Damek.

…on a feminist website. (Well, sort of, it’s more just etymology with a cultural dimension, but anyway.) I love her run-through of trying to explain “Damn” and “pardon my french” to a non-native speaker. And the concluding paragraphs:

…if there are words and phrases that I use, but haven’t actually thought about — idioms that may be so common that I don’t have a clue about their etymology, but which I find are undeniably rooted in discrimination and oppression when I use the “explain it to a non-native speaker” exercise above (such as the phrase: “I got gypped” — a slur against Romani people that I’m often surprised people don’t know about) — if I continue to use these words and people are offended by them and I say: “Hey, it’s common usage! I didn’t mean it like that” . . .

Well, if I do that, I think that what I’m really saying is:

“I want to use these phrases because they are an easy short-hand for me, and/or they make me sound hep, or edgy, or current — and I want that more than I want to effectively communicate and connect with you.”

Which, when I put it like that, sounds really shitty of me.

Unrelated, this post on “mansplaining” is also good – I’ve definitely been guilty of it.

Came across these posts on feminism and the men who are rejecting negative masculinity, but questioning (and eliciting good discussion) what the alternative is. If you’re against negative masculinity, great, but what’s a replacement concept of positive masculinity?

One of my favorite responses:

This is the same kind of argument I often hear from young women who, despite fully supporting gender equality, don’t want to be “labeled” as a feminist. Which makes me wonder: Do men really lack an alternative to “toxic masculinity”? Or is it just that even these gender-conscious youths still have trouble fully identifying themselves as feminist–balking, like too many women’s rights supporters, from a conception of themselves that should be empowering? Moreover, the concept of a “feminist masculinity” seems unnecessary, and if anything detrimental, to the goal of combating sexism and homophobia in that it continues to present men and their “masculinity” in opposition to women. What if everyone just worked toward being a decent (feminist) person?

This all reminds me of John Stuart Mill’s ideas of liberty, and critiques of them. The idea being that he has important things to say about liberty, but they’re negative philosophies: “Don’t do this, don’t do that,” that define freedom as against what it isn’t. But how do you have a positive idea of freedom as an empowering, enabling force? And again, my favorite answer is basically, true freedom requires each generation to constantly renew its freedom by finding the new limits and removing them. Some would call this progress… But the point is, this means positive freedom is the struggle itself to achieve freedom. And you do this by acting positively to remove limits, which may itself be a negatively-defined thing, but the actions of doing so are positive.

Thus, if you want to be a manly, masculine male man, but reject oppressive masculinity and male hegemony, the answer is: simply be a decent human being. If you need some sort of storybook archetypical role to fit yourself into, and you’re rejecting the ones presented to you, I’d say “simply human” is a pretty good alternative

Or as another person put it, “If all the problems are due to the fact that the sexist masculine stereotype is simply an act, then not acting is actually quite an accomplishment.”

Yup. Yet another part of the constant struggle to be authentic. And I’ll take “human” over “male” any day.

My own costume idea is a secret. And lame. But these Halowe’en costume ideas from Feministing are pretty cool.

Kanye West

Need: These, microphone, and a willingness to repeatedly make the “Imma let you finish” joke.
Related ideas: Taylor Swift (Couple costume!)