The “Why are you so angry????” edition
This week has been a veritable smorgasbord of RAGE-inducing reports of various incidents. Here’s some of the stuff that has been fanning the flames on the side of my face….
How I lost my health insurance at the hairstylist’sFreemarketer: “But if we offer a public option the insurance companies will go out of business!!!” Me through gritted teeth: “That would be the goddamned point!”
Organization Pays Addicted Women to Undergo Permanent Sterilization
Which Women play center court at Wimbledon, the sexy or the talented?? I’ll give you three guesses and the first two don’t count.
How sexism in women’s sports is linked to homophobia
Choice Quote:
As Granderson writes:
Organizers are trying to sell their sport and believe the casual, straight male fan is more apt to watch attractive women—because if they had a love of the game, they wouldn’t be casual fans, would they? In a sport in which Anna Kournikova, a player without a singles title, can become the most popular on tour, no one should be surprised by any of this.
While Granderson is entitled to his own opinion, that doesn’t mean he’s entitled to his own facts. We now have some definitive answers as to whether sex sells women’s sports or if it just sells sex. Dr. Mary Jo Kane, sports sociologist from the University of Minnesota, specializes in gender and sport for women and undertook a far-reaching study of images of women athletes putting their bodies on display for a wide-ranging focus group of both men and women. Kane found a very basic truth: sex may sell airport frat-porn like Maxim magazine, but it doesn’t sell women’s sports.
Kane believes these images “alienate the core of the fan base that’s already there. Women, age 18 to 55, are offended by these images. And older males, fathers with daughters, taking their daughters to sporting events to see their favorite female athletes, are deeply offended by these images.”
A-fucking-men. It surely drives me up the wall when I see this everlasting unrelenting push to make women sexy no matter what the hell they are doing at the time.
Sexy and the Gender Binary Naked women are a selling point, naked men…are porn?!
Don’t know much about history…Abolition as self help movement It doesn’t help that Texas assholes want to further downplay minority civil rights leaders in the history texts. Cause they take up so much damned space already. But then the only history that counts is the history of white Americans amirite?
The Not so Hidden Politics of Class Online
How Coco Cola has fucked up India for profit
‘Cisgender’ isn’t an insult. No really, it is NOT an Insult How to check your cis priviledge Please apply the above info to this next post. Why I hate filling out forms
Horndog Billionaire: The Philanthropist Sullies A Good Man’s Name I am sick unto death of shows like these. SICK of them. Take your midlife crisis, grief, need to save the world, need to make a difference, need to fuck the natives, need to get personal fufillment, WHATEVER… and shove it.
On a less crazy-making note…
Musing on Queer People, Fandom and Slash
What does feminist urban policy look like?
Bayou has been updated.
Yellow Peril Supports Black Power
And finally…
If you like links. I have a couple that might interest you. First, some context. About 20 years ago I researched and wrote a history of science fiction fandom in Britain. During the course of this I discovered our first ever fan group had been formed in 1930 and that its meetings had been written about in their local newspaper. An hour or two going through microfiches of that newspaper gave me copies of those reports, and from those reports I got the address of the house where they met. Armed with the address, a few minutes going through local voters lists for the period – held in the same library – gave me the names of the people who lived there and thus the names of more members of the group. Why should this interest you? Because a year earlier than organised British fandom got its start in Ilford, Essex, organised fandom in the US got its start in a house in New York’s Harlem. The Scienceers’s were America’s – and, indeed, the world’s – first fan group. They met in Harlem and their first president was a black man named Warren Fitzgerald:
http://www.fanac.org/timebinders/scienceers.html
He also went on to be one of the founding members of the American Interplanetary Society (later renamed the American Rocket Group) which I believe was the first rocket group in the country (though that would need checking):
http://www.gravityassist.com/IAF1/Ref.%201-49.pdf
And other than the fact that Sam Moskowitz misnames him James Fitzgerald in THE IMMORTAL STORM his history of early SF fandom (which contains no more on the guy, alas) that’s all I know about him. He was the first black fan, and he was there right at the very beginning of fandom.
I don’t know how distinctive a name Warren Fitzgerald would have been in Harlem in 1929. If it was uncommon then a look at voter lists might yield an address for that house. With an address it might be possible to then learn more about him via public records. It would be particularly cool if someone could find out more about him, or at least the address of that house and maybe even post a photo of it if it still exists, before the end of the year. Why? Because the Scienceers held their first meeting on December 11th, 1929. So a few months from now is the 80th anniversary.
You can be less angry if you take something for your PMS. If Michael Jackson were still alive he could tell you how to be less black.