Avoid Sarcasm. Altogether.

[rm]

The above mantra in this artcile (which is actually interestng and important) is making me howl with inappropriate laughter. Like in a bad crack!fic sort of way. I think the dust from this moving thing is getting to me.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/30/magazine/30feminism.html

Also the girl? Truly fancies the sarcasm. But perhaps that's why she's not a boy.

In truth, I have long and artful things to say about this piece, but that's for another time. I'm a bit exhausted right now and the reliaities it's presenting are pissing me off.

Comments

[feyandstrange.livejournal.com]

Oh, I'm so glad I got to leave the work force and become dependent on a man! Good thing I lost ten IQ points in the process, too! Now I know I'm more attractive! And to think I thought that big, important career job was meaningful somehow! Gosh, I bet other girls are so jealous that I get to be a stay-at-home artist now. Well, sorry, girls, not everybody gets to become disabled!

...funny, I've been using sarcasm as an intelligence test for years. Any date who can't see past the dumb-blonde act the first time I whip it out gets seriously downgraded. Anybody who doesn't get my sense of humor, or instead of passing back the witty conversation, gives a girlish laugh and says "Oh, you're so smart," in that vapid tone - so out of there.

I admit to being old-fashioned about the paying thing, but in a different way: whoever asks the other out is offering to pay, last I checked. By the second or third date, sure, it's time to split some checks.

Now I want to tell the boyfriend he only has "boy money". Except that would be mean right now since he's job-hunting his ass off to support me. I just want to say that to someone, though. Wish I'd done that when I still had the $50K Microsoft job. "Allow me. Please. You only have Apple money."

And I forgot to mention earlier: you (both) looked lovely at the dance in those pictures! And yes, there was a certain air of the Yule Ball at Hogwarts circa Napoleon about you. (Oh, God, no, no Regency-era Rowling fic, must beat that idea to death with stick right now.)

[saltbox.livejournal.com]

Hunh, the article makes it seem like I've totally lucked out, which I feel like I have, but not for the reasons set forth in the article. I feel like I've lucked out because I've met someone with whom I have an insane amount in common---including not only similar politics and outlooks on life, but also very specific interests. But the article makes it seem like I've lucked out by finding a boy (not that I was looking for one, mind you) who can "tolerate" that I make more than him, have a successful career teaching (well for the time being) at a top school, pay for stuff more often than he, barely communicate in anything other than sarcasm, would never consider adopting someone else's surname, and spend both my free time and my work time worrying about the Supreme Court.

That said, I actually have no idea if that's what it's "really like out there". I've always made my own niche, datingwise and socialwise, so I never find out about these things through experience. Is this what's up with all those people I avoid? Hunh.

[heron61.livejournal.com]

Dear gods, what a deeply creepy article. I'd never heard to term "girl money" before, and hope to never again, and I was horrified to learn that:

"A Harvard economics professor, Claudia Goldin, did a study last year that found that 44 percent of women in the Harvard class of 1980 who married within 10 years of graduation kept their birth names, while in the class of '90 it was down to 32 percent. In 1990, 23 percent of college-educated women kept their own names after marriage, while a decade later the number had fallen to 17 percent."

It's not unexpected that this nonsense is getting worse in these dark days of religious right idiocy and "covenant marriages" (shudder), but I still remain baffled at the idea that most men would not be looking for confident women who are their intellectual equals and not (as it seems) women who are (or must at least pretend to be) toys, infantilized chattel, or glorified servants and that clearly most women not will not only put up with that sickness, many of them actively embrace it. I am once again overjoyed that I am surrounded by freaks, queers, trannys, and eccentrics who mostly have no part of such things. After reading that article, I feel like I need to go and scrub my brain - ugh! For the first time in two decades, I feel the need to go and read some books by Gloria Steinem or Robin Morgan.

[ladyofthelog.livejournal.com]

Scary scary scary. I so do not operate on the same plane as these people in so many levels.

I have a bad habit of not letting people pay for ANYTHING. Yay for feminist liberation! This leads to entertaining discussions with the boy, who is From The South, about who gets to pick up the check.