Newsflash

Gay people confuse kids (via Dave):

Kids also confused by:

1) Color of the sky
2) How Santa gets down the chimney
3) Why he/she has to go to school/church/etc
4) Where babies come from

You get the point. Fortunately, I had parents (opposite sex, but I think one parent or two parents of the same-sex could handle these dangerous confusion points in the same manner) who had the forethought to, you know, explain shit to me. School was also a help here.

Just for fun (and some language thoughts)

Someone threw this video up on Facebook, and I can’t stop watching:

Not because of the sentiment (a good one), or because it’s just fun, but because I keep reminding myself that these kids (for the most part at least) are French.  And then I get jealous of how they’re able to lip-sync English like that.  But then I think about whether that would be oppressive, since it’s not like one can choose whether to be inundated with another language like English is throughout the world.  But then I inevitably return to just marvelling at the way English is just part of everyday life here in a way that very few Americans ever experience.

Picking targets

At the risk of putting myself on the wrong side of this argument, as much as I agree with Jill that not tolerating homophobia — represented in the case of Miss California by her distaste for same-sex marriage — is not intolerance as most people would define it, isn’t the real problem that we are so quick to attack the beauty pageant contestant for saying what President Obama, to just take the most prominent example from many “left” politicians who take the same stance, believes?  Why does he get a pass but she doesn’t?  Isn’t just too easy to attack the beauty pageant contestant for being everything we expect from a beauty pageant contestant (who isn’t reminded of the notorious Miss Teen USA video while reading about this controversy)?  Perhaps we should start wrestling with a President of the United States who utilises the language of equality, but continues to advocate for a position of distinct inequality?

I love Sarah Chalke

I haven’t confessed that I’m a huge Scrubs fan, yet have I? I only had eyes for Sarah Chalke in this video:

A Gaythering Storm from Jane Lynch

Update: I’m not sure if the video is just not showing up for me, or for everyone, so here’s a link instead.

Blaming the victim 101

In an oh-so cleverly titled article in the Weekly Standard, “Victimology 101 at Yale,” (unfortunately, but unsurprisingly, approvingly linked to by Robert KC Johnson at Cliopatria), Heather Mc Donald claims that Yale’s LGBTQ students are just imagining their marginalization.  Yale, after all, is an elite university with a history of support for LGBTQ research and study; a course catalog always being sufficient evidence of total acceptance, apparently, while scholars of class, race and gender (and, one supposes, sexuality), just don’t know how to find the evidence to satisfy Johnson’s requirements.  Whatever that is (am I increasingly annoyed  the easy dismissals of whole bodies of work by Johnson on the otherwise excellent Cliopatria?  Yesssir).

But in any case, bashing queer kids for getting a resource center from a university administration (a process I was involved in at Washington University) wasn’t exactly a surprise.  The arguments are old and tired and rely on a fundamental misunderstanding of how oppression works, disregarding the subjective feelings of the students involved and the institutions, practices, and discourses that constantly perpetuate norms of behavior, in favor of hard statistics that only really show that Yale likes to appear to be avant-garde.  More disturbing, if not terribly surprising either, was this piece of the Weekly Standard piece (not referenced by Johnson):

Of course, other students can be counted on to respond less than respectfully to the constant assertion of victim status; the resulting friction happily fuels the further expansion of the student services bureaucracy. In 2008, a Yale fraternity photographed its members holding a tiny sign “We Love Yale Sluts” in front of the Yale Women’s Center (dedicated to providing a “safe space” for Yale women). The fraternity posted the photo online. The Women’s Center denizens and university bureaucrats predictably took the bait. Yale promised to refurbish the Women’s Center, created a permanent Intercultural Affairs Council, and established two committees to study the incident. Those committees recommended chartering a standing committee to implement changes in Yale’s sexual harassment policy. The fraternity members were charged with intimidation and harassment, but eventually were cleared.

Ah yes, the classic pretend I’m a victim of sexism in order to elicit a sexist response in order to receive a refurbished office ploy!  Well done Yale women.  Bien fait, even!  No thought of course, that the fraternity brothers’ actions are in fact the evidence sought for the need for spaces for women and GLBTQ folk (sexism and homophobia being, of course, linked; as seen in this all-male ritual expression of sexual dominance over women that also assumes these women’s easy availablity for sex).  Or that the sign represents the fact that even an institution such as Yale has a long way to go in terms of fostering a campus climate appropriate to the needs of all its students, rather than just the frat boys.  Or, finally, that if these actions weren’t “intimidation and harassment,” what exactly would it take for the charges to stick?