Sleep's all messed up. No surprise there - I slept all day after the hospital, then all night, then long naps in the morning and afternoon, so ping, there I was at 3 am, on the sofa with a book light and The World's Greatest Stories For Boys And Girls, being stared at for hours by an eerily immobile demon-eyed cat who wanted his breakfast ( Read more... )

Questioning Transphobia links to a post at Problem Chylde called The Top Five Ways That White Feminists Continue To Discredit Women of Color. For both bloggers, I think, the problem boils down to exclusion: "...it attempts to define what feminism is, what counts as feminism, and tells us that we aren't really part of it" (PC); "as being outside the ( Read more... )

Introducing Thealogy by Melissa Raphael has been lying about in a plastic tub for about four years, waiting for me to pick it up and read it. Oh I am glad that I've finally started. It's one of those books that pulls that crazy quilt of understanding in your head into a pattern ( Read more... )

Comment screening is now switched on - apologies for the screwup!

Poll Doctor Who fandom demographics

Dickensian London, Cybermen and two Doctor Whos: Russell T Davies reveals the secrets of this year's Christmas special.

Yes, it's the Mail. What's he going to do, turn down an opportunity to pimp the Xmas special to two million potential viewers? My excuse is that I only found that 'cos I was looking at this: Britain's most UNLIKELY male sex ( Read more... )

Scott Adams, at some length, on the gentle art of the straw man.

most white, male, middle-class managers exhibit behaviours eerily akin to lekking birds. lol

From The Onion: Barack Obama Defeats Barack Hussein Obama

Rather than bombard you with further postings, I'm ETAing further info on the broad differences between the "fanboy" and "fangirl" streams of fandom into a "data points" posting.

But I also wanted to sketch a quick schematic of the debate:

• Do men and women typically communicate differently? If so, how?

• Do men and women typically communicate ( Read more... )

( Getting insanely long )

Browsing through Enterprising Women over on Google Books, I found some evidence to back up one of my hunches: that a lot of fangirls are mutants like me. The author, Camille Bacon-Smith, recounts how many female fans have experienced "scorn" for their "masculine" interests. She describes Star Trek fangirls growing up during a time when, as ( Read more... )

OK, so let's see what the 1995 book Women, Men, and Politeness by NZ feminist and linguist Janet Holmes has to say about differences in the way men and women talk, and especially how they handle conflict.

First lemme quote you these two bits from chapter 1:"Most women enjoy talk and regard talking as an important means of keeping in touch, ( Read more... )