Posts by Danielle
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Hard News: Music: In before Christmas, in reply to Alan Perrott,
Alan Alan Alan! So excited to see that linked here! I absolutely love 'The Clapping Song'! (In fact it may have been the genesis for our household theory that all songs containing handclaps, numbers, days of the week, or spoken word interludes are awesome. Which doesn't necessarily hold up under scrutiny, but we still have a weakness for them.)
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OK, so this is neither out nor about, and I have the photography skills of a gnat, but it is Christmassy! And weird. It's from a bag of Christmas tree decorations from my childhood and is, I suppose, a reindeer? Or someone's crazed anthropomorphised 70s cartoon character version of a reindeer, anyway. It's on our tree now and I stare at it quite a lot in fond consternation.
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You can't go wrong with Vince Guaraldi.
And (although I have been a Nancy Wilson fan since I was quite young), I discovered this song via the Ultra-Lounge Christmas Cocktails CDs (both of which are basically my favourite thing to listen to on Xmas day). There's something about swinging mid-century American Christmas music that makes me nostalgic for something I never really experienced at all. Anyway, this makes me cry because I am a sap. Her voice and phrasing are so great.
But! I also get all thrilled and nostalgic about pohutukawas and little kids at the beach and ice cream and eating plum pudding in sweltering conditions. I wish I could find The Brunettes "Christmas in the Summertime" somewhere to link to it here. (The other day one of my in-laws on Facebook got all weird with me about declaring myself happy to be having "a normal NZ Xmas" after being away for the last few years. "Christmas in America is normal!" she declared. Christmas in summer was "abnormal". Hey lady: bite me. Normal is in the eye of the beholder.)
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Hard News: Cultures and violence, in reply to Emma Hart,
All I’m really trying to say is that a lot of people (myself included) have genuine negative experiences of trying to engage in discussions on feminist websites, and those negative experiences will inevitably shade the next discussion on a similar topic they try to have.
This is why feminists can't have nice things? :)
Look, I take your point that some feminists are annoying (in the same way that some PEOPLE are annoying, but they get to use different language to do it), but this shouldn't affect the usefulness of feminist theory *in general*, and it certainly shouldn't matter all the way over here in the PAS-bubble. We're some reasonable-assed bitches up in here.
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Evolutionary psychologists have ruined the word "hard-wired" for me forever and ever, amen.
(This discussion is making me wish I'd got to the end of Cordelia Fine's Delusions of Gender: The Real Science Behind Sex Differences, which was, I thought, pretty eye-opening about how even some science is a bit... dodgy about this stuff. But I didn't finish it, because babies. Oh, the irony.)
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Hard News: Cultures and violence, in reply to David Hood,
I tend to view pop evolutionary psychology explanations as the equivalent of phrenology in the 1800s or social Darwinism in the 1920s- a justification for the social world being as it is.
Yes! I find them frustrating for precisely that reason. Thank you, David, I'm finding your posts very edifying.
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Hard News: Cultures and violence, in reply to Lilith __,
This stuff makes me want to bite my desk, frankly.
High five. Although my laptop is on a formica table and I think I might chip a tooth.
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Hard News: Cultures and violence, in reply to Russell Brown,
I read that whole thing, and basically you were unfairly abused-via-jargon because she was embarrassed by mixing up Anika Moa and Emma Paki, and instead of doing a "my bad" she doubled down on the bullshit. I'm not really sure how that particular incident reflects on the usability or otherwise of feminist theory for blokes, though.
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Hard News: Cultures and violence, in reply to Lucy Stewart,
That’s the graph to keep in mind when discussing male/female differences. That’s how the distribution looks for most of them, albeit maybe slightly wider apart. The bulk of both distributions is still in the same range.
So if, statistically, we are more alike than different, why are we so invested in differences? Because (and I am not talking about PAS, let's make that clear) for every anti-essentialist feminist rudely shouting down a discussion on brain chemistry, there's some other... person... nattering on about "lo, my ancestors upon the fruited plain beat the shit out of woolly mammoths and shagged all the big-titted women of the land, and so it's my BRAIN and I don't need to think about this socialisation shit". (Note: I do not think that either of these extremes are good, but I do find one considerably more annoying than the other. I will leave you to guess which it is.)
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Hard News: Cultures and violence, in reply to Megan Wegan,
To be fair, my GPS is a total bitch.
