Things You Learn About Yourself While Writing (or, Dumbness for Everyone!) · 8:09pm Jan 23rd, 2014
So a funny thing that happened when I was writing chapter 2 of Twilight Sparkle vs the Equestrian Library Association:
I went to write the first scene where Twilight is actually interacting with patrons--the one with Davenport and an at-that-point unspecified pony--and I came to a realization. You see, Davenport was supposed to get into an argument with another male pony.
In fact, all of Twilight's most difficult patrons were--in my head, and in the rough mental sketches I had of the scenes that would take place (which did not include several scenes that would end up in the chapter but did include several scenes which are being saved for future chapters)--stallions.
I had not written a single female idiot into this story.
Now I'd like to say that this is because I've grown up with a lot of female friends and authority figures and that, from a pretty young age, actually, I would rather hang out with girls than boys, because the things other boys liked often seemed dumb to me. But that would be to remember with an eye towards explaining--plenty of things that girls enjoyed also seemed dumb to me, and even though I and some of my female friends braved the usual conversations about cooties and implications that we were doing scandalous things while sitting in a tree (as if I was ever brave enough to climb a tree!), my overall friend balance skewed male until I started spending time on the internet/came to college.
In all honesty, I think the problem is that our cultural view of "stupid women" is essentially an idea of women as shallow. Vain. Unable to see past the nearest mirror.
Whereas men are seen as stupid when they don't know things, or don't listen to reason, or when they believe things that are obviously erroneous (at least from the audience/author's point of view: see, making fun of religious fundamentalists), the implication that women are stupid is almost always a "social" stupidity. Men can be brilliant mathematicians or scientists or detectives and have zero social skills and be thought of as smart, but women who are the same are much harder to come by (I can come up with Temperance Brennan from Bones off the top of my head and that's it).
So any reluctance we have towards showing "stupid" women in the sense of being ignorant of politics or math or what-have-you isn't about respecting women per se: it's about not expecting women to be good at those things in the first place, and seeing them as stupid only or mainly when they fail in the areas that we still perceive as "Female" (that would be--ignorant of social relationships or selfish instead of being good care-givers). There's nothing funny about "the expected," so if you expect a group of people to not possess certain kinds of intelligence, there's no joke in having someone in that group not have that kind of intelligence. (Obviously the jokes WORK with women, but you may not BUILD the joke that way if you're going on your first instinct)
Now, note, I don't really claim to be a gender expert, just a person who likes to hold things up to the lens of my own logic and whatever knowledge I've absorbed from others. The situation on the whole is probably a lot more complicated, and it's not like there aren't ANY female characters who have the kind of stupidity I'm talking about. But I do think that the cultural image of a dumb man is sort of a redneck or a sitcom "dad" figure, i.e. fat, lazy, uneducated, and the cultural image of a dumb woman is a ditz or a bimbo.
So, having realized this, I decided I couldn't very well let that stand. Hence the birth of Joy Buzz, the mare who starts a fight with Davenport over a medical journal, having also been taken in by the earlier ruse about "reading sickness." I think it's also worth noting that the reason I was thinking of a stallion there was that there had to be this aggression between the characters, and in either case that sort of aggression between a male character and a female is viewed in a pretty negative light, but it's almost expected that men will fight with men and that women will pull each other's hair. But in a cartoon setting, we have the opportunity to remove any real peril from a "fight to the death over a book," so there's absolutely no reason it shouldn't be between a mare and a stallion, especially in a setting that does its best to challenge gender perceptions, allowing for both men and women running the gamut from weak to powerful (or, perhaps better, a setting whose characters are all powerful in a variety of ways and weak in others, regardless of gender).
(By the by, it was really hard to figure out what sort of a epithet Davenport was going to use on Joy Buzz having changed her gender in my head. I knew I wanted something with the feel of "Oh, look at this @**hole with all the books!" but not actually vulgar. And you can say "This joker" but it feels mostly male-gendered, and "turkey" wasn't quite right [and, suffice it to say, most insults that are female-gendered in common usage are pretty sexist in one way or another]. Finally I settled on "This clown" and thus Joy Buzz's appearance and name were born to match, though in retrospect I suppose her coat should have been like, white with red stripes or something to really sell it)
Likewise, I changed Covert Gardens from a stereotypical redneck stallion to a mare with a more deliberately anarchist streak, and added the unnamed mares who are not really sure what the book they're looking for is called, or who wrote it, but would very much like Twilight to find them a copy if it isn't too much trouble.
On the opposite side of things, I think that Split Pea's concern about his weight is a joke that could ONLY really work with a male character. He's not exactly made fun of for his self-image issues (and I hope you didn't take away from this that I was mocking him for being fat), but for the lack of self-awareness that could allow him to, after raising a whole fuss about his appearance, look at a picture of himself and say "huh, you know, that's not so bad." But I think the social stigma and forces on women to be concerned with their appearance would make a female character in the same boat more cruel than funny, at least without changing the joke around.
What I really wanted to be taken away from this, though, is that mostly the joke is on Twilight for COMPLETELY mishandling the situation. She thinks she's being reasonable but she's basically saying the exact wrong things to deal with these particular issues. Split Pea also takes her the wrong way in the extreme, but Twilight is, hopefully, the censured party here.
(And that's not to say you couldn't make some problematic accusations of that bit--I mean, it's very difficult if not impossible to make a fully non-problematic story anyway, there's just too many ways things can reinforce negativity to ever be "perfect." You just have to try your best and be willing to learn from your mistakes)
And, I dunno, part of me hopes that having a male character feel objectified and fetishized by Twilight might open some people's eyes to how the gender-flipped version goes on in the real world, but that may be hoping for a bit much out of my writing.
Anyway, the point is, even as someone who strives to do positive things in the world of gender issues, I was totally capable of picturing Ponyville's population (who needed to be stupider, more self-absorbed, and really prone to overreaction than they are typically in the series for this fic to work) as suddenly having WAY higher numbers of male characters because the jokes I wanted to tell wouldn't normally be told with women.
Which I think goes to show that the ability to examine one's own beliefs and prejudices is pretty freaking vital in today's world.
You know, take or leave the details of the social justice movement. I'm not someone who thinks that everything that comes out of SJ discourse is necessarily true or productive (or that anything that comes out of it is okay to dismiss or mock without thinking about it first). But that's why you need to have the ability to evaluate what others are saying, and ALSO what you're saying, even if it's only to yourself. That's just important to being a thoughtful, engaged person, whatever you decide to engage with.
((Sorry, that got a little PSA-y. Writing advice blog next time? I've got one partly written but it needs work, and I do want to get that right, so we'll see how it goes.))
I will be downright fascinated to see what kind of comments this blog post generates, although my money is on none whatsoever
Well now, that was interesting enough.
(Also, a comment. You owe me a dollar.
)
It's probably an unconcious decision from the way male and female roles have been treated on TV and movies for the last few decades. Feminism has decreed that any commercial, TV show, movie, or play that shows a male as being intelligent and wise paired up with an airheaded female is therefore Evil, and should be scourged from the face of the planet, as well as the creators turned into chopped ham. Famous comedy teams like Geoge Burns and Gracie Allen, or Lucy and Desi could not exist in modern society. I've caught myself doing the same thing in writing OCs or even main characters for my historical fantasy novel (Now 20 years in the making, and probably will be another 20). It takes effort to write an airhead or a really unpleasant female character, although I've done it twice to good effect (Laminia and Lady Bea Tress).
Say goodnight, Gracie.
Goodnight, Gracie.
Well played. Equality means we get the good and the bad. [Insert rant about how nobody cares that women are underrepresented as garbage truck drivers.] If mares can be world-saving geniuses, they can be hypochondriacs and anarchist nutters, too.
*dons asbestos long-johns*
Although, to be fair, if pony "intelligence" distribution is similar to humans, mares would tend to cluster more closely around the middle than stallions, who would have a greater proportion of both the unusually smart and the couldn't pour water out of a boot stupid. Given reproductive biology, it's genetically a better bet to roll the dice with the males and play it safe with the females, rather than adopt the opposite strategy.
1750562 With due respect, I think I'm going to have to stick to my initial assessment here. While there have definitely been moments in the feminist movement that haven't been as healthy as they might have been in the long-term (though perhaps necessary in the short term: see the "empowerment" ideology leading to some girls reading "you can be anything" as "you MUST be EVERYTHING"), I don't think it's fair to blame "we want women to be powerful, not airheaded, and we don't want powerful women to be automatically evil" as a sentiment for any reluctance towards having female characters who you laugh at. I mean, what's actually important is that you don't make characters out to be the representatives of whatever groups they're in--you can laugh at A woman as long as you aren't laughing at WOMEN, and ditto men, nonbinary folks, bees, and so on.
Some people will probably always take it the wrong way if you're laughing at a member of a marginalized group, but the trick there is to be laughing at the things that make that character a unique individual, not the things that make them a part of that group (or the perceived traits of that group). If you've genuinely done that then you're probably more progressive than not (at least as far as the one character goes), although you could also just avoid laughing at people in general if you don't want to offend anyone. Though I'm not sure it's possible to actually not offend anyone--and that's not to say that you shouldn't try to minimize as much as possible.
But I do think you may have missed the point of my post, which isn't that men or women can't be smart or stupid: it's that our view of what makes a woman stupid is very narrow, and it seems to be BECAUSE we, on some deep cultural level, still do not EXPECT women to be smart. My female friends in the hard sciences often experience a specific version of this, where people are surprised or unduly impressed at the idea of a female scientist or mathematician, when conventional wisdom is that women don't like math and have more interest in the humanities. It's part of the Enlightenment-era (? don't quote me on that, though the point is it's old but not as old as you think) idea of men as rational and logical ("smart" in the traditional sense) and women as irrational and emotional (and, if they are lucky, "smart" in the social sense... sometimes only "necessary" or "competent" however, at things like raising children and loving men).
And to be fair, the historical context of representations of women as being less intelligent than men and therefore needing to be "Taken care of" is... that it's all over the damn place and people have every right to be sick of it. Which isn't to say that that relationship should never exist, but again, it can't stand in for ALL women and ALL men. And when it's ubiquitous to the point where you have to go looking for intelligent and capable women in historical writings, any further entries in that "genre" of relationship feel very negative indeed. I'm not sure how well having dumb female characters would have gone over in ELA if the lead character were male.
So you're not really winning any points with me by lamenting that some classic styles of comedy are no longer appreciated. Blackface was once considered legitimate, too, when it is obviously, deeply racist. So likewise, I think accusing feminism of being responsible for a lack of dimwitted women in TV is to sort of blame exactly the wrong group (to say nothing of the fact that "feminism" represents a pretty broad spectrum of ideas--anyone saying "feminism is just the notion that women are people" is skipping over a LOT of the other baggage that comes with it, even if they mean well by saying as much).
I mean, most of modern feminism would say that the "fat, shlobby husband and pretty, competent wife" dynamic on sitcoms is actually pretty antifeminist, if only because it comes with an implied joke "Oh, look, in this CRAZY family, the MAN is useless and the WOMAN gets stuff done! How funny and not like reality!"
But really, modern mainstream feminism is about fighting prescribed gender roles in general, as being restrictive and harmful to both men and women (though historically causing more damage to women). People who say different are out of touch at best and deliberately misrepresenting feminism to hurt the cause at worst.
1750679 It's not so much a question of "you have to be able to depict women as both good and bad" to me--it's sort of more that you should always be laughing at a person's qualities/actions, not the perceived qualities of their race/sex/religion/group. And you should always be paying attention to what qualities you ARE laughing at. Henri Bergson's Theory of Laughter suggests that the act of laughing at something is always an attempt by society to censure that behavior--I think there's a legitimate case there that he's not entirely right, but he's right enough that I think it always bears paying attention to the qualities that you're making fun of.
(Which is why I love driving Twilight bonkers, because she's the character I most relate to, and I know at least some of the time when my attitudes/thought processes are crazy and deserve to be mocked)
Also I'd just in general be careful with statistics like that--there's lots of factors that determine a nebulous thing like "intelligence" (really, when I talk about stupidity as regards this fic I'm being pretty imprecise), and societal expectations of different groups play a big role in how they might end up developing etc. etc. Biological arguments for "why [this group of] humans are like this" have been used to defend some pretty awful practices across history (I mean, black slavery for one, also sexism, genocide... yeah), and if nothing else, they discourage people from thinking outside of those limitations. I mean I'm a nurturist or a "nature and nurture both inform each other in a complex process"-ist, rather, but I still just think that biological facts as applied to issues of gender are pretty dangerous and often kind of misleading.
I mean, yes, broadly speaking, there are diseases that only women can carry and only men can contract because of chromosomes and such, but any big conclusions one might draw about men being the genetically "riskier" bet as applied to things like intelligence just seem like they would be inherently problematic. Like, even if true, they would ultimately be harmful in almost any conversation.
Especially since, if we're being actually precise, there's a number of kinds of intelligence and most people excel at some number of them and maybe not so much at others--and intelligence is made up of many things like capacity to retain information vs. putting information together in new ways etc...
I say "stupid" without distinguishing because this is a silly comedy story, and I usually mean some combination of "gullible, obsessive, disinterested in or outright hostile towards intellectual pursuits like reading, and/or lacking social awareness/self awareness."
To be honest, speaking from personal experience when I worked in the service industry, I really didn't feel that Twilight did anything wrong. What she said was not really all that bad, and Split Peas reaction, while overblown, is true to life. (In the sense that some people will simply look for any negative implication in another's words and then react strongly to them.)
In the end, I was utterly sympathetic to Twilight in this instance, and generally hated Split Pea.
1750787
Indeed. Judge individuals as individuals, rather than by stereotypes about categories they may or may not fit in. Conversely, judge statistical groups by their statistical data, rather than the individual traits of prominent members of said group. Doing otherwise dooms you to failure.
Hence the quotation marks around "intelligence". However, given the limitations just listed, the prior abuse of statistics does not render them "bad". Data is amoral. And I'm speaking of biological sex here, not gender. Pointing out that a randomly-selected healthy adult woman will likely be shorter and have less upper body strength than a randomly-selected healthy adult male isn't anything-ism, it's just statistics. Telling a strong, tall woman that she shouldn't do X because women are shorter or have less body strength on average, however, is.
Here, I categorically disagree. If theory or ideology conflict with reality, that is not reality's problem. I can wish for cheap room-temperature superconductors and faster-than-light data transmission all I want, but if I try to build a device that requires both when neither are available, it will fail. Refusing to admit that is willful stupidity of the highest grade, especially if the relevant facts are available, but have been disregarded as "problematic". The same goes for any attempts to correct societal issues while ignoring "problematic" or "harmful" data.
I haven't yet read the new chapter (being sick totally blows
), but I think you make a pretty good point here. One thing that really bugs me about a lot of media is that men are expected to be stupid, or that women are always portrayed as in the right, all for the sake of "comedy". Japan seems to be especially bad, where almost every single comedy series has the male lead get beaten over the head for any perceived slight, regardless of whether he did anything. One series I recently watched (Ben-to, if you're interested) had a male character that could hold his own in a fight and had no problem brawling with women, but he still let himself get slapped around by one girl that every other character in the series notes is completely out of her right to do so, yet nobody does anything to stop her. Why? Because it's comedy, which means it needs a guy getting unnecessarily attacked by a girl. That kind of thing really gets under my skin with how utterly prevalent it is.
Sorry if this comes of as ramble-y or if it doesn't make as much sense as I'm trying to make. My thoughts are still kind of scattered from being sick.
1750980
Uh... data may be Amoral, but only in the abstract sense of theoretical perfect information. You have never seen data wild and free, untouched by human bias, because it would be prohibitively expensive to study everybody about everything and thus decisions are made about how to "simplify" the population to take statistics. For instance, almost all psychological data over the last 50 years taken from the pool of mostly white, middle to upper class, early twenties, western, college student volunteers. It is only recently that anyone ever even thought that maybe this group is not reflective of the world population.
As soon as you involve "intelligence" you hit the other tricky spot: interpretation of results. See, no one would really care if you said "Women in our test group of 100-200 individuals took closer to the average time to build a house out of match sticks", (Example, not actual test) but when you say "Women are more likely to have closer to average crafting ability" that sounds like a sweeping result. We cannot measure intelligence directly--we can't even define intelligence in a way everyone will agree on. So forgive me if I remain a tad skeptical of the "scientific" result.
Bringing Statistics into a conversation in the absence of context cannot be seen as the be all and end all of introducing "truth". Statistics are just Data that has been hand-picked to make a point. It is disingenuous and dangerous to presume that simply because it has some tie to reality that statistics are free of the coloring that Fed spent this blog post talking about.
1752902
Unless your objections about data and bias are restricted to a rather small subset of the social sciences, I'm afraid that I must reject your worldview. A meter is a meter, regardless of human bias. We can measure and analyze the average heights of males and females of any species, and make meaningful comparisons. This is not dependent on the biases of the human observer.
Since everyone is hung up on the term "intelligence", what about groups of tests that can measure "general abilities X Y and Z?" We can measure things like spatial reasoning and mathematical ability. We can make comparisons based on those results. And if "members of group A clustered around the median score for ability X, while group B had a wider distribution", then "members of group A are more likely to be average with ability X than group B" is a perfectly valid conclusion, provided you're clear on the terms A, B, and X.
And, no, "Statistics" are not "just Data that has been hand-picked to make a point." You've just described cherry-picked statistics, and when journals find out you've done stuff like that, they publicly retract your papers. It's universally considered to be intellectual dishonesty. To reject all statistics based on those few who misuse them is fallacious.
1753005 I believe that Lady Grey's point was that all data is affected by how you go about obtaining it. I mean, I'm not a hard sciences person, but isn't that built into quantum mechanics? You can't observe electrons without adding energy to the system.
(Not to mention that any attempt to measure intelligence is always going to be a pretty soft science)
What I would say though, is that even if we grant that statistics are roughly accurate, they at best reflect the world as it is, not as it could be. And there may be many things that we dislike about "the world as it is" that merit investigation and efforts to change.
So I may have misspoken to say that your assertion that the distribution of "intelligence" is closer to "average" for women and has more outliers for men is inherently unhelpful. What I actually mean to say is that your assertion that this is biologically motivated is inherently unhelpful, while not mentioning the possibility of social factors.
For instance, (and to use a slightly hot button issue) if one were to look at the rape statistics for western countries, and even quite a lot of non-western countries, and also observe that rape occurs in the animal kingdom, one might be led to conclude that rape is on some level "a thing which males are naturally predisposed towards." Now you may still think that rape is evil while believing that, but your attitude in your efforts to stop rape "men must fight their natural instincts towards viewing women as objects for sexual pleasure."
However, if we look at studies from outside of modern/western cultures, we can find that in cultures where women were/are held in extremely high esteem and possess more power relative to most cultures today, the incidence of rape is much, much less. This would seem to debunk the theory that there is any natural or biological impulse towards rape, and suggest instead that social factors and societal views of the roles of men and women have more impact on the incidence of rape.
So yes, it may be statistically accurate for modern America that women tend to have less muscle mass than men, but attributing such to biology, especially without viewing other, cultural factors that could have an impact, has been and will continue to be part of sexist discourse.
(I hope that is all relatively cogent, I meant to go into some other stuff but am pressed for time at the moment)
1753314
Re: the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, that's flat-out irrelevant on the macroscopic scale. I am a hard science person, on the engineering side rather than the theoretical. If we couldn't measure things accurately without messing them up, no modern technologies would function. Now, that doesn't strictly apply to some of the social sciences, but that's what controls, reproducibility, and multiple angles of attack are for.
As for "intelligence", rape, and muscle mass, you're coming off as someone who thinks these are strictly (or at least predominantly) cultural. I don't deny that culture has some impact on it, but I am convinced that there are significant biological factors involved, and that much of our modern society's efforts are aimed at "correcting" those factors. Specifically with rape, the statistical trends (when you compare apples to apples over historical time-frames) roughly mirror those of all violent crime. It isn't a special case.
For muscle mass specifically, I did not confine my sample size to modern America. A random sample using the global population, whether modern or historical, would yield the same result. There is most definitely a biological component involved. Even given the very best training, diets, etc. as seen with world-class athletes, the trend holds. Check out this table of records. Even correcting for age and body weight, the records for men are significantly higher than for women.
I submit that, when dealing with social issues where a relevant biological distinction between males and females has been shown to exist, failure to take those distinctions into consideration is a recipe for failure. If you want a certain percentage of female firefighters, but the physical abilities actually required to perform their duties are within [I'm making up numbers as an example] the capabilities of 5% of males and 1% of females, you're going to have a problem. That doesn't even touch on the nature/nurture debate around whether they'd even want the job.
1751198 Heh, I was wondering why I hadn't heard from you, you're usually like the first person to jump on anything new I put up. Hope you feel better, dude.
Like I said, I think that trend, although it seems to portray women as being "right" and men as being "wrong" is actually supportive of misogyny--the comedy is built around women being overly emotional, men being stupid (when they "should" be smart), and/or the idea that women are so non-threatening that their attempts at violence automatically become slapstick comedy. I mean it's not great for men either, but I really don't like to use the word patriarchy a lot because it makes people look at you funny and, frankly, I don't really find it that useful of a term when one could be a lot more precise about what specifically they mean (not to mention, to cast it in terms that don't make it sound to the uninitiated like you're accusing all men or all male authority figures of being evil).
I mean, you can get into a whole thing about the morality of slapstick violence in general--does it encourage violence, or belittle the consequences of violence? Or does it reinforce that violent actions do have consequences, and the joke is that the consequences are "exaggerated"/"inflated" to the point where we know that's not how the world works? Do children (seem to) find it more amusing than adults because it touches the part of their brain that's still figuring out how the physics of everyday life works? It's something I'd be curious to read more about. Surprisingly when I was trying to do a paper on cartoons I was having a hard time finding many literary analyses of this issue in particular, which seems odd to me because I would expect it to have been researched at least a little (given our conventional modern wisdom that the slapstick era of the Looney Toons was too violent for kids). But I may not have done the most thorough job checking, so.
I also find it interesting how quickly people turn to Japanese media when this stuff comes up, although it could be the circles that I run in and the fact that anime and manga (and certainly the shonen stuff that lead the boom in the states) have a lot of very open, very bad gender politics (I mean, I love Rurouni Kenshin and its female characters are okay but they are NEVER as capable as the men). But it's like, both the negative and the positive stuff in Japanese media, I can't help but feel should be taken in context. Japan is a pretty sexist country still, but its culture, especially as regards gender, is pretty different from America's. For instance, it doesn't have the dearth of intelligent media marketed towards girls and women that America does (making things like MLP stand out to the extent that it did). But it also has an even skeevier cult of celebrity surrounding idol culture, where girls who become these famous singers are practically stalked by some of their fans and get sent death threats if they're seen doing anything as "impure" as even having a boyfriend (not to mention being expected to then apologize to their fans for the indiscretion).
So I'm always dubious when people say things like "Magical girl shows are important because they're shows about how femininity can be powerful, a message that girls don't get otherwise," because that's true in AMERICA, but I'm not so sure about Japan (and ditto when people complain about Japanese media that upholds negative gender stereotypes, although it's probably easier to assume that some of that stuff applies cross-culturally). And Japanese media may be great and inspiring as an American consumer, but it won't be a product of our culture, and it won't (generally) reach people who aren't seeking it out, so it's not necessarily a good metric.
That said, to return to the issue of slapstic, there are definitely a few shows with more of a female audience in mind that I've seen where I got a little uncomfortable with the violence against women being played for laughs--Karekano (aka His and Her Circumstances) and Nodame Cantabile come to mind. I mean, it's bop-on-the-head level stuff, not like Winry cold-cocking Ed with her wrench, but my own cultural predisposition towards awareness of male-on-female domestic violence makes any violent action from a man to the woman he's in a relationship with seem kind of exaggerated. I think it's very possible that it's my problem, not the show's problem, though (although it really creeps me out in the live action version of Nodame Cantabile where it's actual people getting hit--they add some cartoony sounds and special effects, but still).
It's sort of interesting though, how it flips depending on the audience--in the case of a man getting beaten up for an accidental or on-purpose moment of sexual perversion, you're usually allied with his sense of befuddlement that it's been blown so out of proportion. The joke/intended viewer reaction becomes "what the hell, girl?!" I don't know if you quite get that the same with the shoujo/josei shows I just mentioned... they almost give the impression that the character actually does deserve it, usually for doing something dumb/being overly and inappropriately affectionate/being selfish and/or sneaky. I don't have a big enough sample size to really make any large comparisons there, though. And that doesn't necessarily mean that those shows take a negative view of women, they do seem to generally view comical violence as an appropriate response to those things.
But it is interesting that, on the one hand, you have the character who commits an accidental (usually sexual) indiscretion and is unjustly punished for it, and that character is almost always male, while on the other hand you have a character who is being dumb/silly/conniving/inappropriately affectionate (but not usually sexual) who is justly punished by violence. I think it may be a cultural double-standard issue rather than any one story's fault though.
1765464 That is a lot of (rather well-thought-out) words, but all I seem to be able to take away from it is that you noticed I hadn't commented. That... actually means quite a bit to me. Thank you.