Would it be possible for us to treat opinions about grammar and usage sort of the way we treat arts criticism?

Other Semitic languages have broken plurals, but as with other unusual language features Arabic runs this one furthest into the end zone.

Not everything should be about science.
There. I said it.

SO YEAH, COME VISIT AUSTRALIA.
WE’RE ALL FUCKING WAITING WITH OUR WEIRD SHIT.

A literal reading of this passage would require us to believe that God wants people who can’t stop stealing to cut off their own hands, or that He expects people who can’t stop lustfully looking at others to gouge out their own eyes if they wish to avoid eternal hellfire. However, a historical understanding of these verses offers a better interpretation. Christ was using imagery that would have been both evocative and inflammatory among the Jews of His day.

The assault on our body image, the hypersexualization of girls and women and subsequent degradation of our sexuality as we walk through the decades, and the general incessant objectification is what this conversation allegedly about my face is really about.

By shooting all those redundant, useless digital images I’m simply passing the buck to my future self, the one sitting despairingly in front of the computer.

But maybe you want to make kids forever have to read your book in freshman English classes and struggle with the magnitude of your truth and beauty. An honorable goal, to be sure. Here’s a few tips on how to write a book that ought to be carved into marble, made into a bestselling movie with action figures and make you a much better, much happier person.

And just as you can’t get two repelling magnets to sit together just by pushing real hard — they’ll fling back as soon as you stop pushing — I’ve never been able to overcome this mental force field through sheer willpower. Instead, you have to be sneaky about it — you have to rotate a magnet.

I am tired of knowing it, when I see something that is wrong. I am tired of knowing that only speaking out can change it. I am tired of knowing exactly how hard and scary it can be to do so.

By all means, credit God, who doesn’t lift a finger to alleviate the major suffering of the world, but somehow intervened to help Krystyne get all A’s. The insipidness of these invocations of the holy are one of the most significant factors in my unbelief.

Hip-hop was a problem because an underclass that had been left to die didn’t, and instead created a music decrying their conditions that was vivid, troubling and beautiful, a declaration of existence in the face of those who’d condemned them to oblivion. It screwed up the narrative, and thus was born an anti-rap racism in which symptom became cause, laments of violence and deprivation becoming justifications for violence and deprivation.

But most of us have some form of privilege, and it is particularly in that area that we need to do some extra work.

The problem with resistance is that it is often portrayed in media as this big, terrifying thing that “extremists” do. Resistance is scary! You do not want to be seen as a radical! You will alienate people! And then you will be alone and nobody will listen…

Katy Perry has escaped nothing except the prison of marriage to the guy from the shitty Arthur remake, and I guess maybe that’s what Katy Perry is trying to tell us here: Being married to Russell Brand was as bad as being married to the legacy of centuries of racism.

Here’s a plot with a dot showing the time of each of the third of a million emails I’ve sent since 1989:

The argument’s been made (by dudes, mostly) that her method of confronting gender – within the politics of “The Club” – is so narrow that it serves no purpose, or that it isn’t a very fresh idea anyway. But I have to repeat myself: a pop star exists within a micro-universe, and the current iteration of the pop universe has The Club as its home base. And the things that go on in this arbitrary universe have real-world implications.

But enough of that positivity – it’s the revulsion that “TiK ToK” inspired that interests me. Seriously, homegirl broke ground in the trolling game here. I think I remember hearing about the mysterious case of fans of The National spontaneously combusting upon first hearing it. (Only their sweatervests remained.)

I would like to look at the things we are able to think when we allow ourselves to criticise not just singular sex acts but the ‘niceness’ of sex under patriarchy as a whole.

This intersection of threats to pretty much ALL the basic assumptions our culture carries about sexuality and gender ends up creating a situation where there’s considerable emotional stakes involved in simply acknowledging or confronting the existence of trans women. But trans-misogyny is not simply the emotional responses. It’s the institutional discrimination, hatred, ridicule, trivialization, pathologization, dismissal and violence used to avoid confronting those questions, and render trans women either invisible or “invalid” in terms of having to be confronted, accepted and our implications considered.

Lots of people go through periods of doubt and flux about their gender—not everyone, and you’re not broken if you’ve always been very, very sure of your gender—and pretending that we don’t harms pretty much everyone.

It’s women in particular who tend to be victims of armchair diagnosis, where people make judgments about their mental health status on the basis of their behaviour, often with very limited information. People seem to think they are qualified to practice psychiatry because they know diagnostic terms, and they feel very comfortable using them even when they don’t actually understand what those terms mean. Or how they are used to marginalise people, pathologise perfectly normal behaviour, and force people out of conversations.

I’m not offended by those words. I’m contemptuous of those words, and I’m letting you know that using them just made me think less of you

The question isn't whether or not to censor artists who espouse misogynistic views. The question is whether or not we support them as listeners and consumers.

The fact that this new rule would almost certainly be enforced in a way that conflates sex with gender and reifies cissexism is the most immediately troubling thing about it, to be sure.  But you know what, when you’re given a cornucopia of fuckery this abundant, why stop there?  Let’s dig deeper!

For those who are agnostic on this issue, let me make it clear for you: the victim of rape is never ever ever ever at fault. Why? Because men are in complete control of their faculties when it comes to the decision to rape or not and blaming the victim is an implicit contradiction of this premise.

If we were one of those cultures we deem primitive we would argue that the camera possesses an evil spirit. Since we are so actively involved in the process of taking pictures, being in pictures, looking at pictures, we might as well admit that that evil spirit lives inside us.

Outside my house, the world was full of singing, bowing, wiggling, hot and cold running futuretech.

Inside my house was a different story.

I turned from her to see another person lost in their phone and took a shot of them. I turned once more to see another person on their phone. In a movie the camera would pan out and I would be standing on a street corner surrounded by people staring into their phone screens.

America has realized something about transgender people: Not all of them are adults. This was promptly followed by a more sinister realization: the children are easier to get to.

The problem is that only certain people are detected with gaydar: usually those whose queer identities are highly visible because they clash with the heteronormative framework (for example, femme men and butch women). And of course I think those identities are as wonderful and as valid as anything else, but the concept of gaydar reinforces the idea that queer sexuality only comes in so many flavours, and nothing else.

In other words, hegemonic heterosexuality is the vast cultural conspiracy to describe all heterosexual relationships as the unending war between stupid people and crazy people. If that’s really the model of love you want to aspire to, then okay, you have that right. But don’t piss down my neck and tell me it’s raining, and don’t show me toxic relationships and tell me they’re normal.

The Box is a game that you just can’t win. You might be able to for a while, but if you live long enough, you’ll find yourself on the outside sooner or later.

The rhetoric about good patients and bad patients includes an element of bootstrapping that often goes unexamined; very similar rhetoric is used in conversations about poor people, and it’s telling to see how readily it is accepted and used to keep people in their place.

Go through your piece and flip the gender of your descriptive phrases' subjects. Are there any that sound ludicrous as a result?

A person whose assigned sex feels ‘wrong’ to them will acquire different self-beliefs and behaviours than a person whose assigned sex feels ‘right’

Reclaiming tr*nny feels like a way to have a history. But that word was never our history.

When consequences for saying “no” (e.g. social sanction, direct violence) are potentially higher than consequences for saying “yes” (e.g. experiencing rape) or when the sexual negotiation takes place in distorted conversational territory which may severely impede or discourage giving a “no” in the first place, there is no “yes” which can be directly understood as consensual.

Understanding consent as a binary is powerful because it allows us to say that “no means no”, a statement which has had and still has incredible power to change attitudes about rape for the better. However, it can make it more difficult for us to conceive of what else might mean “no”, as well as to distinguish between different kinds of “yes” given in different contexts.

A consent culture is one in which the prevailing narrative of sex--in fact, of human interaction--is centered around mutual consent.  It is a culture with an abhorrence of forcing anyone into anything, a respect for the absolute necessity of bodily autonomy, a culture that believes that a person is always the best judge of their own wants and needs.

Here's some common misconceptions that can fuck up geek sex.

So in this case, it’s not even a situation of respectful disagreement, but personal truth: Nixon is not telling me that I chose to be gay, but that she did. I can’t possibly know whether or not that is true because I do not inhabit Cynthia Nixon’s body and mind.

This insistence that “someone special” equals “someone you are having sex with” doesn’t just leave asexuals out in the cold. Lots of sexual people also have deep, meaningful relationships with people who are not sexual partners and will never be. Those relationships are much more than the word “friendship” can adequately describe, yet they’re often treated as less important than a marriage or long term sexual/romantic relationship.

Is gender something people need to get? Is it something that can be quantified and assigned values and easily described? Cis people struggle to grasp what it means to be trans—not just nonbinary, but trans in general—and I’m not sure they really need to.

The notion that animal rights are a matter of opinion is directly related to the status of animals as human property; this question, like most others examined here, assumes the legitimacy of regarding animals as things that exist solely as means to human ends.

Finally, if your solution to sexist abuse on the internet is, “Just don’t let anyone know your gender, or see a picture of you, or ever mention where you live” (as one of the first commenters on Watson’s post suggested), you are so fucking awful, I can’t even.

Armisen and Brownstein text each other every night before bed. Brownstein says of their friendship, “Sometimes I think it’s the most successful love affair either of us will ever have.” Both claim that it wouldn’t work if they were romantically involved.