Revisiting Radway’s Reading the Romance: A Critical Ethnography of Romance Fans | Osteophage – Coyote discusses a 1980s book that studied women who read romance novels.  The author Janice Radway is sympathetic to the women of her study, seeing them as mistreated housewives trying to find an escape.  And yet, the romance books contain a lot of sexism themselves, and she is disappointed to find that the women tend to uncritically accept that sexism.  Coyote positions Radway’s book in relation to more recent debates about fandom.

Trans People are Under Attack and We Must Help Them | Rebecca Watson (video and transcript, 9 min) – Trans and nonbinary people are a tiny minority (estimated at 1.6% in the video), so how much does it matter that they’re under attack?  Well, that’s a lot of people if you think about it.  For instance, it’s far larger than the number of federal employees fired or laid off, and it’s larger than the total number of federal employees period.  Trump has signed 80-some executive orders, and if each one chips away at the rights of as many people, that affects all of us.  (And the video doesn’t even discuss the ways that cutting trans rights directly impacts cis women, e.g. by requiring them to undergo invasive examinations for sports.)

Superhero Violence | Life’s a Gas – On the subject of hangups around common tropes, Bebe Melange says a bit about superheroes punching faces.  More dangerous IRL than on screen!

Personally I don’t really like stories centered around violence or action, not because I’m averse, but because I’m desensitized.  It doesn’t mean anything, it’s not about anything, it barely even resembles real world violence!  It just fills space where more story could have been.

My weird hangups about charity | Tell Me Why the World is Weird – Perfect Number explores some feelings about giving to charity, unpacking the values received from an evangelical background.  For example, Christians believe that giving is about sacrifice, and if you’re not truly giving anything up then you’re not doing enough.  Well, there’s that Bible story about the widow who gives away her last two coins, and Jesus remarks that this is greater than the other folks who merely give away surplus wealth.  I always found that story to be confusing, because surely a widow with two coins to her name is a fitting recipient of donations, more fitting than the temple anyway.  The Wikipedia article suggests some interpretations along those lines, but I wasn’t taught those.

Personally I find donation to be very stressful, because I worry I’m not doing it wrong somehow.  Norms about how you’re supposed to feel while donating are unhelpful to me, because I just feel worse about not feeling the right way.  At some point I just do it regardless of how it feels.

These days, I make an annual donation to GiveWell.  Yes, that’s one of the charities advocated by Effective Altruism, mostly targeting global poverty.  Regardless of any ideological considerations, I could never be EA, because fundamentally they’re a community that likes discussing how to select the best charities, and that’s a discussion that I find particularly stressful.  But without participating in that discussion, I can borrow some of its conclusions, and I feel confident that GiveWell is a decent recipient.