor of a grade-schooler having to handle menstruation and the male gaze. At least, I hope that's true. Some of them might be all for it and think it's a good thing.)
More importantly, though, giving someone the fundamental respect that they know who they are and if they want to delay a puberty, that's a reasonable thing to do, is the important part. There are still plenty of parenting styles and commands that say children are there to obey grownups, full stop, and that whatever the grownup says is the complete and inarguable Truth. That kind of thinking leads to terrible results.
( And more of what you've come to expect inside )Last for tonight, an example of collective storytelling -
the movie Goncharov, a Scorsese flick starring de Niro that doesn't actually exist, but has more than enough meta around it to make someone believe it did. Unlike
the movie that doesn't exist starring Sinbad as a genie (it's Shaq who's the genie in the similar-sounding movie), Goncharov is a deliberate creation and collective story around a source material that doesn't exist, and that sometimes makes things much cooler than remembering something that you swear existed but doesn't actually exist.
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swannee has
a Fannish Fifty challenge - fifty posts in the calendar year on fannish topics. They can be themed if desired. Or not. The average is a little less than one a week, and if you are looking for more people to talk fandom stuff with, there's already a fair number of people who have pledged to take the challenge.
Much less light-heartedly,
Murder by Pixel: Crime and Responsibility in the Digital Darkness, a fiction about the good and ill that a learning program does, simultaneously, and the questions that arise about who is ultimately responsible for the actions of a program, regardless of whether those actions are intended. It is very good science fiction, in that, really, the only fictional part of the story is Sylvie, the learning program at the heart of the piece, and who Sylvie has been trained to destroy and who Sylvie has been trained to preserve. Everything else, including the tactics of the botnet, the psychological toll (and physical consequences) of being ratioed and harassed off the Internet, the reality that guilty humans often need very little prompting to reveal their guilt to everyone, the early chatbots and the fact that we've long since passed the point where bots can pass the Turing test, all of that is extremely real and relevant to our own times, where we talk about AI art bots and have decisions made for us by programs whose code, training sets, and implicit and explicit biases are never made available to us to examine or contest. And about harassment and how only certain voices ever seem to get piled upon, even as the ones directing the piling proclaim themselves the victims of countless cruel attacks.
Musician Tom Lehrer has released all of his material into the public domain. If you like the songs, or you want to be able to play them on your own, get them while the getting is good.
Also, December is an excellent month to purchase a paid account or renew one,
and get access to new features and larger amounts of space.
(Materials via
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adrian_turtle,
azurelunatic,
boxofdelights,
cmcmck,
conuly,
cosmolinguist,
elf,
finch,
firecat,
jadelennox,
jenett,
jjhunter,
kaberett,
lilysea,
oursin,
rydra_wong,
snowynight,
sonia,
the_future_modernes,
thewayne,
umadoshi,
vass, the
meta_warehouse community, and anyone else that's I've neglected to mention or who I suspect would rather not be on the list. If you want to know where I get the neat stuff, my reading list has most of it.)
