This is new! I usually don’t get rape fantasies, but Thunderf00t’s angry rabble have opened up exciting new vistas.
The whole point of free-thinking is to express what you have been thinking to others; what would the point of Socrates’ trial have been if he had not made the impressive speeches he made? If the people judging him had simply written him off as ‘too out there’ and simply condemned him five minutes into his talking? The point I’m trying to make is that as much as I think Watson is at a minimum misguided, you are culpable for much worse. Free Speech is the fundamental human right; without it, we are all doomed. You removing his website because you disagree on a matter of opinion makes you as bad as the papacy banning books, or Iran banning books, etc. etc…. In other words, by shutting off free expression you have sauntered effortlessly to lines the old and evil; too much information is bad, we decide what you should be exposed to, let’s have Salman Rushdie killed for writing something we don’t agree with. You have not tried to have Tf00t killed yet(my, what restraint you have), but at this point I wouldn’t be surprised to see that either. You’re supposed to be a scientist; a little open-mindedness goes a long way in investigating the truth.
In this modern world the only way to survive and live well is to laugh, rather than cry… A little cynicism never hurt anyone.
Anyway, I don’t believe I shall be reading your blogs any more; at least until you apologize to Mr. f00t; if you don’t all I can to is hope you get raped to death by Jaguars in the Yucatan. Next time think with your brain instead of your balls, and maybe over time I’ll grow to trust and respect you again. until then, eat shit. I mean, you’re supposed to be a scientist, for Christ’s sake.
I could swear some more but based off what I know of you you’re probably bawling already. Nobody likes a crybaby. You old cunt.
Thanks for your time!
Phil Krstulich,
someone who actually believes in equality of right for all humankind, and who isn’t a two-faced fuck who pretends to be in favor of free speech while trying to stamp it out.
Curses! My plan to have Thunderf00t killed has been exposed!
I have now seen a teeny tiny fraction of what Anita Sarkeesian gets.
While I agree with some of what you are saying, you are conflating gender expression with gender identity.
It is possible for someone to identity very strongly with a male identity while being expressive of some female typical behaviors or social expectations; and having a female-typical appearance.
People generally don’t identify as a particular gender because they wish to “act like” that gender. It is because the part of the brain that tells them what gender they are, is telling them what gender they are.
You can certainly have effeminate cis-men and masculine cis-women; and this is true of transpeople as well.
I don’t like the “trans” label either, because it makes it sound like someone is going FROM one gender TO another. What is really happening is that, at about the age of three or so when the concept of gender is becoming clear to the child, the child sometimes figures out that the people around them are mis-gendering them….other times it takes until puberty for that to happen, or even later. However, they didn’t CHANGE from one gender to another. They were always the gender they are.
Depending on the individual, they may decide to change various aspects of themselves (such as their gender expression and their appearance) to conform to typical aspects of their actual gender. Some transgender people have very severe body dysphoria, and if they do not change their body it can cause them great psychological harm.
It goes well beyond the social expectations of gender roles.
While I deeply sympathize, humans don’t seem to work that way. Almost everyone DOES identify as male- or female-gendered (hope that’s the right terminology), does so very young, and then seeks out societally gendered behaviors to express that identity; and gender identity’s far more important and intrinsic to individuals than such intractable concepts as religion and bias. Much as I’d rather belong to a genderfluid species, it ain’t gonna happen anytime soon.
It’s unusual to see someone cast himself as shit in an analogy, but I can’t dispute your accuracy.
Naked Bunny
Ha!
@Caine:
They’re just trying to score rhetorical points. It’s very common when people can’t back up their arguments with evidence or logic. They spatter emotion-plucking statements all over the place indiscriminately to get the desired response from their audience, which is expected to not notice the inconsistency because they aren’t thinking, they are feeling. It’s a wildly successful approach for politicians and priests, and it’s telling that those supporting the slimepitters and MRAs have adopted it.
Duh, The Horde likes GIRLS! You can’t expect to get away with liking girls without being trolled by morons who do exactly what they don’t like you doing.
2506 comments and counting… o_O
>.<
In my continuing efforts to keep my genitalia as far away as possible from the male supwemacists, I would prefer that the two concepts were not linked as a slur.
May I suggest wunderschwanz as a accurate and splash-free substitute?
“pussyhounds”
Unfortunately makes me think of when large spit-filled dogs come sniffing around your crotch; and you have to push their noses away while their owner apologizes.
Unpleasant.
SamStrange @#464: Not sure what you’re asking for links about, but
here are a fewI put some in the next comment.nigel @#467 (& irenedelse @#479):
It was anthropomorphized by the Love-Is-style-cartoons, and therefore misleading at best, and it was presented as having something to do with human ‘genders’ which it really does not.
Ing @#470: Ing, fuck you, lose the crybaby paranoia, and take your criticism like everybody else. I couldn’t care less about shitting on you, but when you make a biological argument I’m going to evaluate it just like everybody else’s. I would have said the same thing about those cartoons if they’d been posted by Myers or Dawkins.
sg @#472: thank you for your eminently reasonable comment. You are of course correct about the subtleties and realities of actual language.
[I’ll just point out again that my original comment was criticizing the attempt to substitute a specialized technical meaning for the mush of overlapping everyday-English meanings that people in general understand from context. Where I put my foot in it was substituting my own evidently equally technical meaning (but not specialized; mine is the broadest possible sensible meaning; see below) instead. That was stupid of me.
ibbica @#473: nope, that’s not what I meant. The only definition of sex that is meaningful across all of biology is gametic sex. (Looking back now, I see that you did list ‘gonadal sex’ which is almost the same thing; my bad.) It’s only applicable to oogamous organisms, but in those cases it is unambiguous. Sperm or eggs? That’s le difference. Period. Biologically.
pelamun @#475:
I fucking know the concept. My initial complaint was in fact about the imposition of a single, restrictive definition. My secondary complaint is the frustrating imprecision of communication that massive polysemy causes in places like these comment threads. See my comment here
@$477:
First, that suggestion was semi-facetious, as the reference to Spock’s eyebrow was supposed to convet. Second, and repeating myself yet again, sociologists can use whatever terms they want to in their specialized academic contexts, as long as the people involved in the discourse (including students) are clued in to these particular meanings. Fine. My objection is the subsequent attempted imposition of their particular meanings on general discussions such as this. OK?
carlie:
uh, well…that was a rather drunk-n-grumpy comment there. And I actually didn’t know about Crepidula or your other examples (so thanks for linking). So I was wrong and I’m pleased to back off from ‘wrong’ to merely ‘imprecise and misleading’.
We’re actually talking about a single family of limpets and your 2 other isolated examples. The vast majority of gastropods have separate sexes, and almost all of the rest are simultaneous hemaphrodites.
Actuall all of them are protandrous, which means they switch once, from male to female, not (as seemed to me to be implied) back & forth. It’s always size (not age) related (because small indivs can make lots and lots of sperm but relatively few eggs). The environmental conditions influences the timing of an individual’s only switch.
Very cool example, but not the same thing at all. Two hermaphroditic snails actually fight to determine who gets to be the male (transfer sperm) this time (interestingly, the winner is usually the smaller snail, who has much more to lose reproductively by ‘being the female’. There is no change in sex, most simultaneous hermaphrodites go both ways each time anyway, and more importantly it has zero to do with the concept of human ‘gender’ (in the social-science-approved sense).
here, LMG ‘alternative reproductive tactics’ FY.
Here‘s a decently recent review
There’s a whole book about it
And here‘s the side-blotched lizard story from the source
I’ll take that. I was going for simplified and didn’t spend enough time to be sure it was properly representative of the whole group.
Chas, fuck off.
As per your request
Ing: You’ve been reminded several times. That request was rescinded. You must now deliver your contempt of your own volition.
@Chas
That’s exactly the issue I was commenting on, though: yes, gametic/gonadal sex used to be referred to as the marker of ‘biological sex’, but we now know better. We know that there are all sorts of ‘biological’ processes and organs that contribute to ‘maleness’ and ‘femaleness’, and that they are neither mutually exclusive nor exhaustive categories into which every individual can be placed. The phrase is sloppy, misleading, and simply not as useful as the much more precise language we have available.
(Not to mention that those ‘more precise’ terms often have fewer syllables, so it’s not like it’s even particularly useful as shorthand.)
This again is human exceptionalism.
For the other 10,000,000 species of sexually-reproducing animals (to say nothing of other eukaryotes) we most certainly do not “know better”.
A gynandromorphic chicken (or cardinal), for example, really is half male and half female, referring to literal left and right halves. It’s not a different ‘gender’.
But I have already granted that in the context of a discussion about humans, “male” and “female” are indeed far more complicated and nuanced terms as actually used for sex (‘biological’ or, arguably, otherwise)and/or gender.