I think one of my least favorite types of responses to people speaking up on sexual harassment and sexual assault is are articles like “in wake of weinstein, men wonder if hugging women still ok”, and comments like “this is why men don’t pursue women anymore”, “i don’t wanna work with women cause i don’t want a lawsuit”, or “i don’t even look at women anymore cause everything is sexual harassment”. this is a particular brand of rape culture, men acting as if women are overreacting, as if men don’t have the basic social skills to know the difference between wanted and unwanted advances, as if women simply setting boundaries is “cramping their style” and “emasculating” them, as if the rules of respecting women are super confusing, so confusing that they’re supposedly forcing men not to interact with us altogether.
this is an act they’ve been putting on for decades: playing stupid, pretending not to know better and then getting upset when we tell them what “better” is. if that doesn’t show you how emotional and emotionally manipulative they are, i don’t know what does.
When you’re team iPhone and you follow Apple maps and end up getting lost and the android user in the back seat comments “this would’ve never happened if you used google maps”
it amuses me to see people being surprised/impressed/amused by this setup, because it’s extremely common on the plains. if you don’t plant a windbreak, your heating and cooling bills are huge, and storms do things like throw the lawnmower through the living room window, take the roof off, or cake the entire north side of the house with six inches of solid ice.
evergreens remain bendy even in the coldest weather, so – wait, no, not the coldest. i remember when i was a kid it got down to like -45 and the norway pines around my house were cracking like gunshots as the sap froze.
maples, incidentally, make that noise around -20f, and i hear it at least once every winter here in southern minnesota. but i only ever heard norway pines make it that one time.
so anyway that’s why we plant pine trees around our houses. because otherwise the wind would freaking kill us.
This is informative and perfectly sensible under the circumstances but I also cannot resist the temptation to compare it to planting stuff all around the boundary of your lot in The Sims