The sexualization of little Asian girls, especially Japanese, Korean, and Thai, is honestly so revolting. These girls can’t even wear their school uniform without being turned into some Western dude’s Lolita fetish. And you know what, “fanservice” anime where the girls are tiny and innocent but still highly sexualized doesn’t help the problem. It’s not “just a cartoon” because media doesn’t exist in a bubble. It contributes to the harm of real little girls because Western men go overseas to rape young girls who are being trafficked precisely because of the prevalence of this fetish through media. Stop the sexualization of innocence, school, and youth and let these girls have a childhood without gross adult men getting off to them.
“I think of too many of my white graduate students at Harvard who somehow feel perfectly comfortable calling me by my first name, but feel reluctant to refer to my white male colleagues– even those junior to me– in the same way. And I think about how my black students almost always refer to me as ‘Professor Lawrence-Lightfoot’ even when I have known them a long time and urge them to be less formal. The title indicates their respect for me, but also their own feelings of self-respect, that part of them that gets mirrored in my eyes. And besides, if their mothers or grandmothers heard them call me by my first name, they would be embarrassed; they would think that they had not raised their children right. So I completely understand when one of them says to me (n response to my request that he call me Sara after we have worked together for years), ‘I’m sorry, that is not in my repertoire, Professor Lawrence-Lightfoot.’
These private daily encounters with white and black students are punctuated by public moments– too numerous to recall– when the humiliation of being called by my first name seems to demand an explicit response; when I feel I must react to the assault not only for my own self-protection, but also in order to teach a lesson on respectful behavior. I regard these public encounters as ‘teachable moments.’ I make a choice to respond to them; a choice that I know will both help to shield me and render me more vulnerable.
A few years ago I was asked to speak at a conference at the University of Chicago, a meeting for social scientists and their graduate students about race, class, gender, and school achievement. The other speaker was Professor James Coleman, a distinguished sociologist, a white man several years my senior who was well known and highly regarded for his large-scale statistical studies on educational achievement. Both of us came to the conference well prepared and eager to convey our work to fellow scholars. The language of the occasion was full of the current rhetoric of our disciplines; focused, serious, sometimes esoteric and opaque. I say all this to indicate that there was nothing playful or casual about either of our presentations. Neither of us said anything that suggested informality or frivolity.
When we had finished speaking, the moderator opened the floor for questions, and several hands shot up in the air. The first to speak was a middle-aged white man who identified himself as an advanced graduate student finishing his training at another prestigious university. He began, ‘I would like to address my question to both Professor Coleman and Sara…’ I could feel my heart racing, then my mind go blank. In fact, I could not even hear his question after he delivered the opening phrase. I saw there having a conversation with myself, feeling the same rage that my parents must have felt sixty years earlier in Jackson, Mississippi. How can this be? How can this guy call him ‘Professor’ and me ‘Sara’? And he has no clue about what he has done, how he has injured me. I’m not even sure that the others in the audience have heard what he just said; whether they’ve recognized the asymmetry, the assault. Somehow, I must have indicated to Jim Coleman (we were friends and colleagues) that I wanted to respond first. He must have seen the panic in my eyes and my shivering body. I heard my voice say very slowly, very clearly, ‘Because of the strange way you addressed both of us, “Professor Coleman and Sara,” I am not able to respond to your question. As a matter of fact,’ I say, leaning into the microphone, holding onto it for dear life, ‘I couldn’t even hear your question.’ The room was absolutely still. I was not sure that there were any people out there who had any idea how I was feeling, any idea that I was on fire. But my voice must have conveyed my pain, even if the cause was obscure to them. ‘Would you please repeat your question?’ I asked the man, who had by now slid halfway down his seat, and whose face revealed a mixture of pain and defiance. ‘And this time, would you ask it in a way that I will be able to hear it.’ …My ancestors were speaking, reminding me of my responsibility to teach this lesson of respect; reminding me that I deserved to be respected.”
– Prof. Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot, Respect: An Exploration, Chapter 2
you ever see girls that are so pretty that you don’t know what to do with yourself
i made a pretty girl laugh w/a silly joke and i got so flustered that i apologized
this pretty girl told me my hair was cute and touched it briefly and I couldn’t form full sentences for a solid 10 minutes.
at a football game a pretty girl told me i was cute and she also called me kiddo and i couldnt play my instrument right for the rest of the night
every girl I see is pretty, I am in a constant state of paralysis
this pretty girl offered to teach me how to longboard and when she was teaching me how to balance she put her hands on my hips and I felt my soul leave my body
one time a pretty girl called me “gorgeous” and I was so shocked and flustered that I literally cried right in front of her
today a pretty girl walked me out of class and i was surprised when she kept walking even though we reached her bus stop and i asked her where she was heading and she said “oh i just wanted to walk you to wherever you’re going” and we both blushed
at work this summer there was a pretty girl who came in multiple times a week and every single day she showed up I would lose the ability to form coherent sentences for at least ten minutes
A pretty cashier at the campus store told me I was pretty and I got so flustered that when I went back to my room I had to lay down for half an hour and my roommate was starting to get concerned.
There’s a REALLY pretty girl in my band class and she’s three chairs away from me and every time I even glance up at her she looks back and smiles at me and I forget how to read music
I thirst followed a pretty girl on here and now we’re engaged
A pretty waitress called me honey and I stopped breathing
History geek note: Now I’m imagining an editorial cartoon from 1615 comparing “Ye Moderne Bible Reading Woman” with the good, old-fashioned women from 1315 who didn’t insist on learning to read the bible for themselves but were content to have a learned Man of the Church interpret it for them. I’d try drawing it myself if I could draw anything other then stick figures.
The editorial cartoon from 1615 you imagine actually exists! Or at least, something a lot like it.
This is an illustration from the 1600s. First picture shows the good old days, when people carried around lances to stab people with and we actually read literature and wore spurred boots. The second picture is THE DEGENERATE PRESENT, where all these 1600s millennials wear RIBBONS and play DICE and SMOKE and DRINK STUFF FROM SNAKE FLAGONS. Damn 1600s hipsters. It was better when I was your age.
Humanity, never change.
Look! Silvermarmoset posted an editorial cartoon from the 1600s, providing more proof that no matter what century you were born into you always just missed the good old days.
Reblogging this, it’s amazing.
Early 20th century British conservative cartoonist WK Haselden ran a whole series like this in 1920, where “Maud of the Eighties” (1880s, that is; sturdy, Victorian times) was faced with modern mores generally or “Gladys of Today” specifically:
I’m sure this was a hilarious, cutting insight at the time:
By the way, Haselden himself was all of eight years old in 1880. “Born in the wrong time,” I suppose they say.
It’s hard to say how much outright disapproval Haselden was expressing when you read, for example, the below – but as I have pointed out before, things like this that read to us today as awesome were usually intended to be read as unseemly and absurd at the time.
This is a more overt example of the same sentiment:
And before giving him too much credit, I hasten to add he was a staunch anti-suffragist:
Haselden did at least seem to recognize the ironies implicit in “good ol’ days” talk:
Whatever his level of self-awareness, he seems to have reached the conclusion that the chattering class will always be thus:
Indeed, in 1921 he anticipated this entire post!
There is a chance I originally reblogged this partially in the hope David would make amazing hay of it and I WAS NOT DISAPPOINTED
And speaking of gross bros thinking of nerd girls like fucking unicorns…
I was actually talking to a female client once about cannon-fannon and how much I love listening to her talk comics, and had a male client interupt us to tell me he has never met a chick that is into comics before, he’s never even heard of a girl being into comics before, and he has always wanted a nerdy girlfriend and that i absolutely MUST give him her number.
I actually had to explain to him that I wasn’t joking when I said she was out of his league. Yes, she is incredible, she is beautiful, she is intelligent, successful, highly knowledgeable and enthusiastic about comics, and she’s also not even going to look twice at you because literally all you got is that she fulfills a fantasy of yours.
Yes bro i get it, she’s your ideal girl. Trust me, she’s a lot of people’s ideal girl. And you’re not even on her radar. You’re not special because you’re into comics. She has a very wide range of potential partners to choose from and ‘never having met a nerdy girl before’ isn’t a good character trait, because it means you know zero women. Or zero women have trusted your creepy ass with the knowledge that they are into comics.
The most concerning part of that entire conversation was his complete inability to grasp the concept that she wouldn’t date him and his insistence that she would.
He insisted that I give her name/number/fb/actually call her and ask her to come to the studio (wtffff???) because he needed to meet her. And then just could not fathom that I refused. He seemed to be running on this idea that if she met him, she would like him. For no other reason than that he was into comics and he wanted a nerd girlfriend.
And I was somehow out of line for refusing to give my best freinds deets to this creepy nerdbro because I couldn’t possibly know that she wouldn’t be into him.
He got really upset.
He was in my studio for 45 mins arguing with me on and off about this and trying to push me into giving her number.
Out. Of. Your. League. Not on your level. Too fucking good for you. Not a possibility. You’ve got nothing she wants. You’re one of literally thousands who would want her. You have nothing to offer her. You tick zero of her boxes. You do not even meet the minimum requirements for me to even ask her.
NOT
HAPPENING
MATE.
This is why women don’t say they’re women in WoW, this is why women don’t say they’re into games irl. This is why women don’t hang out in comics stores. This is why nerd women hide one of these two aspects of themselves when interacting with nerd men.
Because you creepy as FUCK about us.
‘never having met a nerdy girl before’ isn’t a good character trait, because it means you know zero women.
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