Apple Cider

I honestly feel that frat houses, and this is probably an anecdotal feeling, normalize the kinds of really rape-prone attitudes towards women's bodies that most men don't receive as much every day at that age. It's one thing that a lot of college guys have no issues with drunk women but having a physical location that you share with other men who ALSO feel like that and reinforce it with parties and such increases that tenfold.

It's specifically a term from the political sector, as I found out by doing a twitter search of the term. And much like many other incredibly precise and very emotionally dense phrases, it gets used for everything now because it sounds incredibly scary. The irony of the fact that it's being applied to a group of women is not lost on me.

I think a lot of it is incredibly sympathetic - I think a lot of people who are incredibly victimized by GG's antics are being flogged a bit by the same male allies who took our general advice about stepping back from dunking on nerds as a personal attack and have been consistently agitating this. It was A Man In Black who even authoritatively said that we were mounting a whisper campaign, I shit you not, that's a quote.

There's absolutely a reason I used scarequotes and the term synecdoche and I really hope that the context I was using it in underscores what I was attempting to do. It's a group of people, loosely defined by their relationship with eachother, who do similar things. Within that, it's a list of people who have specifically been mad at myself and my friends for months and attempting to vent this by making shit up and subtweeting us and I didn't exactly want to create a giant hitlist of these people either, especially since their names are not crucial to what I'm expressing. I really don't want my post to get derailed because I didn't use the proper terminology, like I don't know where the terminology comes from. But if I have to change it, I will.

"Anti-GG" doesn't technically exist but it's a bit of a synecdoche to describe a group of people on Twitter who are a grab-bag of people who aggressively got involved in documenting and responding to GG stuff - some of them outright victims (like SRHButts, etc) doing it for their own archives, plus a HUGE throng of supporters and allies and whatnot. The problem is a lot of these people are generally not the "big names" of opposing GG and got involved because they were fans of people like Brianna Wu or Anita and this was their first big rodeo in terms of online activism. There's also a lot of people who have been involved in the games scene for a while and have a few axes to grind, particularly against Soha for one reason or another. It's not organized in the slightest, it's just a bunch of people who are friends because they all dislike GG for one reason or another but they are known now for talking about GG all day, regardless of how useful that is or not. Myself and my friends pointed out in APRIL that male allies spending all day RTing screencaps of GG people being bigots or otherwise publicly fighting with them on Twitter vs. doing things like signal boosting victims or other people's work/positive efforts is just reproducing hypermasculine concepts of "allyship." This was a general statement but a lot of guys in that group took that VERY seriously and to heart, and got very mad. Since then we've been sniped at by these people, including the people who HAVE been victimized by GG because they think we want them to stop talking about GG at all, ever. It's basically a giant cold war on twitter that's mostly subtweets and actual antagonistic lying from some quarters, to the point of spreading lies like saying we're enforcing a "whisper campaign" because all four of us (and our friends) blocked these people for generally being horrible to us? So yeah. That's the long and short of it. Imagine a huge group of people you've never formally interacted with talking about you online on a regular basis except in very apocryphal, vicious terms but vague enough that a lot of people don't realize it's you and you can get a gist of what we've been dealing with for months.

She's been wanting to get out of it for a while now, but this just is the straw that broke the camel's back. The kind of shit all four of us have been dealing with (Maddy, Soha, Gita and myself, Soha most in particular) is so fucking baffling.

How do the Victorian people post thinkpieces

yeah the jumpiness/art house style of audio cues and produced voices at points is a bit jarring, especially with an auditory processing disorder.

I sped through the archives of Gaming is a 4 Letter Word and I have to sincerely suggest that everyone listens to it.

Your RSS feed is http://gameisa4letterword.libsyn.com/rss actually. I am glad you posted here because the RSS feed you have via your Tumblr page is broken and won't work with catchers and I've been trying to find where your actual site was located because it's not what's listed on your Twitter, I think, and I wanted a place to either pull the podcasts into my web catcher on Pocketcasts or listen directly via your page and your old website had neither. :<

Thank you for posting this, I hadn't read Burke's article and I think he succinctly puts why people arguing about rape joke's "true" efficacy makes my stomach flop over.

You're a consistently pedantic, intellectually obtuse person with a track record so far of doing this on any even vaguely contentious social topic to the point where I think it's intentional. This is not the thread nor the topic to do this with, it's too personal and has affected more than just me. This is not an intellectual exercise for me, this is something brutally upsetting that I've had to experience. If you want to argue about this with other people who aren't fucking dealing with the aftermath of cultural effects of shit like this, be my guest but take it elsewhere. I'd really like one thread where I don't have to debate shit about rape.

There's no 1:1 link. There never going to be. However, you know what rape jokes do? They normalize a culture that already has rape problem. Sure, we are all against rape, but quite a few men can't even tell what rape is if you don't call it that, have issues with consent across the board, think violence against women and sex are interlinked. Telling rape jokes provides a situation where we're laughing at something and that just contributes to continuing attitude that it doesn't matter as much as it should. All of these things have a cumulative effect when you see it on TV, in movies, when victim's narratives aren't centered, when we laugh at those jokes while those of us who have suffered through it have to suffer quietly as we see people we know laughing at something that is a horrible part of our lives. If you want to argue about the cultural impact of other shit like violence or whatever, be my guest, but don't come into this thread and argue about how you don't think rape jokes and related content don't have a cultural impact. Just don't. I'm asking you now. I don't want your pedantry on this subject in particular.

I'm deeply impressed by your faith that GG people want to learn something versus just have an excuse to exercise rank misogyny on any woman who doesn't date her man forever, give him 2 blowjobs a day and wait on him hand and foot, as only a proper alpha male deserves.

Oh yeah, that last one is kind of a doozy. I wasn't aware Hynde had a feminist legacy to speak of and given she's been saying these sorts of sentiments for nigh on 20 years now, I'm not sure how that legacy was established? If anything, this is why I get really edgy about people being held up as "The Feminist" versus being feminists or doing feminist work because so much of who decides who the Big Name Feminists are are often the most moderate and liberal of them out there who are prone to making consistently bad statements. Less pedestals means less falling-then-redemption narratives versus learning and growing and doing the work. RE: MSGV My boyfriend bought the game and has a Quiet doll in his office, much to my (mostly joking) consternation. What has made me less interested in Metal Gear is less the scantily clad Quiet but moreso that the developers are trying so hard to not say "we just want some scantily clad sniper babe" but instead invent really horrible excuses that make no sense as to why she's dressed like that. I also don't like the inclusion of really fucked up sexual assault narratives. I think you can both enjoy a problematic work by engaging it critically but also be allowed to just not want to engage with the material at all. It's up to people to make that choice. I stopped watching Game of Thrones for a reason.

As another rape victim, I have sympathy for her plight. As a feminist, I really hope she has her Come to Jesus moment where she recognizes that our culture is predatory and horrible to women. This not really a tricky position nor excludes her from being criticized for her beliefs? Internalized misogyny doesn't stop being a problem if people just kinda continue to let you wallow in it.

I can't talk about it yet because it's not 100% settled but I think I got a guest I'm a fucking fangirl about and I'm trying not to scream and freak out about it, I think I'm the only person who is. I try so hard to be professional but sometimes it blows me away that people in the industry want to come on and do our show.

Jesus was extremely compassionate to sex workers and women with reproductive disorders.

Oh yeah, in a lot of ways you are. We have our own particular strain of conservative here though that seems deeply embedded in the fact that we got all of your zealot Puritans those years ago. But you definitely have xenophobia, racism and sexism in Europe as far as I can tell, heh.

It's what happens when the Internet allows certain US-centric opinions to flourish globally because everyone uses Twitter or Reddit or whatnot. The throughline, I think, is regardless of politics, patriarchal notions of women are something that transcend many country borders.

Ah yes, a product you need to live comfortably and healthily is a luxury item. https://medium.com/@veryapplecider/re-thinking-menstruation-4836706a0764 here's the piece!

I'm absolutely a menstruation evangelist, just in that I think it's a HUGE public health issue and we really ignore it and a lot of inter-related issues that crop up because of it. i would love it if we could get health insurance providers to reimburse or otherwise defray the costs of birth control AND sanitary products, or provide them for free or low-cost from the government. I am okay with paying higher taxes if it means people have access to sanitary products - they are absolutely essential to living, beyond all other things.

I wrote 1000 words on menstruation between yesterday and today. I will link it up when it's done being proofed. I'm sure you guys are hotly anticipating such topics.

I have the same pre-fab furniture woes. I bought a cheap bookcase off Amazon, only to figure out midway through the assembly that the backing piece, that's crucial to keeping the frame together was literally cardboard with a wood grain printed onto it to give the illusion of wood. The holes were all drilled badly in the wrong spots. My boyfriend came in to find me just sitting, abjectly looking at this piece of shit bookcase. He said, "This is not going to do anything. It's never going to work." I threw it out, halfway built. I paid $20 to go out to the garbage can.

*hugs Mangela* I'm posting here just to say that I'll be in Chicago on Saturday because BitBash is happening. Just a heads up for all the Chicago Thumbs.