STOP The Fucking Song And Back It Up To The Start We Didn't Think About The Right Thing At The Right

You were alive in 2006? How old are you??

If you were born post 2006 you shouldn’t be following me I’m dead serious

I am so bored with the trope of the poor character constantly trying to emulate a rich character, negatively comparing themselves to the rich character, wishing they could be more like them.

Like, where's my poor girl who doesn't care how her secondhand cardigan measures up against the rich girl's Balenciaga sweater? Where's my poor girl who doesn't gush on and on about how graceful the rich girl is while disparaging herself for how she occupies the same space?

Why does the poor girl always have to hate herself and be embarrassed about her background? Why does she have to idolize her wealthy counterpart?

Why can't authors imagine someone coming from poverty who doesn't feel the need to put on the mask of class privilege? Who doesn't wish they could perfectly imitate and perform an extremely limited view of sophistication? Who doesn't automatically see those with more privilege as being automatically better than themselves?

I'm just so freaking bored with this stock Poor Kid Character. I know there are people born in poverty who desperately wish to be accepted by a higher socioeconomic class, but there are plenty of us poor people who don't care about their acceptance of us. And I wish more authors knew that.

Projeto Identidade (Project Identity) is an exhibition in Rio De Janeiro, Brazil that is recreating pop culture images using people of color.

Bisexuals in media: "I don't really like labels, you know. I just date who I want. We don't have to call it anything."

Bisexuals in real life: "Hey, I'm bi! Have I mentioned that I'm bi? You have to understand, I am bisexual. Bi. I am bi. I love being bi. Did you know that I'm bi? Check out my bi pride shirt/poster/pin/shoes/tattoo. Isn't it awesome that I'm bi?"

I think I'm done with podcasts made by men

I love listening to podcasts while I work. Especially ones related to history, film, and literature.

And damn near every time I try listening to ones that are made by men, I end up hitting a point where I have to stop listening and switch to something else. There's always a point where they say something that is so ignorant, blatantly sexist, etc., that I just can't take it.

Often times it's the host buying into a very male-centered lens of interpreting whatever it is they're discussing. And, you know, that's kind of expected. They're men. They're viewing things as men. I get that and I'm usually willing to just roll my eyes and move on. But then it keeps happening, or gets much worse than what can be excused by simple ignorance. And then I can't just roll my eyes anymore. I just want to start yelling. And that's not a good energy to have while I'm trying to do my job. So I switch over to something else.

A good example of this happened today. I was listening to a podcast called History by Hollywood. I found it because I'm a huge fan of History Buffs on Youtube. Comparing historical fiction to the actual history is fascinating to me. I love learning about the real event and how it's translated into fiction. But...it got bad. Real fucking bad.

Now, I can't place all the blame on the creators of HbH. They had guests who do a podcast that I think is called Green Screen, which discusses films through an environmental lens. And I definitely will not be listening to that podcast after hearing them today.

The episode was about Gorillas in the Mist, which is biopic about Dr. Dian Fossey. If you don't know who Dian Fossey is, look her up. She was one of the group known as the Trimates, sometimes called Leakey's Angels. The group consisted of three women who were expert primatologists: Birute Galdikas, who studied orangutans; Jane Goodall, possibly the most well known of the three, who studied chimpanzees; and Fossey herself, who studied gorillas. I would love to write hundreds of pages about how awesome and unbelievably badass these women are/were. Seriously, learn about these women if you haven't already. They are amazing.

Anyway, the episode was about Dr. Fossey. My first issue is that, despite her PhD, they never once referred to her with her proper title. This is upsettingly common with women who have earned doctorates. Men never want to call them Doctor. It frustrates me to no end. But that's not nearly the worst of it. They went on to discuss how she became pregnant twice during her time in Rwanda. She chose to abort both pregnancies because she did not want pregnancy or motherhood to interfere with her work with the gorillas. One of the GS guys commented on this saying "I suppose her reasons could be considered valid." Um, excuse me? First of all, why do you think that you get to decide whether or not she had valid reasons? You don't. Second, of course her reasons are valid. Whatever a woman's reasons are for having an abortion are valid. She's the only one who gets to make that decision. So fuck right off with that. Sorry for getting a bit heated here, but that really pissed me off. There was no need for a comment like that. Especially since it makes it sound like he doesn't actually think her reasons are valid, but is scared of catching heat so tried to sugarcoat it.

Moving on, TW: rape, they also got into the fact that Dr. Fossey stated that she was repeatedly raped by soldiers in 1966 over the course of two weeks. People freaking love to claim that this is "disputed" or "exaggerated" and some go as far as to claim that it was an outright lie. Why? Because she originally claimed that she was treated well and then escorted to the border. Later on, she admitted that she was actually beaten and raped. I'm not going to delve too far into this because a) this post is already way longer than I intended, and b) I will get SO MAD. For the sake of brevity, I'm just going to say that I believe that she was raped, and that she initially lied because she was not ready for this information to become public. The hosts however...well, they'd like to claim that they didn't come down on either side of this "debate" and simply presented facts. But they totally don't think she was raped. They went on and on about all the reasons that she would have lied about being raped, such as political clout, publicity, propaganda, and other dumb reasons. But just couldn't seem to think of any reason that she would have lied about not being raped. Gotta love how men are always able to come up with fifty million reasons why women would make false accusations. It's absolutely not in any way revealing how they think of women.

They also got into the admittedly shitty things that Dr. Fossey did during her time in Rwanda. She wasn't perfect, and she did do some rather bad things. Her approach to conservation work was very much steeped in a colonialist mindset. I'm not about to deny that. And they did do a good job of explaining some of the more overlooked facts of poaching--most African poachers aren't cartoon villains who want to destroy nature. Many are farmers who are killing animals that threaten their crops and/or livestock. And then they get offered lots of money to do it. It's not a simple issue, and doesn't have a simple solution. I don't have a problem with them addressing this, and I'm glad that they did. However, and this is a pretty big HOWEVER, they also didn't discuss any of the great things she did. She saved a huge number of gorillas. She helped improve the Rwandan economy. She fought against multiple colonialist organizations trying to exploit Rwanda and it's wildlife. She helped to revolutionize the field of primatology. There's so much that we know now that we only know because of her. They also decided that the fact that she's a heavily revered and respected figure in Rwanda was worth a few sentences and that was it.

They referred to her as cold and unfeeling multiple times, largely due to her relationship with Bob Campbell, who was married when they met. Apparently the fact that she didn't stick with him for her whole life means that she's cold and uncaring. Ugh. I just fucking can't with this.

And the cherry on top, they made jokes about her murder. Yep. Dr. Fossey was horribly and brutally murdered with a machete in December of 1985. And they apparently think that's funny. Now, I know that some of the people who were close to Dr. Fossey have also made jokes regarding her death. However, there are several Grand Canyon-sized differences between someone using humor to cope with the death of someone they loved, and some assholes with a podcast making jokes about the brutal murder of a woman they never met. They also said that it doesn't matter who killed her or if they're ever caught. Which...no? It very much matters who snuck into this woman's home in the middle of the night and used a machete to brutally murder her. It very much matters if this person is caught. I can't even imagine trying to say that it doesn't matter if an actual murderer is ever caught.

All of this goes into a huge problem when it comes to studying history, especially the history of science. Women are always scrutinized more heavily, always criticized with more vitriol, and always have their enormous accomplishments either left out entirely or pushed to side. I almost never see male scientists given this treatment. Edison comes close, but he always gets quite a bit of "Yeah, he was awful, but let's not forget all the awesome things he did!" Women however get "Yeah, she did a few cool things for science, but let's not forget that she had an abortion!"

I just can't handle this shit anymore. If you managed to get all the way to the end of this wall of text (yay) please recommend me some good history/literature podcasts created by women. I will love you so much.

I swear to God I'm getting fucking ads on my keyboard

Using predictive text and it keeps suggesting titles for shit I've never heard of

Trying to text Zan and type the letter g and fucking swiftkey is immediately like "Ghosts of Tsushima" and I have no fucking clue what that is

I look it up cause I'm curious now and it's a goddamn game. It's some fucking video game that I don't know anything about, have never talked about before, have never typed out before, but the fucking keyboard is telling me about it

And then it happened with other shit

Movies, shows, other games that predictive text has no reason to assume I'll be talking about

I am aware that we live in an advertising saturated hellworld but I really don't need it rubbed in my face like this

Shout-out to the time I told my boss that I would close the department three hours early and go home if he kept trying to make me run it by myself

Why does Dragon Age 2 make me so very thirsty?!

Ugh, whatever. Just come join me on twitch and watch me drool

https://www.twitch.tv/therobichaud

If y'all look around hard enough on tumblr (or just happen to come across it with no effort whatsoever) you will find my old blogs.

If you do find these blogs, I want to say, loud and clear: I AM NOT THAT PERSON ANYMORE!!!!

I know that I said some awful, stupid shit. I fell for some dumbshit propaganda and came dangerously close to being radicalized. The anti-sjw stuff sucked me in hard.

And I am fucking ashamed of it. I wish I could hide it away and pretend it never happened. But it's better to own up to who I was. I like to think that I was better than a lot of the people in the anti-sjw crowd, and I was very willing to call out the worst ones. But that doesn't make my old views any better. It doesn't excuse them.

I sucked.

And I'm sorry.