Ferris Mx > Recent Status Updates

The mind will hit a wall and when I write, I chip away at it, that is why I write. I work on the wall to discover which parts have substance and significance ... I repeat and I vary the repetition, shamelessly ... in order to process and understand or to reinforce the bitterness and excitement. I summon up my parents ... We were never indifferent to each other. But they were frightened of me and so they should be.

After their liberating, conciliatory, and unifying conversation, I became the unexploded bomb. And in the years that followed, I noticed their growing unease towards me. I felt it, but didn't understand it, because, in contrast to my opponents, whose fate and mine were tied together, I didn't know the landscape in which I was living.

I always chose essay questions that were about debating an issue, the case for and against disarmament, etc, and in time I developed methods to trick my monitors, a coded language that allowed me to express what was in my heart and on my mind without them being able to detect it. But it was a long and circumstantial process and it took years to develop the method and to discover what was in my heart and on my mind.

I remembered what I had decided on my way to Helle's house days ago, my resolution to take my time with things I normally did quickly, to become more aware of what was happening and the effect it had on me. It was hard. ... But I didn't want to imagine it because what I imagined in advance never turned out the way I had hoped and had imagined; if I imagined it, the chances it might happen as I'd hoped would dwindle.

Soon, however, as early as Monday morning, my Saturday transgressions of beer drinking and tongue-kissing appeared in a different and more distressing light, how easily I had broken the commandments, and again I felt the fear of impending corruption which mum had succeeded in instilling in me, a fear that I had not been fearful enough when faced with danger, what was next for me, drugs and sudden death?

But later she would knock on my door, open it, astand in the doorway and accuse me of being the cause of all her worries...the next day the same thing would happen, hysteria and screaming and arguing, and she didn't understand that she fed what she was trying to prevent, that her fears and the promises she forced me to make homed in on and pointed to something I wanted deep down something I desired.

The reality was that I'd not acknowledged myself as a body for a long time, and doing so was a shock to me. Before Nim arrived in my life I hadn't exercised, I hadn't eaten properly. I'd allowed myself little sleep, even less touch. I'd been focused on chasing down things I couldn't hold: I craved status, admiration, control.

It's the curse of the straight man, don't you think? He wants a woman to offload all his problems onto, but he can't offer the same level of emotional support in return, so the relationship never starts, or else it ends badly.

It is almost unanimous in our governing bodies that people do not have the right to quality and affordable healthcare, clean water, excellent education, and a sustainable path into the future.

The father, according to Lifton, "is identified with social and moral authority," and those without the resources to take advantage of the freedom to create one's own sense of social and moral authority are vulnerable to making a substitution with a false father.

Hon, that's the patriarchy. You lost your own plot!

Meredith then, in her new position of undeserved power, sexually harasses Tom and "nearly rapes" him. It's an upsetting scene not because of its depiction of sexual assault but because of all the heavy breathing and slurping sounds.

How, a college-educated liberal will say, can a working-class man blame immigrants for his inability to find a job, rather than the real culprit, globalization/the billionaire class/and so forth?
Well, one could answer: How can a college-educated liberal blame personal failings for so-called toxic masculine behaviors, rather than the real culprit, globalization/etc.?

Not the same. Did you hit your head?

He wants to be better than his father, and not necessarily in the patriarchal way that each generation hopes that the one that follows will suffer less, have more, and build on what has already been established.
No, this is not the patriarchy, sorry.

The patriarchy as a system of institutions, rituals, and roles, has encouraged, even if it didn't celebrate, hard work, delayed gratification, and public service. Now material incentives like financial stability and property ownership and a sense of purpose have been destroyed and replaced.
This is the crux of the book's thesis, and it's weird. The "patriarchy" and late-stage capitalism aren't linked in that way.

(Wall Street) Carl's life is the patriarchal dream of a good life, but it's conjured by a man asleep to social changes. He'll find himself not respected and emulated but hated as a baby boomer by the coming generation for not leaving behind a bountiful enough inheritance.
WHAT

"If he is loyal to his company, the executives will pay him les than what he deserves and then they'll lay him off to hit some arbitrary number on a quarterly report no one reads."
Yes, investors are generally aware of financial results. What?

"Men's rights" organizations highlighted the disparity between the genders when it came to custody cases, although they left out that more than 90 percent of custody cases are decided with both parties consenting to the terms. The vast majority of mothers who leave a marriage with full custody do so because the father agreed.
-- Most settlements are decided according to how the lawyers advise the judge will decide.

[no-fault divorce], the conservative critics rightly believed, would make it even easier for men to abandon their families, leaving stay-at-home mothers alone to raise their children in diminished circumstances. Other parts of the feminist project (gay rights, desegregation, access to birth control and abortion, and so on) offended their sensibilities, which were often religious in nature.
UM, NO - also TERF vibes

Maybe men should have been reconsidering how to be husbands? Many didn't, as was made evident by how the number of hours married men spent performing domestic or childcare labor barely moved upward through the eighties and nineties. (About eleven hours a week in 1987, up from seven in 1970, according to a University of Maryland study.) - That's more than 50%, a lot! We don't know the womens' hours.

The kind of man Michael Douglas represented in films was not a bigot. ...But he also didn't seem to think that the feminist movement and the changes happening in the political and cultural reality of women had anything to do with him. And in that way, he was a kind of cinematic stand-in for a lot of men of the time: liberal, tolerant, and clueless.

Pat Robertson called the feminist campaign for the Equal Rights Amendment an "anti-family movement that encouraged women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians."
Me: Sign me up.

It was tricky because I was trying not to take any hits (getting away depended on me being able to look like a normal augmented human who had not been participating in any incredibly violent internecine corporate wars).

"Good", Bea says. "You've got to nip that sort of silliness in the bud, early."
"Have a lot of experience with trans women, do you?"
"Enough to know that if you give them an inch they'll steal ten years from themselves."

"Hey--" A woman stands beside her.
"Cold night."
Saoirse doesn't reply.
"What's your name?" The woman's gentle voice draws a pinch at her eyelids.
"Saoirse," the woman repeats. "Freedom."
"Catherine," and Saoirse feels endeared to her, her briskness, her directness.
Catherine checks her watch. "It's midnight," we've survived another day. Now that's something to celebrate. I'll walk with you."

The reds he couldn't stand, though. What did those rebels ever do, he'd say, except kill some cops and take revenge on innocent families, then run and hide in the hills while two or three hundred souls were slaughtered in retaliation in their villages alone? All to build their earthly paradise, but what kind of paradise is hell?

In order to have a future worth fighting for, you must have a past worth remembering.

Don't be two humiliated people together, don't be three ashamed people

A woman must stay alone for a long while until the hate men have for women has left her, and even longer until the jealousy women have for other women has left her, and longer still until the anger her children have for her has left her - until she is no longer a woman altered by teh resentment of men, women, and children, no longer what others have forced her to be.

At this time when Satya collapsed, Pooja's personality switched.
She would say, "Do we have a roof over our heads?"
I would say, "Yes."
"Do we have food on the table?"
"Yes."
"We are healthy?"
"Yes."
"Then?"
Once Pooja had this experience of being the stronger person, our marriage changed. With her strength, I am looking for another job."