Les Liens du Lundi
Feb. 25th, 2019 11:43 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
highlyeccentric- Dr Phil Metzger, a Scientist On Twitter, talks through the physics of water fountains.
- Wilson (
the_sidecarist) offers a thread on polyamory (aimed at gay men)
Because so many gays love to post shitty opinions on open relationships and/or polyamory, now I’m going to post some thoughts/takes of my own, as someone who has been in those relationships for 20 years. Thread:
— Wilson 🏳️🌈 (@the_sidecarist) February 21, 2019
Something in there doesn't quite sit right with me, but I haven't yet figured out what. - Lucy Fisher (The Times UK) reports that the gatwick drone crisis is believed to be an airport insider's work
- The British Library will likely have to suspend public access to the Spare Rib archive as a result of Brexit (EU copyright law will no longer apply to works of unknown authorship).
Longreads - essay, memoir, natural history, other
- Hannah McCann and Lucy Nicholls (Inside Story), Gender Troubles, on the boogeyman of 'gender ideology' and disciplinary/ideological divides within feminism:
A more generous reading of both the utopian and the pragmatic politics of many gender theorists could reduce the intensity of the reaction among gender-critical feminists. While gender theorists undermine some of the easier conceptual givens of some earlier feminisms, such as the reality of biological sex, they are not denying that we live in a world where binary ideas shape opportunities and expectations. In the words of original radical feminist Shulamith Firestone, “we are talking about radical change. And though indeed it cannot come all at once, radical goals must be kept in sight at all times.”
Lived experiences of gender are much messier than any neat theoretical divisions suggest. Rather than hyper-focusing on trans activists as a problem for feminism, feminists could unite pragmatically on specific issues, such as violence, reproductive rights and harassment, around a common ethos such as the reduction of harm. This would not require complete consensus but would focus on real threats to liberation rather than imagined, abstract ones.
I'm a little skeptical of what might be glossed over by 'would not require complete consensus' (who's going to be asked to sacrifice their dignity in the name of pragmatics? Not white cis women), but otherwise, this is a sensible piece. - Gary Pearce (Overland) reviews Jeff Sparrow's 'Trigger Warnings: Political Correctness and the Rise of the Right', and it looks like it might actually be a decent journalistic-historical book on how the right came to position itself as the bastion of free speech. Given the title, I'm skeptical, but... I might give it a shot. I used to like Jeff Sparrow's work.
- Fransjohan Praetorius, for The Conversation UK, offers a historical explainer on Conversation camps in the south african (Boer) war.
- Sonja Erikanien (University of Edinburgh Centre for Biomedicine, Self and Society), On Being, Unquestionably, A Woman (piece on the persecution of Caster Semanya and the regulation of women's sports).
- Sarah Kurchak (Far and Wide), 12 Tips for Travelling with Depression. A bit fluffy but much of it rings true for me.
- Alexandra (Sugoi.com) interviews Erica Friedman (founder of Ozacu, Yuricon, and ALC publishing) on the genre history of yuri manga. There's a spanish version at below the English, too.
- Gay Lynch (Meanjin blog), On Decluttering, Narratives, and Stuff.
Raised in a peripatetic family that moved every two years from one old, stone, bank premise to another, we were adept at fast transitions. We arranged the same furniture, pictures, ornaments and vases in the new space and added fresh flowers. Within two days of arrival our living space signified our ongoing family identity, one that relied on heritage and the slow accretion of material things by annual gift giving. I might interpret Mother’s dedication to cherishing her material world as a longing for her widowed mother, eight hours drive away, and the aesthetic values she had instilled. In each of our homes, she set up a realizable world that worked, a metonym for her childhood home, adding nostalgic objects that triggered memories of her exile in various Australian country towns.
[...]
This essay is not, however, just about decluttering, but the relieved gasp of a second-generation, hard core, collector-conservator, whose documentation of history had enslaved her body and crushed her spirit. How did this happen? Like Stewart, I believed that collected historical objects, including ephemera—theatre tickets, launch invitations, school reports—became ‘a mode of knowledge’ that was more than a hobby because I taught history and restored houses (161). My need to conserve and supplement, then display historical items became close to pathological and it generated work for which I had little time, outside teaching loads and unpaid farm labour.
Items of practical interest:
- Judy at The Woks of Life has a piece on how to set up a steamer which finally made sense of steamers for me! Including how to use them to reheat food, which I expect will be very useful to me in Japan.
I have a LOT more links stored, but I think I'll put them off to Thursday, spare your reading lists.
Read anything cool on The Internets lately, folks?
no subject
Date: 2019-02-26 10:45 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-02-27 07:59 am (UTC)One place where I strongly disagree with the_sidecarist is that polyamory or being unable to maintain multiple romantic attractions at once is some kind of "choice"; that anyone can "choose" either poly or monogamy; that it is not hard-wired and encoded how we feel attraction (however we are defining attraction) even at the basic level of "can I feel it con-currently for more than one person or is it exclusively felt for one person alone when I experience it". Obviously, some people cannot/do not feel it ever. Some people feel it often. I feel it very rarely, exclusively limited to a very small subset of types of people and people with whom I have a pre-existing relationship and relationship dynamic.
I have tried to fall in love with someone. I was not successful. I have tried not to love someone. It also was not successful. I don't particularly like terms like metamors or polycules (they don't describe my relationship matrices) but one of my main emotional partners is someone I failed to fall out of love with when he got married; that's fine, we are fine, we are now in a romantic friendship that will stay an extremely intense romantic friendship. It doesn't map well onto pre-existing poly terminology; I love other people a lot, but have a set of core reasons my spouse is my primary partner who gets first priority in decisions and how I spend my time. ALL OTHER PEOPLE ARE NECESSARY IN SOME WAY. MANY ARE NOT ROMANTIC. Some I am attracted to. Some I do not have an attraction-based relationship with but they'd traditionally try and be wedged awkwardly in a "polycule" despite my self-declaration they fit better as family.
There's more I want to unpack, about entitlement, dating, and the idea monosexual people are bitter and resentful about polyamory and probably sticks in the mud who should try it like a kink they don't know if they'll like yet or not, but I think that's my big hang-up with the conceit described there: I think it's hard-wiring, with some social influences, not a kink you can turn on or off. It changes, because sexuality is fluid, but ... this one, totally divorced of shame, seems really hardwired to into people the way gender attraction is hardwired into people with a firmer sense of gender than me. (I mean, I could, at length, describe the pattern of my attractions, there IS a pattern, but not now.)