ink on paper by Pablo S. Herrero

Lots of content warnings this week–misogyny, rape and death threats, stalking, self-harm. I’ll do my best to put in a warning if the title of the post doesn’t make the content clear.

• Why/Why Not: “The Invisible Orientation: An Introduction to Asexuality”
• OCD and Cutting
• Columbia University E-mail Reveals Disdain for Anti-Rape Campus Movement The thing is this: yeah, they’re students. But they’re also adults. And they absolutely should get a say in how the institution deals with their safety.
• Safety or freedom: what would you pick? (content warning: stalking)
• A Woman’s Room Online (content warning: rape and death threats, misogyny) I wish I could see this in person–it sounds like a visually powerful statement.
• Life in an English Town Where Abuse of Young Girls Flourished (content warning: rape)
• “The Consumption Palace”: Gamers, misogyny, and capitalism and Writer-Creator vs. Gamer Consumer-King: an addendum
• The End of Gamers
• Why We Didn’t Want to Talk about “GamerGate”
• Gamer’s Revanche This, right here, is one of the best posts that I’ve read about gaming (and geek) culture and the toxic masculinity which is so pervasive. Here’s your explanation for the Sad Puppies.
  

  The culture of video games has long been a fairly insular one—as has, to a greater or lesser extent, the wider “geek culture” in which it has been embedded, encompassing phenomena like Dungeons and Dragons, science fiction and fantasy novels and movies, and comic books. All of these forms have long histories of politically subversive, socialist, and feminist experimentation. But in their best-funded and most widely consumed commercial forms, they have especially catered to certain kinds of socially awkward boys and men, providing them with alternatives to dominant standards of masculinity.

  At the same time, however, they cultivated an alternative misogyny, based on resentment of other men and a desire to usurp their patriarchal dominance, rather than overturn patriarchy entirely. Hence the geek culture is a breeding ground for Nice Guys who see themselves as persecuted outcasts but are unable to get over their desire to control women.

• Live Nude Girls This is an incredibly powerful piece by Genevieve Valentine that links the nude photo leaks with what’s going on in gaming culture–and in our wider culture, too.
  

  Women are being watched. Women are never safe. The goal is always to strip you, of anything, of everything; the hunt is on.

  Tomorrow morning, step outside.

• It’s not just Jennifer Lawrence: women in pop culture are under attack
• The Great Naked Celebrity Photo Leak of 2014 is just the beginning
• Missouri Swore It Wouldn’t Use A Controversial Execution Drug. It Did. Jeezy creezy, Missouri, what the hell is wrong with you? Is it something in the water?
• The pathetic and predictable end for Bob McDonnell
• American slavery: Blood cotton This goes to a review of Edward Baptist’s The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism; the anonymous reviewer needs to re-examine their life choices and think about why, in a book about chattel slavery and its undeniable link to white American prosperity, they decided to end the review with a complaint that all the white people in the book were villains and all the black people were victims. I wish I were joking. I’m not. The Economist has apologized and withdrawn the review, so that’s something at least. It should never have been published to begin with.
• In the Wake of the British Boom: The 72nd World Science Fiction Convention There’s some really gratuitously nasty comments in this wrap-up.
• So, You Want To Host A Comic-Con At Your Library Super relevant to my interests and also Kennett Square isn’t that far from where I live and I wish I’d known this was happening!
• Amazon UK Ruins Cat’s Birthday By Shipping Gift In An Envelope, Not A Box
• Poet Patricia Lockwood Dreams of Roasted Pturkeydactyls
• The Maine Hermit Is A Terrible Hero To Have
• Delaware Governor Accidentally Tweets Bondage-Themed Pic, Wonkette Asks ‘That’s It?’ So, to recap: in the last three months we’ve had traffic accidents involving a million honey bees, a broken interstate because someone dumped dirt underneath it, and now our governor’s office tweets out the world’s tamest bondage pic? This is actually what passes for scandal around here when we don’t have wacky Tea Partiers running for Senate or well-connected attorneys killing a woman and ineptly disposing of the body in the Atlantic Ocean.
• Someone else who does a fantastic set of Friday links is Tansy Rayner Roberts and it’s there that I found this wonderful link to Hark, A Vagrant’s take on “The Lady of Shalott” and I think I might be dead now. The curse has come upon me.