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New York, 12:16 PM
Tue Nov 10
73 posts in the last 24 hours
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10/28/09
Check out veryshortstories for more. I dig that their avatar is Poe, who was a fervent advocate for short stories. #margaretatwood
10/28/09
thanks for the link! #margaretatwood
10/28/09
10/28/09
and i forgot to add, thanks for the links, but it doesn't work. i was going to edit, but you got back here before me. #margaretatwood
10/28/09
10/28/09
/crank #margaretatwood
10/28/09
Allow me to ruin her day: #margaretatwood
10/28/09
But seriously, I don't think anyone is using Twitter to write Margaret. Writing and communication are intertwined, but believe it or not, not the same thing. Hence the difference between "friend speak" and "job interview." Or Facebook grammar and thesis grammar. DEAR GOD THE CHILDREN ARE ALRIGHT!
/rant over. apologies. #margaretatwood
10/28/09
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10/28/09
I love the Atwood books I love...but I can't say that for all of her work. #margaretatwood
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10/28/09
While I do have a small Facebook and iPhone addiction, I fully admit that my ability to pick up all of this "e-comm" so quickly (and lack of face-to-face comm to go with it) is why I have some of the social quirks I do. #margaretatwood
10/28/09
Patience is a virtue, so I will henceforth blame Twitter when I fail to behave virtuously. #margaretatwood
10/28/09
It does provide a great external validation of my existence, and occasionally some excellent content... but overall, my power of discernment has been dulled. Anything goes... #margaretatwood
10/28/09
I'm actually not thrilled that I seek immediate, external validation on, um, certain online discussion forums. Can't be good for me. Which I think is your point :) #margaretatwood
10/28/09
10/28/09
As a lisper, my mocking comes with love. #margaretatwood
10/28/09
10/28/09
True story: until the day he died, my grandpa pronounced "electricity" as "electwicity". If only he'd lasted until the era of online bill pay and e-communication; he never would have had to suffer embarassment at the hands of the electricity company ever again. #margaretatwood
09/09/09
But, I agree with Anna. I identify myself as a feminist, because I believe that women of all ages, races, religion, etc. deserve equality. And that we're not there yet. The end. It's not about whether feminism is "cool" or "fun" or whether my generation has it easier than the ones before, or whether a glass ceiling is more important than a sex worker in a foreign country. It's that things aren't equal, and they should be.
09/09/09
And contrary to Atwood's assertion, the vote on whether women are human beings is still ongoing. Many people see females as the substandard gender, or have dehumanized them into objects. I'm not even talking about woman-centered violence or rape, but the PUA mindst of people like shooter George Sodini who seemed incapable of viewing women as actual people. That's the kind of destructive paradigm feminists fight against.
It's just so dispiriting when articles interview only privileged women, whose references seem to extend only to their immediate circle of educated, progressive colleagues and friends, as the arbiters of current feminism. Take a look in the real world. Not just in Bangladesh, but rural America like the town I came from, where gender equality is a joke. The cultural myopia in these articles disgusts me.
09/09/09
So really, tell me to my face you don't believe in feminism, and I'll show you someone who doesn't understand the meaning of the word.
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09/09/09
And the rest of her statement just seems to be a version of the "feminists just tear everything down and are shrill" trope which isn't the case. Pointing out inequality, and figuring out the how and why of it, is the only way we can effectively address it. You can't just ignore it and hope it'll go away.
This is my issue with the way most things like this are discussed, though. People rarely ever look at how each issue influences the other. Including Atwood, it seems. She's focusing on the "how are we different" meme...and the "women elsewhere have bigger issues" meme. Which I get, perspective is important.
But I don't really care how women are different than men other than the obvious physical characteristics. We could argue about biology all day, and mostly what we'd come to is that we still don't know how much is hardwired and how much is socialized. And I've always found the hardwired argument difficult...mostly because science and interpretation of results can be subject to the same sexism as anything else. It also takes science quite a while sometimes to get over it's own conclusions. Science, after all, thought our wombs literally wandered around our bodies and made us crazy at one time.
I do think many women around the world have it much worse than I do as a white, suburban, middle class person. And it's important to keep that in mind. But it's not a comparison. I can no more help the fact that my issues with sexism are related to my station than someone else can help theirs.
09/09/09
Work towards feminist goals and you're a feminist. It doesn't matter what you do or do not call yourself. Words have power, but actions have more power.
09/09/09
If you're working to promote women's equality, then you're a feminist in my book. And if you don't want to call yourself a feminist, that's fine. As long as you keep working.
09/09/09
And yeah, exactly. While I don't think semantics will be our undoing, at a certain point it gets to be a distraction.
09/09/09
Having said that, I am hearting you too for that great sentiment.
09/09/09
Feminism is dying, and women are killing it.
09/09/09
@GirlyQ ain't a-marchin' anymore: Is this your classmate?
09/09/09
Because aren't men different than men? Last time I checked, they weren't cut out with little cookie cutters and made in an easy-bake oven. They span a spectrum on each little personality trait, temperament issue and method of processing the universe around them. So, as far as I am concerned, do women. So maybe the spread's a bit different on some issues, but we don't know for certain what that's attributable to. And really, why do we bother trying to pin down minute statistical differences when most of us overlap on most things anyway and a given individual could show up pretty much anywhere on the spectrum?
A whole bunch of inchoate thoughts, there.
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