I keep running into people who believe these things are fundamental truths that are really just stereotyped bullshit. It’s a common enough occurrence that there should be a site for this shit like TV Tropes.

And I feel more than a little stupid having to write this post. It pains me. It annoys me. It makes me want to smash, feminist-hulk style.

1. Women are humans. Suprise, so are men. Treat accordingly. You do not need a guidebook, instruction manual or self-help advice column to understand a member of the opposite gender. Or to understand a person with a different sexuality than yours. Or a different race, creed, color, ability etc. etc. All you need is to shut up, open your ears and listen. And then believe them when they tell you who they are. That’s it. Simple.

2. Not all women like to shop or buy pink things, but some women do. Not all gay men are into interior design, but some het men are. I like beer, the Boyfriend does not. Explain that, crappy beer advertisements. People, shockingly, have individual tastes and preferences and interests. Sometimes these things line up with behavior classified as stereotypes, sometimes they do not.

3. There is no behavior, not even giving birth or having periods (thanks to modern medicine and a slightly more accepting understanding of the gender non-binary)that is exclusive to one gender. Not a single one. Men are usually taller than women, except when they’re not. Woman usually have larger breasts than men, except when they don’t. There are men who just want to cuddle and never have sex and women who could have sex 3 times a day and still not be satisfied. (Actually, I know of more cases where the lady half of a het couple has the bigger libido than the dude half, than I do of the reverse).

4. “Ladies just want to rant about their problems while men want to problem-solve” bull-fucking-shit. I am a problem-solver by nature. I have to be, being a single mom of tiny means, but I am also pretty damn good at it. IRS has a lean on your house, gimme your paperwork and we will solve that problem. Creditors being douchenoodles, here’s some things you can do to get them off your back. Lemme figure out what your insurance papers actually say about what’s covered. Etc. etc. etc. I am also a good listener, or at least I hope that’s why I have friends who still talk to me when they need to be heard. Judging by that oft repeated trope about ladies ranting and men fixing, I am half dude at least.

5. “Ladies want to get married and have babies, men just want free access to sex.” Does not compute. Again, I’ve known way more men that wanted the ring and the ceremony than women. And more men that wanted the wailing infants than women.

What you should be getting from all this is that anytime someone trots out some variation of “men are blech, women are blah” you’re talking to an asshat at worst, a clueless dingleberry at best. It is up to you whether you want to disabuse them of their terrible ideas or simply call them names and make fun of them. I know it gets old and tired, always having to educate people. And for the love of Pete I know how frustrating it is when the person sporting the asshat is someone you actually like and know to be smart enough to pick up on this shit without a 101 course. I advise copious amounts of Vitamin V(odka) for such situations.

So ends this rant. No, I do not need you to problem-solve that shit for me.

I’m in a music searching mood, what with the cheese wars (seriously, is there NOTHING to make the boy’s ears bleed?)

So have some Stevie Wonder, who is not cheesy. (And hey boyfriend, it’s got horns)

And the best baseline in music history, plus it’s a song for skeptics.

That’s a quote from Arundhati Roy that up at The Crow’s Eye, go read the whole thing.

I once saw this brilliant, wrinkled old man give a lecture. He had escaped from some horrible regime, I can’t remember if it was communist or facist. He was a pacifist, but when asked about it his response was amazing. “I would never chastise a person for acting in self-defense against an oppressive state. People have the right to decide for themselves how to respond to violence”. I wish I could remember his name.

I’m not a pacifist, but I do waver, back and forth, on non-violence and it’s effectiveness. And honestly, on violence and it’s effectiveness. There is no question, violence works. If it didn’t we wouldn’t be bombing Libya. But violence is like chemotherapy, pumping toxins into society to kill the tumorous elites. What’s left afterwards isn’t always a healthy body.

And people keep offering me these false constructs, “Isn’t A preferable to B?” and getting peeved when I refuse to let that kind of framing be the basis for an argument. No, neither is preferable. Think bigger, think better, demand more! So maybe I need to think bigger, think better, demand more of myself when wavering on the violent/non-violent ideas. Never let it be said that I don’t look inwards first, since the only thing we really can change is ourselves.

I was going to write a post about colonialism movies, having just watched an awesome one (Even the Rain, in Spanish on Netflix) but it’s been a long week (of obvious light posting). I’m using today as a “Girl Friday” which, when I used to work 4 days a week, meant spending the day painting my nails and lounging in a tub of sudsy water before going out and partying like a rockstar. In the case of this weekend, that means swimming tonight, Gay Pride tomorrow day and a friend’s birthday party tomorrow night. Rockstar!

And since I was reminded of their awesomeness this morning in the ongoing musical cheese wars being waged by the Boyfriend, here’s some Crowded House.

I have watched way too many white man comes to the “new” world movies, from Aguirre:The Wrath of God by Herzog to Roland Joffe’s The Mission

After many alcoholic beverages, by Sylviaaaaaaaaa.

You all know I have a perverse love of the literal music video genre, right? I mean I can’t think of Aha now without singing “I’m gonna kill this guy with my own pipe wrench”.

But today it’s a nice day for a goth wedding.

Womanist Musings has a couple of great posts up about poverty from Dan and Brittany-Ann and the comments on both are telling in what we expect from poor people. Dan gets shit for dying his hair blue and stealing toothpaste. Brittany-Ann gets a bunch of people telling her that she’s wrong(ish) when it comes to religion helping poor people.

Much like feminists understand that there is no ‘good enough woman’ to escape sexism, there is no ‘good enough’ poor person to escape poverty. Trust me, I’ve tried to be both kinds of good enough and it is an exercise in failure, created specifically to keep us running on a hamster wheel thinking there is some mythical finish line ahead.

Most of you readers will be familiar with the perfect woman traps. We have to be thin, but not too thin. Sexy but not too sexy. Smart but not smart enough to intimidate the boys. We’re supposed to perform femininity like it’s a drag queen act but it we go too far into stereotyped femininity then we are Paris Hilton and worthy of mockery. We’re supposed to support ourselves so as to not be gold diggers but we’re also not supposed to pick up a check? There is no winning and we are always checking the calculus in our head to make sure we’re finding that tiny line of acceptability that we are forced to walk.

Same shit is true of being poor. We aren’t allowed to let our religious views (or serious non-religious views) take precedence and must accept help from churches that we have serious issues with (The Salvation Army’s virulent anti-gay stance, Catholics general anti-woman stance, etc. etc.). We don’t have the option of voting with our feet (and with the whole faith-based bullshit passed by Bush and cemented by Obama- the options for assistance when poor are now decidedly skewed to religious organizations).

We also walk a fine line when it comes to personal style. Don’t look too poor. god forbid you send your child to school in pants too short or a dirty shirt when you’ve run out of quarters for the laundry. Not only are you a bad poor person in that moment, but a neglectful parent. But if you dress too well, or flashy, or have blue hair or expensive taste in perfume (my own little vanity- I just used the last hiccupy spray yesterday from a bottle I’ve managed to ration for 2 fucking years) then you must be lying about how poor you are. If you spend appropriately for your budget on food then you just end up eating ramen and mac and cheese, where you end up getting shit for your unhealthy eating habits and the inevitable “why don’t you budget better, shop at farmers markets, blah blah blah” but if you blow your entire monthly income to eat the required fresh fruits and veggies at the calorie amounts required to sustain life then you get shit for spending too much money on food.

There is NO winning when you are a member of a (or more likely, several) oppressed groups. You can never be good enough to be accepted by the dominant class, except as a token of exceptionalism. That is the point. We keep running, trying to make ourselves over in an attempt to be seen as worthy, but the finish line keeps changing. And we are kept too distracted by the running to see that it’s rigged from the beginning.

(Note the same thing applies to POC, PWD, LGBTQQ, etc etc. We are never good enough just as we are or just as we want to be.)

Dilbert creating dillhole, Scott Adams, is still trying to defend his all men are rapists theory by interviewing Jezebel’s Irin Carmon.

His responses to her answers are classic douchenoodlery, deserving of a BINGO card (look, I made Obot bingo during the primaries and I’ve got a mess of people coming over for Carnitas! tonight, so I can’t make the card. Someone make the card!)

So Imma gonna shorthand it a bit.

“Whew, wordy” = you women sure do talk a lot. It’s like my ears shut down when you just go on and on and on.

“Can you try again, in simpler terms, and without the history lesson, to explain your objection to my post?” = I am too lazy to know actual history or to use a dictionary, explain yourself in tiny words female, or I can’t be bothered to comprehend you (He actually pulls this shit 2x)

“The men who complained imagined I was saying all men are repressed rapists. That’s a simple case of bad reading comprehension” = Just because I said all men have to repress the urge to rape doesn’t mean I meant all men have to repress the urge to rape.o

How many spot across do I have to get to have bingo again? And what’s the free space? And seriously, it’s not feminists who think all men are repressing their rapey urges in order to function in society.

Since we are well into the War on Women and Planned Parenthood in Indiana now has to turn away medicaid recipients, I thought I should watch Vera Drake. A few months ago I watched Story of Women with the incomparable Isabelle Huppert. One of these stories is fiction, the other is based on a real woman. The differences are telling.

Vera Drake is a saint. She’s poor but she loves and cares for her family and neighbors. She “helps women” (and never says abortion) out of the kindness of her heart and not for any money. The first third of the movie is all about her moving through space doing kind acts and making tea for everyone she comes across.

In contrast, Huppert’s Marie is a bit vain, also poor but decidedly more materialistic than Vera Drake. She cheats on her husband. She’s friends with prostitutes. We’re made to see her as human, flawed, but still providing a service desperately needed in Nazi occupied France and providing for her family better than her husband can. (Oh the feminism, it burns the little men).

Spoiler alerts

Marie is the real story, and it’s based on the life and death of Marie-Louise Geraud who was the last woman guillotined in France. She was sentenced to death for performing abortions.

Vera, a fictional saint pulled from the mind of Mike Leigh, gets 2 years and meets a bunch of other women in prison for the same thing. And she never ever stands up for herself or the women she has helped. She just whimpers and snivels and accepts her fate and apologizes.

Here’s the thing, we don’t need straw saints, anymore than we need straw people in general. Vera Drake is an okay movie. You’d only see it if you were already pro-choice anyways. Story of Women is a fantastic movie. Sit through the subtitles, it’s worth it to watch a fully fleshed out human being portrayed.

(yes I used that title as a Dickens reference to another story, set in both England and France, about a miscarriage of justice)

Stupid fucking Microsoft Word and your shitastic formatting! I’m a fucking Office Pro. I got that shit down inside, outside, backwards forwards and twisted up like a tornado. And still you’re utter shittiness makes doing anything take longer than it should. I don’t need you to autoformat. YOU NEVER AUTOFORMAT IT RIGHT!!!! And heaven forbid I try working in something that isn’t fucking Word, because everyone and their dog uses fucking Word and I’m gonna have to convert it anyways. And it NEVER converts right.

ARGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH. I am now on my millionth attempt to get my perfectly formatted google docs resume to look right in Word. I have wasted hours trying to fix shit. And what’s really fucking funny is that the resume was originally written in Word and uploaded to docs so that I could move around the country without having to worry if I lost the usb drive the original was on (which I did). Google doesn’t seem to have a problem understanding the formatting. Why does Word?

Hate, hate hate you, Microsoft Word. Hate.