Lisa Simpson just owned Lady Gaga
“I denounce thee for positing a world where social acceptance and walking on heels are easy!”
But really it should start with “Fuck you”.
Object vs person recognition & female objectification
A team of psychologists at the Universities of Brussels and Nebraska-Lincoln just did an interesting study on the objectification of women. The press release is here: http://medicalxpress.com/news/2012-05-people-sexy-pictures-women.html Of course, the comments are ridiculous, and having read the actual paper, also unfounded (it’s clear the commenters either don’t have subscriptions to Psychological Science, or haven’t bothered to read the actual article).
The idea is very simple. It’s well-known that we recognize persons through a “configurational process,” by combining many features into one, and we recognize objects through a different, “analytic process.” It’s also well-known that masking part of a face, inverting an image, etc., causes significant problems for the former process, but not at all for the latter. And sure enough, inverting images of near-nekkid men caused significant difficulties in recognition, but significanly less so for images of near-nekkid women. And this, sure enough, can’t be attributed to general difficulties in recognizing men & women (i.e. either in upright or inverted forms). But obvs people think they know more about analysis of variance than, like, actual psychologists, so they sure do love opining some stupid shit.
In one study, researchers used computers to generate several faces that were exactly the same except for the skin color — half were black and half were white. All respondents (yes, including black people studied for the project) were more likely to rate the black faces as showing greater hostility. In another study, scientists showed a group of subjects a video of one person pushing another person. When the “shover” was black and the “victim” was white, 75 percent of research subjects said the push was aggressive. When the “shover” was white and the victim was “black,” only 17 percent of subjects said the push was aggressive. Implicit racial bias has also been found in what researchers call a “shooter bias” — in which subjects playing a simulated video game are more likely to mistakenly pull the trigger on unarmed black men than on unarmed white suspects. The phenomenon has been tested and proved with police officers, too.
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Trayvon Martin, Obama, and the persistence of bias | The Great Debate (via robot-heart-politics)
anti-blackness is a form of logic, an epistemology
(via so-treu)
(via cosmopolitan-fascist)
smh, poor girl.
wow and she’s already so light smh
she’s such a pretty girl
thanks eurocentric society
thanks for having such a huge impact on dark-skinned poc
thank you. |:
and this alone is reason why we will never need white history month
This saddens me, and brings my anger to another level. She is beautiful just the way she is. I thought the same when I was little all thanks to racism and Euro-centric ideas of white being “flawless.” She doesn’t need to be fair-skinned to be beautiful. Set that belief on fire.
(Source: onafuturetipteenjesus)
Taylor Swift hugs a dude with a swastika shirt. Mainstream America doesn’t care.
Motherfuckers are really going to believe that Taylor Swift didn’t know what a swastika was.
Really.
That’s her actual response.
And people will actually believe it.
Because she’s a cute white girl and it’s totally believable that she’s innocent enough to not know what’s going on around, because there’s no way someone as pretty, white, and blonde as her would ever do something so terrible.
But soft! What middle finger through yonder window breaks? It is M.I.A.’s and she is the worst person ever for doing it.
Mmmmm dat whiteness.
(via cosmopolitan-fascist)
Now, this IS an interesting case.
From When Brute Force Fails, there was a crack cocaine drug market in High Point, NC that, as such markets tend to do, was bringing in lots of outside users and causing a lot of problems in the neighborhood. Residents desperately wanted it to stop. But years of arresting dealers had just left holes for new dealers to fill, and the problem seemed endless.
A Black neighborhood, the residents did not trust police. But both wanted to end the open drug trade in the area, and they actually held lots of community meetings where grievances were aired and they decided that, despite other ongoing conflict, they could work on this issue.
So together, police and residents identified all of the drug dealers in the area, which turned out to be less than 20. Police did the work they normally do — they went undercover, bought drugs, mounted evidence. But instead of then conducting arrests, they did something different. Police and community leaders went together to invite the dealers to a meeting.
At that meeting, the dealers received three messages from three different sources. Their neighbors told them that the dealing had to stop, but that the neighborhood was ready to support their efforts to go straight. Social-service providers offered a smorgasbord of assistance, from dental work to tattoo removal to job training. Then the police and prosecutors delivered the final message: “As of tomorrow morning, the market is closed.” Each dealer was given a three-ring binder with all the material needed to send him away—down to an arrest warrant ready for a judge’s signature—while a video screen showed a montage of covertly filmed undercover transactions. “Raise you hand,” said the police chief, “when you see yourself committing a felony.”
Three dealers did not respond to the warning and were arrested. The rest stopped dealing. Because dealers were now so easy to identified if they attempted to enter the market, new ones did not take their place.
As Kleinman notes, this unsurprisingly did not stop crack cocaine use. The market spread out elsewhere, to locations that were not disrupting community life. But residents got to enforce their community rules about what behavior they would and would not condone. Drug addicts were not punished for their addiction. Dealers received compassionate support in finding a new line of work instead of ruthless prosecution.
Hmm.
(via cosmopolitan-fascist)
white feminists & rap
I don’t listen to the Beastie Boys honestly. But it is too ridiculous that some white guy who made “hip-hop” died and everybody is coming out of the wood works acting like he was the only good thing about a genre of music made for black people by black people.
As if there aren’t black male rappers right now in the game that bring positivity to women. I guess they don’t exist. But a white man starts rapping and suddenly the white woman says “the music I loved loved me back” or whatever.
I think it’s because black men can’t ever be loving and respectful in the eyes of white supremacy. The whole point of white supremacy is to strip POC of their humanity. That does specifically to black men by absolving them of the possibility of being gentle and kind and loving… especially not to women.
White people love to front and act like black men are the worse (sexually perverse, violent, uncouth) and that black women “like” it I guess or enable it or don’t care because we’re “strong”.
Obviously, the black community deals with sexism and patriarchy. But if you listened to whites, the situation becomes totally misrepresented. And one way to uphold this misrepresentation is in how white feminists talk about rap music.
I can tell you right now, as somebody who loves trap music and ratchet music, that I listen to some sexist stuff. But you have to be kidding me if you’re gonna say folks who stay in white music land don’t.
If anything, T. Swift and all that stuff is the same. It’s internalized misogyny. Why is that upgraded over sexism? Both send “negative” messages to women, do they not?
And I feel like white women act brand new in the sense that pretty much all of the white male music I’ve heard engages in benevolent sexism. But that’s cool I guess. But twerking (which some women like to do & I wish I could do to be real) is oh so horrible.
It’s a double-standard. Pretty much a white man can say whatever he wants. They *may*cut the line at him saying he wants to murder a woman (like Eminem) but a black man has women dancing up in his video or says the word “bitch” or “hoe” is the worst thing ever.
And I don’t know why white women think this is any good for them. These double-standards are good for no one. They’re supporting a society where white men can do whatever they want (and that includes to white women) and maybe not even get much of a consequence. Of course, there is more likely to be justice if it’s a crime against a white woman. But even then, oftentimes white men are not held accountable for their actions.
Why? Because they’re pure and angelic just like white women claim to be. They want to over hype the problems in the black community while glossing over their own.
Good look.
oh my god wait what
i could definitely understand this argument if valenti had made comments about black artists and rap as being wholly misogynistic etc etc but i keep reading this article and i see NONE of that
she’s praising MCA in a tribute about how the beastie boys were ONE OF the first rap/hip hop groups that she heard with a strong feminist message and how that affected her
there is nothing offensive about that
all of the complaints about valenti’s article seem to be grasping at straws and putting words in her mouth. and if you read the comments, she response to all of these things by saying “yes i understand your complaint BUT that’s not what this article about” which isn’t derailing or privileged, it’s just TRUE
why are people pitching a fit over this? honestly? i don’t think she said anything offensive and i’m honestly just really confused
if someone wants to explain this to me, please be my guest
but i keep reading this article and like… what? she’s just saying that the beastie boys were good for her and made her feel good. where is this vitriol coming from? where does she say or imply any of the things OP is talking about??
ok here’s the problem with her article:
it’s fine to say that they are pro-women in their music or anti-sexist. nobody is saying that it’s wrong to affirm that.
but the problem is when you act like they’re the only ones in the genre being pro-woman. which she did when she said, “But for women who love hip hop—or who love pop culture—and are denigrated by it every day, it was validation. For one of the first times, the music I loved loved me back.”
one of the first times? really? maybe “one of the first times” for a white person who only listens to white “hip hop” but that’s ludicrous to act like it was “one of the first times” for the genre as a whole.
that invalidates all of the black people (because ‘hip hop’ is a black genre) that have been anti-sexist and positive
*that* is why people, including myself, are annoyed by her article. i don’t see how that’s grasping for straws at all
when it is already well known that the only national conversations around misogyny & music that have occurred is about rap. and only the black (male) artists as well.
we can’t ignore *that* history (of demonizing black males and everything they do with a magnifying glass) and not see that valenti is perpetuating this cycle with her white feminism in that article.
Jessica Valenti never heard of Native Tongues.
Today, in “Who Gives A Shit?!” On the literary judgments of famous writers.
There’s not much worse in literature than vanity publications. You know what I’m talking about, right? Pseudo-intellectualizing the droppings from aging literary minds in rare volumes in order to learn one more way to say something smart and hip about well-read and long-dead authors. Some authors are wrung for every last drop of essence.
Who was first to think it was a good idea to take all the scraps of a popular writer’s labor and put them in one boring collection after another? We have an Internet for this sort of crap, don’t we? It’s a tradition that needs to stop. Isn’t it at least wasteful?
Who really needs to read another white man’s reflections on reading Flaubert for the first time that are similar but a little different than all the others since Flaubert was alive? NOBODY. There’s a reason these books end up in bargain sections within twenty-four months. Economically speaking, the books are ultimately nothing more than obligations for readers to the authors’ publishers to exchange as much text for value as possible before the authors die, by which I mean cease to write, of course, because every last word they’ve uttered since becoming immortalized in popular culture will be transcribed and published in a new and interesting collection of musings about life itself.
And we all know the people who read to fulfill a sense of social and economic obligation are the worst sorts of people. Many of you likely have several friends who are like this—who insist quoting from obscure (but widely published and available for purchase) books about what one of their favorite authors has to say about this or that subject you’ve been stupid enough to express interest in.
“What?! You mean you didn’t read what William Gass had to say about Nietzsche? Well, then you haven’t read Gass at his Gassiest!”
Sniffle, mumble and FUCK OFF! Somedays, Goodreads is the sort of thing that makes me realize people are much more interested in telling me about what they read than actually living the lives they read about in their special books, which is why I get excited about literature. I thought that was the point. I’m sick of our culture that insists rewarding people for cultural cache. I list anything I’m reading on my virtual bookshelf for me. I like looking at it. I like looking at what my friends read. However, I know a lot of people who only post to their shelves what they think me and their other “friends” will think is unique and quirky.
People really do work had on putting on their faces. And it’s the sort of behavior that makes me work so hard at scraping them off and flinging them to the curb.
Bolded for why I like reading & Goodreads, bolded for why I don’t like readers & Goodreads.
