I’m struck. Part of me is genuinely shocked that a goy is that cut up at not being able to follow an internet blog that isn’t meant for them, especially since they are allegedly “curious.” Another part of me is humiliated and horrified that goyim are still patrolling and surveilling this space for the express purpose of treating us like lab rats for their “stories” and “characters”. Part of me is interested by the idea that goyim (or any privileged group) feels they must be given the right to educate themselves about a marginalized or targeted group and the oppression they face. Part of me is open-mouthed aghast at the patronizing inherent in “Something to consider.” “You should learn how to better coddle me. You should learn how to make me comfortable in your spaces. You need to learn the proper ways to butcher your culture and make it palatable enough for me to violate and water down for me and my goyische friends.” Obviously this person’s response is, “That wasn’t my intent,” if they care at all. Such an interesting study. I mostly wanted to share this to demonstrate to other Jewish people that it’s ok to feel hurt when your boundaries are transgressed and to express those feelings, and to warn people that there’s definitely quite a few goyim hanging around surveilling these spaces, and also to issue a brief response to this Anon:
Jewish people are getting fucking murdered and this is what you’re fucking doing. Go the fuck outside sometime, you collaborator piece of shit. “I WAS going to follow” then perish.
Not to mention there are spaces that focus on learning about Judaism that aren’t this specific blog. There are sites like chabad.org that give basic info and there are tumblrs like @jewish-education and @yidquotes that have more advanced info and don’t say that gentiles can’t follow.
I mean OP probably shouldn’t be writing Jewish characters anyway if they’re going to act so entitled but their concern trolling looks even more obtuse and nasty considering that any person who genuinely wants resources has other options.
I’m a little ticked with a lot of this right now. And since I’ve been @ here I’m going to insert myself into this conversation. Putting two hats on at once here as a writer and a Jewish person. Jumblr and writeblr should read all of it, but some paragraphs are to one of the other of you:
To writeblr: Research is great. Research is awesome. Research is necessary for good writing and a societal shedding of -isms. Do it where you’re welcome and will best be able to learn.
To jumblr: Writers do research not because minority people or characters are lab rats, but because they need some help learning to understand a life and worldview different than their own. And it’s great when writers make diverse characters/worlds. Sometimes the only place folks will meet someone Jewish (or of another minority group) is in the pages of a book. Let’s make sure those characters are done well.
To writeblr: You should be respectful and do research in places where folks are chill with it. No group is required to let you in to all of their spaces. Some of them are exclusively for intragroup conversations or are intragroup safe spaces. I feel like many of y’all know this by now? I hope.
To jumblr: It’s okay for us on jumblr to get angry and feel threatened when folks cross one of the boundaries we’ve put up (especially when we’ve often got good reasons to put them up!).
But jumblrites need to remember that making sure writers do their job right is mutually beneficial. Given, this anon doesn’t seem (at least from this snippet) like someone who would do a good job no matter what we did…But if a writer approached y’all politely, with a genuine desire to do things right by all of us, I’d hope that (given the energy and ability) you would be willing to help:
A polite, genuine request could have been “I’m trying to learn about x because I’m working on a [piece of writing, etc.]. I came across your blog and know it isn’t for me, but would you be willing help me find some places I can go to learn about x?”
I’d caution people from using my @jewish-education (or even @yidquotes?) to learn how to write a Jewish character. We just mostly don’t post about the lives and opinions of your “average” (lol) Jewish person. (I mean maybe some of my blog’s #jewish identity tag??) Chabad is good to know about traditional, Hasidic practice, but it won’t teach you how [random Jewish character] lives.
I’d recommend following personal blogs (on tumblr/beyond that are chill with random gentiles reading), reading published works by and about Jewish folks, and relying on writing advice blogs with Jewish mods when questions come up. If you have Jewish people irl who are willing to talk to you, that’s a great resource too. I am open to (some) personal-ish jewish life/identity questions over messaging. I am also willing recommend books or use my blog as a platform to ask followers for books recs (I haven’t read everything). Me and I think my end of jumblr will talk books ‘til the cows come home.
I would really recommend that writers ask if they can follow a personal blog specifically for research because I would personally be really uncomfortable with that …
Thanks for the important emphasis @nerdyqueerandjewish! Yeah…I said that are chill with random gentiles reading. But that should probably be in bold and italicized so amendment of: “I’d recommend following personal blogs (on tumblr/beyond that are chill with random gentiles reading)
”
I mean I’m happy to have gentile readers, sure, it is the idea that it would be for researching a character that gives me the creeps I guess?
there is literally a dedicated writing tumblr for this, though: @writingwithcolor
King James I: *builds secret tunnel connecting his room to the room of a man he calls his husband*
Historians: it’s very hard to tell what kind of relationship they would have had, let’s not look at this through a 21st century lens
i mean, no. there wasn’t this whole late 80s-to now trend of “no homo” in the 17th+18th cent (as a whole–let’s let the Puritans be anti-homo bastards who will rot in unread history books). homosocial/same-sex friendships were a lot more affectionate at the time than they are now. i mean, shit, pick up any shakespearean play and see how many times a man says “you know i love you” to another male character, that didn’t mean he was gay. now, that’s not to say that he wasn’t or that he didn’t have what we’d think of as gay desires, but he wouldn’t have have the words that we have today. sexual queerness has had a long and storied history and to ignore that in favor of going ‘uwu they’re gay!!!’ borders on homonormative, it’s just the reversal of insisting that someone is straight.
but sure, let’s just automatically point at stuff like this and call it gay. because fuck history and studying sexual queerness, right? let’s just slap our modern labels without considering why other historians might be so hesitant to do so. (and deconstructing that hesitation would be a more solid case than just saying LOOK HE SAID HUSBAND HE MUST HAVE BEEN GAY.) fuck’s sake.
Given how fucking HARD HISTORIANS HAVE TRIED TO ERASE HOMOSEXUALITY in figures like Da Vinci and Michelangelo, ie, trying to erase and burning most of Da Vinci’s sketches for being too homoerotic, you really think historians haven’t tried their damned hardest to erase how gay as all fuck this guy was?
Especially given there’s three major recorded instances of him falling in love with men, publicly, with written evidence, from his own writings and the observations of others.
Fuck you, dude. You’re just as bad as all the straightwashing historians who thought two lovers in Egypt were, like, bros or whatever.
ONE GOOGLE SEARCH AND MULTIPLE SOURCES COULD HAVE TOLD YOU YOU WERE WRONG but nah you just wanna be a dumbass.
But here, to soothe your whole “can’t be too modern” issues about this post:
HE WAS MORE IN LOVE WITH MEN THAN WOMEN. GIVEN THE SETUP OF HIS CHAMBERS AND HIS INTERACTIONS, HE LIKELY FUCKED THEM, ROLLING IN HIS OWN HYPOCRISY.
There you go. Facts. No labels. No modern takes. Just observations from historical sources.
JAMES LOVED VILLIERS MORE THAN HIS OWN WIFE, WHO HE TREATED LIKE SHIT. HE PREFERRED HIS SUPPOSED HUSBAND OVER HIS OWN WIFE.
Does that help?
If it doesn’t, there are a couple of people on this post who’ve already proved you wrong 🙂 Just check the notes.
call me ignorant but i genuinely don’t understand why sports have to be split up by gender.
@ everyone in the notes talking about physical performance: if that were the case, then sports would be divided by physical performance. that’s a thing you can measure. that’s a thing that varies by individual. a weak man and a strong man would be an unfair fight in boxing/wrestling/MMA, which is why they divide those sports up into weight groups based on physical performance. but they also further segregate them based on gender. chess is segregated by gender for no reason but sexism. if it’s actually about skill and physical ability, then measure those and separate people by those metrics. don’t do some bullshit gender segregation and pretend like men and women are inherently on different levels no matter their individual abilities.
This isn’t a new idea; it’s a second- and early third-wave feminist one.
I mean, yeah, it’s true there are unnecessarily gender-segregated sports and competitions of all varieties.
The problem is sports where physical strength and speed are unconditional determinants of success. Humans do in fact develop dimorphic secondary sexual characteristics, including stark differences in muscle mass, among various more aspects applicable to sporting prowess (for example, lung capacity).
In elite training, even minuscule differences in physiology produce a sizable impact. Men and women are different enough, physiologically speaking, that individual ability hardly matters when paired in competition. While the difference isn’t quite what I’d call “inherent,” it’s undeniable. The hormones behind such effects and compounds that promote said hormones’ production are banned as performance enhancers for a reason.
For boxing etc. where weight classes already exist, it’s vital to note women and men of similar size aren’t comparable in terms of muscle mass or strength. Training doesn’t do much to bridge that gap. (Unless you’re looking at an elite female boxer versus some untrained dude, I guess.)
Top competitors in most realms of sport, as per what the above posters are suggesting, would end up exclusively or almost exclusively men. Women wouldn’t be able to qualify as Olympians.
For a quick and easy example, these tables below (via Wikipedia) show men’s and women’s mile records:
You’ll see women’s record holder Svetlana Masterkova is significantly slower than Asbel Kiprop, man #25. In fact, Masterkova’s world record is bested on a regular basis by high school boys who’ve had fairly limited training.
Even figure skating’s jump-derived scoring would need to be overhauled, or again women wouldn’t survive as top competitors.
Let’s say a handful of professional soccer teams reach out to include one or two women. Where strategy and teamwork are concerned, each individual player isn’t required to be as fast as possible, kick at maximum force, et cetera. However, most women who play at present on top women’s teams are going to be SOL. The odds that those who remain on “non-gendered” teams are derided, harassed and end up relegated to an almost mascot-type role are 1/1.
Eliminating women’s athletics means eliminating women from athletics.
For most sports, your Divisions 1–3 will end up primarily if not entirely men’s domain. Divs 4–10, assuming such exist, will begin to include a greater proportion of women. Divs 18–20, finally, may be all women. Who’s funding Division 20? Who’s funding Division 4, even? Who’s its audience? Where is women’s prestige? Is that supposed to be irrelevant?
The overall effect is a raised, if not insurmountable, barrier to entry. Fewer women will be involved in competitive sports to start. You’re looking, from there, at a knock-on effect on young girls, their interests, their world-views.
It needs to be clarified, too, that competitive chess isn’t gender-segregated in the sense implied above. The WCC is open to women and men; women can participate in it and in WWCC games. Various levels of women-only tournaments exist to serve as outreach programs to get more girls and women interested in what is considered by society to be a male pursuit, and as voluntary reprieves from sexism in competitive chess. Calling women’s tournaments themselves sexist is grossly disingenuous.
The World Chess Championship’s open model would be acceptable, I think, even wise, to apply more broadly to sports. Women who want to compete against men should get that opportunity. Trans competitors whose hormonal states and/or genders don’t conform to traditional dimorphic standards should be able to participate in sports and
not be misgendered or required to abstain from events early on in HRT. And in situations where no girls or women’s teams exist, for example in (American) football, those who want to play shouldn’t be barred.
Eliminating women’s sports, though, is backwards and phony egalitarianism.
I want to write an alternative version of Romeo and Juliet where instead of being a little ponce and trying to work things out for himself, Romeo asks his smarter friends what to do about the whole thing and Benvolio and Mercutio come up with the world’s greatest plan:
Marriage of convenience between Juliet and Mercutio.
Think about it.
Juliet’s parents want her to marry into the Prince’s family. Mercutio is a good compromise between no marriage and Paris.
Mercutio probably won’t get his inheritance if he keeps being HELLA FUCKING GAY ALL OVER THE PLACE so a beard is only a benefit to him.
They would probably get along great rolling their eyes at how adorably stupid Romeo is.
Romeo and Benvolio could get a “bachelor pad” right next to Juliet and Mercutio’s house. Every night, Romeo and Mercutio high five as they hop the fence to go bang their one true love.
The second half of the play is just all of them trying to keep up the charade and being “THIS CLOSE” to getting caught all the time. But everything ends nicely because true love conquers all.
Everybody wins. Nobody dies.
THE SHAKESPERE AU I NEVER KNEW I NEEDED
DUDE DID YOU JUST FIX ONE OF THE MOST ICONIC PLAYS EVER CREATED?!
ONCE AGAIN EVERYTHING IS SOLVED BY THE QUEER LENS.
What Amazon will probably say to justify this later: “It’s so we can tell if one of our staff is stealing”
What the article says it’s for: “It vibrates or shocks employees if they sort the packaging wrong”
What Amazon’s ulterior motive probably is: “We can track the pace of their work and if they’re taking a few seconds too long or using their hands to wipe their sweaty brows, we bring it up at a performance review and will fire them for it. But remember that if you whine about this or demand better conditions/wages, we’ll just replace you with robots, so keep working you mindless and invasively-monitored drones“
Death By Catchphrase 