This just in: I am a woman! Again. At least according to a blogger calling herself miliefisathand, who recently wrote a post about that “are nice guys sociopaths?” post I wrote a while ago.
Her evidence? When writing her response to me, she repeatedly found herself referring to me using female pronouns — so therefore I must actually be a woman.
Yes, that’s actually her argument:
While editing my article I lost count of the number of times I had to change “her” or “she” to “him” and “he”. I don’t normally make gender pronoun errors so I have a deep suspicion that the author is a woman impersonating a man. I’m spiritually sensitive to such things.
Hate to break it to you, but your guy-dar is way off. Protip: I post under my real name, and if you google that name, you will find ample evidence that I am, in fact, a real, living dude.
In the case of MRA dudes who misgender me as a woman, it’s clearly the result of their misogyny. In the case of miliefisathand, a self-described Smartassed Burmese Transwoman, I don’t quite understand what exactly is going on.
She also misses the point of my post, and the comments from regulars here that offered some pretty sensible criticisms of what I wrote, but at this point it’s not exactly a shock to see a Man Boobz critic arguing against things I didn’t say rather than things I did say.
DYOR: I’m confused. What’s the joke here?
When I went to brave there was a five year old seated not too far from me.
Slight spoiler: Brave is fricking SCARY in places. The poor kid was melting down and asking to leave, and her parents kept telling her it was okay, and just be calm, it gets better…
It didn’t get better. It got scarier and more intense as it went. And I was just like…. urgh. Guys! Teaching her that going places with you involves being scared and not being able to end the experience when she asks to end the experience is NOT going to end with her thanking you when she’s all grown up for a lovely therapy-free life!!
*sigh*
On the other hand, there were kids squealing with delight when *spoiler* and *SPOILER* and all the *SPOILER!!!!!*
And that was great.
Ozy… don’t you have some men to service? 🙂
I think the whole kids thing is a mess anyway, it’s another area where society just doesn’t let anyone “win”.
On the one hand, kids are expected to be “seen and not heard” and people get all ragey when they perceive someone not keeping a kid sufficiently “under control”. I mean, if a kid is tearing around the supermarket bumping into people and pulling things off the shelf, and the parent isn’t doing anything to discourage them, that’s one thing.. but if a baby is crying because it’s hungry and the parent doesn’t have anything on-hand to give it (because, you know, parents don’t generally have precognition), then judging them for “failing” rather sucks. Kids don’t generally work to a set schedule, even if you teach them to. It’s one thing to teach kids to be reasonable human beings, it’s another entirely to expect them to be completely perfect.
Then on the other hand, we’re expected to want kids, have kids and love kids just because they’re kids. Personally I don’t specifically hate kids (that would be terrible), but kids are still human beings and when a good percentage of human beings irritate me and I don’t have much patience with them, kids aren’t going to be exempt from that. I accept that my annoyances with people aren’t always completely logical though, but my natural reaction is to avoid rather than confront in an arsehole-ish way, so it makes it my problem and not their’s.
You know you’re a dumbass when: you hit post, then think of something else to say immediately after.
For the last sentence of the second paragraph, i’d reword/add: “It’s one thing to teach kids to be reasonable human beings, it’s another entirely to expect them and their parents to be completely perfect.”
DYOR: Actually I’m celibate at the moment, thank you for asking. Any progress on the “what’s the joke there?” field?
Shade: I think if a kid’s melting down in public the parent is having a hard enough time even without everyone glaring at them. Have some empathy, dudes.
DYOR’s jokes are too sophisticated for my lady brain. I can’t figure out the one about David at all, and I think the one about Ozy is about how… zie likes sex? Liking sex is funny? I like sex! Am I funny too?
Ozy: Q I’m confused. What’s the joke here?
A DYOR
Oh, and, @Howard: I went to Tangled with my mom and, without being too spoilerific, there’s a point near the end when it appears that All Is Lost. Anyone who has been around long enough to be at all familiar with Disney movies would know that it would work out okay, but somewhere in the audience was a little girl who did not fit that description. She was crying like her heart had been shattered into pieces. Mom and I looked at each other with identical D-: faces. Poor little kid.
Viscaria: It makes me wonder why we have all those stand-up comedians, if the secret to comedy is simply to stand up in public and say “I have a vagina and have had sex at least once!” 49% of the population can pull that one off and have them ROLLING in the aisles.
My, that statement rubs me entirely the wrong way.
Oh, I’m sorry, you had a smiley there. My mistake. That totally makes it all better, because we can say any old thing, no matter how it sounds or how it comes off, as long as we put a smiley in.
Fuck you. 😀
Ozy: Oh yeah, I totally agree. Glaring or passive-aggressively criticising someone with a kid that’s melting down isn’t going to do any good, even if you think the situation could/should be handled better, and the parent(s) is (are) likely to already be stressed-as-fuck just from the situation itself. The best thing is to either help or leave it (the situation, that is) the fuck alone.
In the end, a kid going apeshit is going to affect everything around them and everyone is going to get annoyed. As far as I can see, that’s not an issue as long as you’re not being a gigantic douchebag about it (which glaring at the parent definitely is, or any glaring for that matter. I think I just worked up an irrational hatred of glaring..).
Sometimes I just wonder how much of it is empathy and how much of it is a sort of “kids will be kids” sort of view on things (which as someone who’s apathetic towards kids, confuses me). Obviously kids don’t have the same capacity to understand things as an adult so expecting them to act like one is too much, though, so.. I dunno. It’s probably a good thing I don’t have to deal with kids, I obviously have no idea. 😛
Also, sorry if i’m coming off as an arse here. I do agree with what people are saying, and i’ll generally defer to their knowledge of kids because obviously they know a lot more than I do.
Aw, fat boy Howard got rubbed the wrong way poor baby. Don’t get your panties in a bunch. What, you hate freedom of speech?
Aw, that’s so cute. You think you know things about me.
And you think you know what words mean!! That is cute. Hate freedom of speech? Um, shouldn’t I be trying to suppress your words for that to work? All I said was FUCK YOU.
That’s speech.
And fuck you.
I think it’s even worse when the douchebag actually glares at the children. Yes, it helps so much for a stressed out child to see a stranger glaring at them. It’s one thing to be hateful to an adult, but if someone is hateful to a child, then they are officially a bad person.
Kids don’t even have to do anything wrong to make some people fly off the handle. Some guy at Hardee’s actually cussed at my kids and me when they were sitting quietly and drinking pop at a table near him. The manager kicked him out and gave me free meal coupons. So if a kid is sitting quietly drinking pop, that harms all the adults around. If a raging asshole cusses at a kindergartner, that is not disruptive. It is a public service against the tyranny of children existing.
Also, I feel no sympathy for someone that attends a G-rated, Disney film but hates being around children. They may as well go to Chuck E Cheese and whine about how children are spoiling all the fun.
/eyeroll
Hey, DYOR, sometimes people with penises have sex with people with vaginas. Isn’t that wacky, shocking, and outrageous!
It’s almost refreshing to have up-front honest mockery instead of half-hearted attempts to dress the hatred in argument.
“So if a kid is sitting quietly drinking pop, that harms all the adults around. If a raging asshole cusses at a kindergartner, that is not disruptive. It is a public service against the tyranny of children existing. – thebionicmommy
Sorry, if there was an implication in my posts that children doing nothing warrants random arseholes yelling at them, then I apologise. If anything I post doesn’t make sense, I hope people will be kind enough to let me know so i’m not confusing (or worse, offending) anyone. 🙁
Also, maybe there’s a bit of a cultural thing going on here? I must admit that people being anti-the-existence-of-kids (ie. with no provocation) is sort of an alien concept to me (I think people getting angry at parents for not being perfect is universal concept though). I’m used to it being the opposite.
Anyway, i’ll shut up.
No worries, ShadetheDruid. I knew you what it meant and it’s fine. I was just ranting against the people out there that feel outraged at the existence of kids at all. I always wonder if they were born as fully grown adults to be able to hate children so much.
I don’t know if it is a cultural thing or not. That’s a good question. Joplin is in the running for 2012’s Most Friendly City according to Rand McNally, but we still have our fair share of assholes.
So again, it’s cool. You didn’t say anything wrong, and I never took it that way at all. 🙂
Ok, phew, thanks. 🙂
Brave is fricking SCARY in places. The poor kid was melting down and asking to leave, and her parents kept telling her it was okay, and just be calm, it gets better…
When I saw Coraline, there were some kids there getting their dose of childhood traumatization. Mine was Jumanji.
The scariest movie I saw as a kid was The Blob. I still won’t watch that movie.
Mine was Event Horizon, but i’m guessing i’m being a little too literal by picking something that’s actually supposed to be scary (although The Blob would also apply under that distinction). O.O
Mine was the Rankin/Bass “Return of the King,” which I saw when I was far too small to have any idea what was going on. All I got out of it was, “scary people will bite your fingers off.”
As they say in the site-I-won’t-even-name-it’ll-eat-your-life-and-brain-don’t-think-about-it, they clarify that there’s Nightmare Fuel and Accidental Nightmare Fuel.
But whether you catch the on-purpose stuff too young, or your kiddie movie suddenly does something that you, personally freak out about… (hint–the kid wasn’t freaking out because a bad person had shown up. They were freaking out because the mother was ##@%@#$%23-SPOILERS, PEOPLE—it was like Bambi all over again. Only worse. Now mommy was —listen, this discussion is hard if I can’t assume everybody has seen Brave. Can I assume that?
Might want to take it to the forum if you want to talk spoilers.