So much white patriarchy to smash, so little time.
Tag Archives: gender
His
I may not personally like terms like “herstory” and “shero,” but I acknowledge that they exist for a good reason, which is more than anyone can say about the “men’s rights” herd.
Test
Then there’s the Bechdel Turing test, where you read two different characters’ lines without knowing the gender of the characters, and if you can’t tell which one is female, it passes.
(For anyone not in the know: Schrödinger’s cat and the Bechdel test. Which, incidentally, would be an awesome name for a band.)
Journalists
What’s important about that study is not that women were found buried with weapons, it’s that women were found in earlier burials than we expected, showing that the earliest waves of Viking settlement in Britain included women. It’s an interesting discovery, but it doesn’t fundamentally change our current picture of gender relations in Viking society. Whenever you read a headline that says: “New discovery proves historians all wrong about X,” you can usually just mentally replace it with: “New discovery proves historians have been pretty much right about X since the 1970s.”
Privilege card
It’s not pleasant to have strangers online calling me out for enjoying a bunch of advantages I didn’t earn, never asked for, would share if I could, but still adhere to me solely because of how I was born. I understand the temptation to tell them to just shut up and leave me alone because none of this is my fault. The better response though, is to use what advantages history and society have given me to try to make the world better for everyone who didn’t get them. We’re not in a zero-sum game here: when other people’s lives are better, that makes my life better, too.
