GiuliettaMasina

That was my feeling as well--I taught at an all girls high school for years, and she's how most 15-16 year olds look in my experience. I think some of it is also that we're used to seeing movie teens dressed really well and with impeccable make-up and hair and not the more unpracticed looks of most teens. So even actors who are young look older/more mature on screen.

The post in question. C'mon now, TJ...

I am only passingly familiar with one of the participants, but the Twitter response to the GMA scandal is absolutely sending me.

He may not have known about her medical condition, but he sure as heck knew what he was doing making fun of a Black woman's lack of hair. He made a whole documentary ostensibly about the topic (but which actually just further shamed Black women), and then accepted a whole bunch of public awards and praise for being the person to bring attention to the issue and for being a "supporter" of Black women. Edit: I'm just going to add in the trailer of the documentary Chris Rock himself produced about Black women and hair, and then bow out of this convo for my own mental health.

Agreed--which is why I didn't say they did. I was speaking very specifically about the 3 individuals involved and myself (I am a woman). I would defend any of my friends of any gender from those kinds of jokes, though only the Black women femmes and women would need defending from misogynoir, hence my specificity there. Edit: Black femmes of any gender can be the object of misogynoir--that's my mistake.

I think this is understandable, but if I had one quibble it would be that "nobody was into the violence." Many people weren't, that's clear, but I was not bothered by it and I know there are plenty of others who weren't. Personally, I don't have the type of muscle to engage in physical fights, but making fun of someone's disability and/or mocking a Black woman for being "bald-headed" (especially in front of a mostly white audience) are well-known as "fighting words" and I absolutely would be having an equally public (shoulda made the joke in private if you wanted it to stay private) confrontation with someone who did either of those things to someone I loved.

Just last week we had numerous celebrities putting on their capes to defend Chris Brown's right to a second chance (when he hasn't even stopped being a violent piece of shit!) and Helena Bonham Carter calling #MeToo a "trend." The hypocrisy is galling and makes me think they were most traumatized by seeing someone stand up to a bully for once instead of protecting and covering for the bully like the rest of the pack.

That's where I'm at. I'm honestly most mad at Will because his actions allowed for attention to be deflected from that disgusting "joke." Not even a funny one, using decades old references. I'm kinda of waiting on Chris to start making jokes about it--as someone who's enjoyed many a first half of a Rock set and then turned it off in the second half when he becomes just another misogynist misogynizing under the guise of "humor," I suspect he'll tell on himself enough that the coverage will start to balance out.

That's where I am. Their behavior may have been out of step with the majority at that time, but there were many outliers, and given that we've seen plenty of storylines about homophobic parents on film/tv, I'm quite happy to see something different. There's plenty of dramatic possibilities to explore as they no doubt existed on a spectrum from "ok with it being an open secret" to "complete and total acceptance." Ohhhh, yes! You've put your finger on what it is about these two that I just can't get into. Yup. And no doubt plenty of willful blindness about the gay people they loved, like not thinking too deeply about their "roommates" on purpose. I would watch the hell out of this show.

Laughing at both of these posts. I try so hard to be interested in Lucille b/c she's the only main character of color, but gosh if she isn't the drippiest of drips.

No need to take her word for it, history supports her. Exactly. Access to safe and effective contraception and the stability to use it as directed continue to be issues facing poor women. In the US, birth control requires a prescription, which requires access to health care (or the ability to access an overburdened free or low cost clinic), which requires a job that provides health insurance. It also needs to be taken at the exact same time every day or its efficacy is affected negatively. This can be hard to do if you are juggling shift work or "odd jobs" as many poor people are. It really is not as simple as finding a drug store. There is nothing inconsistent with believing that abortion is a grave sin and also being upset that only poor people have to die for it. Also, they are Anglican not RC or American fundamentalist--not every religious denomination believes the same thing about abortion. American Protestants largely did not care about abortion until the 70s and even the Catholic history is not as solid as one might think. Also, people can believe in some parts of their religion's doctrine but not others. I'm not sure why we need these characters to act like fundamentalists to understand that they oppose abortion--they've literally shown their opposition in every abortion storyline on the show.

One has to admit to doing something wrong in order to atone. Being worthy of forgiveness and being owed forgiveness are not synonymous. Yup. Or even better, done the right thing and quit his job to marry her and uphold the religion he supposedly is a representative of. Zero sympathy for this piece of trash.

I came away thinking it leaned to heavy on the pro-life side, so mileage clearly varies. The nuns literally recruited people to testify against the abortionist, their positions were pretty clear, and it seems obvious this storyline will continue, they'll likely say more. The spent the majority of the episode having the characters deemed moral direct vitriol at the abortionist, and only had the abortionist (redeemed only by her own submission to a punishment even her accusers deemed harsh) talking about the bigger structures driving women to obtain abortions. I don't see that as preaching a "pro-choice" message.

Just to be clear--I don't think youth absolves one from responsibility, or more precisely, accountability. When children do wrong, they should absolutely be made to take account for the harm they've caused (even inadvertently), but we should also view their mishaps in the context of their age and life-experience. Diana behaved poorly plenty, I just don't think pretending to share her crush's interests and believing in idealized love as a teenager indicate that she was a manipulator (plenty of other evidence she was to use actually) nor do I view them in the same light as the mature people who looked at her clear lack of experience and thought "Yes, exactly, the perfect candidate to throw into a pressure cooker (while telling them it's a kiddy pool because otherwise they'd run away"). Puh-lenty of women would have been willing to have a marriage of convenience with the PoW and they could have found one if they'd taken their heads out of their asses. That doesn't mean society should step in and save Diana from those decisions she made as a young adult, nor did they. I don't think we can deny she suffered consequences for her poor decision-making.

We'll have to agree to disagree that making a poor decision about who to marry is "a sin." I'm not taking away her personal agency--she made choices as a 19 year-old that were hers to make, and she, in fact, did live with the consequences. She also did not have a fully formed brain when she made those choices. Those two things can both be true. No absolution of "sin" necessary.

Exactly! They brought this mess on their own heads, only to have to change all the rules anyway. The law is not the arbiter of physiology. A 17-year-old does not magically gain maturity on their 18th birthday, they've just reached the stage in life where we've decided that they need to start making their own choices and living with the consequences because that's how you learn to make good choices and learn to cope with the consequences of your inevitable bad decisions. When I was 19 I was "old enough" to make my own choices, I was also still very much a child. In other news, I thought it was interesting how many times this season I wanted to give characters the "Walter Sobchak Award;" that is to say "You're not wrong...you're just an asshole." Diana, Charles, the Queen all had moments where they were "technically right" but butchered the execution. I felt this particularly with Charles, who is definitely had the right idea about modernizing the Firm, but couldn't get past his own peevish self-righteousness to be a good advocate for his ideas.

This is the crux of why, despite all her subsequent bad behavior (and there was plenty), I still side more with Diana. Plenty of teenagers pretend to be more interested in their crushes' interests than they actually are. That's not manipulation, that's being immature, and it comes along with the territory when you are an actual child. And, yes, I absolutely consider a 19-year-old a child; the law's got to draw a line somewhere, but that doesn't change brain chemistry and physiological development. If the royal family was looking for someone with a mature understanding of how marriage can be a partnership in ways other than romantic, they should've found an adult.

Sure, but it's pretty rich (quite literally) to look down on "brown nosers" when you require people to call you by titles and bow in your presence and represent a system which is the symbolic representation of a social hierarchy with leadership chosen not by skill but birth. It kind of invites ingratiating behavior. Expecting people to pretend you don't have power when you literally won't appear in public without its protection and pagantry is entitled snobbery. We'll have to agree to disagree on the idea that a white person wouldn't have been seen differently by either the press or the royal family. People can disdain racial slurs/outward displays of racism and still be racist. People can even love individuals of a certain race while maintaining an overall racist opinion of the group as a whole (see: this episode). QEII sat at the head of a colonial empire and was in partnership with a well-documented racist, I don't think it's a stretch to think she had some regressive ideas about race, so I'm not going to cape for her on this.

Her child's father included. And, I like Rihanna. Ugh, so disappointing, but, I agree, not surprising.

I had to start fast forwarding midway through the 3rd episode for this reason. For me it starts with: the files just automatically popped up when she put the thumb drive in? I guess I can kind of buy that they're image files so maybe he just didn't have them in a folder, so she saw the thumbnails? But then I get stuck on--this is a man so (rightly) tormented by his actions that he attempted suicide, couldn't name them at out loud, and on top of that was being hounded by his mother, but he didn't (at the very least) put the files in an innocuously named folder? It doesn't track. And, if the lesson was meant to be that times of stress reveal our "true" nature, or whatever that "man behind your eyelids" speech was supposed to be: 1) Going with the premise that there was nothing the vicar could do to convince Janice the CSA materials weren't Ben's, then isn't this more a case of "desperate people will at out of character and compound lie after lie to the point it collapses on them"? In which case, isn't this something we all learn as toddlers when we try to lie our way out of something? Not sure why this needed to be a fable for adults. And in this case, the vicar didn't do even anything wrong to incite the story. There is no way he could know there was anything out of the ordinary on the drive. Although why he didn't put the material that he clearly regarded as personal anywhere besides the effing ENTRY WAY COMMON PILE O'STUFF, I simply can't understand. And... 2) Doesn't the same apply to our oh-so-clever heroine? Like if she had calmed down for five seconds she might have realized his explanation might make some sense--he's a vicar with religious, if not legal, codes of privilege; "secretive" does not necessarily mean suspicious. Even if she said, "I don't believe you, but let's go the station and I'll let you explain--all I did was open a drive, I can't prove where you got it" that gives everyone an out. Or, later, when she was confronted with a terrified child who pretty clearly was completely befuddled, maybe she backtracks for and minute and reconsiders. This is why I hate stories that rely on people acting nonsensically--it makes me hate EVERYONE. I think the idea was there were two payments? One to the "the therapist" and one to "the rapist." But, it still didn't make sense to me. Thanks for this info! Now the story makes even less sense to me, lol.

I always say that the best form of birth control is listening to parents talk about their children. I'm not enamored of what they're saying, but I agree that they're not outliers in complaining about their kids.

This is fair, but if she's offering marriage and baptismal records as proof of anything other than a marriage or baptism happening on a given date (and she is), she's not starting from a place of rigor or ethics, and that should absolutely be apart of evaluating her content and whether or not it meets journalistic standards. It's not just her past history--her main argument here is that Sacheen's father is Mexican and therefore they are not native; that's ludicrous on its own merits.

The problem with this is that systemic racism provides a large incentive for those who can "pass" to do so. Lots of people will call themselves white when the alternative is "face systemic barriers to accessing even your most basic of needs." And similar pressures exist on the other side of the color line as well--especially when the main way to sell your area as a safe/desirable location has historically been "Look at the lack of POC!" Others have already mentioned that it was common for census takers to decide on the races of those they were counting. As to paper, paper records are extremely easy to destroy/lose (not to mention extremely flammable) and many archives of the past were aggressive in culling out records that they perceived to be unimportant. There is no guarantee the paper records still exist. Also, "very few people of x ethnicity lived here" is not the same thing as "no people of x lived here," and being outside of community only increases the pressures to assimilate/pass, so that factoid is not doing the work for me that Keeler wants it to. Regardless, as an outsider, if the people whose story she's purported to have stolen (and it could be that she did invent this story, I don't know) are saying, "either way, we claim her as ours," who are the rest of us to say differently? She certainly walked the walk which is more than I can say of the current crop of culture vulture celebrities this country loves elevating.

Noooooooooooooooo

Almost all of the Native Americans I follow are pushing back hard on the Sacheen Littlefeather story. The author is known to be harmful to Black Native American, sloppy in her research, and it's unclear whether Littlefeather's sisters told her that they weren't Native, or if in fact, she told them that and is now misrepresenting their acceptance of her assertions. Edited to add some relevant threads (I'm making no judgement as it's not my place, just adding further context):