By David Futrelle
A quick little update post.
First off, GIANT THANKS to everyone who’s donated during this fund drive! I can’t do this blog without you, and I appreciate everything you all do to help, whether your donations are large or small or if you contribute to the blog in some other way.
If you can’t donated yet, please do! Pledges are running behind what I need to cover costs, and every little (or big) bit helps!
I’m going to extend the pledge drive for at least a few more days, and will have another update soon. THANKS!
Second, sorry that posts have been light over the past couple of days!
As some of you know, I have problems with chronic migraines that can interfere rather severely with my productivity. Right now I’m in a difficult spot, trying (on the advice of a neurologist) to break a vicious cycle of rebound headaches by more or less going cold turkey on my regular migraine meds and all other painkillers, which means I basically have to deal with my headaches raw for now in hopes of fewer headaches in the future. Hopefully this process won’t take more than a few more days, but until it’s over posts will be light.
I’ve also fallen behind on emails, but please keep on sending tips!
Thanks for understanding. Thanks for everything!
The writer William S. Burroughs said, or wrote, something to the effect of, “Human beings have the experience of immortality, through their pet cats.” Since we are practically immortal, compared to them.
I know Burroughs is a very problematic writer, from a woman’s standpoint, but I’ve always liked his works – well, since I was a teenager, anyway.
Big hugs if you want ’em, David!! Which I at first mistyped as “Favid,” because you are among my favourite Davids.
Diego and kupo, I’m so sorry for your losses. Of course we know (or expect, or hope) that we will outlive our companion beasties. It would be even harsher to take them into our lives knowing we might go first, and leave them helpless behind us.
Scildfreya, double sympathies because this is right now for you.
I know playing internet vet is on a par with playing internet doctor, but: your diabetic kitteh with the skin condition – is the usual skin treatment out because it is steroidal? Has your vet considered NSAIDs such as Meloxicam or Piroxicam which are becoming more frequently frequently used in animals?
About 5 years ago I could find very little on the internet about their use in cats, but since then, much more info has been put up.
These NSAIDs don’t interact so badly with insulin, and piroxicam can be given as a topical gel, which means less of it enters the bloodstream to mess with the overall metabolism of the human or beastie.
Just a thought, because 5 years ago none of the vets I took my cat to had heard of it before, so yours may not have either.
*Nerdish detail: the effectiveness of piroxicam in treating canine bladder cancer appears to have been discovered because some of the test dogs used for skin safety-testing the drug for human use had CBC and got better in piroxicam trials – so, occasionally human experimentation on animals benefits other animals in the long term.
Sending solidarity in healing migraine vibes to you, David. Hope you get relief soon.
I’ve had my latest migraine for 5 days now. Yesterday, I apparently decided to have a new symptom: dizziness (which is a common aura for me) followed by an inability to swallow (not common). Lasted about 30 seconds, then the pain got worse. I’m guessing I’m either having hemiplegic migraine (which has happened in the past), or my brain is starting to have the little “mini-strokes” that are common when you get to my age with the type of migraines I primarily have. Either way, not cool.
I can’t even with the whole dog brains for women thing.
@Scildfreja
~^.^~
Re: Cornwallis
You said it better than I could!
@Gussie
Only what’s in the news, I don’t really socialize much.
Nova Scotia?
Hey, that’s where I live at the moment!
Neat.
Not related to anything: Have people here seen American History X? I’m just watching it for the first time, and it’s really striking me just how relevant the writing of it still is today, what with the surge of white nationalism and everything that’s been going on in the past year or two.
David, I hope you feel better.
Please enjoy this video of my new fluffy kittehs playing. The brown cat is the black and white kitten’s mom, which makes this funnier and more wrong:
You need to understand that we describe a whole ball of thread with just the one word, “gender.” Gender means gender presentation, gender identity, and the experience that someone has of being gendered by others, just to name a few important threads in the ball.
Gender identity seems to be hardwired in some way, otherwise trans people would not exist. But “gender” is a social construct in the sense that the experience that a feminine-presenting person has in the world is different from the experience that a masculine-presenting person has, and these experiences are entirely shaped by social forces. I hope that makes sense? I can say that I do not identify with any gender (innate), but my gender presentation means that I am treated as female by the world, and that gives me a certain experience that male-presenting people don’t have (socially constructed).
Now, I see the argument sometimes that gender is entirely socially constructed, even gender identity, and that used to be the story that we were told. That’s what I was taught in college, for instance. But the existence of transgender people puts the lie in that, so I don’t think it’s a valid way of looking at the world anymore. It’s more helpful to think of “gender” as encompassing many things, including the social experience of gender, which is definitely a construct, and including gender identity, which is almost certainly innate in some way.
If there was no difference, there would be no trans people. However, “differences between the sexes” is typically used to mean that women aren’t any good at math or science, because difference between the sexes, which has been demonstrated to be bullshit. So you are correct in identifying this as a bad-faith argument. When someone invokes “differences between the sexes” and mentions brains, it means “women’s brains are inferior” 100% of the time, so even though gender identity is probably related to brain function in some way, it’s not going to be easy to avoid the “women can’t STEM” nonsense. Good luck with that.
I hope that made a modicum of sense because I’m operating on very little sleep right now and plan to hop into bed in about 10 min.
Sex is also a social construct. Especially the MF difference. We put all sorts of expectations into what someone of any sex is. That woman will have children and men are only there for sperm giving( I’ve heard this on both sides). But as science has shown that the binary isn’t exactly real, with all of the ways one can be intersexed. Our ideas of what sex is change constantly. And very few of us know what our sex chromosones are(which at most make up 2% of our genes). Then our bodies go through development multiple times, from before birth to puberty. Or second puberty. Many things typically thought of as being part of sex turns out to be because of hormones. Which can be added to the body anytime. Gender is a social construct because every bit of it is something cultural, it’s what people expect of you, and what you expect of yourself. But if we were to map that over time and culture, you’ll see there is no true gender. What is expected of woman in America is different from what Japan expects.. Now go through history. Its very complicated. For me it means I’m not transgender but I am transexual, I’m quite settled with my gender nonconformance, but I am not happy with my biology, and wish to match more with woman, hence hormones. Not everyone agrees with me. But to put it shortly, the world is more chaotic and messy than most people want to admit. None of us are objective all the time, or use logic all the time. Also, Freedom of Choice, Biology is not Destiny, we aren’t just Gene machines but also meme machines. We’re more than Nature, and can go.beyond nurture.
If someone is telling you that this is a feminist position, it’s on them to provide evidence of that. You can’t prove a negative.
@dslucia:
I really liked American History X, which means I want to discuss it critically.
A few years ago I read a critique of it which said that it helped to spread the unhelpful “racism is a thing done by clearly-evil skinheads with swastika tattoos, and if you’re not one of them you can’t be a racist” narrative we’ve all encountered. At the time, this critique hit home for me. Since then, however, the world appears to have discovered that many of the less-overt racists were just waiting for the right moment to revert back to being skinheads with swastika tattoos, which has complicated the matter somewhat.
There’s also class issues in it, which are interesting in their own right but I don’t know enough to speak about.
In unrelatedly hilarious news, my poor PS4 just tried to autofill “For” as “Fucksplattering.” What the hell have I been teaching it?!
@ SFHC;
I was texting a friend and my fone autocorrected a misspelled “Oklahoma” to read “pornography”…. That was… awkward
Just saw Cars 3 and Spider-Man: Homecoming, but now I’ve read an alt-right rant about that upcoming HBO show where the South wins the Civil War, so now I’ve got that plus Star Trek: Discovery plus Doctor Who on my plate. When Black Panther comes out, they’re going to rant about that too, aren’t they? Jesus Christ, keeping up with all the movies and TV shows these people take issue with is becoming exhausting…
It would be pretty easy to demonstrate that some feminists say that. It was in my undergraduate gender studies textbook, after all.
One can’t prove a negative, but one can show evidence that the opposite is true. If the two are mutually exclusive, then the same evidence is evidence of the negative.
@EJ:
It was a super tough movie to watch that comes with all the content warnings, and I think it could’ve actually benefited from being longer so that it could spend a little more time showing more of Derek’s general slide into white supremacy and/or his transition away from it again, but I thought it handled the general idea of how young white men are radicalized incredibly well. The thing that particularly surprised me was just how similar a lot of the rhetoric in the movie was to the things we see being said online today; a lot of Derek’s racist rants sounded almost word-for-word exactly like the stuff that comes out of the manosphere. And it never fell back on trying to imply any of them were mentally unstable or anything, which I think is something that could’ve been a very easy out.
I’m not sure about the ending, though. Kinda felt like that was just there for dramatic purposes.
@SFHC, Weird Eddie
Reminds me when I went on a tired rant to my phone on speech to text the other night. Apparently I informed them not to snort memes up their cock. (They don’t have a cock.)
Just wanted to add:
Not only that but there have been cases where someone has been born with both sets of genitalia (ie. intersexed) and the doctor, with or without any parental input, takes it upon his or herself to decide that the child is male or female (interestingly though they always seem to skew male..strange).
If gender were entirely socially constructed this wouldn’t really matter (robbing the child of their choice is another matter though) and they’d live a normal(ish) life. However, since gender identity is hard-wired, it does matter. If the doctor chooses wrong, that child is either going to have a miserable life, or they are going to have a short miserable life before suiciding.
And then there is the case of David Reimer (Coincidentally he had the same birrthday as me, except for the year).
I’m going to copy/paste here, otherwise it’ll probably take me forever to get to the main point(s). I tend to take the ‘verbal’ long route I know, I’m sorry.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Reimer
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2013/5/17/1209792/-Sex-change-surgery-performed-on-16-month-old-South-Carolina-child-without-consent
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-3191600/The-agony-learning-ve-raised-wrong-sex-rare-condition-meant-doctors-weren-t-sure-sex-Joe-born-support-Princess-Diana-finally-accepted-girl-came-shattering-discovery.html
@Jesalin
RE: David Reimer – I’ve read about his case before. Poor guy. And, what an arrogant shrink.
I do not know if I have an intersex condition, but it would explain a lot if I did. I have never really related to being a woman, and god knows I’ve tried. Being female really makes no sense to me at all. I was told that once I met the right man I would feel different, mum still lives in hope some guy will come and make me all broody and bring out me maternal instincts, but as I’m 40 that’s never happened and I’m certain it won’t. Being female has been a huge inconvenience to me, I try to ignore it and hope it might go away, but it hasn’t yet.
that’s… ummmm…
….
@Weird Eddie
I may have derived it from Joel of Vinesauce, who once advised his watchers not to snort memes up their cock[i]hole.[/i] This was after something profoundly nonsensical happened.
Uggghhhhh.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2017/07/21/silicon-valley-sexism-backlash/493800001/
@dslucia & @EJ
I was weirdly addicted to watching American History X for a few months in the late 90s.
I’m surprised by that reading of it, because to me the message was the complete opposite of that: that you could be a regular, ordinary person in a regular, ordinary working-class family, and still dive deeply into a world defined by hatred and bigotry.
Because that’s the kind of household I grew up in. White, working-class, casual and outspoken racism and bigotry. Who knows how I may have reacted to a trauma like their family sustained?
I found the film kind of hypnotic. I haven’t watched it since then, but at the time I rewatched it at least 5 or 6 times.
Re: racism is a thing done by…
I read a while back a treatise saying that one of the triumphs of racism is the idea that racism is done by evil-minded people to others.
Racism is not individual. Racism is systemic. Organizations are racist. Systems are racist, institutions are racist, hierarchies are racist. People are bigots, and the evil they do is bigotry.
Bigotry is racist (and sexist, and ableist, and ageist and etc), because bigotry supports, reaffirms and reinforces the oppression of systems, institutions, organizations, etc., and bigotry allows the continuation of that oppression.