But if I saw her running I wouldn't have gotten the political message.
Yes. I'd assume the lines at the portable toilets were too long and she was trying to make a certain time.
Anyway, googling "Marathon runner poop" is the sort of thing you don't want to do right before lunch.
2 was what I was about to do before I realized it's a bad idea. Pooping on the run has a long and distinguished history, so why not menstruate freely as well.
Like REO Speedwagon sang, "You're under the gun so you poop on the run."
Both the poo and blood scenarios mostly just make me think that running 26 miles is a terrible idea.
Well, because in the rest of life, people menstruate while walking, exercising, swimming, etc and there a well-established convenient way to do so. People less often poop during those activities.
5: Poop and blood clean up quickly. Tendons are the real problem.
But if I saw her running I wouldn't have gotten the political message.
For the tl;dr among us, what is the political message?
We've had this conversation before.
10: As I ran, I thought to myself about how women and men have both been effectively socialized to pretend periods don't exist. By establishing a norm of period-shaming, [male-preferring] societies effectively prevent the ability to bond over an experience that 50% of us in the human population share monthly. By making it difficult to speak about, we don't have language to express pain in the workplace, and we don't acknowledge differences between women and men that must be recognized and established as acceptable norms. Because it is all kept quiet, women are socialized not to complain or talk about their own bodily functions, since no one can see it happening. And if you can't see it, it's probably "not a big deal." Why is this an important issue? Because THIS is happening, right now.
13 to 11.
The math is off on 12. In any given month, well below 50% of the human population has a period.
I don't menstruate, but I certainly experience it.
By that standard, you've may have also run a marathon.
To OP.1, wasn't there another very similar story from someone who was trying to get a writing-for-hire business started, and with a male name immediately got much more business? Can't track it down.
You know, I will never menstruate again. I'm practically Donald Trump.
To OP. 1 -- shouldn't agents/editors be suspicious about writers named "George"? There's a tradition.
18: That ground was already covered in the opening sequence of Remington Steele.
You know, I will never menstruate again. I'm practically Donald Trump.
I think there's more to it than that. At least I hope there is.
Actually, I've barely menstruated for the past seven years. But who's counting.
26: We were hoping the math professor could.
The interior angles of a pentagon sum to 540 degrees. I think.
Regular pentagons can't tile the plane, but many irregular pentagons can, which really makes you think, what's so great about regularity?
On the other hand, what's so great about tiling the plane?
It's a stumper.
If you confine an angle somewhere it can't escape, you might say that you have "pent a gon".
These pentagon references evoke Lewis Mumford for me:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Myth_of_the_Machine
I thought the Remington Steele reference too; I'm glad Moby used it. Such a familiar trope, going back a good long way.
Whenever five apocalyptic Christians link arms, that's a repentagon.
what's so great about regularity?
It's not that regularity per se is so great, but rather that constipation can be quite unpleasant.
On the other hand, what's so great about tiling the plane?
First up against the wall.
Regular pentagons can't tile the plane, but many irregular pentagons can
They found another one the other day. That can.
38 me. It hasn't lost my sig for a while.
I will never menstruate again.
Not with that defeatist attitude you won't. I believe in you, heebie!
38/9: I know, there was a post about it.
40: If you run a marathon with me, I promise I won't use a tampon.
Can you get Penrose bathroom tiles? I've always sort of wanted an aperiodic floor.
My grad advisor has exactly that, in his bathroom.
I was thinking of the what do you call them? Kite and dart tiles?
43: I just heard that the Oxford math dept got them. But it was quite difficult: it requires more precision in manufacturing and laying the tile than simpler filings require, and it's a lot of work for the workers to constantly check that they're doing it correctly. On just a bathroom the latter is probably less of a big deal, but the former is a problem because you're not ordering very many tiles so it's not clear that it's worth it to anyone.
46: I've considered doing some Penrose knitting but haven't tried yet.
The pinwheel ones look like they might be easier to buy since they're such a simple shape to manufacture.
Running 26.2 miles with a wad of cotton material wedged between my legs just seemed so absurd. Plus they say chaffing is a real thing.
I don't have experience menstruating obviously but I would have thought chaffing would be a serious concern either way. I mean, I've got a lot of experience with ball sweat and chaffing can certainly be a problem there.
I see that for this new pentagon all 5 angles are multiples of 15 degrees (60, 135, 105, 90, 150). Are mathematicians worldwide slapping their heads that they didn't write a simple computer program to test tiling-ness of all pentagons with promising properties like that?
Using a pad would indeed be a terrible idea. Most people would use a tampon.
My guess is that she has edited out the logistics of her decision - that it was actually "I'll be on my heaviest day, and so I would definitely need to change my tampon halfway through, and there won't be any easy way to do so, and I don't want to break my mental concentration...really, fuck it."
Plus they say chaffing is a real thing.
It's the wheating you have to really watch out for.
I don't have experience menstruating obviously
Urple only menstruates surreptitiously.
Of courfe chaffing if a real thing.
I've always sort of wanted an aperiodic floor.
What happens if you put a periodic table on an aperiodic floor?
I can't help reading this thread as outtakes from Wittgenstein's Mistress.
Lots of people run marathons on their aperiods.
It'f fpelled "chaffeing", you filly fod.
Chaffing, on the other hand, is a perfectly good if slightly outdated synonym for "taking the piss".
We freeze the piss and then mail it packed in dry ice.
I've never understood why urine theft is so pervasive on Knifecrime Island.
The bobcat farmers we visited are one of the largest suppliers of bobcat and coyote urine in North America.
They make a lot of money reselling it later as whiskey.
The tricky part is training the bobcats to pee in a jar.
Presumably to keep unwanted animals off your land. British zoos sell wolf shit for this, I suppose American zoos do too.
It doesn't actually work, but Big Zoo doesn't want you to know that.
Presumably to keep unwanted animals off your land
I think it's for hunting, but I don't really know.
69: I will always remember your personal info, chris y!
(sung unsuccessfully to the tune of "I will always love you")
In antiquity they used to throw camel shit at war elephants in battle, which for some reason made them panic.
The submitting under a male name story is *extremely* depressing, especially as I am sending my novel around to agents and publishing houses currently; also since I've been having a rough patch lately -- I did sell a story (finally!) last night, but up to then it had been almost a year between sales.
And meanwhile in the SF we've been having the latest Unpleasantness with the Puppies, so I've been seeing what, exactly, *is* getting published by (some) of the men in the field.
Which, you know, fuck.
Let's all write a novel and run a marathon.
Have you considered submitting your novel to publishing houses under the pseudonym "Theodore Beale"?
I am 100% seriously going to send out any novel I write under a male name, unless I think it is bombproof genius (which is vanishingly unlikely). I have never in my adult life expected anything except the outcome described in that article, and I'm surprised that so many other women still do. Okay relurking.
It's bizarre because the market for novels is almost entirely female. Maybe not in SF.
Certainly not novels about the tech hero who saves humanity from AI-based extinction.
MHPH, you made me snort with laughter, here alone in the office.
I sometimes wonder if I could write a whole novel. Then I remember that lately I lack the focus to read a whole novel.
I could totally write a novel, if it was nonfiction and the plot was my life and it came out in weekly installments and wasn't expected to be particularly fascinating.
77 expresses my opinion. I feel more sympathy now toward Jennifer Weiner and her "Woe is me, the incredibly popular novelist, because I am not taken seriously by unspecified people" campaign.
Roberto: Yeah, but publishing decisions seem to have strangely little to do with readers as such. They're always there, churning around in a state of Brownian motion through the stacks, occasionally pushed by some overwhelming wave of genre or cultural change. There is a more significant model reader who wants certain things from male authors and other things from female authors, to a large extent regardless of the reader's own gender. Publishers will buy into that model reader schema until doomsday. In a way it hasn't evolved with feminism because that female-readership dynamic has always been part of the history of the novel in English.
It's not easy to puzzle out the details, though, and I'm not going to drive myself nuts trying to assign percent agency to players. Young male writers want to be Joyce. Young female writers also want to be Joyce, but know they'll fail in the eyes of the world no matter what. Their male peers will fail too; yet it's a different failure. Everyone knows how it works. Jesus I'm calm today.
In the SF/F, we have other complications, though opinion are divided on just what those complications are.
The biggest problem -- if you want to know what *I* think -- is that most publishing houses and most publishers were raised in a patriarchy. So, you know, they *know* that most readers (yes, even in the SF/F world) are women and that maybe they'd do better if they considered that when they looked at what they bought and what they published, and YET.
Year after year, you get the Big Six publishers and the Big Three magazines telling us that just not enough women submit to them, and not enough writers of color submit to them, and not enough LGBTQ writers submit to them, so whatever can they do?
They can only publish what they see, after all! This is the sole and only cause of the disparity in publishing!
And when you show them studies like this -- that the same story or pitch submitted under a man's name and under a woman's name gets a very different reaction -- many of them won't believe it. Because they're not sexist. (Or racist, or homophobic, or whatever.)
Our press, OTOH, Crossed Genres Press, has made it a mission to seek out women writers, and writers of color, and LGBTQ writers. Our editors hunt out these writers and encourage them to submit. Oddly enough, we see tons of excellent stories -- some from white straight cismen, sure, we've got nothing against straight white guys so long as y'all can write -- but plenty from other people too.
My point, and I do have one, is that the world can change. But not unless writers and editors and publishers make it change.
I just heard that the Oxford math dept got them.
It's a very nice building, and there's a lovely film of the Penrose tiles being laid:
https://www.maths.ox.ac.uk/about-us/our-building
The old Maths Institute was horribly ugly, but fortunately I didn't have to go there much (because my lectures were (mostly?) in the University Museum. And I didn't go to many lectures). I'm very envious of the new place.
86: Your press? Really? The SF class/group* that I run just read Long Hidden. The group as a whole was not quite as patient with the book as I would have liked. I think people probably liked the Tananarive Due story best, but my personal favorite was "Ffydd"/the one with the conscientious objectors and vampires.
*More structured than a reading group with more prep by me; looser than a real class and I don't have that much authority. Perpetually contending ideologies to the point where it's exhausting and I long to be the kind of teacher who shuts the discussion right down.