Micah Is My Hero/a roundup of curiosities.

I'm just keeping up with Heroes on BBC2 - ie, only halfway through season 1, not nearly far enough to do a complete Heroes/gender lambast, but I do want to say that oh dear god do I love Micah this evening. Because he won't let single-daddy off the hook. Micah is a small boy who used to live with single-mummy, Niki, and now lives with single-daddy, DL (which I am still disappointed is not spelt properly, ie Dalziel, but hey). Transcript stolen from Shadow Anthology:

DL: It's not my fault you can't keep track of your own stuff.

MICAH: Mom always put my lunch in my backpack every single morning.

DL: Well, I'm not your mom.

MICAH: Yeah, that's for sure.

DL: Micah, this isn't easy.

MICAH: Well, it wasn't easy for Mom either.


Next, some extremely old news I only just stumbled across; an FAC complaint about the practically Aristotelian approach the BBFC has toward the female body. (Text-only, but NSFW). Censorship; it means that if you want to know something about a woman's sex life, you have to ask the BBFC, because women aren't allowed to make films about how it really is. It's a familar story.

I keep meaning to say a few words about a completely different thing that also has to do with governments not giving a shit about women's experiences; Form DS-157 (link is an evil, vile PDF). It should be familiar to anyone who's ever applied for a US work visa. It's included in every batch of paperwork the embassies send out for such ends; it asks if you've ever been in a combat zone, and if you've ever been a victim of war. It asks if you have specialised training in the use of firearms or explosives. This form is given to all applicants, but completed versions are only accepted from men. While I'm aware this is all weed-out-the-terrorists stuff, it's beyond odd to be asked such questions then, twice now, told 'nope, don't give a shit, you're a chick'; I'd imagine it would be odder if I had any 'yes' answers to offer, as many female applicants must.


If you didn't read The Monkeysphere the first time around, the Wong has relaunched it elsewhere. I've not a fucking clue how well it fits with Proper Primatology, but it's a concept I sometimes like to bear in mind; I think it does seem helpful to assume that one can only really be aware of 150 other human souls. Sendalin (the imaginary enemy/shadow side whatsit) says one should keep it to 149 at most, so there's always a clear place in your awareness for that someone you might meet on the highroad. (Sendalin also says that being sensible about love is like being turquoise about puppies, and that he likes his coffee desperate with two spoons of melodrama, so how much stock to put in his ideas is up to you.)


My last-but-one post lied, btw; the green person has told me she reads Marie Claire sometimes! I FAIL .__. But I can still find it creepy & misogynistic that Mr Moran says it's 'reassuring' that Suu Kyi reads it, right?


And the only thing worth reading that has ever been printed about Madeline McCann, ever.

In which I conflate two unrelated issues, yay!

I've spent a lot of today reading about the 'LJ Strikethrough', with rapidly-rising disgust. The short version of the wank is thus; Livejournal has, seemingly due to complaints made by a (perhaps dubious) pressure group, been deleting journals that have unsavoury activities listed under 'interests' - regardless of whether the journal in question was a paedophile ring, an abuse survivor's journal, a literary discussion group, a fanfiction archive or even an RP villain's blog that expressed the foul personality of someone who does not even exist. This explanation was given as part of one support request on the topic - it happened to pertain to a blogger who'd been running an RP that had lost two journals pertaining to the latter group, fictional villains;

Material which can be interpreted as expressing interest in, soliciting, or encouraging illegal activity places LiveJournal at considerable legal risk. When journals that contain such material are reported to us, we must suspend them. Because LiveJournal's interests list serves as a search function, and because listing an interest enables other people also interested in a similar topic to gather and/or congregate, we have been advised that listing an interest in an illegal activity must be viewed as using LiveJournal to solicit that illegal activity.

In particular, the interests that you had listed on your two journals' profiles that qualify as expressing interest in, soliciting, or encouraging illegal activity were: child abuse, human sacrifice, kidnapping, killing, murder, paedophiles, paedophilia, rape, and beating people up.

Now, better bloggers than I have already torn this statement into itty bitty pieces, and also noted that it's both ripped holes in fandom and left real abusers underground and unscathed. What I'd like to add to the collective ranting is an observation; it reminds me quite a lot of the discussion that first sucked me into this part of the blogosphere, a discussion that began over here (but which soon migrated elsewhere because it's hard to discuss stuff when people are refusing to publish comments that don't support their side of the story. The tenth comment on that thread has to be one of my favourite internets evar.) The message being put out strikes me as being mighty similar; we've decided already, talking about it would be an incitement to abuse, you can't have this discussion in our conversation-space, it's not safe to say that here because you might hurt someone/get into trouble, so shut up about the difficult stuff, you can't form a group about that, anyone who wants to talk about it in this space must be wrong and evil, shut up, shut up, shut up, shut up, shut up.

I'm making a mental list of books I love that couldn't be hosted on Livejournal right now. But that's by the by. A few days ago I read Trinity's post questioning the wisdom of alliances between feminists fighting against abuse and the far-right. She asked; 'What does that do for us?' Well, here's a presently exploding example of what well-meaning right-leaning men have to say to women who speak out about abuse, whether real or imaginary; shut up. Don't discuss books, or your own past, put walls up in your imagination and your memory, don't go there, stay home at night, good girls can't go to that part of town, shut up.