Tag Archives: America

So How About That

More tomorrow on the election in general, but for now let’s talk about Tammy Baldwin.

She was the one who got me started with the crying.

I’ve been doing a lot of reading at work about corporate diversity and inclusion initiatives, and the idea I keep coming back to is bringing one’s “whole self” to work.

What does it do to people when they feel like they can’t post a photo of their family, or talk about their personal lives, or speak with their real voices? How can you truly contribute if a piece of your brain is worried about letting slip the wrong pronoun?

There was a generation, no… several generations, who had to choose between being themselves and becoming a public servant. The election of Tammy Baldwin, the first openly gay senator, is another crushing blow to that Chinese wall that queer Americans have had to create between their personal lives and their professional lives.

Fuck, sometimes America is pretty alright.

Related Post: When NYC passed marriage equality.

Related Post: Andrew Sullivan on marriage equality.

1 Comment

Filed under Gender, Politics

Monday Scraps 69

1. AMERICANA: Max Fisher at The Atlantic interviews new visitors to the U.S. about what surprises them most. Grocery stores and nursing homes, apparently.

2. RACE: If you read one thing on this list (but I hope you read it all), read Kiese Laymon’s essay “How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America” about race, racism, violence, Mississippi, and 8,000 other things. Content aside, the prose will bowl you over (Gawker).

3. FRIENDS: I love love love this Roxane Gay list of tips on being friends with another woman: 7A: Don’t be totally rude about truth telling and consider how much truth is actually needed to get the job done. Finesse goes a long way. 7B: These conversations are more fun when preceded by an emphatic, ‘GIRL.’”

4. BIKINI: The internet is a strange place. Exhibit A: Matchbook, which pairs bikinis with beach reading by literally matching the pattern of a bikini and the cover a book…

5. WRITING: Chicago writer Megan Stielstra in a lovely essay on finding, or not finding, a room of one’s own in which to work (The Rumpus).

6. OLYMPICS: Divers’ faces while diving. You’re welcome.

Related Post: Sunday 68: Your twenties, POV of a condom, Jason Alexander, Hope Solo.

Related Post: Sunday 67: Lego The Wire, Caterina Fake, models without makeup

2 Comments

Filed under Books, Chicago, Gender, Media, Politics, Sports

The Promiscuity Line According to AskMen

SATC's Samantha Jones helpfully summarizes my thoughts on this survey result

Oy vey. This is one of those articles where I just want to shake people by the collar and say “FOR REALZ?”

In a nutshell: The Great American Male Survey (conducted by the experts over at AskMen.com) polled men about how many sexual partners make a woman “promiscuous.” Want to guess the winning response? Five. Sigh.

Well Said: Read Chiara Atik’s response on HowAboutWe in which she does some handy math involving average age of virginity-loss and average age of marriage and all of the years of celibacy that a “five” might require.

Methodological Concerns: The question was asked in a non-gender neutral way. While probably intentional, I think you might get more interesting results if you took out the gender references. Ask “At what point does a person become sexually promiscuous?” instead of “At what point does a woman become sexually promiscuous?” I wonder if men might give a little more leeway if they were potentially measuring themselves and their buds.

Worth Noting: Interesting that Americans are the most conservative regarding the promiscuity question. They are more than twice as likely as Brits to think 5 partners crosses a line. In fact, 9% of British dudes pinned the promiscuity line at 50 partners.

Other Fun Results: About half of dudes would dump girlfriends if they got “fat.” 25% responded “I have no sex life” to the question “How satisfied are you with your sex life.” (Maybe they shouldn’t dump their girlfriends when they get fat.) 55% think they can tell when women fake orgasms, which is almost as funny as the 23% that are sure of it.

Related Post: This is almost as irritating as that terrible Atlantic piece about “granting sex.”

Related Post: And it might even be as dumb as the WSJ article about why girls dress like prostitutes.

8 Comments

Filed under Media, Sex

Sunday Scraps 13

1. DATING/GEOGRAPHY: An artist joined 20 online dating sites and then created a map called “A More Perfect Union” that maps the United States based on how we describe ourselves in profiles. City names are changed to reflect regional differentiators. New York is “Now,” Chicago is “Always,” Omaha is “Steak.”

2. COMEDY: Is Groupon supporting the next generation of Chicago comic masterminds? Smart Girls, Stupid Things writer Kate reports for WBEZ on the relationship between the Chicago mega-company and the city’s improv community.

3. FOOD: “America Feasts” is a photo series documenting America’s relationship with food, from drive-thrus to BBQs.

4. BOOKS: The Atlantic reports on why adults love apocalyptic young adult fiction. As someone who was recently obsessed with The Hunger Games, I can get on board.

5. THE FRENCH: I’m not usually a super fan of Maureen Dowd, but her column this week about French politics and sexual culture is pretty great. And the title, “Non means Non” isn’t half bad either.

6. EDUMUCATION: How relevant is student testing to measuring teacher performance? I don’t know. You probably don’t know. But here are a ton of smart people talking about it, which is pretty much about the most I can ask right now.

Related Post: Scraptastic links for Chelsea Handler, sex education, art vs. childsplay and other fun stuff.

Related Post: Scraptastic links for Charles Barkley, pubic hairs, prison food and tv scheduling.

1 Comment

Filed under Art, Books, Chicago, Education, Food, Hollywood, Media, Politics, Really Good Writing by Other People

Profanity Nationwide

This is a map filtering a couple million tweets for profanity during the months of April and May, 2010. It was created by Daniel Huffman by filtering 1.5 million public tweets for profanity and mapping the iso-somethings. Dark spots are highly profane. Lights spots, they stick to “goshdarn.”

Observations:

1. North = more profane than the south… possibly people bitching about the weather?

2. That big dark patch left of center? Utah.

3. Eastern seaboard seems pretty tame. Including D.C. Maybe Rahm was out of town for the duration of this study?

4. New Orleans is a dark spot in an otherwise bright state. I wonder what they possibly have to be frustrated about.

Further studies: I would love to see specific profanities broken out. Where does “fuck” beat “shit,” or “cocksucker” beat “motherfucker?” The world needs to know these things! You could map “wicked” and get yourself a big bright map with one pulsing dark spot in the bay state. Actually, with this methodology, you could map all kinds of fun linguistic trends. Pop vs. Soda, the prevalence of “y’all,” Kardashian-mentions. Could be fun!

Related Posts: How bad does a movie have to be to get good again? Mapping case studies.

2 Comments

Filed under Uncategorized