I mean, seriously?
I’m not even sure if I’ll be putting up a tree next year.
That said, Martha Marcy May Marlene is an awesome movie. You should rent it and eat cupcakes.
In the meantime, let’s celebrate International Women’s Day the right way. With a gif of Maude Lebowski saying “vagina.”
EDITED TO ADD: In case anyone is wondering, I have no idea who did that graphic; it’s floating around on tumblr. I found it courtesy of unknowable woman.
@FelixBC: I think they also got it right on the telescope, though like most inventions we’ll probably find upon examination that the line chosen to decide who invented it is arbitrarily drawn. Almost every person who has been called the inventor of something was in fact simply improving upon the design of someone else, because invention in general is simply evolutionary rather than revolutionary. Someone chooses at one point to say ‘well, because of this advance the thing became a commercial success, so we’ll say Edison and not Tesla created this thing and move on’.
Despite American entrepreneur myths to the contrary, Invention typically does not exist. Ideas exist in the collectivity and people tend to come up with the same inventions in parallel all the fucking time.
also I was under the impression neanderthals invented fire
Nah, that’s one more (comparatively trivial) way in which this guy is wrong. At least if Neanderthals has discovered fire, it might plausibly have been a European “man” who first figured it out, albeit probably not a particularly “white” one. Instead, the earliest sites demonstrating fire usage predate the Neanderthals by a fair amount – they are from Homo erectus, in Africa. So even if somehow he happened to guess the gender of the extinct species member who first banged two pieces of flint together correctly – not that he’d ever actually know he did, since there’s no earthly way short of magical time machines we could possibly know that – he pretty definitely got the “white” part wrong. Also, you know, the implied “human” part. And the “fire is a thing one ‘invents'” part. But other than that, he totally made sense! :-p
Dudes. Prometheus is a European man. Hence, white men invented fire.
This is true, what is also true is that the vast majority of things which would actually count as “invention” historically have been untracked, especially in women’s “spheres” or in poorer communities. Novel ways of doing things are often spread throughout small communities with spotty attribution at best, even in the period of time right after the development of the method. Notions of exclusivity around patents and invention don’t often mesh well with traditional community and family skill sharing.
BlackBloc: >>It’s because we invented fire. And the wheel.
I believe those were likely invented by proto-humans, so modern racial concepts probably don’t apply.
Fire yes. The Wheel, no. It’s Middle Eastern.
Writing has two proveably independent inventions (Mayan Glyphs, and Cuneiform. It’s not provable the Chinese were completely independent, but it’s possible.
No white folks in either of them. The Alphabet is probably semitic, from adapting Egyptian heiroglyphs (which were syllabic).
We could look at things like weaving… probably a woman. Spinning of carded wool? Probably a woman (though it’s possible that the twining of fibers was male… no one can really say).
Which is true of most fire, the wheel, even writing. Gunpowder… probably male, because it was late in the day.
Domesticating fowl? I’ll bet that was women. Agriculture… side effect of, “women’s work”.
In short, I’d say the important advances (relative to the world we have today), probably about 50/50, by count, and one can dispute which of them were more important.
A woman is never more feminine than when she has a sloth attached to her head.
I do know one of the first writers, one of the first great writers, in human history was a woman. Enheduanna was high priestess and her religious prose was the Sumerian equivalent of Biblical and epic poetry. Her work was preserved and held in high esteem centuries after her death.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enheduanna
Just a little thing I wanted to throw in there.
And the Book of J is arguably written by a woman, so that’s the parent of a chunk of the Jewish/Christian sacred texts.
kiki, I have no idea what that’s apropos of, but I think I’ll make it my status message.
Kiki, please share whatever drugs inspired the sloth comment. Or at least tell us where we can get some.
It’s from the picture in David’s post. Though you may have to be high to make the connection sans help
The sloth and the guitar are pretty much the only good parts of that picture. Now, if we could just have the sloth play the guitar in an adorably sleepy fashion, that would be awesome. It wouldn’t have anything to do with International Women’s Day, but it’d be awesome.
Did someone say sleepy sloth playing guitar?
There are no words for how much I love the internet.
I had to explain to my colleague why this was possibly the worst time ever to do the vote on this bill and then I had to explain to him what transvaginal ultrasound was and why it was used.
Conservatives. *sigh*
<blockquote
Did someone say sleepy sloth playing guitar?
There are no words for how much I love the internet.
The internet is amazing, and I am laughing my ass off now. Well done!
Damn you, blockquotes!
Incidentally, I think Randall Munroe just gave us a present for International Women’s Day. Go look! http://xkcd.com/1027/
“The thing standing in the way of your dreams is that the person having them is you”
That’s fantastic, even by xkcd’s high standards. I’m going to get it engraved on a bracelet and wear it always.
I’ll admit that I was pretty high when I made that comment. But I was also surprised – and other posters’ comments seem to back this up – by how many times I had to look at the picture before I noticed WTF THAT WOMAN HAS A SLOTH ATTACHED TO HER HEAD.
I’ll de-lurk for that awesome “femmes de l’avenir” post. Everybody click that link it’s so fantastic! I see it’s probably ironic and not at all feminist, but the cards are still awesome as hell.
I want the top-hat with the duck. So bad.
Two other things:
The Women’s Day wasn’t invented in Russia at all but by German communist lady Clara Zetkin (I think), and
@BoggidWurms: As an ANE scholar I have to give you major props for knowing Enheduanna! Hers was a time when women – while not actually on the same powerlevel with the guys – had it much, much better than in the roughly three millenia that followed. I wonder what went wrong…
Even if this were true (and it mostly isn’t), it doesn’t really matter what “white males” have accomplished.
What matters is – what have YOU accomplished? And I would guess, not a whole heck of a lot.
This discussion reminds me another one, where a guy tried to convince me that islamophobia is normal because Arabic countries haven’t contributed (his thoughts, not mine) to culture or science in the few hundred years.
Ignorance makes bigotry easier.
Hey, isn’t that
http://manboobz.com/2012/02/29/mras-most-inept-propagandists-ever/
the same sculpture? (or whatever it is)
I wonder where it came from.
Kyrie: That’s the “Venus of Willendorf” and it’s one of the oldest known representational sculptures of a human.