Words by Frances Rowat
(1) I am exhausted. So much so it is not even funny.
(2) CanCon had some lovely panels today, including one on the portrayal of disability in specfic (modded by Derek Newman-Stille, who runs Speculating Canada, and involving Tanya Huff and Dominik Parisien). Did not properly tweet during that one, being distracted by discussion.
(3) Related to that last, am sharing Captain Awkward’s #514: Justifying Your Deviance From Ordinary In A Work Setting.
(4) More later!
Brain-controlled robotic arms? So last year. Literally.
Synthetic organ transplants? Two years ago. (Synthetic. Organs. No clones were harmed in the extraction of this windpipe!)
I watched the latest Star Trek movie, and I’m wondering why the hell I’m supposed to believe that after three hundred years of medical science (even if you argue it’s effectively only one hundred because of lost ground due to a bad 22nd C) someone getting non-instantaneously-fatally-shot is meant to kill them. Cooked, I could buy (and that’s from six years ago), but generically shot-splosioned? Please. Continue reading “I think we left the future behind some time ago.”
So on Friday, someone said something that I honestly thought was… uhm. Deeply deeply problematic and insulting. Actually two people said it.
And I didn’t say anything. I mean, I wasn’t thrilled about this, and I ended up swearing to a friend over it, and they made a pretty reasonable suggestion about the whole thing. Which I ended up taking, today.
But I didn’t think of it on my own, and more to the point, I didn’t say anything. A couple of acquaintances are saying stuff that–Jesus, I can’t even believe it, I didn’t think I knew anyone who was stupid and shrilly desperate and passive-aggressive and did I mention stupid enough to say that. And I know people who say some fairly stupid stuff. I don’t spend time around most of them.
And I didn’t say anything.
I feel like a coward. I suppose I am a coward, and I am currently going to work on not being nothing but a coward. For what it’s worth, which doesn’t feel like enough.
Today I apologized to the person they were talking in front of for not saying anything.
…yeah. Definitely not enough.
Was thinking of movie commentary in the car this morning, and of Return of the Living Dead, and something that’s been in my head on and off came to mind: Why isn’t there a word that defines what gender you’re attracted to, but doesn’t do so in relation to you?
I mean, the movie has a striptease scene in a graveyard, and part of the commentary (or possibly an interview I read once; regardless) is along the lines of “Yeah, we did this for the guys… If we’d known there would have been so many girls in the audience, we’d have put in eye candy for them too.”
Which is actually kind of nice to hear, but that’s a tangent–what I’m trying to address right now is that the group meeting the definition of “finds women attractive” is not the same as the group that meets the definition of “guys”. (And yes, I get that the movie is nearly thirty years old, I am perfectly aware of colloquial assumptions, I know there is a long habit of going with the “everyone is straight until proven otherwise” assumption, and I think it’s at best a bit of a lazy and horribly erasing habit but that is neither here nor there. So.)
So what is the word or term for people who are attracted to men or women? As humans we tend to label and categorize and articulate; I can’t believe that there hasn’t been a term a little less unwieldy than “straight women and gay men and bisexuals of either any or all genders” created yet. I doubt it’s a perfect term, because one of the other things we tend to do is simplify and generalize, but there has to be something.
And am I completely missing something? Christ knows it’s possible–this knapsack is invisible, but it does one hell of a job as a pair of blinders.
Thoughts?
The terms exist! They are androphile and gynophile.