I finally read that non-consensual touching piece in the NYT by a former dominatrix, so we could talk about that.
I had a teacher who confiscated a fake brick. He would throw it at you if you weren't paying attention.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-sri-lanka-rights-un-factbox/what-does-un-human-rights-resolution-mean-for-sri-lanka-idUSKBN2BG1D5
Interesting distribution.
April Fool's pranks became so tilted toward actually hurting people emotionally I think they're on the way out, and good riddance.
I just saw one where the "joke" was that a city would replace a parking garage with affordable housing! The joke being "ha ha, homeless people".
If this were a normal year, I might try to do some simple office prank, like the brownies one here if I was feeling very motivated. (If I had the same idea but was slightly less motivated, I guess I could just do the first part of that and buy a box of donuts for the second part instead of making brownies.) Since no one is working in person and I'm not feeling very good about work these days, who cares.
Last year I can only assume April Fool's was subsumed by gallows' humor of varying degrees of tastelessness about COVID. Before that I don't remember, but the usual Internet type of pranks would have seemed less fun since the Trump administration, when "fake news" took on a new meaning.
We were mostly cautioning each other it was a bad time for pranks last year - first month of lockdown.
Pranking and consent are intertwined concepts, just saying.
In Czech, practical jokes are called "Canadian jokes," and jeans are "Texas pants". So, master p[rankster cultural overlords bring us Canadian joke Texas pants
I got all excited because they discovered a collection of Emily Dickinson sestinas, and then it turned out to be a prank.
April Fools! I didn't really care either way.
8: In Native American folklore, the coyote is usually a prankster and a rapist/attempted rapist. Or so we learned in college.
The professor didn't really make the last part explicitly.
I don't remember if I've told this story here, but in 2015 my parents, lourdes' mom, and both our sisters were all in the middle of moving or had just moved, so I thought it would be a funny joke to tell them we were temporarily moving to Australia and ask if anyone had a place to store all our stuff. This email, written by me and concluding with "April Fools!", passed immediately into infamy: my parents mostly rolled with it, but lourdes' mom cried and her dad panicked, the entire "can you store our stuff?" punchline was missed, and we had to make calls to reassure people. Never again.
I'm not even sure Australia is real.
I wanted at one point to do an "I'm pregnant!" prank with my parents, and I wanted the punchline to be "...and I've narrowed the father down to three possibilities!!"
But I was not committed enough to the part to really pull it off and plan for how to stay in such a conversation. I think I attempted it but not convincingly.
I went for my first jab today and the women who stuck me opened with "we wanted to let you know that you have the option of having the shot in your rear end instead of your arm. The CDC is advising that people who receive the shot in the buttocks may feel less of a reaction to the vaccine."
They had me briefly contemplating the possibility of sticking my butt out the car window before letting on that they had been pulling that routine all day.
This is the only worthwhile April Fool's gag I've ever seen from a media outlet.
NPR once did a "slow internet" bit about how the new trend was for (essentially) artisanally hand-stretched dial up modems. I laughed.
9 deserves more appreciation than it is getting.
I don't know if people consider it a practical joke or what, but I am getting pretty goddamned sick of all the Bob Ross nonsense in every conceivable internet milieu. First of all, Bob Ross was hardly the most notable or important 1980's daytime broadcast TV phenomenon. Where are the PM Magazine memes? The film references to Newton's Apple, or even the People's Court? Which brings me to my other point, the reason people are so uncritically accepting of this cult of personality around Ross is that THEY WEREN'T THERE. All these late-Millennials with their happy little trees and shit, it's just a solipsistic internet fad that's based on nothing but itself, they don't know what it was like to lie on a hot summer afternoon couch in 1985, vainly trying to find something that could hold your interest long enough to get comfortable, and you finally acquiesce to watching Bob Ross, because you only get five (5) channels, plus that really fuzzy UHF one that only has like one good show a week, and because he's painting a winter cabin that day, and you can visualize yourself in a climate that does not so closely resemble Hell. You Senator, are no Bob Ross!
Yeah, the 80s were different. I used to watch a lot of Gunsmoke reruns.
I don't think any of these people would care that Bob Ross was not in fact a cultural phenomenon. Solipsistic internet fads based on nothing but themselves are an art form.
They used to be based on real things, like Mr. T eating your balls.
I genuinely liked Bob Ross when I was a child. I thought he was a genius and it was magic how perfect it looked as he went.
Game shows. Match Game, What's My Line (Richard Dawson!), Hollywood Squares, they're all on youtube
I watched a lot more Bob Ross than the People's Court. There was also some guy in Saturday's who drew/painted different animals. People (kids, mostly?)would send in their versions, and he would show them.
26: As a kid I heard one woman who said she found him soothing when she was home with sick kids.
the only worthwhile April Fool's gag I've ever seen from a media outlet.
Oldies but goodies...
Great Blue Hill eruption prank. Unfortunately, I can't find the actual video.
The Gaetz case takes a weird turn right out of "that thread":
Sources said Gaetz was part of a group of young male lawmakers who created a "game" to score their female sexual conquests, which granted "points" for various targets such as interns, staffers or other female colleagues in the state House. One of the targets of the scoring system was a group the lawmakers had heard were "virgins," according to a source. The scoring system by male Florida lawmakers was previously reported by the Miami Herald.
22 can only have been written by a psychopath.
It may be availability bias based on this type getting caught more often, but it sure feels like for a lot of abusers, it's not just about the physical gratification or the power trip, but also the risk-thrill of doing stupid shit they know has a chance of getting them caught.
I think it's availability bias. I think for others the game is to go undetected and get away with as much as possible over a lifetime. But for some, the risk of getting caught is the thrill that escalates.
Btw, we're camping at the moment. I do have reception but may or may not post. It will be a surprise.
I think there's a lot of truth to 35. Had a conversation last year that started "Did you hear what happened to X"? Where the answer was definitely going to be either plummeted to his death off a rock face or got fired for sexual harassment.
I agree that 35 describes a certain profile!
And I also liked the article in 1. Although the description of Cuddle Parties sounds well-designed but very not relaxing in any way.
I do love the idea - maybe for its irreverence - that we should be training boys to respond to "no" by saying "thank you for taking care of yourself".
First of all, I watched Bob Ross on every sick-day of my childhood and he was a goddamn national treasure.
Bob Ross is popular with the Millennials because of the epic livestream of the entire Bob Ross catalog that got shown on Twitch a few years back, which was a genuine cultural moment.
Bob Ross also basically invented ASMR, so of course he's a legend.
The article in 1 had me thinking a lot. Putting aside the sexual context, it's really hard to figure out how to navigate interactions with people who can't say no. My mother is a really extreme case of such a person, we were strictly trained as children that we had to answer the phone (not her) and we had to say "she's not available" (in exactly those words), because we couldn't lie and say she was out of the house (and if she was out of the house we weren't supposed to tell people that for safety) but we also couldn't say anything that indicated that she might be in the house or else she would feel obligated to come to the phone and then she wouldn't be able to get off the phone because she can't tell someone that she needs to go. This remains an issue, I was recently in a city 45 minutes from my parents house and wanted to see if she wanted to have dinner and my dad was busy so I was talking directly with my mom about logistics, and eventually my dad intervened to cancel the plans because my mom was stressed about driving but felt she couldn't say no (even though I genuinely was asking because I thought she wanted to meet up, not because I wanted to). I don't really have a good answer to how one is supposed to manage these kinds of interactions. It's really hard for me to accept that people really mean it when they say yes, and that they're not just saying yes because they feel like they have to.
Returning to the sexual context, the question of how one navigates the situation described in 1 as a heterosexual man is extremely fraught and I think is a key part of what the less bad ScottA was getting at when he accidentally became the main character on twitter. Yes the author says these weren't sexual assault, but it has a lot of overlap with the Dworkin "all sex is rape" perspective that ScottA was reading as a teenager, and if you're a sensitive boy who really reads an article like this one and takes it to heart, it's hard to figure out how you can navigate male desire in the world described in 1 in an ethical way.
33 is a good reminder of why naming a daughter "Chastity" will create a burden for her.
44 is a real thing. A man operating in good faith is really in a quandary with a woman who has been conditioned to avoid saying no. I'm not anywhere near as extreme as U's mom, but I have enough of an echo of it that makes it resonate.
Also media teaching us that kissing and other first contact will/must always happen spontaneously without talking about it at all.
Bringing together the threads, there's a really charming thing in ASMR videos where it's essentially ubiquitous that if the ASMRtist is going to touch your face (e.g. in a beard trimming video or a make-up video) they always verbally ask permission to touch your face, even though the whole thing is just a video and no one's actually touching you. I'm optimistic that a lot of the youngs are genuinely getting better at these kind of consent issues. But it still doesn't help if like in 1 you have someone who feels like they have to give verbal consent even in settings that are as non-coercive as possible.
44.1: there must be societies, somewhere in history or in the present day, with an elaborate system of etiquette around giving someone a ready out without making them say no.
I really am curious about this: "What models had I ever encountered for real, enthusiastic consent? Hardly any, until I found a queer community as an adult." Maybe she goes into more depth in the book, and she does immediately qualify it by saying "Even then, there were few people who seemed capable of the deep attention required to actually know what they wanted, especially when faced with the wants of someone else." It does seem like a real question with parenting: it's cruel to withhold physical affection from small children, but do you stop completely when the kid starts wriggling out of hugs and so on? I like to have some small ways of expressing affection and care that aren't verbal, but of course Elke never formally consented to this mother-child relationship. Obviously, if total inhibition becomes the default for physical contact, you end up with a different set of problems, and I'm not totally sure what the ideal scenario is beyond "always err on the side of not touching people, especially women, unless they solicit it somehow." Inhibition can be a ratchet.
The "disrupting the cuddle parties" passages were amazing, and so hard to read. Nightmare territory.
To some extent the answer is that although culture generally teaches women to have difficulty saying no, nonetheless individuals vary a lot on that character trait. So you want to know someone well enough in a non-sexual context to be able to see where they fall on this spectrum before asking for any kind of sexual consent. And if someone's a stranger then maybe you just need to wait for her to ask.
I was thinking more about total inhibition around casual touching, actually: the handshakes and friendly hugs and so on. Boundaries with that stuff are all over the place. ("I'm a hugger," aagghhh.)
51: My wife has mentioned how nice it's been for the last year to have hugs from acquaintances and customers shut down, without her having to rudely refuse or dodge. It's one of a few things that she'd like to carry forward (like masks when you're sniffly!), somehow.
Entire book reviewed. Okay, so Harlow's monkeys make an appearance.
My kids seek out much more physical affection from me than I did from my parents. Hawaii does this rather sweet thing where she comes up and just sorts of leans into me, shifting her weight onto me in a way that invites me to hold her. By 12 I was basically never touching my parents. Probably by 7 or 8, actually.
Was it the 80s fashion? I can't touch someone wearing that much pastel.
The shoulder pads and heavily sprayed hair were kind of into wire-monkey mother territory.
"Emotional labor" is eventually going to be used to describe every human interaction that isn't just people telling each other to fuck off.
It does seem like a real question with parenting: it's cruel to withhold physical affection from small children, but do you stop completely when the kid starts wriggling out of hugs and so on?
Yeah, this question does worry me. She's not quite 2 now, and I can't imagine how we would parent La Infanta at this stage under an 'affirmative consent for all touching' regime, but I do really want her to eventually internalize that idea.
I never had children, but I had a sibling 12 years younger and as far as I remember the trick 1. Let them go; 2.Wave goodbye extravagantly; 3. Pay attention to what they're doing while they're gone, because they'll probably want to talk about it when they come back if they're old enough; 4. Throw them in the air and catch them when they come back.