Will Shetterly's Blog, page 138

Dance is changing my idea of female beauty

My standard for female beauty was probably set when I was ten or twelve and first saw Diana Rigg in The Avengers:



I don't mean racially. My standard for female beauty includes Michelle Yeoh:



and Pam Grier:



and Buffy Sainte-Marie:



and a great many women with dark hair and bodies that look tall and strong, on-screen, anyway. But since I've started dancing, I'm finding shorter and heavier women attractive too. I'm sure it's the effect Laci Green describes, the consequence of paying attention to m...

In Chain Mail Bikini News: Britney Spears, Beyonce & Pink - We Will Rock You (Pepsi)

time to accept my aspieness

About every ten years, I'll come across something about Asperger's, take a test online, find I score in the 30s, wonder if I should get professional testing, then forget about it because a professional would only tell me to accept I'm a bit aspie.

But after reading How Asperger's reignited a passion for art, I'm thinking I need to do more than accept it. I need to embrace it. I need to love my limitations to make them my strengths.

At those times when I wondered about aspieness, I read Wha...

Yoga was "culturally appropriated"—by upper-caste Indians

From Ghosts of Yogas Past and Present:

Central to this discussion is “Take Back Yoga,” led by the Hindu American Foundation (HAF), a campaign that claims yoga must be credited to Hinduism. HAF has cleverly used this deceptive appeal to white-liberal guilt, in order to get major play in the mainstream US media. The influence and “multiculturalist” legitimacy they acquire through their yoga campaign is useful for their real agenda—supporting the Islamophobic Hindu-right. According...

the top 1% in the US's most and least equal states

Too Much February 24, 2014:

In the world's freest economy, people are free to live in cages

From Too Much February 24, 2014:

The world’s “freest” economy? That distinction belongs to Hong Kong, says the Heritage Foundation Index of Economic Freedom, an annual tally that rewards governments for keeping taxes low and regulations on business feeble. Yan Chi Keung probably doesn’t feel particularly free. The 57-year-old, profiled recently by photographer Brian Cassey, lives in a six-by-three-foot cage home that costs him $195 a year. Why do over 50,000 people in Hong...

my brilliantly simple or pathetically obvious unified theory of prejudice

I apologize for this post, because I may've just figured out something that's been obvious to everyone else.

I've been casually thinking for years about Engel's observation, "The first class opposition that appears in history coincides with the development of the antagonism between man and woman in monogamous marriage, and the first class oppression coincides with that of the female sex by the male."

I kept thinking there was no connection other than a love of a hierarchy.

But that assumes lovin...

Martha Reeves and Lesley Gore: the music was for everyone

From 50 years after Beatlemania, a look at a year of change (which you needn't click 'cause it's behind a paywall):

For Martha Reeves, the music that came out of 1964 wasn’t about skin color; it was universal. 

“When I first got into show business, there was no white or black music,” Reeves says from her home in Detroit. “There was just music that everybody enjoyed, and Motown was not an all-black company. Our music had no color on it. It was made for people who enjoyed music, an...

Freedom - cover by Justine Dorsey & Octavius Womack

Stephen Hawking on people who brag about their I.Q.

The New York Times > Magazine > Questions for Stephen Hawking: The Science of Second-Guessing:

What is your I.Q.?
 I have no idea. People who boast about their I.Q. are losers.