I prefer not to be asked for my “preferred pronouns.” In a world as diverse as ours, not everyone’s preferences can be catered to all the time. This leaves us with the question: should we ask everyone, no one, or only those who look “different” for their pronouns?
It won’t be othering, they say, because we’ll ask everyone.
But they won’t. Not only will they never get everyone else to ask all of us for our pronouns, but the wokest among us will, in most situations, only ask the queers, the gender non-conformers, the people who look like they might…
The word “man” originally referred to all humans. There were malemen (“wermenn”) and femalemen (“wyfmenn”), but we were all men. About a thousand years ago a shift began that pushed “man” toward referring to penis people, and it was only as of the late 20th century that it came to be exclusively used for them. Thus, over the course of the last thousand years, people sometimes used “man” to refer to humans, sometimes only to male humans.
About a hundred years ago, a convention arose that we should use the lower-case “man” to refer to dudes and upper-case “Man” to…
For the past few months, my girlfriend and I have been traveling around the country living in a 2010 Ford Transit Connect she converted into a little fort for us. Driving through everywhere but major cities, she will often point to a flag waving in front of a house or business and ask, “Now, what does that one mean?”
Then I’ll google it. “Okay so the black and white American flag with one orange stripe is for dispatchers. Not to be confused with the thin yellow line flag, which is for security people.”
Don’t get me wrong: cancel culture obviously exists and needs to be discussed, or you wouldn’t’ve intuitively understood what I meant by “it.” Maybe the “it” is simply a culture of people who have lost their senses of proportion and humor.
Then again, there may be several sometimes overlapping phenomena we refer to under that term’s umbrella. …
A lot of people I know say they don’t want to take the vaccine yet, if ever. For some, the idea is to let others take it first, to make up for the truncated testing and approval process this new mRNA thingy went through. And, I suspect, on some level there’s a sour grapes dynamic playing out amongst those of us who won’t be offered the chance to take it till last anyway.
For many others though, they don’t plan to take it at all, as they fear that some powerful and malevolent forces are sneaking in, along with the…
It’s not my fault it turns out that part of the keeping up with The Joneses for the ultra rich is getting away with fucking small children. It’s just part of their culture at this point.
If you think the business handshake on a golf course is binding, try one on a pedophile island. You don’t back out of that deal.
I wonder whether some of them do it despite not really being attracted to kids, just because they can get away with it, for the thrill. Like how Wynona Rider didn’t need to steal those socks.
I call anyone…
While you read this, please sometimes pause and consider what latitude you lend me given the gender I’ve identified myself as (lesbian), versus what you would if I’d they’d myself up top or if I referred to myself a trans man.
Fast-forward to January of 2019, when I caught them wringing their hands on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.
Watching this now, I feel like I’m watching Kamala Harris: the politiciany hand gestures, the playing the crowd for indignation regarding oppression that people similar to them experience. Of…
They should’ve changed his name to Elliot years ago. It’s what most of us dude-spirit lesbians have always done. Jacquelines goes by Jack. The Katherines are Kats. Courtneys might go with Cory. Hopefully the Tiffanys have middle names to utilize, or else they can just go by T.
I never had to change mine because it’s Arielle, which, while technically my parents used the French feminization of a Hebrew male name, still causes enough gender uncertainty to work fine for me. …
Tell me you’ve decided to boycott their projects/products/performances.
Tell me Netflix has removed a show they made or acted in.
Tell me we’ve got #cancelsoandso trending on Twitter.
Tell me everyone in your YouTube world says they’re “human garbage.”
Tell me they lost X followers or that their sales are down Y percent.
Tell me they lost their job (and their health insurance).
Tell me they’ve become a social pariah and receive daily death threats, that they’re scared for their family or desperately wish they had one to be with right now.
Tell me people on Instagram are burning the…
