17% of cardiac surgeons are women, 17% of tenured professors are women. It just goes on and on. And isn’t that strange that that’s also the percentage of women in crowd scenes in movies? What if we’re actually training people to see that ratio as normal so that when you’re an adult, you don’t notice?
…We just heard a fascinating and disturbing study where they looked at the ratio of men and women in groups. And they found that if there’s 17% women, the men in the group think it’s 50-50. And if there’s 33% women, the men perceive that as there being more women in the room than men.
As many of you know, I recently purchased an Uruk-Hai scimitar.
Well let me tell you, it was quite the pragmatic purchase. It has endless uses in my morning routine.
Such as making the bed:
Making toast:
Getting things off high shelves:
Making coffee:
Reaching the remote when it’s too far away:
And assisting me when I ran out of toilet paper:
I don’t know how I survived life without it.
Every time I read that post about doing things out of spite I remember that C. S. Lewis put that fucking street lamp in Narnia because Tolkien once said that no good fantasy story would have a lamp in it.
i’m so tired of the AU where your soulmate’s name is on your wrist. i want my enemy’s name on my wrist. i wanna know who i’m going to have to physically fight eventually. turn on your fucking location
your enemy’s name on one wrist and your soulmate the another. no clue which is which. hope it’s not the same name on both wrists.
Pratchett went back to older throwaway jokes (like dwarves being apparently unisex) and used them as metaphors to discuss social change, racial assimilation, and other complex issues, while reexamining the species he’d thrown in at the margins of his world simply because they existed at the margins of every other fantasy universe. If goblins and orcs and trolls could think, then why were they always just there to be slaughtered by the heroes? And if the heroes slaughtered sentient beings en masse, how heroic exactly were they? It was a long overdue start on redressing issues long swept under the rug by a parade of Tolkien successors who never thought of anyone green and slimy as anything but a notch on the protagonist’s sword, and much of the urgency in Pratchett’s last few books seemed to be related to them. “There’s only one true evil in the world,” he said through his characters. “And that’s treating people like they were things.”
And in the last of his “grown-up” Discworld books, that idea is shouted with the ferocity of those who have only a few words left and want to make them count. Goblins are people. Golems are people. Dwarves are people, and they do not become any less people because they decide to go by the gender they know themselves to be instead of the one society forces on them. Even trains might be people, and you’ll never know one way or the other unless you ask them, because treating someone like they’re a person and not a thing should be your default. And the only people who cling to tradition at the expense of real people are sad, angry dwellers in the darkness who don’t even understand how pathetic they are, clutching and grasping at the things they remember without ever understanding that the world was never that simple to begin with. The future is bright, it is shining, and it belongs to everyone.
John Seavey, The Evolution of the Disc (via pornosophical)