this is not who we are

andrea. 29. feminist. navy wife. mom to a toddler and two big dogs. history enthusiast & voracious reader. multi-fandom & -shipper trash. i go hard for ladies and the people who love them. formerly thesouthway. icon & header

[clarkesgrxffxn]

okay, so, my dream crime procedural starts out pretty basic. you've got your two hot partners whose personalities are fairly dissimilar. one of them is an established part of "the team" and the other one has just been transferred in. sparks fly. sexual tension all over the place. the interns or whatever are on the verge of spontaneous combustion. and you're waiting for it. that moment at the end of the pilot that's going to set up the standard will they/won't they for the next five or six seasons. and then boom. you find they were together the whole time. they've been doing this long distance thing for years and they finally got the chance to work together and took it. all the tension revolves around adjusting to the new relationship dynamic and finding the balance between their work lives and personal lives. sparks still fly. the interns still fan themselves. and i'm at home dying, wondering if they're going to make it home from the office before ripping off each other's clothes.

[archive-theirins-blog]

BTVS REIMAGINED — Arden Cho as Buffy Summers

“I’m the thing monsters have nightmares about. And right now, you and me are gonna show ‘em why.”

[bodysanctuary]

sam wilson is literally the first and last person you see on screen in the winter soldier and the person you see the least in fics 😒😒

[legallyblonde]

[t-w-i-n-g-h-o-s-t-s]

[clarkesgrxffxn]

watching potc (again) and i am beside myself because baby elizabeth swann loved the sea and was fascinated by pirates and piracy and protected baby pirate will turner and grew up to become the pirate king. story telling, you're doing it right.

[robertreich]

The Fraud of “Family-Friendly” Work

Netflix just announced it’s offering paid leave for new mothers and fathers for the first year after the birth of adoption of a child. Other high-tech firms are close behind.

Some big law firms are also getting into the act. Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe is offering 22 paid weeks off for both male and female attorneys.

Even Wall Street is taking baby steps in the direction of family-friendly work. Goldman Sachs just doubled paid parental leave to four weeks. 

All this should be welcome news. Millennials now constitute the largest segment of the American work force. Many are just forming families, so the new family-friendly policies seem ideally timed.

But before we celebrate the dawn of a new era, keep two basic truths in mind.

First, these new policies apply only to a tiny group considered “talent” – highly educated and in high demand.

They’re getting whatever perks firms can throw at them, in order to recruit and keep them.

“Netflix’s continued success hinges on us competing for and keeping the most talented individuals in their field,” wrote Tawni Cranz, Netflix’s chief talent officer.

That Neflix has a “chief talent officer” tells you a lot.

Netflix’s new policy doesn’t apply to all Netflix employees, by the way. Those in Netflix’s DVD division aren’t covered. They’re not “talent.”

They’re like the vast majority of American workers – considered easily replaceable.

Employers treat replaceable workers as costs to be cut, not as assets to be developed.

So replaceable workers don’t get paid family leave, paid sick days, or much of anything else. And they won’t get them unless government requires companies to offer them.

If replaceables are eligible for 12 weeks of family leave it’s only because of the Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993 (which I am proud to have implemented when labor secretary under Bill Clinton) requires it.

But this leave time doesn’t come with pay – which is why only 40 percent of eligible workers can afford to use it. And it doesn’t even cover companies or franchisees with fewer than 50 employees.

Yet almost all other advanced nations provide three or four months paid leave – fathers as well as mothers. Plus paid sick leave, and limits on how many work hours employers can demand.  

The second thing to know about family-friendly work policies is that relatively few talented millennials are taking advantage of them.

They can’t take the time.

One of my former Berkeley students who’s now at a tech firm across the Bay told me he’s working fifteen-hour days.

Another, who’s at a Washington law firm, said she’s on call 24-7 by smart phone. Emails often arrive past midnight, followed by text messages asking why the emails haven’t been answered.

These young men won’t take paternity leave and these young women won’t even get pregnant – because it looks bad.

Forget work-life balance. It’s work-as-life.

A recent New York Times story about Amazon reports that when young workers hit the wall from the unrelenting pace, they’re told to climb it.  

Why do the talented millennials work so hard?

Partly because being promoted – getting more equity, running a division, making partner – promises such vast rewards. Vaster rewards than any generation before them has ever been offered.  

You’re either on the fast track or you’re on a dead-end road.

“I’ve got to show total dedication,” one of my former students explained. “It’s all or nothing.”

Which is why millennial men – who research shows have more egalitarian attitudes about family and gender roles than their predecessors – are nonetheless failing to live up to their values once they hit the treadmills.

It’s also why women on high-powered career tracks delay or ultimately give up on being mothers. Or they give up on the fast track.

After the collapse of 2000, the share of women working in tech dropped sharply. And although tech recovered, female participation is still 6 percent lower than in 1998.

Or, if they’re lucky, they can afford to buy their way to motherhood. Marissa Mayer, appointed Yahoo’s CEO while six months pregnant, was back at her desk two weeks later.

It’s possible for such women to have it all – to “lean in” as Sheryl Sandberg puts it – because they have enough resources for 24-hour childcare, car service for the kids and nannies, and all the extra help needed.

I’m delighted Netflix and other high-powered firms are offering family-friendly work.

But I take most of it with a grain of silicon.  

[infiniteglitterfall]

I keep seeing these otherwise fantastic and magnificent Tumblr posts, about that horrible Stonewall movie, that basically boil down to:

they weren’t gay white men they were trans women of color

and as a trans person I’m excited and encouraged by the fact that so many people feel like it’s really important to say THEY WERE TRANS WOMEN OF COLOR.

but as a bisexual it kills me a little bit every time that nobody ever says they were *bisexual* trans women of color.

like, particularly since we’re specifically talking about the people who started the riots, people who were fundamental in the movement for the rest of their lives. We’re talking about Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson. Who were bisexual. [Citations: Sylvia Rivera, Marsha P. Johnson]

[Yes: there are a lot more bisexual/trans/people of color involved, including Miss Major who is amazing and whose sexuality I don’t know. But this discussion tends to be centered particularly around these two and the “what is a white gay man doing throwing the first brick” fiasco.] I haven’t reblogged each or any of these posts to say, one by one:

and bisexual

And bisexual

AND BISEXUAL

Because tbh, bisexual issues are so de-emphasized within the queer community that I think it would be interpreted as if I were tugging on the community’s sleeve and meekly piping up, “They were also Baby Boomers! Don’t forget!” 

But today I figured out how to explain this. 

When you say:

they weren’t *gay white men*

they were *trans women of color*

you’re correcting “[cis] men” with “trans women.”

You’re correcting “white” with “of color”.

And you’re erasing their sexualities as trans women of color.

You’re acting as though “trans woman” replaces “gay man”, as though trans is your sexual orientation. Or as though you can only be one kind of queer, and if you’re trans then that’s it, you can’t also count as bi, gay, or lesbian. 

You’re also telling other bi and pan people that our identities and our contributions don’t matter – that no matter what we do, we’ll be remembered as we always have been, as something other than who and what we were.

You’re feeding the people who say things like “bisexuals don’t belong at Pride” and “when bisexuals fight for our issues they can be part of our community,” as if we haven’t been here from the literal beginning of the modern-day movement (and before). And as if we don’t share many of the same issues.

So: thank you for re-centering trans women of color in queer history. And please start re-centering their bisexuality too. 

[goner-deactivated20160922]

for kingwellsjaha and her ridiculously underrated ot4 ♥

[pyrotyger]

GamerGate, Twitter, Feminism

I had an interesting weekend on Twitter.

I follow Randi Harper, a well-known feminist, OS developer and pioneer of anti-online-harassment initiatives. One tequila-fuelled night some months ago, she rattled off “GGAutoBlocker,” a few lines of automated script that produces a list of a few thousand twitter accounts that follow prominent GamerGate ringleaders, which you can then plug into your twitter settings to auto-block them.

And she is right at the top of GamerGate’s MOST WANTED list - she is regularly doxxed and SWATed, and receives credible anonymous rape & murder threats every single day. This just makes her fight harder, and she’s a phenomenal badass.

So this GGAutoBlocker tool she made is bad news for GamerGate. They *hate* it. It allows the (mostly) women they utterly swarm with harassment to reduce their twitter feed from an endless hateful roar to a normal gabble. GG have been impotently trying to stop it through any possible means ever since its creation, and make constant vague references to its illegality.

After watching this for months, I finally bit. Mark Kern - a team lead for World Of Warcraft and GG ringleader - was making yet more vague insinuations, regarding free speech, censorship, constitutional law and libel, and so I challenged him to plainly state his legal argument. I just wanted to know, once and for all, what the hell he was getting at.

This was a truly eye-opening experience.

Against all evidence, I honestly expected directly challenging one of the biggest, most vocal names in GamerGate to lead to some kind of drubbing, a schooling in some unpleasant and poorly defined point of unfortunately applied law, but the opposite was true. Mark often mentions his law degree, but consistently avoided the legal question or fudged his replies. There was nothing to his case.

I kept pressing for something specific, turning his replies back with a calm and consistent refusal to go off-point, (and some support from other interested twitter folks) and I even started to feel bad for him after a while. I felt like a cat batting a mouse around, boxing him in more & more. It became clearer and clearer that he had no argument at all, and finally, I pinned him down to the following statement:

“the blocker is being used to screen potential hires by at least 2 companies I know of”

“if the list is aiding such illegal activity, there are grounds for potential legal liability by the list maintainers”

“certain states make conspiring to black list illegal. That would be the legal theory on those states.”

Just to be clear, then:

if Randi Harper were actively curating a list (which is in fact auto-generated & updated by a short script)

and if it could be proved she were doing so in conspiracy with a third party company

with the clear purpose of keeping a person from being hired

and if it could be proved the potential hire was refused a job for being on that list

and that they would have otherwise been hired over other potential hires

and it could be shown that the social media activity that got them on the list would not have otherwise led to their non-employment

and if this all took place in one of the states that legally prohibits blacklisting

…then there might be a civil case against Randi Harper. Not against the list or the script, mind you, which Mark admitted is legal.

Which is to say: there is no legal case whatsoever.

All this is by-the-by, and the lack of reason and proportionality betrayed by GamerGate’s advocates is no surprise. What shocked me was just how pitiful Mark was, with his argument and his response. I felt bad for him.

But that realisation was as nothing compared to the the sheer VOLUME of the vitriol that accompanied the exchange. For every tweet Mark or I posted, I received ten or a hundred mentions from the seething morass of his followers, the avid rabble of GamerGate. It was deafening. At its peak I was receiving notifications every few seconds.

Bear in mind, in Privilege Poker I was dealt a straight-flush (pun intended). I’m an educated white cis-het able-bodied man, with no skin in the game and no financial reliance on the web. I am literally the least viable possible target for these trolls, and I was facing a fucking *deluge* of bile and rage.

It was staggering.

And I *know* that what I faced was but a tiny fraction, in volume and severity, of a percent of the shit that gets flung at women, PoC, industry members, journalists, or anybody with something to lose or something to say, whether or not they directly engage these hateful children.

I felt the furthest, most fleeting, feathery edge of the stunning, endless tapestry of constant noise and terror that smothers Randi Harper, Anita Sarkeesian, Zoe Quinn, Ellen Pao and other figureheads of feminism in gaming. I’ve read some of their stories and I still cannot even fathom, emotionally, how extreme their experiences are. It’s a hallmark of privilege that I will never experience anything like that.

However valuable that peek of insight is to me, though, it’s not what stuck in my mind. What really stays with me is what GG is actually doing. The argument itself, the stuttering half-thoughts of a misogynistic luminary, was completely forgettable. Debating with Mark Kern was like having an argument with an angry tween: a barely-coalesced bundle of opinions and convictions crammed into the ostensible mould of adult words, draped in the trappings of any rhetorical sledgehammer that might shut down further dissent.

But the noise *around* the argument, the braying mob of hate and rage, was endless and overwhelming. If it were to continue for days or weeks, I’d be forced to leave twitter. If it spread into the rest of my web-presence, I’d give up on the web. The arguments are nothing, but the noise…

THE NOISE IS THE BEGINNING AND THE END OF THEIR POWER. That’s literally all GG has - its ability to shout and scream and threaten and terrorise, without end, beyond reason or appeal. If only someone would invent a tool to shut them out of my twitter feed…

And THAT is why GamerGate is so *terrified* of Randi Harper and GGAutoBlocker. The Noise is the only weapon they have in their desperate pursuit to keep the world of gaming in its cultural infancy. They have nothing to say that can’t be shot down with a moment’s rational thought, but fuelled by the fear and fervour of the cult, they can say it louder and longer and angrier than anyone else. Take that away, and they have nothing but each other.

TIL: A smart, bold, tequila-and-anger-fuelled woman did something more powerful, enduring and good in one evening than an entire legion of angry, misogynistic (mostly) man-babies could do in a year.

[lilithsaintcrow]

“The noise is the beginning and end of their power.”

[fastphoridae]

Gamergate is just a tale, told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

[redlipstickresurrected]

[praial]

Quebrada de Llanganuco, Cordillera Blanca, Perú // Patagonia, Argentina

[clarkesgrxffxn]

no, dad, i do not want to get into a fight about alternative medicine with you today. but, by god, i'm not going to let your nonsense go unanswered either. almost nine weeks pregnant and i'm already becoming an argumentative asshole.

[sizvideos]

[sizvideos]

Video

[decemberpaladin]

I love how she almost drops it until she smells it and that flashbulb memory hits.

[saunteringvaguelydownwards]

“Real isn’t how you are made,” said the Skin Horse. “It’s a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real … Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.”

― Margery Williams, The Velveteen Rabbit

[redscudery]

Notice she says “who” it was and not “what” it was.

[katdensetsu]

Im crying

[allerasphinx]

fantastic beasts and how to ensure that i won’t see your racist movie

[clarkesgrxffxn]

me: *driving an unfamiliar route*

me: *turns radio down so I can see better*

[theliberaltony]

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