I'm with you on the concern trolling bit, but I don't know how it's the editor's fault if posting a picture of a gaunt celebrity (whose issues might not have anything to do with an eating disorder) would be triggering for someone with an eating disorder. Is this image any worse than half the images in Dirt Bag? Where do you draw the line? Your first point was strong enough without wading into "everything is potentially triggering" territory.
That was one of my biggest critiques of the film. Especially given that the Lucas & Co. don't erase ALL women from the film. There is the Italian love interest, after all. Worst of all, the film had many opportunities to include black women in even the smallest of ways - like having the married pilots include pictures of their wives, girlfriends, and mothers on their plane dashes, just as they did with La Italiana and Black Jesus - but didn't. That was a deliberate and conscious decision to appeal to a broad viewership by selling black women completely out.
"As soon as you sign this 'no-beatdown' contract I'm really going to give you a piece of my mind!"
I don't know, there's something really old-school about this that I find charming. It reminds me of back in the day in Philly, when people would just yell and cuss at each other and leave it at that. I mean, that girl didn't even leap over and stomp the old lady like I expected! This whole thing seems really civilized.
It totally makes sense for the NEA to reject the donation, because they - and our education system as a whole - are just swimming in money right now. Plus, America always wins when we let judgy moralists decide what's best for students -- that's why teenage pregnancy and AIDS are over, and why we outperform every other country when it comes to literacy, math, science, and all the other markers of a functionally educated populace!
All good points (but to be fair I didn't say "offensive," I said "annoying"). It's always been a bad habit of Jezebel commenters to take the "now let's talk about me" approach to nearly every story, which was in part why I thought groupthink became a thing, to give people a forum in which to be off-topic and self-centered to their hearts' content. I just think it is disrespectful to this particular story to pretend we need to make room for hearing about heterosexual love connections.
I'm gonna die on this sword, probably, but anyway: I find it annoying that in a space dedicated to drawing attention to lesbians being excluded from participating in their school's contest, you decided to make it about you and your (presumably) heterosexual relationship. As though the story about SJU isn't further proof that there are more than enough acceptable spaces for that on the internet and in the world. Why claim this one - on this particular post of all times/places - too?
If you told me Julianne Moore was a baby-puncher I'd be like, "well, did the baby look at her weird or something?" because I just love her that much.
Or Asian, or Latina (when's the last time J-Lo wasn't Italian in a movie?), or remotely non-white.
This is a really huge issue for me, because it plays out in lots of other arenas. White women's stories get to sell in ways that do not apply to women of color: in film, in television, on blogs (a white girl's surprise pregnancy gets her name atop a Glamour column, a black girl's surprise pregnancy gets her name in a statistical column), and in print media (when has a woman of color EVER had a memoir make waves on the order of Elizabeth Gilbert, Elizabeth Wurtzel, or, hell, even Emily Gould?). Only white ladies have experiences worth mining in detail and from all sides; the rest of us just have to hitch our wagons to Oprah (which, when you think about it, means making even more room for white women to tell their stories.)
I am not convinced the negative portrayals are disconnected from our larger social gains. Seems like the better we do the more the media wants to say, " no, this is how they REALLY are: trifling, unloveable, petty, crazy, and lazy."
There is a real book called All My Friends Are Dead, that is written to look like a children's book - illustrations and all - but is decidedly adult-only (I'll spare you the gory details of how I came to own such a thing). I realize you're joking, but my point is that there is apparently a market in the grown-up world for that, if you ever wish to actually write it.
But he's done just that since the rape. He went to a different school and graduated early. I mean, I've come around to what Mad Madam Mim and others have said, and of course I know its not fair for someone facing genuine discrimination to move away, but he has moved on from that community. Anyway, this whole situation is terrible and I don't have the stomach to keep talking about it. I just bristled at the suggestion that the boy was in any way a victim in the way the girl was, since there is so much more evidence to support the fact of her victimization over his.
I just don't believe him. I am not convinced by what I have read, especially when he had several opportunities to remove himself from the situation involving the girl.
Again, I believe that gay teenagers face discrimination, that men and boys make other men and boys do terrible things in the name of masculinity, and that often people find themselves in terrible situations where they feel they have no other choice but to make bad decisions. I'm just saying that I don't believe the young man's story is an example of those truths.
I just don't buy the adult pressure/gay-bashing excuse. There is no evidence or examples (at least not in a single article I've read about it) that the men called him gay or threatened him. Plus, he is the one who drove the victim to the scene of the crimes. So he exercised a fair amount of volition when at several points he could have removed himself (and the girl) from the situation.
I think it's possible to acknowledge the bullying gay (or presumed-gay) teens face without allowing this guy to lay claim to that as an excuse for truly horrible behavior. Especially because the end result is to implicitly endorse the idea that it was better for him to commit a heinous crime than be thought of as gay.
Basically the guy is saying that it's better to be a child rapist than be thought of as gay. That his lawyer saw fit to press that as an "explanation" tells me that no one around him thinks that that's an absolutely appalling thing to say. It doesn't mean we have to buy what they're selling, though.
Oh my god I find this so annoying for reasons that I cannot articulate. Mostly, though, it's because this is being presented as though it's a "here's how the thing you love is bad for the world" expose, when really it's what happens when you fall down a wikipedia rabbit hole and put what you find in a cute graphic. What's the point?
This is important, because it raises questions about all the power dynamics in place between older men and younger girls that can affect conversations about protection. Older men tend to like younger girls because they can pressure them and call the shots, especially when it comes to when, where, and how to have sex. So while it's crucial that teen boys be taught to wear condoms, there is also a lot to be said for sex ed that empowers young girls to be critical and self-protecting when it comes to relationships with older men.
I'm interested to read her book, in large part because I'm curious about the age range of the women she interviewed in her focus groups. I get the sense from the excerpt here that they're in their 50s, but perhaps it's a more age-inclusive range than that. In any case, one thing that's long been clear to me is that as a 33 year-old woman, my experience with/exposure to peoples' (white, black and otherwise) stereotypes about black women is very different than my mother's and grandmother's.
I don't say that to diminish the older women's experiences at all; just to say that instead of encountering people who think "we are supposed to be from the jungle and like to have wild sex," I operate in a realm where they assume I don't know what I'm talking about in professional settings, and in which I'm often either invisible or highly visible (to different men in different settings for different reasons including hair, skin, and body type), and I could go on but I hope you get my point.
I just think there is room for more nuance beyond calling the judge horrible and reducing her ruling to the fact that the woman is schizophrenic. There were other details that the judge seemed to find compelling (which I cited in my above post). Or every comment in this thread can be about the horrible horrible horrible judge's horrible horrible horrible decision.
