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HAMILTON, OH—Despite being the beneficiary of numerous societal advantages and having faced little to no major adversity throughout his life, local man Travis Benton has spent the last four years squandering his white male privilege on a sales floor job at Best Buy, sources confirmed Tuesday. “You can get by with a regular HDMI cable, but if you’re looking at a length longer than 10 feet, I’d go with a gold-tipped one,” said the man dressed in a bright blue polo shirt and pin-on name tag as he continued to fritter away such innate life advantages as greater access to higher education, leniency from the justice system, and favorable treatment from other white males who lead and make hiring decisions at a disproportionately high number of American companies. “The AudioQuest gold-tip is actually the cable I use in my own home entertainment center and it provides excellent audio and video clarity, plus it comes with a full five-year warranty, unlike the 90-day warranty of a bargain brand. For your money, you’re not going to find a better cable.” At press time, the man born into the world’s most affluent and privileged socioeconomic group was spending his 15-minute break silently consuming a sleeve of Donettes purchased out of a vending machine.
I have to thank tumblr for occasionally putting such important concise definitions at my fingertips. So, let’s define what sex based oppression and where it comes from.
“As Friedrich Engels made clear, even before feminism’s First Wave, women were historically controlled because we are “a means of production”—without women, there are no heirs, and without heirs, no inherited property and wealth. Women’s reproductive capacity is why we were colonized as property, just as animals, countries, weapons and land was colonized. Otherwise, we wouldn’t have been important at all; any thing we could do (cooking, cleaning, sewing clothes) could have been done as well by men (and in the military, it was). The reason women were oppressed was to control our REPRODUCTIVE ABILITIES. This does not mean all women had these abilities, but women were assumed to have them until proven otherwise. (In many religious traditions, a woman’s “barren” status was the only acceptable reason for divorce.)
There can be no other logical, rational basis for women’s oppression; unless you think men were just being “mean” or something. No, it was for a very real, profit-centered reason. Men without families and heirs could not build empires (or even working farms) and without this centralized, religiously-sanctioned consolidation of the family, the state could not have evolved. The state then effectively empowered men to be women’s keepers until very very recently in human history.
THIS is the origin of women’s oppression.
So yes, women’s oppression is because of vaginas. Also: uteri, ovaries, ovum and menstrual cycles. That is just a fact. This is what got us consigned to the lower class, and our vulnerability during pregnancy and childbirth is historically what kept us weak and dependent on men. And this is how patriarchy evolved.
To write “vaginas” (or other female body-parts necessary for baby-making) out of the history of patriarchy and the evolution of the state, is flatly incorrect.
It is also anti-feminist, since this account effectively erases the one thing women were allowed to do, the one exception to our limitations: birthing and raising children. Anything women dared to do, had to be somehow connected to that. So, the first women artists and writers were women who painted their children’s portraits; sang their kids songs or made up stories and poems for them; knitted/crocheted/sewed their clothes, created pottery for the family to eat on, etc. Women’s creativity was harshly limited to domesticity like this, and yet, we found ways to express ourselves regardless. It is a story of SURVIVAL. To explain to our daughters (as Virginia Woolf did) why there is no female Shakespeare or Chaucer, is to go back to….. VAGINA. We were only allowed to have babies and failing that, teach or take care of some other woman’s babies.
Period.”
I apologize to my veteran blamers as this is 101 type stuff, but I like being able to link to posts that define a concept clearly. :)
[Source:“Gender is an Experience”]
This game has a long title, it is called Warhammer:Endtimes – Vermintide. Vermintide is a four player cooperative survival game, set in the Warhammer fantasy universe. People familiar with Valve’s Left4Dead series will be familiar with the play-style and challenges to be encountered in Vermintide.
The plot of the game resolves around the actions of the five playable heroes as they travel around the besieged city of Ubersreik. As this is a first person melee combat game all missions will revolve around you introducing the sharp end of your sword into the assorted Skaven rat beasts that serve as the enemies in Vermintide. Certainly, there is variation in theme, as there a missions where supplies are gathered or objectives are required to be destroyed, but make no mistake of where the focus lies in this game.
The focus of Vermintide is melee and the developer, FatShark, has done an excellent job of making rat smashing an exciting and challenging experience. Each character has a range of melee weapons that require different strategies adding a fair bit of depth to the game – for instance, choosing a two handed hammer versus a sword and shield combination will effect how the the player interacts with the levels.
The interaction with enemies is modelled very much on the Valve’s Left4Dead series with the Skaven hordes standing in for the zombie hordes that swarm the players. Being swarmed in game encourages the players to stick together and use the environment to their advantage to minimize the damage hordes can do. Facing down hordes would become stale quite quickly though, fortunately special classes of Skaven exist to only to wreck havoc and break apart tight knit groups of player characters.
- Skaven Gutter-Runners are agile, teleporting assassins that leap onto a player from medium distance. Assassins knock down their targets and require another player remove them.
- Skaven Globadiers or Gas-Rats throw area of effect poison clouds that break up the group.
- Skaven Ratling Gunners bring a mini-gun to the party and focus fire one of the members of the party.
- Skaven Packmasters bring are armed with a medieval man-catcher and will drag their victim away from the party.
- Skaven Rat Ogres – Huge, Durable, Uber-Rats that will punch or pound the players into submission.
The special Skaven force players to make quick tactical decisions as these specials are all high priority targets and always seem to show up with the party knee deep in regular Skaven.
Knee deep in regular Skaven and constant besieged by specials – this formula keeps the pressure high through most maps. The difficulty level in Vermintide is quite challenging. This is one of those games where skipping the ‘easy’ and ‘normal’ levels is not a good idea. Without a firm grasp of Vermintide’s blocking and dodging mechanics novice players quickly succumb to the ravages of the Skaven horde.
Vermintide can be a grind, as better weapons are awarded only at the end of a completed map. Wiping halfway through a map grants only a small pittance of raw materials, and this barrier to progression can be frustrating at times.
Optimization issues still plague Vermintide as this game will put a heavy load on your CPU and GPU. Scaling down the graphics helps, but much work still remains for Fatshark when it comes to streamlining their code.
I’ve had a great deal of fun with Vermintide and if you have a beefy CPU and some friends who like cooperative action I would heartily recommend this game.
So many rats…
How untruth becomes truth; a good bit of insight into how religion becomes codified into society.
Our corporate news media is very good at keeping inconvenient facts away from the public eye. A six minute video, by definition, cannot provide many startling revelations, but rather a starting point to become informed and hopefully take action.
Étude Op. 25, No. 11 is a study for developing stamina, dexterity, and technique – essential skills for any concert pianist. It begins with a piano introduction of the main melody. The first theme follows, consisting of tumultuous cascades of semiquaver-tuplets (sixteenth-note-tuplets) and a leaping figure for the left hand in the relative major, C major, which shortly segues into a repetition of the first theme. It finishes with a short development into a fortissimo coda, and ends with one final statement of the theme.
Clearing up some of the confusion about socialization and being ‘born that way’, Ruth Hubbard in this excerpt tackles the nature/nurture question head on. Read the whole article here.
“We can visualize this kind of interaction or transformation by thinking about the interplay between biological and cultural factors that affects the ways boys and girls grow up in our society. If a society puts half its children into short skirts and warns them not to move in ways that reveal their panties, while putting the other half into jeans and overalls and encouraging them to climb trees, play ball, and participate in other vigorous outdoor games; if later, during adolescence, the children who have been wearing trousers are urged to “eat like growing boys,” while the children in skirts are warned to watch their weight and not get fat; if the half in jeans runs around in sneakers or boots, while the half in skirts totters about on spike heels, then these two groups of people will be biologically as well as socially different. Their muscles will be different, as will their reflexes, posture, arms, legs and feet, hand-eye coordination, and so on. Similarly, people who spend eight hours a day in an office working at a typewriter or a visual display terminal will be biologically different from those who work on construction jobs. There is no way to sort the biological and social components that produce these differences.
We cannot sort nature from nurture when we confront group differences in societies in which people from different races, classes, and sexes do not have equal access to resources and power, and therefore live in different environments. Sex-typed generalizations, such as that men are heavier, taller, or stronger than women, obscure the diversity among women and among men and the extensive overlaps between them for all traits except those directly involved with procreation. Most women and men fall within the same range of heights, weights, and strengths, three variables that depend a great deal on how we have grown up and live. We all know that first-generation Americans, on average, are taller than their immigrant parents and that men who do physical labor, on average, are stronger than male college professors. But we forget to look for the obvious reasons for differences when confronted with assertions like “Men are stronger than women.” We should be asking: “Which men?“ and “What do they do?” There may be biologically based average differences between women and men, but these are interwoven with a host of social differences from which we cannot disentangle them.”
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Mystro
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