In which I dream of a world where justice is both swift and severe.

I'm sure I've covered this before, but apparently it's a phenomenally difficult idea to grasp, so I'll try to take it in easy steps.

1. I feel safe in asserting, doing no research whatsoever, but rather relying on what I already know about human reproduction, psychology and constitutionally "protected" medical procedures, that the primary reason a woman would have an abortion is because she does not want to be pregnant, or to give birth, or to have a baby.
1.a. Therefore abortions happen because there are unwanted pregnancies.

2. If you are genuine in your concern about abortion and not jut a fucking woman-hating fucking asshole, then if you want to prevent abortions you would do everything in you power to . . . prevent unwanted pregnancies.  Focusing on slut-shaming, restricting access to abortion, contraception and reproductive health measures is not at all in anyway whatsoever no matter how much you try to fucking lie doing a single fucking thing to prevent unwanted pregnancies.
2.a. Therefore unless you work to ensure women have true sexual and reproductive freedom, you actually just hate women.
2.b. Therefore Oklahoma is close to being the worst state ever.

Hypatia's Household Goes to the Movies and Hypatia's Girl Swears Off Pop Culture

That's it.  I'm done.
I'm over dude culture so hard.  I'm sure that life is really scary if you're a dude and all with women who do things like leave you and aren't super duper excited that you've impregnated them and want you do things like ZOMG hyphenate YOUR last name with hers JUST BECAUSE YOU GOT MARRIED.  It sounds fucking awful.

So Hypatia's Household was restless and went to see a movie.  We went to see Hot Tub Time Machine.  How could you possibly go wrong with a movie whose premise is there is a hot tub, and it's a time machine.  It has John fucking Cusack, for fuck's sake.  How do you fuck it up?

You make the whole movie an extended joke about homophobia, non-consensual sex, how fucking hard it is to be a dude and then you throw in some racism (just a smidgen).

What I learned from Hot Tub Time Machine:
Dudes are sad when their women leave them.  But sad only in a kind of plot point so that we know that John Cusack is kind of sad, it's hard to be him.  But it's WAY more sad when his high school girlfriend breaks up with him, WHEN HE'S 40 AND SHE'S ACTUALLY STILL A TEENAGER. Also it's not fucking creepy IN THE SLIGHTEST when you find out that you're married to a woman THAT YOU ACTUALLY ONLY KNEW FOR LESS THAN 2 HOURS.

(Black) dudes are sad when their women ask them to give up their dream of being a mediocre singer and are really emasculated when they have to sacrifice their identity, THEIR PERSONAL SENSE OF SELF by CHANGING THEIR FUCKING NAME WHEN THEY GET MARRIED by hyphenating with hers.  THIS, DUDES, IS THE WORST THING EVER, but it's probably ok if she changes her name to yours without hyphenating at all, in fact, it's probably fucking emasculating if not, because, apparently LIFE IS FUCKING SO HARD FOR DUDES.  Also dudes are sad when their women cheat on them.  But not so sad that they talk to the women about the email they broke into to find out about the cheating. And I'm assuming this is harder for Black dudes, because we all know how fucking pushy ALL Black women are.  For reals.

It's totally NOT AT ALL A RAPEY THING TO DO to get a woman drunk to sleep with her.  Nor is it at all to be remarked on that you INTENTIONALLY KNOCK HER UP.  AGAIN, when YOU'RE IN YOUR 40s AND SHE'S A TEENAGER.  Also, it's fucking HIGH MOTHERFUCKING COMEDY to make jokes about nonconsensual sex, so long as it's dudes blowing each other.  And it's NOT RACIST AT ALL to trot out "once you go Black, you won't go back" or that black dudes ALL UNIVERSALLY BECAUSE THEY'RE SO FUCKING SEXUAL LIKE THAT have REALLY HUGE COCKS.

I cannot tell you how fucking OVER I am of the pop culture meme that ZOMG IT'S SO HARD FOR MEN OUT THERE.  Dudes are just trying to be all dudely, and like THOSE FUCKING WOMEN WITH THEIR - well I'd say needs, but hot shit, owing to the movie's utter lack of character development of ANY of the characters, I'm not actually certain what WAS the fucking problem besides those dudes just generally being kind of huge fucking jerks.  And really, if you're a huge fucking jerk, LIFE SHOULD TOTALLY SUCK FOR YOU.

I literally cannot remember enough of the movie to do justice to how annoying it was.

But you heard it here first, kids, Hypatia's Girl is officially throwing down the gauntlet on PEOPLE NOT FUCKING GETTING IT.  I don't think that it should be hard to not be a giant douchecanoe.  This common-sense radical will be there, loudly asking you why you are a douchecanoe.  Oh, you think rape jokes are funny, huh jackass?  Why is that?  Oh, yeah, black guys have big cocks? Why are you such a racist piece of shit?  Could you please detail me the ways in which you are not ACTIVELY MAKING LIFE WORSE FOR EVERY SINGLE FUCKING PERSON EVER by not being an active, informed, committed feminist/anti-racist/queer-ally?  Because, dear world, frankly none of this shit ought to be hard any more.  We should fucking know better.  And I, for one, am 100% out of patience with this shit.

Dick Moves and a Sense of Proportion

I was planning on writing a nice nostalgic post about Sean Connery Day IX and the importance of rituals of friendship.  It was going to be all sensitive and bittersweet and ultimately uplifting.

However, three things happened between my intending to leave for Up North and my arriving Up North that kind of soured me on the whole bittersweet-and-ultimately-uplifting theme.  Nothing particularly bad per se, just those moments of mild annoyance that we encounter in our lives.  And I thought that I'd rather complain about 3 dick moves in 60 minutes than write anything, like, productive and shit.

Update on The Listening Project

Meant to post this, like, a week ago.
The Listening Project is on hold for a bit.  My car was broken into and part of what got stolen was my beautiful and totes loved external hard drive.  The hard drive that had all of my music (in addition to all of  my writing and most of my teaching materials).  Gone.  Disappeared like my last willingness to give this Rust Belt city a chance to turn my heart.

I have some music right now, but it sure as shit isn't anything I'm willing to tell the internet I listen to.  At least not without some decent stuff mixed in.

Your sympathies are appreciated.  I'll try to get back to this soon.

Until then, try this:

Hypatia's Girl and Hypatia's Boy go to the movies

It's hard going to the movies when you are the sort of person who can't watch most commercials/television shows/movies/etc. without identifying all the ways in which the message is designed to encourage systems of privilege, particularly when you're dating the sort of person who a. enjoys the philosophy of film and b. does not distinguish between aesthetic judgments and moral failings.  But nonetheless, sometimes I struggle out of my safe, feminist blogosphere and engage in example of pop culture.

Like last night when Hypatia's Boy and I went to see Alice in Wonderland. (Or, Tim Burton imagines what Alice in Wonderland would be like as an action flick).  Spoilers probably follow.

The Stylings of Ideas Man, Ph.D.: Breaking News: Glenn Beck's Dungeons and Dragons Character discovered!

The Stylings of Ideas Man, Ph.D.: Breaking News: Glenn Beck's Dungeons and Dragons Character discovered!

This is what we do.

We are also accepting contributions for What is it like to Be a Glen Beck. Poetry, haiku, essays, interpretive art pieces. Email em!

Rust Belt Love Letter

This town is empty.  An exoskeleton of despair slowly decaying around an already forgotten corpse.  The sign in the bar, You will do better in Toledo, more mocking than not, or perhaps . . . Perhaps more deluded, the fading grand dame in her mansion, wearing the dress she wore to her last cocktail party, 40 years ago, the glass in her necklace chipped and missing, the fabric of her green satin stained and moth-eaten, tattered around her dry body.

I walk from 14th and Monroe past empty buildings, faded signs and flyers torn but still stubbornly clinging to glass-front shops.  You can look inside and see the remnants, a chair, a shop counter, a piece of bad art.  You can also see the dirt that covers everything, the leaves and animal droppings.  This is an image of a world after a war.  The reclamation of Chernobyl, the monuments to Dresden, the Rust Belt in the 21st Century.  We have lost and the population here, what's left of it, knows that.  Even the graffiti is faded.  Either no one left to claim space of their own, or nothing left to claim.

This is a town of tragedy.  No great, visible tragedy, no sharp divide between what was once and what is now, but rather a town composed of those small quiet tragedies that build the foundation of our impoverished society.  This is a town of can't-pay-my-bills and repossessions.  This is a town of cut-backs and a fading tax base.  A town filled with people so forgotten that they've become invisible. 

I cross the streets of downtown at 9:30 on a workday morning and I cross them in the middle of a block.  I could walk down the center of the street.  Laying heel to toe down the cracked and faded lines with no fear of traffic.  The buildings, surely large and grand in the booming days when they were built, lurk awkwardly around me, windows like the eyes of the dead, half-shuttered, sometimes broken.  They whisper apologies to me as I navigate the cracks and craters of the sidewalk, the parts of the street where the asphalt has been missing so long the bricks beneath are worn and crumbled.  They politely pull out of my way down narrow paths.  Or sit silently, staring over my head, searching for the horizon.  I ignore them.  Am silenced by their obvious decay.

This is a town of tragedy.  Of scratched-off lottery tickets littering the gas station parking lot.  The billboards are all for the lottery, or cheap lawyers, Planned Parenthood and those "crisis pregnancy centers."  There is one near the crumbling grand apartment in which I live that implores me to "erase the hate."  It stands in an empty field, its edges torn, the red bleeding pink into the white.  Paper and trash, bottles and cups and broken liquor bottles have gathered beneath it.

A woman wearing a knit cap with Obama's hope logo on the front asks me, politely, for a dollar as I cut through the gas station parking lot, picking my way carefully around broken glass and those lottery tickets.  I tell her I don't have one.  I wish I did.

This is a town that makes me feel my privilege.  I am only passing through here.  I am walking back from dropping off a second copy of an application to a Ph.D. program in philosophy at the post office.  I am the transient.  Putting in my two years, joking about the emptiness, the meaning of You will do better in Toledo.  This stretch of street lined with trash and brown grass, the half-hearted flutterings of litter in the still-icy March wind, this is not my home.  I walk up to my apartment and stare out at the tops of buildings, at the sky still gray despite the sun.

Oh, Toledo, I cannot love you.  I would only bruise my heart on your bricks, cut my lips on your broken glass.  My fingernails seem to always have dirt underneath them in this town.  Cigarette smoke and exhaust in my clothes.  Glass from my broken car window in my shoes.  You are a sliver in my heart, Toledo, a symbol more than a city.  You are the Tower card of a Tarot deck.  Loss and despair.  I pile what has been lost here, all of the losses here, in the parts of my heart where you would sit.

I come home and consider starting to pack.  Leaving months from now.  To go somewhere else.  I cannot see the future in Toledo.  I cannot imagine days outside of these.  I've tried.  I don't pack.  Instead I memorize the way the street looks right now.