Google who Debbie Harry was before publishing the damn article, I should hope.
I’m frustrated by the number of people on Twitter who are shrugging this off as a “mistake”. This wasn’t a “mistake”, this was a choice to present the subject – Debbie Harry and her memoir – in a specific way.
If, after #MeToo and all the rest, you still think it’s okay to run with “hey, not a bimbo after all”, it’s more than a “mistake”.
Bring back the hat pins!
That headline is very poorly worded.
The context of the article seems to indicate that she means to answer disrespect with disrespect, violence with violence, rudeness with rudeness, and so on as necessary to get men to be properly afraid of the consequences of treating women poorly, and to dismantle the patriarchy. And on that, I wholeheartedly agree. You don’t win a fight against an opponent who has been making himself more powerful for centuries by tying one hand behind your back.
The headline (and the same line near the beginning of the article) reads as “civil, respectful and polite should no longer be options for women and girls [in any context],” which I can’t possibly agree with.
I have a friend who actually makes a point (no pun intended) of wearing those.
Me, I usually have knitting needles on me. Blunt but way more ways to use them.
But they got attention and isn’t that what they were really after? /s
Anyone who says that bullshit line is ignorant about what women who come forward often have to go through…
I FINALLY told two close (online and in IRL) male, musician friends about my rape and who did it, as they were both friends with him on FB. (And especially with musicians, “friend on Facebook” doesn’t indicate friendship; it’s a networking plo…er, strategy.) And they unfriended them and blocked them. This happened on 9/11 (no I didn’t plan it that way, lol),
It’s taken me SIX years to do just that , AND in private messages, not publicly. THAT…it doesn’t just scare me, it frightens me.
Thread:
never meet your heroes. A twitter thread in which Cait Flanagan (from The Atlantic) joined the patriarchy
Yup.
A few years ago, I attended a writer’s conference. One of the author/instructors was someone my SIL adores – she had all of these author’s novels.
I am respectful (still am) but not a fan, so I didn’t attend any of the author’s workshops.
I did have to talk down someone who did, though. At the time, the author was working on a since-published book which deals with sexual abuse and assault.
The student was a survivor, and when discussion turned to “handling controversial or delicate subjects in fiction”, the author apparently have a lot of bad advice re: depicting rape, and repeated a lot of rape myths.
The student tried to set things straight, and in the course of the discussion explained she was a survivor and what happened to her.
Well, apparently this author claimed to know more than she did about it, despite also saying she’d never been assaulted, never really researched it before working on her novel.
And then, at the end, the author made a big show off checking the student was “okay”.
The student told me, and I believe her, she wasn’t upset, but angry.
Being believed is so important in this culture, and having it taken away by solve self-serving “ally” is the worst.
Her first mistake was admiring Caitlin Flanagan.
Thread 
The maximum height for an Apollo astronaut was 5’11", same as for the test pilot pool they were pulled from. I can’t find a stated minimum height, but it looks like it would have been whatever it was for military pilots as well.
Since then, the minimum has gone lower (4’10"), and the maximum had gone higher (6’4").
Not sure how that entire thread got written without stating some of the most publicly-available height requirements ever. Instead she switched to talking about the set from the Muppets, which yeah was built for a tall man, but Fran Brill, the woman puppeteer referenced but not named in the thread, is 5’4" – and lots of women are taller than that.
She’s actually done a lot of back and forth with NASA, including astronauts for her writing and is a professional puppeteer who recently auditioned for Sesame Street.
The ISS was built long after Apollo, but still built around white men to meet their height issues.
The thread is about how the world is basically optimized for dominant groups and nobody questions it. Not just the ISS or Muppet sets. Which means that the rest of us are forced to find adaptations, or not be a part of it at all.
Edited to fix acronyms.
I dunno, I’ve been questioning it since I became a 5’9" 12 year old. Tall women get locked out twice: once out of the women’s club for being tall and once for not being a man, because height is never the only dimension factored in (see: airplane seat pitches).
That’s the point. She used two examples where it’s clear to see, to illustrate that it’s everywhere.
That still is from today’s spacewalk. Ro do what she needed to do, Jessica could not keep her feet under the bar. Luca could. But it’s a mundane piece of workplace design – like the chair you can’t sit comfortably in, because the seat-pan hits you in the wrong spot – that was meant to fit a specific group, and didn’t change when the people it was meant to work for did.
It’s not about asking for sympathy for Jessica. It’s about showing how in a lot of cases women and people outside the norm aren’t “less capable” like they’re assumed to be, any more than you’re “less capable” of dressing yourself. It’s that they’re having to work with systems and designs that are optimized for someone else, and no one takes that into consideration.
I’m not sure the words “people being stupid” is the best way to describe what you mean there. “People being unaware of” would be… less hostile, and still get the point across.
(Sorry, but I really don’t want to flag that.)
And when you complain, how many people look at you like you’re speaking nonesense? Or you know better than to complain, because you will be treated like a conspiracy theorist.
It took decades of women finding workarounds to drive (and being labeled “bad drivers”) before someone thought about putting in seats and steering wheels that adjusted more than just back and forth, and that was probably more of a globalization effect (easier to make one type of fully adjustable seat than different seats for Asia, North America and Europe). They’re still considered a luxury item in trucks which are still generally seen as the purview of men and the large truck market is mostly North America.
It’s not even just men/women where you see it. We’re also optimized around the able-bodied and right-handed. The former is starting to change, thanks to hard work from the disabled community, but the increase to that lately (new construction mandates for increased accessibility, for example) is because a very large cohort is finding that it is no longer able-bodied. Some may say the latter doesn’t need to. But the world is still optimized to us righties in ways that just seem natural to us. Doesn’t mean they are for everyone, but they were designed by right-handed people, and we just assume it’s the only way they can work. But maybe if we rethink these things, we’ll find that some “incompetent” people are more competent than we thought.