Posts by Lucy Stewart
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Hard News: The Treasure at the End of…, in reply to Craig Ranapia,
I loved Aaron Johnson and Sam Taylor-Wood’s elegant work around when they got married last year. They both changed their surnames to Taylor-Johnson and anyone who’s got a problem with that gets (rightly) treated with studied insolence. :)
That is a nice solution, as long as your names are euphonious. My spouse is in the process of transitioning gender right now, so I’m kind of curious to see what assumptions people make about the name thing - whether we share one or not and whose it is, etc. - once they start meeting us as a married lesbian couple. (We would have switched to a civil union when necessary, but it’s vastly preferable to not be forced to.)
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Hard News: The Treasure at the End of…, in reply to "chris",
You could give “I’m Chinese/ Cambodian/ Muslim” a shot. Or If all else fails ”..Belgian”.
That would work better if I wasn't more Anglo-Saxon than most popular swearwords.
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Hard News: The Treasure at the End of…, in reply to Russell Brown,
I’m slightly bemused by all the marrying twentysomethings I know – and especially the occasional woman changing her surname (ye gods!).
Most of my twenty-something acquaintances are very much not married (the exceptions largely being people who were going overseas for long periods, like us) but I have had some very odd conversations with peers who didn't understand why I wouldn't want to change my name upon marriage, if I was going to bother getting married. The only argument that seemed to sway them was "it would stop people following my entire scientific publishing record".
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Up Front: Gathered Together, in reply to Ben Austin,
The various speeches in support from those on the right – Banks, Henere, or Burrows are especially moving, given the expectation of a contrary view.
Wasn't Burrows the "I guess the gays are okay, but I can't quite bring myself to give them rights" speech? Because I'm not finding that particularly moving.
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Hard News: Media3: Panic or Peril?, in reply to Luke Williamson,
And, as pointed out by Ben and others, let’s not forget that it was not so long ago that girls of 13 and above were married off, pregnant and dead from complications at birth.
Western European society has been characterized by a high age of first marriage (mid-twenties) for some centuries now, actually. (C.f. this US Census data for the last 120 years.) The median age of marriage has been rising steadily since WWII, which makes people assume it must have been even lower before then, but in fact it had dropped dramatically during the 40s/50s, and took decades to return to late-19th C levels. This is one social norm which is very responsive to environment (i.e. the cost/benefit of having children in whichever society you're in.)
Which isn't to say girls have never been married off and had children in their early teens, but it wasn't normative in the way you're implying for the majority of people.
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Hard News: Media3: Panic or Peril?, in reply to Emma Hart,
"Sexualisation" of girls is a concept that buys into the idea that girls are not naturally sexual. Which is a lie. That paradigm is the same reason this debate always ignores the sexuality of boys: because all boys are total horndogs, all the time. Which is a lie.
OTOH, I think there is an argument to be made about *objectification* of young people - I'm less worried about the affect on children of, to take some entries in this debate, underwear with tacky objectifying sexual messages on it and magazine stories discussing the sexual appeal of eight-year-olds. I'm worried about what it says to people old enough to pay attention - because those things are still part of a culture that positions women as sex and men as always wanting sex. (C.f. the last episode of GoT's Naked Lady Quota scene.)
And we’ve also seen young lives blighted when kids are charged as child pornographers for taking and keeping photographs of each other.
That would be bad enough, but teenagers in the US have been charged for taking photographs of themselves which then got distributed by others.
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There are increased requirements for schools to provide psychometric and in some cases intelligence testing (yes, really, next it'll be polygraphs) to back applications.
If I recall correctly, my high-functioning autistic brother-in-law had to take a test showing an IQ below 90 to qualify for a teacher aide. Because all those average-intelligence-or-above autistic spectrum people are soaking up our precious resources, amirite?
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Hard News: Neither fish nor fowl, in reply to Paul Campbell,
The US does have places where "no turn on red" signs are posted (this is one that needs one) and traffic lights need to be very carefully tuned.
I've really enjoyed the free turn rule since I moved to Massachusetts - it does great things for traffic flow - but we're semi-rural, so there's less pedestrian/driver confusion. Most of my run-ins with cars while biking have had to do with people who clearly know I'm there and clearly think I have no right to be on their road.
And school buses, because school bus + law saying school buses cannot cross into the other lane, ever + narrow road + cyclist = regular heart attacks for cyclists.
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Hard News: Violence in the streets, in reply to Chris Miller,
As an interesting piece of trivia, celebrity culture was born during the reign of Henry VIII. His marital issues had the right combination of scandal and relevance (the religious beliefs of whoever he was currently in love with, for example, had a huge impact on who was likely to be victimised) to get people's interests and they haven't stopped since.
Nah, that's way too recent. Humans have been interested in what humans further up the totem pole have been doing ever since we had the language to speculate about it. Think about where the "Caesar's wife" quip comes from. It's waxed and waned with access to information - hard to have gossip about people in the capital when you live in a tiny rural community and barely know who your ultimate overlord *is* - but in any sort of urban culture, speculation and discussion about the social lives of the rich and famous has probably always been a feature of life.
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Adulthood, as far as I'm concerned, is realising that the buck for your life stops with you. All those skills like cooking and driving are just various reflections of the willingness to take responsibility for yourself, to whatever extent you're capable of it. I'm at an age where a lot of people are transitioning between acting like adults and not doing so, and the ones who don't seem like adults are the ones who still expect their parents or other people to take care of things for them, or just break down in the face of difficulty.
The problem is that doing it and getting other people to recognise you've done it are always the same thing. I've noticed this very much in the US, where moving halfway around the world to undertake postgraduate studies doesn't get you much in the adulthood stakes, despite the attendant difficulties, but being married, which is comparatively falling-off-a-log like, is an automatic passport to the status - at least in some people's eyes.