Came to see if anyone was talking about this. Playing the national anthem at sporting events is dumb. Do not award unearned gravitas to an institution that is primarily about entertainment and moneymongering. However, eliminating it now will make that decision about silencing voices and getting their players in line…

Right! Even the explanation is damaging! “Well, I can take advantage of the girls’ empathy.” Then I hear her and her sisters complaining about *their* lazy brothers in the sixties and it’s like, okay, I guess you grew up learning that that’s how it was, but why perpetuate it????

Yep, and in my family all the women worked, so it wasn’t even like you could maybe explain it away by saying “oh well since the men work so hard at their jobs this is just our division of labor that works for us.” Nope, the aunts and uncles *both* had full time employment (often from the same employer-lots of…

Hillary’s worst KNIGHTMARE!

Those stories make me feel for you and for your mom, too. So many women in that generation totally buying in to the idea of dish-washing etc as women’s responsibility. Because if you think about it as your noble responsibility instead of shitty thankless work that is forced on you then you don’t have to feel bad about…

Aw fuck, that’s terrible! You had it worse than me. If I mentioned my brother my mom would just kind of sigh and be like, “it’s not worth the fight.” I’ve confronted her about it as an adult and she admits that it’s one of her biggest parenting regrets. She describes it as being in survival mode and knowing that my…

The day that gendered insults disappear from language cannot come too soon

Why do they do that, when they *pride themselves* on problem solving skills in other areas? (Well, I know why. Because they were taught that it works.). But listen, dudes, I’m all the time googling shit like how to cook a thing I’ve never cooked or how to get a stain out of a thing, as well as “man” stuff like how to…

Ohhh my brother does that. He just moved in with a long-term girlfriend for the first time, and I’ve been meaning to check in with her and see if he’s been a jerk about it.

Thanks for the link! I love learning about linguistics but I’m not in the profession, and I hadn’t seen it yet.

Ahh, thank you!!! I’d seen it before and lost the link.

Yuck- I would have been livid! Once I realized it, that is. Took me long enough to notice the holiday gender roles thing, where the aunts retire to the kitchen to clean up, and the uncles retire to the TV to watch sports. -Even the ones that don’t give a shit about sports.-

I’m interested the most in hearing everyone’s smallest ones. One of mine, for example:

Maybe Dole el al need to think about rebranding. I don’t know. I do think that talking about farms in the south is a place to be careful about words. The OP stated that Colbert used the word not in a historical “but it was a plantation so we should call it that” context but in describing a farm owned by a black…

I don’t think I expressed myself quite the way I wanted to. I mean less the “slaves were there” part, because, yes, we should not be afraid of facts, but more the “beautiful white southern princesses drinking tea on the big front porch of daddy’s gorgeous plantation, those were the days, huh” part. “Plantation” covers…

Your statement about people being redeemable extends to DV, too. I have seen men who have really hurt their partners realize how awful they’ve been and they are absolutely gutted and ashamed of themselves (this, of course, being one of the hallmarks of DV that keeps the abused partner from leaving them- they see…

I’ve been helping a friend get herself out of a bad relationship and we’ve been talking about this. The guy she’s trying to get away from hasn’t assaulted her, his abuse is emotional. He is always doing the “protector” thing- finds out (when they were broken up for a while) that she was talking to some guy online and…

This is one of the aspects where it may be valuable to distinguish between “date rape” and “rape” (whereas usually I’m the person going, “don’t call it date rape like it’s somehow different! It’s still immoral and illegal!”) But you’re right- the approach in educating and rehabilitating rapists would be different…

Hmmm, thanks for the links. It reminded me- I was just reading about a book called <a href=”http://boingboing.net/2016/09/06/wea…">Weapons of Math Destruction</a> that discusses the ways that models are ruining people’s lives. Recidivism predictions are one of the reasons I want to read the book.

So the old “prison is…

I was afraid of that. It seems impossible that he didn’t know what he was saying. As much as I like him, how about we get some diversity in our late-night hosts one of these days?!