Archive
Jezebel Teaches me how to be Hipster AND Racist
A Complete Guide to ‘Hipster Racism’
via Jezebel.
There’s been a lot of talk these last couple of weeks about “hipster racism” or “ironic racism”—or, as I like to call it, racism. It’s, you know, introducing your black friend as “my black friend”—as a joke!!!—to show everybody how totally not preoccupied you are with your black friend’s blackness. It’s the gentler, more clueless, and more insidious cousin of a hick in a hood; the domain of educated, middle-class white people (like me—to be clear, I am one of those) who believe that not wanting to be racist makes it okay for them to be totally racist.
Examples of Hipster Racism According to Lindy West:
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Skrillex 
Thanks, Jezebel. I will be sure not to wear my large-framed eyeglasses over my Klan hat, like your graphic on an anti-irony and anti-racism article so artfully depicts. I’ll also be sure to tell my black friends that race is “made-up” and “arbitrary” like” Santa Claus” so they no longer have to worry about sickle cell anemia.
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Next week on Hipster Sexism:
“Women can’t be lawyers.” -Ruth Bader Ginsberg
Next week on Hipster Classism:
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Next week on Hipster Ageism: I’m going to buy rocking chairs and live-blog my knitting party. Where all my friends with scoliosis will most certainly complain about the colored folk.
Changing the tone of the birth control debate
Women like Fluke are persuaded to emphasise health and negate sex as a primary reason for contraception, and so-called feminists are ramping up the demand for the same by insisting that they don’t fuck and if they do, it would never be wantonly or like “sluts.” Rather than insist that Fluke is not a slut, feminists ought to state, loudly and clearly, that contraception should be provided regardless of a woman’s sex life. The fight for contraception is currently based on arguments about women’s health or, as Fluke delicately puts it, the prevention of pregnancy. It’s time we began acknowledging that women need contraception because they like to fuck. Perhaps if we were more willing to talk about ourselves as sexual beings, right-wing hypocrites would have much less ammunition against us. After all, if a slut is not afraid of openly being one, who can possibly shame her into silence?
Yes. Also, in argument of control and convenience, choosing NOT to bleed is the greatest invention of the 20th century.
Observations on Workaholics and American Work Ethic
The American Dream is Shiny with 0% APR.
I want to talk for a second about my friend’s mom, which is actually an amalgamation of several friends’ moms, but for the purposes of this post will be presented as a singular archetype.
(For a more academic read on cultural values read this good article by Harvard professor Juliet Schor. Or if you’re looking for statistics of US workers compared to European workers read here.)
My friend’s mom is a highly competent and well-salaried woman who is seemingly successful in all personal and professional aspects of her life. I respect her immensely for her management skills and her ability to disassemble a bed and have it stacked for moving in a minute flat. (It was the easiest helping a friend move stint I have ever done, because her mom practically did it all for me.)
MFM works as high level administrative position for a major pharmaceutical company. She has a caring husband with whom she owns a nice house, dresses well, and drives a Beemer. We get along because I’m generally pleasant and avoid political conversation with people with the title of My Friend’s Parents. Little does she know that I’m judging her, not for the qualities or material goods she possesses, but for the tacit arrogance with which she presents them.
More after cut.
Gender Stereotypes Purport that Women are Less Funny than Men
A psychology study from the University of California, San Diego Division of Social Sciences used a controlled version of the New Yorker Caption contest to assess the abilities of men and women to create humor.
Amanda Marcone from Slate comments on the significance of the study:
The study found that out of 16 men and 16 women whose caption-writing abilities were voted on in a gender-blind test, the men did slightly better, but so slightly that it’s pretty much insignificant [Males earning a 0.11 points more out of a possible 5.0 perfect score]… the most interesting findings of the study weren’t about the relative ratings of humor of men and women, but the biases of the test subjects when it came to measuring humor levels of men and women. While the subjects rated men’s and women’s caption-writing abilities roughly equally in a gender-blind test, they were so devoted to the stereotype of women being less funny that the subjects misinterpreted their own rankings.
I think that these trends indicate not that women are intrinsically less funny than men; it’s that not as many women are trying to break into comedy. Only one of the Last Comic Standing’s winners has been a women. Only one of the fourteen of Cracked Columnists is a woman. I’m looking at the line-up for The Comedy Cellar for tonight and there’s one.
But this doesn’t mean the ones that do try aren’t successful. A New Yorker blog notes, “When you look at the last thirty-two contests and factor in productivity, women come out on top. The twenty-two winning men entered an average of 70.22 contests, but the ten women averaged 6.4 entries—and four of them won on their first attempt.”
The results of the UC:SD study and the lack of number of women in comedy denotes larger cultural trends. I think that an important role in shaping these sociological trends, whether it’s that women statistically lack confidence or a notion that only pretty women should on stage, is the influence of early childhood experiences:
In one experiment, five young mothers were observed interacting with a 6 month old called Beth. They smiled at her often and offered her dolls to play with. She was seen as ‘sweet,’ having a ‘soft cry’. The reaction of a second group of mothers to a child the same age, named Adam, was noticeably different. They offered him a train or other ‘male’ toys to play with. Beth and Adam were actually the same child, dressed in different clothes.
-Experiment detailed in my sociology textbook [Anthony Giddens – 2006 – Social Science] to detail the early impression of gender roles. (via emaconly)
-file under ‘why i will not coercively gender my children and let them work it out for their own damn selves’ (via i-sauntered-vaguely-downwards)
Netflix Scraps Qwikster DVD-only Service Idea
Thank you to all those that read “An Open Letter to Qwikster, Stop this Qwikster bullshit” and used the contact information to respectfully contact Netflix and express your disappointment with their recent policy changes.
Due to user backlash from users and investors–their stocks dropping over 60% over a period of only a few momths, Netflix has announced in a blog post that they will not be creating Qwikster as a separate DVD service. Good, because Qwikster was a terrible concept and a terrible name.
This outcome shows a willingness on Netflix’s behalf to change policies when hundreds of thousands of customers express dissatisfaction.
I still want to emphasize that we should hold Netflix executives accountable for what they say and promise.
“While the July price change was necessary, we are now done with price changes.”
Done, they say. In the real world, “done” usually means forever. In business, that means until its customers forget the last price change. How long will that be? We’re watching you, Netflix.
Preemptively Hating the New Facebook “Timeline”
Facebook released a video with a preview of the new “timeline” profiles to be released… they keep changing the date. They last said Wednesday for beta, but other sources have been pushing the date back.
The tag says “Tell your life story with a new kind of profile.”
But I don’t want to tell my life story with a new of profile. Because my life has largely been boring if you don’t count the drugs. Most people are insanely boring. When everyone you kinda talked to at a party that one time and was kinda interesting has their own page of individuality and stream-of-conscious thoughts, you stop paying attention to everyone.
Apparently, the trending thing in social media is “timelines.” Twitter has a “timeline.” You know how often I look at Twitter? Once a day. And I manually click on the comedians I like to see if they have funny one-liners and that’s it. If I leave the window open for 5 minutes, 2o people will post 100 tweets I don’t give a shit about. Sorry @BarackObama.
I associate the word “timeline” with crappy 7th grade history class projects where the hippie teacher was too lazy to actually grade people on what they learned so they graded you on who could print the best pictures from the Internet and glue it to a date on a posterboard. Nobody care about what happened to you in 1993 unless you invented the cure for cancer or did something hilarious that they can use it now to embarrass you.
Because too much shit has happened in history at every moment in time. Literally, there are 7 Billion on this planet and each one has shit more than once. And then they have babies and pets and they shit. How many trillion shits is that over time?
If you want me to pay attention to you, make a blog, say funny things, and I’ll bookmark you and read you when I want to.
People on SodaHead hate the changes that were already made. Infographic in the link.
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Sorry, Neil DeGrasse Tyson. “Atheist” is still useful.
Neil DeGrasse Tyson spends four minutes in this video trying to disassociate himself from atheism. But he’s ok with “agnostic.” A deluge of Daily Dish readers explain why they’re not mutually exclusive.
There’s a joke, more commentary that funny, I heard somewhere: There are two types of atheists–those say say “none” when asked their religion and those that say “atheist.”
This is Tyson’s first mistake; he pegs “-isms” it to a “movement.” There’s this irrational fear that I noticed, among even the most prominent atheists, that by giving the belief a label it gives it a unwanted connotation as dogma.
Most people don’t play golf.
“Atheism” is useful because 1) It describes a minority. (It might be less useful a term in a country like Sweden that’s largely secular.) 2) While it’s not a necessity, there is still a correlation between lack of religious belief and political ideology. People want to make organizations around common philosophical bonds, and the language is useful to share that bond. 3) It’s just a synonym for non-believer. Stop attaching other assumptions.
On an interesting sidenote, Sweden still had an officially recognized state church until 2000. But as of 2008, only 2% of the population attended regularly. The Netherlands still has a state church. Separation of church and state suddenly doesn’t sound like everything.