God, anyone else remember when everyone understood that the correct feminist position about sports was that women should be allowed to compete with men because they’re just as capable? When it was a trope in media to have the mysterious star athlete who just blew everyone else out of the water to take off her helmet and reveal that she was a woman the whole time?
Now people are rabidly arguing that supposed “men” (trans women) have inherent insurmountable biological advantages in literally every single possible activity and cis women are too weak and dainty and unskilled to ever compete and must be protected, and then they try to call themselves feminists who are being silenced as if that’s not just the mainstream sexist patriarchal opinion
Anyway, desegregate sports. There was never any reason to separate them by gender in the first place
For people who don’t have any reading comprehension: no this post is not advocating putting a 90lb 4’10” woman against a 270lb 6’5” man in a boxing match. In most sports there are things called weight classes and height classes and they actually mean a lot more than what’s between your legs as far as performance. That said I took tae kwon do for a lot of years and by far the worst person in my classes to go up against was a 5’ nothing teenage girl who nearly outclassed the assistant teacher in sparring matches so even with the size disparity it’s not unheard of. Hell the reason the MLB was officially segregated was to keep out the girl who struck out Babe Ruth or the Olympic swimmer who caused the mens swim team to move because she was “breaking them” by lapping them without a second thought. Womens soccer is notoriously more aggressive and high energy than mens with vastly higher average scores for games. And all of this despite the fact that womens teams have consistently had lower funding for coaches and training equipment and lower pay for players. Hell that’s an argument to end sex segregation in sports right there, let women join teams that have the funding to hire the best coaches and watch how many would come through as world record breakers. I don’t have a doubt in my mind that there’s girls in school right now who could, with the right training, be better quarterbacks than anyone in the current NFL. And keeping trans girls out of sports isn’t gonna help them do that one bit.
We all know the real reason they say shit like that.
Because they’re not actually feminists - they’re sexist shitheads who DO think women are inferior to men. They just know it’s unpopular to say that out loud, so they hide behind a veneer of sexist assumptions and try to bait people - “Oh, you look at the average woman and cleeeaaarly they don’t match up to the average brutish hulking man!” And because sexist stereotypes and assumptions DO permeate society and thinking, it’s an easier sell to people.
They are sexist and they use sexism to their advantage instead of trying to end it.
You ever think about ancient inventions that may no longer actively be used, but which were so geniously designed that technically speaking, they still work?
Consider that old historical monk haircut. The tonsure looks like that on purpose, to keep them humble and away from temptations of sin. And it still works exactly as intended. Do you guys have any idea how much gay porn there would be of medieval monastery dudes knowing each other biblically if their haircuts were not so unfathomably unsexy.
boy, I dunno what I expected after the first paragraph, but it wasn’t what I got
As someone who has written a gay medieval romance where one of the characters is a tonsured monk, LISTEN….
Some situations in life are like when a cat chases a bear up a tree. Logically, you know that a bear could kill the cat with one blow with no effort at all. But a bear has no concept of how cats work. To a bear, everything that’s made out of meat will fight back before becoming prey, once escaping this fate is no longer an option, but nothing that could flee would choose not to, and attack the bear first. As far as a bear is concerned, there is nothing out there that would attack a bear without an absolute confidence that it could kill a bear. If something hits you first, you fucking run.
And cats have no concept of how anything works. As far as a cat is concerned, if there’s something in your face that you don’t want in your face, you just fucking smack it. And if something starts fleeing from you, you chase it.
Sometimes in life there are situations where there only seems to be one logical outcome, the common sense one that seems foregone conclusion. But it only looks like that because you have a clear and realistic view of the big picture. Then the only logical conclusion doesn’t happen, because nobody actually involved in the situation has a realistic understanding of what’s going on.
I want to share something for those of you who are teaching and want your conservative students to be more open-minded to liberal ideas that you’re presenting.
I grew up in a conservative family and a conservative town, and like most conservative kids, had been told that colleges were hotbeds of liberalism, so I was already defensive politically when I started college. My first semester or two I was really skeptical of everything political that my professors presented me with.
And then I took a women’s studies course (required at my college). And on the first day, the professor said,
“You don’t have to be a feminist. There are days when I’m not a feminist. But we’re going to discuss feminist ideas in this class, and you might find that you agree with some of them and disagree with others, and that’s fine.”
And that took the pressure off. By telling me that I didn’t HAVE to be a feminist, that I didn’t HAVE to agree, that professor started me on the road to becoming a feminist. I particularly remember her giving us information about what a huge percentage of the housework was still done by women, even in [hetero] couples where both the man and woman worked outside the home. And after that I remember saying, “I’m not a feminist, but I can see where they’re coming from.”
Within 5 years, I was claiming the term and coming out to my mom as a feminist.
So when I taught college writing, I assigned politically liberal essays to my students, many of whom came from conservative backgrounds. And before they read the first one, I would say,
“The reading for the next class–I want you to know that you don’t have to agree with it. You don’t have to agree with anything that your professors teach you in college. But the point of a college education is to have your mind opened to other points of view. So you’re not required to agree, but you are required to approach the reading with an open mind. You might find that you agree with some things the author says and disagree with others. And that’s cool! We WANT you to use your critical thinking and decide for yourself what you think about things! But to do that, you need to give people the benefit of the doubt and be open-minded to what they have to say.”
And I have to say, it worked really well for me! I remember in particular that after I assigned the essay “Black Men and Public Space”, one of my students wrote in her reading reflection,
“I was taught in school that racism in America ended with Martin Luther King. I am appalled to discover that this is not true.”
Priming your students to be open-minded, while also encouraging them to use critical thinking, can help to break down some of the automatic defenses against new ideas that students are often taught. Approaching your students’ comments during discussion with an open-minded view yourself, validating their experiences while also making gentle counterarguments, can do a lot as well.
So apparently there are now ‘Research Help’ AIs that are just spitting out completely fake citations as reading recommendations? One of my colleagues was staffing our library chat yesterday (y'know, the chat widget most academic libraries have nowadays that enable patrons to get help from a real librarian, rather than a freaking bot) and spent 20 minutes scouring journal issues and even author CVs trying to track down two citations a student was hoping to find, only to ultimately discover the articles were recommended to the patron by an AI program, and didn’t actually exist 😵💫
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@twiceroyaldove-primary yeah, that’s exactly what happened in this case! The AI-generated citations used legitimate author names and peer-reviewed journal titles, and then paired them with fabricated article titles. Looking through the authors’ CVs on their university websites is what ultimately tipped my colleague off—the listed authors were all prolific academics with lots of publications, but none of them appeared to do any research on the particular subject in question. Absolutely bananas.
I’m going to find the person who made this and eat their face
The one I’ve seen was not a research aid specific AI. It was ChatGPT, an AI chat bot that determines a reasonable-sounding response. It’s not for research. It’s not for internet searches. It’s surprisingly good at writing computer code if you tell it exactly what you want. But it has plenty of disclaimers telling people it doesn’t create *correct* responses, it creates *likely* ones. Which happen to be correct more often than not because it’s internet enabled. It’s the other people, those not affiliated with the project, who often say “hey, you should use this to search the internet / do your research / write your essays.”
Oh okay I’ll find someone else’s face to eat then
I just want to reiterate, though:
If you’re a college/university student and either can’t make it out to your library in person or simply prefer text-based communication, take a look at your school’s library site, because MANY academic libraries have widgets on their websites that allow you to CHAT WITH A REAL LIBRARIAN. Like, literally the same librarian you see on the front desk in the morning will likely have a chat shift later in the afternoon. If your school has this option, there is ZERO reason for you to use a “research” chatbot. The librarian will ask you about your research topic and walk you through how to format your search to find the best results. That is literally our job. It doesn’t matter if you’re coming to us in-person or online, we will provide the same level of assistance. Our services are foryou; please utilise them instead of trusting dodgy AIs.
“I didn’t and still don’t like making a cult of women’s knowledge, preening ourselves on knowing things men don’t know, women’s deep irrational wisdom, women’s instinctive knowledge of Nature, and so on. All that all too often merely reinforces the masculinist idea of women as primitive and inferior – women’s knowledge as elementary, primitive, always down below at the dark roots, while men get to cultivate and own the flowers and crops that come up into the light. But why should women keep talking baby talk while men get to grow up? Why should women feel blindly while men get to think?” - Ursula K. Le Guin
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