I would pay money for that DVD. Maybe instead of asking me if I want the standard or the widescreen presentation, the DVD could present me with “No Mickey Rooney scenes” or “Crazy racist original” options.

The 80’s were such a weird decade for casual anti-Asian racism. It seems like a combination of national angst about the economic success of Japan (at the time), the associated fear of Japanese takeover of American industry, and possibly a sense that anti-Asian racism was one of the last racist tropes acceptable to put…

I adore that movie but pretend those awful scenes just aren’t in it.

There is a “lateral” joke here that is probably too awful to tell.

Yeah, I have mixed feelings about this question, but I feel most strongly that unless you’ve specifically asked and gotten explicit permission you should not bring home a rando to your friend’s apartment or home. That’s less a “people not me having sex in my house are gross generally” issue and more a “don’t invite a…

Isn’t “grasping and tacky” just a British synonym for “American”?

I think your point 1) has really been highlighted in these cases. If you belong to a culture where a) sex is never talked about in any depth or seriousness because it’s all “dirty” and b) the only message that is conveyed is that anything sexual outside of sex for procreation with your spouse is morally wrong and a…

Wanting to lighten your skin or reduce hallmark racial features by plastic surgery is not at all the same thing as believing you really are white. Obviously lots of people buy skin lighteners or have plastic surgery, but I’ve never heard from a single person who does it because he or she actually believes he is a…

You missed possibility three, that we agree.

Race is absolutely cultural. People from Ghana are much more distantly related, genetically, to people from Ethiopia or Zimbabwe, than a white person is from a Native American or someone from Japan. Yet we group the most genetically diverse population of people into a single “black” race.

I didn’t “invent” hysterectomies or any number of other very real GYN problems. You wrote back a bunch of gobbledygook about trans people.

Never mind, someone beat me to it.

I can rent you a team of pandas to take care of that, no problem.

So, I guess you’re not going to answer my question, then?

Gender and sex are an interesting confluence of culture and biology, with the two factors playing off one another. Ideas of sex and gender date back to the earliest written records.

I don’t think I’ve read any fantasy books where they actually talk about this except for the Tamora Pierce books. In the first one, Alanna gets her period while away at warrior school (masquerading as a boy) and freaks out because no one ever had a facts-of-life discussion with her. She can’t really talk to anyone…

So, if someone got a hysterectomy early on or never got a period for medical reasons, she’s not a woman?

I went on a trip with a good friend recently, and the first day - whoop - we had to stop at a pharmacy for her. You’re not alone in this at all.

It’s really kind of amazing that Virginia Woolf wrote “Orlando” without having first met Tilda.

I read “fuck up” as “disturb, disrupt, mess with expectations” not “make worse.”