I was first exposed to the works of Andrea Dworkin in 2009. During that time (and today as well) I had considered myself a sex-positive feminist ally, having found my tribe volunteering for half a decade as a sex educator for my peers in high school and then in college by that point.
I'm ashamed to admit that I was only motivated to actually read Dworkin's work after some college-republican took her most controversial and divisive words and used them to paint a group of people (myself included) with a broad brush, with the obvious intent of insisting that feminism at it's core was an outrageous and unnecessary undertaking.
The statement that all heterosexual intercourse was rape made me defensive and angry, and I don't remember reacting well. Eventually, after discussing the matter with my much more activated peers, my thoughts on the (intentionally decontextualized) thesis softened to intellectual curiosity. I have since read Intercourse and Woman Hating and they have changed me for the better.
Posts like these are becoming harder and harder to find - even this one is from ten years ago. When I reflect on the way that discourse around these topics has softened, I can't help but think of another passage from Intercourse:
Men often react to women’s words—speaking and writing—as if they were acts of violence; sometimes men react to women’s words with violence. So we lower our voices. Women whisper. Women apologize. Women shut up. Women trivialize what we know. Women shrink. Women pull back. Most women have experienced enough dominance from men—control, violence, insult, contempt—that no threat seems empty.
I hope that someone sees this post and the inevitable reactionary comments and is motivated like I was to find out for themselves why so many people have been drawn to the same conclusions over the decades. This isn't a click-baity controversial opinion with nothing behind it, it is a call first to empathy and then perhaps to action.
Wasn't sure where to post this dumb little video I made about random nostalgia I came across today. I'm a huge fan of 80s and 90s retro stuff in all forms.
Does anyone else remember the little six-note jingle that would periodically chime out from behind the counter? I don't know if it was the deep fryers or the griddle or what, but it was a long forgotten part of my childhood
A new video from Nick at The Linux Experiment. I'm also sharing the PeerTube version for the sake of trying to expand my use of PeerTube and try to expand my video platform use beyond just YouTube.
"Seriously, NixOS is the new Arch when it comes to telling people you use it" ...as an Arch user, I feel both attacked and intrigued.
But seriously, it's pretty amazing how far the community has come now that having to use the package manager through the command line and editing config files is considered a significant barrier to entry. I'm interested to give it a try to see if the purported advantages with respect to reproducibility and portability are actually robust enough to suit my own use cases.
My fourth shirt (beehaw.org)
I like unusual shirts and recently took it upon myself and my wife’s sewing machine to start making my own shirts....
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Yellow Wendy's tasted better. (imgur.com)
Wasn't sure where to post this dumb little video I made about random nostalgia I came across today. I'm a huge fan of 80s and 90s retro stuff in all forms.
NIX OS: the BEST package manager on the MOST SOLID Linux distribution (tilvids.com)
A new video from Nick at The Linux Experiment. I'm also sharing the PeerTube version for the sake of trying to expand my use of PeerTube and try to expand my video platform use beyond just YouTube.