By David Futrelle
Nyasha Madzima is the CEO of a one-person “branding and media” company that doesn’t seem to have a working web page. He also doesn’t seem to have a working knowledge of biology.
In a recent Twitter thread, he attempted to explain why women shouldn’t have more than one sexual partner in their lifetime.
I’ve run across assorted misogynists making a similar, er, argument — claiming that when women come into contact with a man’s sperm, it essentially rewrites her DNA and makes her a little bit more like the sperm-depositor. (This is complete nonsense, of course.) But Madzima is much more mystical about it, and presumably wearing a condom won’t prevent that Life Force from sneaking into the vagina, or wherever it’s supposed to be going.
Either way, the result is the same, offering men another excuse to claim that women who aren’t literally virgins are man-contaminated whores who can’t love good men correctly because they’re so full of the collective Life Forces of other (bad) men.
Which, even according to the perverse logic of these arguments, doesn’t seem quite fair. If any of this were true, wouldn’t the onus be as much on the man to avoid sex with multiple women to avoid contaminating or confusing them? Wouldn’t it thus be the duty of all men to remain virgins until marriage to keep from damaging them? If contact with a man’s dick is polluting, shouldn’t there be some sort of cap and trade program for dicks?
But it’s pointless to try to argue any of this logically, because this isn’t about logic any more than it’s about scientific facts; it’s just another way to make women feel shitty about having a sex life. Or to try anyway, because there aren’t a lot of women out there who buy any of this bullshit.
Anyway, this all made me think of this old song:
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@Victorious Parasol
Nice, I hope you get that better paying job.
@ Vicky P
That sounds like fate! Everything crossed for you.
@VP, I hope you get the better-paying one!! (maybe the first one was a very near miss? is it possible that there could have been communication from them to the recruiter? I guess that’s not usual, but I don’t know how it might work so I thought maybe (I know someone who just missed a slot but they liked her a lot at interview and found another slot for her instead, so that’s what made me wonder). Anyway, joining the ranks of the crossed-fingers-for-VP!)
Thanks, everyone! The second job is with a very different organization than the first one, but it’s basically for the same sort of work. We’ll see what happens now that I’ve submitted my resume for consideration.
I do feel somewhat vindicated for not getting what the fuss was about over Harry Potter. I never got around to reading the books. I did enjoy the movies well enough, it’s not like I was anti-HP. I just am steadfast in my view that Oz is the best fantasy universe for kids and the young at heart.
Good luck, VP! I hope you get this second job and it’s awesome.
Me, I was, and am still, something of a fan, but I’m not kidding myself. I don’t think they’re ideal children’s books in hindsight. Oz is a lot more creative and whimsical, overall.
So, for me, it’s going to be an HPL situation from here on out; love the books, hate the author. And also cheerfully twist the canon of the books to commit heresy against the TERF ideal.
Naglfar – in a discussion thread about how biological sex is a physical fact whereas gender is a social construct, I asked if the latter meant that one could change gender.
Instaban.
I did find out that they have a cartoon in the sidebar depicting a labrys destroying the concept of gender.
Hey, David? This case might make for a good post:
http://twitter.com/JFinleyreports/status/1270864682610561026
Also may be of interest to any legal eagles we have here.
tl;dr – man who didn’t like being rejected on a dating site has to pay up after harassing women
@ Vicky P
I did find that interesting. I was about to go on about why; but I doubt if anyone needs 47 paragraphs of me rambling about comparative defamation law.
Can see why the fees were $26K though. This is just the motion her lawyer drafted; let alone the hearing fee!
https://danielhorwitz.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/Butterton-Motion-and-TPPA-Petition-to-Dismiss-and-Exhibits-A-R.pdf
Late to the party, back to the original post. I don’t know about essences, but I admit that every boy I ever liked/dated/had sex with did leave me with a little bit of himself: his musical taste. A certain boy is why I still like Elvis Costello. Another one gave me Sondheim. REM’s Automatic for the People will always have a special place in my heart. And Thelonius! Thank you, asshole who broke my heart, for Thelonius!
Remember mixtapes, fellow olds? I don’t even know how modern courtship can proceed without mixtapes!
My dear husband gave me two children but no music. On the other hand, he gave me the Tour de France, European football, and, oddly, Nascar.
Anyway, the point is, all of these experiences made me richer and I wouldn’t have had it any other way.
@Robert
For people who claim to want to abolish gender, they seem very attached to it. Interestingly, one could also read that as a trans*-positive message: that you can’t force someone to change their gender identity and should accept them for who they are. Obviously, that’s not what they meant, but it’s a happier spin.
TBH I think it’s a shame that TERFs take the battle axes as symbols. At least we’ll always have the bat’leth.
@Susan
I remember mixtapes! That’s how my husband courted me (among other sterling qualities).
Late to the show but good luck, VP!!! <3
@ susan
Oh indeed. I did carry on into the CD burning age; but now it’s all fully digital it doesn’t seem the same. Part of the experience was surely writing out, and annotating, the track list?
@Susan
Oh wow that’s familiar. Very familiar. Yeaaahhhh I’ve picked up a lot of music from partners and close friends, including ones who treated me badly.
e.g.
Swallow the Sun was introduced to me by an extremely abusive former friend, and I still listen to them sometimes. For a while they were (ironically?) my go-to for catharsis re anger at sexism.
A better person, one of my dearest remembered exes, got me into Ada Rook (though listening to her work has gotten hard TBH, it’s kind of just All The Emotions).
Another ex, who is still a close friend, introduced me to Loreena McKennitt.
So yeah, it holds true. Though the transfer seems to happen less during sex, and more during long road trips and sickeningly cutesy chat sessions. 🙂
I think “it’s always projection” sort of explains the nonsense. Guys who write this and read/agree with it basically never get laid, and hate any woman desperate enough to give them sex. So they invent a mythology where almost no women are good enough or pure enough for them, thus it’s not really their fault they can’t get laid or find a relationship. It’s that all them wimmen were fouled!
wrt JKR and the HP books, I recently saw a screencap of a series of tweets (sadly I can’t remember from whom) pointing out that there is a scene where Hermione is polyjuiced into being physically identical to Harry (not a glamour, as we know polyjuice canonically creates an actual physical transformation – in this case, complete with bad eyesight), and the author continues to refer to her as she/her. The tweet-writer points out that JKR is thus perfectly capable of unreservedly referring to someone as a woman when that person has male genitalia, and therefore presumably capable of understanding that a person’s gender is not necessarily derived from their configuration of bits.
This seems to be a bit of an open thread now; so if people don’t mind I’ll post this here.
You may recall the mining company trashing that ancient site? Well, as a result of all the outcry they have put on hold plans to mine on another 40 sites of cultural significance. Let’s hope that hold is permanent.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-06-11/bhp-halts-aboriginal-site-destruction-after-rio-tinto-protests/12345566
I remember mixtapes; I have a few. Not from SOs, but from friends. One from a friend who made one for me when I was going into the hospital for a while; one from a friend who made up a tape of songs with a theme based on the character she was playing online; two from other friends who were involved with a shared world writing group where we came up with songs to go with the shared world. (That one had everything from anime opening music to Broadway musicals; one of the characters had ‘Where I Want to Be’ from Chess as his character’s theme.)
@Cyborgette:
I got into Loreena McKennit early on, given she’s Canadian as well and I was living in the Kitchener-Waterloo area at the time.
She burned a fair bit of good will later on when some of her fighting against any sort of online music services was seen by many other aspiring musicians as her pulling the ladder up after herself.
@Jenora Feuer
Oh rats, I didn’t know that about her. :/ Sigh.
But… she’s not an abuser AFAIK, so there is that?
@Cyborgette:
It’s kind of understandable, given the turmoil around online music in the pre-iTunes music industry, but she sure came off as ‘I had to pay my dues, why should you get it any easier?’ at the time while arguing with other musicians who actively used online sharing for building an audience. (Also interesting given that I first heard about her in 1990 over the internet.)
Granted, that’s the worst thing I know about her, and it’s more narrow-minded than actively horrible. There was also the English court case, McKennit v Ash, where she sued a former friend over a published book that contained a lot of personal information, but that’s… also rather understandable under the circumstances.
I do love her work, though, and have several of her albums.
@ jenora
I did wonder to mention that. It’s quite a significant case in privacy/defamation. But dealt with a topic that’s probably only of interest to media lawyers. Did sort of create new law though, or at least ‘clarify’ something turned out we’d all been getting wrong apparently.
Couldn’t think of any other recent thread this could fit in that was still active(ish), so I’m posting this here.
Martin Gugino, the old guy who was knocked down by the police hard enough at a Buffalo, NY BLM rally to break his skull, had a close friend of his write a blog post about that, and about the theory the injury was faked.
https://www.patheos.com/blogs/keithgiles/2020/06/sorry-mr-president-my-friend-martin/
@Alan Robertshaw:
Well, defamation and privacy laws tend to have pretty thick grey areas in any case; they kind of have to, because the subjects are so inherently personal and subjective. There’s no objective way to measure damage, and lots of sliding scales as to when something may become a matter of ‘public interest’. This sort of thing is also, really, part of the advantage of the Common Law system in general: for all the associated vagueness, it lends itself to reinterpretation with the times better than ‘stricter’ systems.
Though English law in defamation and libel has its own history and leanings in particular which may have led to some jurisdiction shopping… though that would lead us to British Chiropractic Association v Singh which caused some rewriting of that.
(I think I heard of that case back when it originally started; can’t remember whether it was from Respectful Insolence or Bad Astronomy first.)